A Northwoods Almanac for 10/2/ 2020

 A Northwoods Almanac for 10/2 - 15, 2020  

 

Sightings

Let’s start with a mystery. Jim Phelps emailed with this sighting on 9/17: “We've had a place in Presque Isle since 1972 and have never seen anything like this. We had a lot of Lake Superior rocks on our deck and some seemed to be disappearing. While sitting at the kitchen table we watched a gray squirrel pick up one and run off with it. Since then this has happened a couple of times. I felt rather foolish chasing one into the woods yelling, ‘Drop the rock’. Jane googled this behavior, and it said squirrels do this because the rocks retain heat in the nest and help the nest dry out. We have also noticed at least two dozen spots in front of the deck where small rocks had been dug out and taken. I know we have a lot of squirrels, but how often does something like this happen? I won't even ask you about the black squirrel that picked up a piece of kindling and was dragging it off the deck.” So . . . does anyone have an alternative theory about what the squirrels are up to? 

Randy and Debbie Augustinak in Land O’ Lakes emailed that coyotes “once again wiped out dozens of snapping turtle eggs near the culvert along Cty. B this week. It’s frustrating, but we’ve come to expect it. Maybe we can devise some sort of ‘egg rescue’ plan next year, and hatch the eggs up near our house, where they’d at least have a fighting chance.”

Mary Jo Oyer in Mercer sent this note: “We went for a walk yesterday (9/17) and when we got back to our place, two bear cubs were in our yard. We didn’t have anything in our bird or deer feeders for deer and birds, but luckily they didn’t damage the feeders.”

photo by Mary Jo Oyer

Bob Von Holdt in Presque Isle sent an update on trumpeter swans near his place: “The trumpeter swan adult pair had five cygnets this spring. Three survived and have gotten quite big.” Trumpeter chicks are fair game for a number of predators, so it’s not unusual for a pair to lose some or all of their chicks. Survival of three chicks is thus a successful year.

chicks in June, photo by Bob Von Holdt

3 chicks left in September, photo by Bob Von Holdt

Candy Cannon shared with me two short videos of a bobcat that passed through her yard on the morning of 9/19. She noted, “We live on Little Bearskin Lake. The cat strolled in and laid in the yard for around 15 minutes. I took photos and videos through our window! What a treat to see!”

Rain and more rain came down from 9/21 to 9/25. Fall colors have appeared quickly, and the hard rains have already brought many of the leaves down. We had four inches of rain in our gauge at Manitowish, adding to the already existing flooding of the Manitowish River by our home. We’re quite concerned how high the water will rise when the Manitowish Chain of Lakes begins their three-foot drawdown on 10/1. It’s an enormous amount of water from over 4,000 acres of lake surface to pour into a narrow little river over a short period of time.

 

Bird Migration: Endings, Peaking , In Process, and Just Beginning to Depart

            There’s timing involved in the migration of birds. In our area, some birds leave as early as the beginning of August, while others wait until late November. Every migratory species has a bell-curved migration, starting slowing, reaching a peak, and then falling off until they’re all gone.             

Our earliest migrants include birds like bobolinks and black-and-white warblers that begin leaving in the first week of August. There’s a long list of these earlybirds that will all be gone by mid-October, including some of our most beautiful birds like scarlet tanagers, brown thrashers, rose-breasted grosbeaks, and Blackburnian warblers.

            Birds that are coming through our area right now and peak in their migration in early to mid-October include such notables as American robins, yellow-rumped warblers, white-throated sparrows, and hermit thrushes.

            Birds which just began migrating in late September to early October, but which won’t peak typically until late October include dark-eyed juncos, fox sparrows, pine siskins, and various waterfowl like ring-necked ducks and ruddy ducks. 

            Still other birds are remarkably hardy, or crazy, and so a proportion will wait until November to finally get out of town. These include winter wrens, swamp sparrows, eastern meadowlarks, great blue herons, and sharp-shinned hawks.

            Each species has a strategy in mind honed over millennia to take advantage of our northern woods and waters as long as possible before leaving. Some species then travel a relatively short distance, like robins, while others jet for South America, like bobolinks and common terns. Every species has a story as to why they’ve chosen their path, their timing, and their ultimate destination, and if we pay attention, we get to witness many of these stories as they play out.

            

Wild Lakes

            In working the last two years on a new book on the last undeveloped wild lakes of northern Wisconsin, I’ve identified well over one hundred lakes I need to paddle. Mary often accompanies me on these explorations, and last week we traveled to Bayfield County to paddle some wild lakes embedded in the Chequamegon National Forest. We camped for four nights on the edge of the 6,600-acre Rainbow Lake Wilderness Area which was the first federal wilderness designated in Wisconsin in 1975. In that time we paddled nine wild lakes, walked in to another four, and failed to find two others despite having “directions”. 

            I’ve now paddled nearly 60 wild lakes with another 40 or so to go before I feel I can say I’ve paddled all the ones over 30 acres that are left in the northern part of the state - well, at least all the ones we can find and/or get to. Oh, it’s a tough job, but someone has to do it.

            Perhaps most interesting and beautiful of all the lakes on this trip was the 537-acre Totagatic Lake, situated within the 1,403-acre Totagatic Lake State Wildlife Management Area. We pulled up to the landing and found a sea of wild rice stalks, now well past prime harvest, but still standing tall from shore to shore. I don’t know that I’ve ever seen so much rice! 

Totagatic Lake rice and fall colors, photo by John Bates

Paddling through wild rice is a bit like walking through a tall grass prairie - it’s hard to see where you are sometimes, and it’s a chore to paddle. The maximum depth of the lake is 8 feet, and only occasionally do you find a tiny piece of open water.

Waterfowl love wild rice, so we had numerous sightings of waterfowl, although more often than not, we could hear them more easily than see them.

I’d like to return in the spring well before the rice comes up and see what the birdlife is like then. All that rice in the sediments should be a paradise for waterfowl.  

 

No Family Reunions for Loons

            In Walter Piper’s latest blog post (see https://loonproject.org/author/wpiper2012/), he discusses social gatherings of loons in late summer and early fall. As always, read everything Walter has to say - his research writings are an absolute wealth of information. But I wanted to just note one item from his post regarding whether loons from the same family ever socialize. He writes, “I have been asked a number of times whether the visitors at social gatherings might not be chicks that were hatched or reared on a lake and have returned as adults to re-connect with their parents. Setting aside the fact that young adults looking for a territory would seem to have little to gain from visiting their parents - and might even harm their parents by drawing more attention to the territory - we have many marked loons of all ages in our study area and can look at the number of times that young adults have revisited their natal lakes. Of 1743 visits to lakes by adults that we marked as chicks that we have recorded so far, only 13 have been visits to the natal lake. We have not yet run statistics on this pattern, but it seems clear already that young loons actually tend to avoid their natal lakes - intruding at many lakes in the neighborhood but seldom visiting their natal one.”

            This is a common practice in the animal world. Once a young bird or mammal leaves the family territory, it’s rare that the family ever interacts again. While we humans have family gatherings every year around various holidays, nearly all bird and mammal parents say goodbye when the young depart, and they really mean it. 

photo by Bev Engstrom

 

Emerald Ash Borer Detected in Dunn, Oconto, Pepin, and Shawano Counties

The Wisconsin Department of Agriculture, Trade and Consumer Protection (DATCP) has detected emerald ash borer (EAB) for the first time in the following counties: Dunn (town of Rock Creek), Oconto (town of Little Suamico), Pepin (towns of Lima and Waterville), and Shawano (city of Shawano). These are the first new county detections of 2020 for Wisconsin. There have also been 30 new municipal detections in counties where EAB was previously detected.

To date, Wisconsin has found EAB in 56 of the state's 72 counties. The entire state is part of the EAB federal quarantine area.

 

Celestial Events

            For planet watching in October, look after dusk for Mars bright in the east, Jupiter equally bright in the south, and Saturn also in the south but significantly dimmer. Before dawn, look for Venus, absolutely brilliant low in the east.

            The full moon occurred on 10/1, but it’s still 99% illuminated tonight, 10/2. Look also tonight for Mars less than a degree north of the moon.

            The peak Draconid meteor shower occurs before dawn on 10/7 - look for around 10 meteors per hour.

 

Thought for the Week

Bird migration is the one truly unifying natural phenomenon in the world, stitching he continents together in a way that even the great weather systems, which roar out from the poles but fizzle at the equator, fail to do.  - Scott Weidensaul

 

Please share your outdoor sightings and thoughts: e-mail me at manitowish@centurytel.net, call 715-476-2828, snail-mail at 4245N State Highway 47, Mercer, WI, or see my blog at www.manitowishriver.blogspot.com.