NWA for 8/20/21

 A Northwoods Almanac for 8/20/21   

Bird Migration!

            Fall migration has begun, a statement I’m always sad to make. Radar in Duluth on 8/12 showed strong southbound bird activity, and during the rest of the week, conditions with westerly and northerly winds were also excellent for more birds on the move. Among the early migrants this time of year are shorebirds, warblers, flycatchers, orioles, grosbeaks, and bobolinks. So, new species from further north may be showing up on any given day now, while we have no choice but to say goodbye to many of our local nesting birds. The young are full-grown, fledged, well-fed, and ready to fly long distances on their first incredible voyages across night skies to places they’ve never seen. 

            From 2013 to 2017 the Cornell Lab of Ornithology summarized migration data from 143 weather stations to provide the first large-scale counts of migratory bird activity across the United States. They estimated that an average of 4 billion birds pass from Canada across the northern border of the U.S. in autumn, while an average of 4.7 billion birds leave the U.S. for Mexico and points south each fall. As ornithologist Scott Weidensaul writes, “migration stitches continents together.”  

 

Sightings – Double-crested cormorant, Blowdown photo, Indian pip

            On 8/12, Peggy Allen reported seeing  a juvenile double crested cormorant on a little pond right next to Howard Young Medical Center in Woodruff.  She noted that it had been there for four dayss, swimming, fishing and hanging around with the ducks. 

            Peggy’s sighting is really unusual for our area. While cormorants are common on large bodies of water like Lake Michigan and Lake Superior, they’re much less common on small inland lakes, and relatively rare on little ponds like Peggy described. 

            Jill Joswiak sent me a photo of a large tip-up mound from a blowdown that occurred several weeks ago on the Franklin Lake Nature Trail east of Eagle River. Her friend Nicki Paulson is standing in front of it for perspective. The photo amply illustrates how shallow-rooted many trees are in the Northwoods.

            On 8/4, Mary Madsen in Presque Isle sent me photos of Indian pipe flowers, now called corpse plant flowers (Monotropa uniflora), growing in the woods along her driveway. Many years ago I’d written about these as saprophytic plants, saying they lived off decaying organic matter. Well, in recent years, this plant has been found to be a parasite, stealing nutrients from mycorrhizal fungi in the soil. Mycorrhizal fungi live symbiotically with various tree species, trading water and minerals that the fungi absorb from the soil for nutrients the trees supply them via their photosynthesis. The Indian pipes tap into this mutually beneficial exchange, grabbing nutrients from the mycorrhizal fungi without any reciprocity. 

            Corpse plants are a waxy white flowering plant bereft of chlorophyll, and thus can’t photosynthesize on their own, leaving them to find a way to pilfer nutrients from other sources. Plants that feed on mycorrhizal fungi are call mycotrophs, and include species like spotted coralroot, pinesap, and beech-drops. 

            Once these pure white flowers are pollinated by bumblebees, they turn upwards and begin to turn black, eventually developing a dry fruiting capsule that holds tiny sawdust-like seeds. Apparently Emily Dickinson loved corpse plants, because one appears on the cover of her first book of poetry.

 

Germain Hemlocks SNA and Frog Lake and Pines SNA

            Over the weekend, Mary and I led four hikes for the Natural Resources Foundation in the Germain Hemlocks State Natural Area and the Frog Lake and Pines State Natural Area. Both are quite different from one another primarily because of the soil where they occur. Germain Hemlocks SNA is 88-acres atop sandy loam soil, and thus supports a beautiful old-growth hemlock-hardwood forest comprised of Eastern hemlocks and sugar maples, with some yellow birches, basswoods, and red oaks. The site runs between three lakes and contains attributes one looks for in an old-growth stand, like large standing snags, an abundance of coarse woody debris covering the forest floor, and some scattered reproduction of hemlock. The natural area is named in honor of Clifford E. Germain, the first ecologist and coordinator hired in 1966 to manage Wisconsin’s State Natural Areas program. His vision helped grow the SNA program from 48 sites and 10,000 acres to 211 sites and over 50,000 acres during his 37-year tenure. 

            Frog Lake and Pines SNA, on the other hand, is situated upon very sandy soil, which supports an old-growth forest dominated by red and white pines, and also includes 42-acre Frog Lake, an undisturbed wilderness lake. About one-quarter of the shoreline around the lake consists primarily of mature to old red and white pines, a few of which are 36 inches or more in diameter. The 1,290-acre SNA lies within the 6,265-acre Manitowish River Wild Resource Area, formerly known as the Manitowish River Wilderness. Wetlands cover over two- thirds of the wilderness, with islands of pine scattered along the shoreline and inland. The Manitowish River, a state-designated “exceptional” river, meanders slowly for 16 miles through the SNA from the Hwy. 47 bridge downstream to the Turtle-Flambeau Flowage. 

            People from all over the state traveled to the Northwoods for the opportunity to walk in these sites, and they reveled in not only their beauty, but in their ecological stories. Because the dense canopy of hemlocks dominate the Germain site, the area is in perpetual shade, and the understory is typically damp and windless. Thus, fires are typically very uncommon here, and when the forest is disturbed in some manner by nature, it’s by a windstorm blowing down some trees. 

            Frog Lake, being dominated by pines, is much more wide open to the sun, and thus is a drier site far more susceptible to fires. In fact, a fire ecologist did a study of the tree rings from one old red pine in the stand, and found that the tree began life in 1805, and showed fire scars in 1833, 1846, 1855, 1864, 1877, 1895, 1909, and 1910.

            So, we talked with our groups about the differences in these plants communities, each community being adapted to natural disturbances caused either predominately by wind or by fire. For instance, common understory herbaceous plants in a dry pine forest are trailing arbutus, hepatica, barren strawberry, and wintergreen. In a moister hemlock forest, common herbaceous plants include wild sarsaparilla, rosy twisted-stalk, large-flowered bellwort, and shinleaf. Some plants overlap like partridgeberry and Canada mayflower, but they’re the exception, not the rule.

            Different plant communities, of course, support different bird species, so dominant birds in a big pine stand include blue-headed vireos and pine warblers, while a hemlock stand has far more black-throated green warblers, yellow-rump warblers, winter wrens, and Blackburnian warblers.

            Beauty, however, was the overarching element found in both sites. Pines, as John Eastman wrote, are “the larynx of the wind”, whereas the wind in hemlocks, as Donald Culross Peattie wrote, is “no roaring like the pine’s, no keening like the spruce’s. The hemlock whistles softly to itself. It raises its long, limber boughs and lets them drop again with a sigh, not sorrowful, but letting fall tranquility upon us.”

 

A Very Hot July

            July 2021 was the planet's hottest month ever recorded. Official global temperature records date back 142 years to 1880. The last time the world was definitely warmer than today was some 125,000 years ago, based on paleoclimatic data from tree rings, ice cores, sediments and other ways of examining Earth's climate history.

            The combined land and ocean-surface temperature was 1.67 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th-century average of 60.4 degrees F, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration (NOAA).  

            July 2021 also marked the 45th consecutive July and the 439th consecutive month with temperatures, at least nominally, above the 20th-century average, NOAA said.

            Due to human-caused climate change, Earth's average temperature has risen more than 2 degrees Fahrenheit (1.2 degrees Celsius) since the late 19th century. It may not sound like much, but it has enormous consequences.

 

IPCC (Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change) Report

            The Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change just released Climate Change 2021: the Physical Science Basis, which includes a full report supported by 4000 pages of technical details. Much easier to read is the 42-page “Summary for Policy Makers” at: https://www.ipcc.ch/report/ar6/wg1/downloads/report/IPCC_AR6_WGI_SPM.pdf 

            The conclusions are dramatic and more than sobering. Among many other things it says, “Human influence has warmed the climate at a rate that is unprecedented in at least the last 2000 years. Widespread and rapid changes in the atmosphere, ocean, cryosphere and biosphere have occurred.”

            But read it for yourself, and note that the IPCC was formed in 1988 by the United Nations, and 195 member governments participate, including the US and Canada. The IPCC is now on its sixth “assessment cycle,” which includes all the reports released from 2015-2021. This report on the physical science will be followed by two more, on impacts/adaptation, and then on mitigation. For the physical science report, 234 scientists from 66 countries volunteered their time to read, compile and summarize all the relevant scientific literature. There are 14,000 references and 78,007 expert and government review comments incorporated. All 195 member governments had to sign off on the report. That deserves repeating – all 195 governments had to agree. When have you ever heard of 195 governments agreeing on anything? Thus, as far as a global consensus goes on any topic, this is as good as it gets. 

 

Thought for the Week

            “The clock starts ticking for every living thing in the North on the last days of summer – the dance of hornets and hummers gorging at the feeders, the last gulps of chlorophyll savored by maple trees showing off a red leaf here and there contemplating their autumnal wardrobe, the frogs putting in one last word or two on subjects they have debated back and forth across the marsh since early spring, the birds laying out their tiny suitcases for destinations far and sunny locations wide, and we humans scurrying about in boats with motors and boats with paddles and on beaches of sand and on decks without bugs and on docks with ripening tomatoes. There’s a renewed rush to everyone’s purpose as the sun goes down earlier and starts to rise later and the shadows get cooler and the nights get longer and the days of mid-summer daydreams starts the long fade into our hazy memories.” – Bob Kovar, Manitowish Waters

 

 

A Northwoods Almanac for 7/23/21

 A Northwoods Almanac for 7/23 – 8/5/21  by John Bates

 

State Natural Areas 70^th Anniversary

            The State Natural Areas (SNA) Program celebrates 70 years of existence this year, making it the nation’s oldest statewide system of natural areas. In 1951, the Wisconsin legislature established the State Board for the Preservation of Scientific Areas (later renamed Natural Areas Preservation Council) with duties found in State Statutes Chapter 15.347(4) and Chapter 23.26. Wisconsin has not only the oldest but the largest natural areas program in the country with 687 sites encompassing 406,000 acres across Wisconsin. These sites represent the last remaining vestiges of Wisconsin's native landscape, and are a living record of natural communities valued for their research and educational use, and the preservation of genetic and biological diversity. SNAs provide benchmarks for determining the impact of use on managed lands and also provide some of the last refuges for rare plants and animals.

            Wisconsin’s leadership nationally in establishing state natural areas has made the state a model for other states. Go to https://dnr.wi.gov/topic/Lands/naturalareas/index.asp for a full description of every Wisconsin SNA along with property maps and directions.

 

Van Vliet Hemlocks SNA

            Last Monday, I led a small private group of folks into the Van Vliet hemlocks SNA near Presque Isle, a 432-acresite which harbors one of the largest old-growth hemlock-hardwood forests left in this region. The old-growth is dominated by eastern hemlocks, sugar maples, and yellow birches, but very few white pines remain, likely because they were high-graded out during one of the several light selective cuts done over the last 50 years. 

            The last advance of glacial ice stopped here 12,000 years ago, where it deposited the loamy sands of the Winegar Moraine. At around 1,700 feet, this moraine marks a sub-continental divide where all waters north of here flow into Lake Superior, and all waters south of here flow into the Mississippi River. 

            Located in Section 16, this land that is now an SNA was set aside upon the creation of Wisconsin’s Common School Fund. As new states were coming into the Union, citizens sent petitions to Congress asking for help to establish public schools. In 1825, Congress passed a law that gave each new state the sixteenth section of every township for the purpose of establishing public schools. The site of today’s Van Vliet Hemlocks was included in this Act of Congress because it’s located in the sixteenth section of Presque Isle Township.

            To manage these lands and the proceeds from their sale, the Wisconsin Constitution of 1848 created a school trust (now known as the Common School Fund) to be managed by the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands (BCPL). Nearly 1.5 million acres of land was eventually set aside for the support of public schools.

            In the years since 1848, BCPL sold over 99% of these lands to create the principal of the Common School Fund, but Van Vliet Hemlocks escaped the sale block and remained a part of the last 5,500 acres of the Common School lands. The good folks at BCPL recognized that it was a rare remnant of old-growth forest and needed to be protected. So, in 2011, the BCPL approved the sale of the Van Vliet Hemlocks to the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources in order for the land to be designated as a State Natural Area and to receive permanent protection. 

            The proceeds of this sale was used by BCPL to acquire better timberlands, and thus income-producing lands, that can be managed sustainably. 

            What happened to the money BCPL received from the state? As directed by Article X, Section 2 of the State Constitution, earnings from the Common School Fund are used exclusively for the support and maintenance of common schools (now known as K-12 public schools) and “the purchase of suitable libraries and apparatus therefor.” Public schools today use these funds to purchase library books, newspapers and periodicals, audiovisual materials, and computer equipment and software. 

            The principal of the Common School Fund is used differently, however. It's invested in loans to school districts and municipalities for public purpose projects through the BCPL State Trust Fund Loan Program, helping communities in every corner of the state. 

 

The Intersection of Spirit and Nature

            The folks who hired me to walk with them into the Van Vliet property heard the above story of how the site was saved, but asked that I focus my interpretation on a talk I’ve given called “The Spirit of Place.” Because of their age and size, old-growth forests often are catalysts for feelings of awe and reverence, which in turn lead to a sense of being in a “sacred” place. 

            Of course, not everyone feels that way, but many people do, and so we concentrated some of our discussion on what it means when we say a place feels “holy,” or when someone experiences a “spiritual” connection to a place.

            This is a very personal, very individual connection. In so many ways it depends on how your “inner landscape” experiences the outer landscape. What is in one’s head and heart when one enters a forest? 

            A “sacred place” is found both in the physical nature of the location and the mentality that perceives it as sacred. We all carry a suitcase of past experiences and beliefs with us wherever we go which filter our present experiences. Often, the first filter I hear from folks on a forest hike is their fear – am I safe here? What about bears and wolves and ticks and snakes and getting lost and . . . ?  Peter Steinhart wrote about this dichotomy in relation to our perception of a lake, “What we see in lakes depends much on what we bring to the shore – King Arthur's sword or the Loch Ness monster.” The same holds true for a forest.

            So, what happens when we enter a forest? Our sense of a place occurs initially through a series of perceptions.

-       Our brain immediately maps the place.

-       We pull out historical/cognitive information about the place – do we know the name of this tree? this wildflower? the function of the place? 

-       We pull out personal memories – this is the place I met my spouse; this is the last place I saw Mom; this is where I first went hiking with my grandmother and picked blueberries.

-       We catalog sensory information – the sounds, smells, light.

-       We intuit emotional information – does the place frighten us, depress us, inspire us, repel us, draw us in.

-       We then begin interacting with the place, building an experiential relationship with it that is based on our self-interests. A birder hears bird songs, a deer hunter looks for rubs or scrapes, a wildflower enthusiast sees flowers, a bug-hater sees only mosquitoes, a woodworker sees tree species and the form they can take in his/her workshop.

-       We proceed then to comprehend our interactions through a host of perceptual filters – our cultural and personal beliefs, our background knowledge, our momentary state of mind. Sometimes we’re so preoccupied with something that happened or what we have to do when we get home that we’re lost in our head and not present in the forest. Sometimes we see the forest through an economic filter – cut this tree down and we could make some money! Sometimes we know we’re in a beautiful place, but it’s a sensory blur. We lack any understanding of what the species are, what bird just sang, what that smell is. 

-       And finally, we leave, and what do we then remember about a place? And why? 

 

            Since a place is different for each observer according to their perceptions and experiences, all places are thus inside our heads (and hearts). There is no such thing as an objectively described place.

            Ancient peoples often had stories associated with just about every hill, spring, rock outcrop, river bend, lake, and unusual tree in their country. Their memories were actually stored in the landscape. Ancients experienced the land at slow walking speed, every day, every minute. Walking was a form of “topographical language”.

            Some cultures were animistic. They believed that all animate and inanimate objects were suffused with spiritual qualities – they were ensouled – and they populated their world with spiritual presences.

            Most Western American moderns no longer see places filled with spirits or ancestors. We see materialistically, not spiritually – it’s hallucinating, we think, if we see otherwise.

            So, our group talked about what today can make a place feel animated, feel ensouled. Of course, there was no answer, but there was rich discussion, thoughtful, heartfelt considerations. We asked the impossible questions, like what has a soul and what doesn’t. Are the spirits of those that passed here still somehow on the land, a part of the place?

            And we talked about the need to know a place ecologically, to give things the dignity of their names and to try to understand their stories, all the while knowing there’s far too much to ever know.

            So, we ended up talking about the importance of humility, of wonder, of appreciation for all that is, for not judging a species as useful or not based on our human use of it, for accepting death in a forest as a necessary ecological process that gives life to other species, perhaps even more in death than during its life.

            Through it all we marveled at the beauty, the quiet, the history embedded in the place, the life histories of so many species all living together in a community of life. And I think we walked away with no “answers” but enriched and enlivened, I think happier, and perhaps having experienced a bit of the soul of the place.

 

Celestial Events

            The “Half Way Through the Summer Moon” (in Ojibwe – aabita-niibino-giizis) full moon occurs tonight, 7/23. And tomorrow night, 7/24, it will still be 99.5% illuminated, so be sure to take a walk in the warmth and brilliant light of a summer full moon.

            On 7/24, Saturn will be 4° north of the moon, and the next night, 7/25, Jupiter will trade positions with Saturn and hang 4° north of the moon.

            The peak Delta Aquarid meteor shower takes place in the predawn of 7/28, but the shower usually offers a decent number of meteors for several days before and after the peak. Look for 15 to 20 per hour, though the bright waning moon will wash out a good portion of them. Look for the radiant point in the southern sky after midnight. The Deltas overlap with the more famous Perseid meteor shower, which peaks this year on the mornings of August 11, 12, and 13.

            By August 2, our days are growing shorter by three minutes per day.

            For planet viewing in August, look after dusk for Venus very low in the west; for Jupiter low in the south-southeast; and for Saturn, also low in the south-southeast. Mars is not observable this month.

            As for national temperatures, the average June temperature across the contiguous U.S. was 72.6 degrees F (4.2 degrees above average), making it the hottest June in 127 years of record keeping and surpassing the record set in June 2016 by 0.9 of a degree.  

 

Thought for the Week

            “One thing I have learned in a long life: that all our science, measured against reality, is primitive and childlike. We still do not know one thousandth of one percent of what nature has revealed to us.” – Albert Einstein

            

 

A Northwoods Almanac for August 6, 2021

 A Northwoods Almanac for August 6 – 19, 2021  by John Bates

 

Storms and Blowdowns

            Last week, some very strong thunderstorms knocked down a lot of trees throughout much of our area. These are always heartbreaking events, because we come to love “our” trees for all that they do for us, from offering shade to beauty to birdlife to even fruits and nuts that we can pick. 

            I’ve written in this column before about the ecological values of blowdowns, but here’s a reminder. We usually describe a major blowdown as a disaster, but portraying a blowdown this way fails to account for the long-term. Individual trees are always dying, and averaged over 100 years, the total mortality of trees in a forest that hasn’t been hit by a massive storm will be very nearly the same as the one that was hit by one. That’s the long view. 

tip-up mound/blowdown photo by John Bates

            Still, a blowdown can take a lot of trees out of a forest. So, does a blowdown decrease the conservation value of a forest? If we narrowly see a forest as merely a collection of old trees, then “yes.” But the answer is “no” if we broadly see a forest as a functionally intact natural ecosystem, a place where all natural processes are at work. Death and life always intermingle dynamically in forests, with some trees perhaps dying young and “too soon” while others may withstand centuries of changes all around them. That’s simply the way of it. 

            This is a hard concept to wrap our arms and hearts around. Seeing huge old trees snapped off after a storm, or uprooted and scattered like straws, feels devastating. The heart hurts, and for a long time. But if we can divorce ourselves from the immediate visual impact, remembering that forests are a complex jumble of young and old and everything in between, and then envision a vibrant future, perhaps we can live more readily with the change. 

            But it will never be easy. The heart always holds sway over the intellect, and so we need to emotionally accept change as best we can, and then ask that our hearts deeply inform our rational thinking. 

            Here’s what my good friend Bob Kovar in Manitowish Waters had to say after the storm last week: “After surviving a thousand windstorms in its thick and leafy lifetime, a huge oak, the Ancient One, fell without a sound in the furious winds of the storm the other night. It is a sad realization when our elders, the most dignified beings among us, the ones stories are written about because even though they have never gone anywhere they somehow have seen IT ALL and survived to tell us and teach us about these things (if we ever take the time to listen), that even these majestic creatures are mortal. On the way down, it grabbed hold of its closest neighbor, the Great Pine, hugging it with such force as it took its last gigantic breaths in the wind and the lightening and the driving rain that the Great Pine came up by its roots trying to save its oldest friend with whom it had shared a million stories of eagles and squirrels and raccoons and full moons and snowstorms and this one family with all their little kids running circles around their feet. During the ceremonial autopsy yesterday morning, I noted the Ancient One had hollowed around the base over the decades, a decay in body that only spoke to the implausible strength of character it must have had to hold up a thousand tons of solid wood for so many decades, so magnificently, without ever uttering one word of complaint.” 

 

Bryozoa

            On 8/1, I paddled a wild lake by the name of “Dry Lake”, which thankfully remains quite wet because Mary and I are leading a paddle trip today, 8/5, for the North Lakeland Discovery Center. Dry Lake has more bryozoa than any other lake I've ever been on. These organisms look like an alien creature, or someone’s brain gone bad, but they indicate good water quality and are utterly harmless. I’ve written about them before, but if you don’t remember, each one is an extremely odd, but fascinating colony of “moss-animals”. The blobs resemble a stiff, clear-gray Jell-O that is actually 99 percent water, and is firm and slimy at the same time to the touch. The surface of the mass is divided into tiny rosettes, each containing 12 to 18 “zooids”, and if you could look through a microscope underwater, you’d see that the zooids have whorls of delicate feeding tentacles that sway slowly in the water and capture food. 

bryozoa - Dry Lake - photo by John Bates

            Massive colonies can be as big as basketballs, although typical sizes are less than a foot. The colonies form on submerged logs, twigs, even wooden dock posts. They feed on small microorganisms, including diatoms and other unicellular algae, and amply demonstrate how amazing, and odd, this world can be.

 

Sightings – Pileateds, Monarchs, Red-headed Woodpeckers, Swimming Eagle

            Gordy Moscinski sent me a photo of a log feeder that he hangs beneath his suet cage to make it easier for pileated woodpeckers to feed. He notes, “I even stuff the holes with suet. The log cut flat on top catches the crumbs or cleans the beak.” 

photo by Gordy Moscinski

            Steve Sash on Pine Lake in the Town of Oma sent me photos of some folks in Oma who are raising monarch butterfly caterpillars. Steve says, “So far as of today, 7/26, they have released 306 adults with the ratio of males to females 54% to 46%. They raise them in a cage to increase survivability of the caterpillars and eggs. Ants seem to like the eggs, parasitic wasps inject eggs into them and kill caterpillars, stinkbugs suck body fluids out of them and who knows what else kill them. Probably 280 of the caterpillars were removed from the 4 foot by 4 foot raised bed patch in their back yard (pictured). That to me is a simply amazing concentration of butterflies. They have been raising them for 3 years.”

            I asked him to describe how they do this, and here’s his response: “The 4'x4' raised bed box is where the milkweeds are growing from which they harvest the caterpillars. A cage that the caterpillars are raised in is from Petco.com. It is called a Zilla Fresh Air Screen habitat for Reptiles (large) ($80). Modifications to the cage have to be made to be successful. A wood lattice should be attached to the top inside of the cage for the caterpillars to hang from when they are making their cocoons. Caterpillars cannot attach to the screen material for some reason. The air holes on the left rear screen needs to be plugged to prevent small caterpillars from escaping. We put water bottles with milkweeds in them to feed them. Milkweed should be fresh and not wilted. Caterpillars removed from swamp milkweed do not do well if their diet is changed from swamp milkweed to the upland milkweed, and we don't recommend taking caterpillars from swamp milkweed.” 

            I’ve attached a couple photos to help everyone picture this.

            Dan Lucas sent me this note: “Yesterday, I observed two red-headed woodpecker young. Wow! Coloration is mottled but you can see the red beginning to appeared on back of head. About 2/3s of full-sized parents. They were plump and appeared healthy. I am not certain but it seems the parents would “hide” seeds in tree crevices for young to find, or the young were following a parent-created “pecked” opening in tree for food?”
            I was curious about Dan’s reference to the parents “hiding” seeds in tree crevices. I wrote about red-headed woodpeckers doing this several months ago, but just as a reminder: Red-headed woodpeckers are “one of only 4 of 198 woodpecker species that commonly store food, and the only woodpecker known to cover stored food with pieces of wood or bark . . . Caches insects (particularly grasshoppers), acorns, and beechnuts, breaking them to fit natural cracks and crevices in posts, in cavities of partially decaying trees, or under patches of raised bark . . . Hammers acorns into crevices so tightly that other animals (e.g., blue jays) cannot remove them.” So, were the parents training the chicks to learn how to store food? Almost certainly.

            Al Toussaint sent me this email on 7/22: “Our neighbor came running over yesterday, worried about the eagle he saw swimming far out from shore here on Lake Alva. The sight was something I have seen before while  fishing in Alaska. The usual cause there was the bird sinking its talons into a fish that was too large for the eagle to get off the water. Unfortunately, here on Alva, it also could have been the result of far too many encounters between eagles and our loon family. However, the too big fish reason appeared to be the case. We motored out to watch the eagle, and it flew off onto a shoreline pine. When we approached the spot where the eagle flew from, we found a large, very white, very dead fish that had sunk to the bottom, its swim bladder likely punctured when bird grabbed it. The encounter ended with eagle spending a good amount of time perched in the tree drying its wings.”
            And Mary Jo Oyer in Mercer sent me this: “I saw this yearling cub when I went out on our deck this evening. It looked like it was pretending to be a bear rug. A few minutes later I didn’t see it through my window, so I went back out, and it was smelling my flowers. I think it could smell the allium, as it smells like an onion. I went back inside and grabbed my camera. It walked by our Packers garden flag as it left. I chuckled and told my husband, “Normally I am a Packers fan, but tonight I love ‘da Bear!” Haha!”

 

photo by Mary Jo Oyer

Celestial Events – The Perseids!

            The Perseid meteor shower runs from August 8 – 14, but peaks on the late evening of the 11^th with the best time from midnight to dawn of the 12^th. They average 60 per hour, or one per minute. Dark skies align well with the meteor shower in 2021, with the new moon occurring on 8/8. The meteors emanate from bits and pieces streaming from Comet Swift-Tuttle, which slam into the Earth’s upper atmosphere at some 130,000 miles per hour.

            So, grab a reclining lawn chair, some blankets, and give yourself an hour of observation, because meteors come in spurts with lots of lulls. Plus, it takes your eyes nearly 20 minutes to become fully adapted to darkness. Finally, give yourself a wide-open sky to observe if you can, because the meteors will be streaking across the sky from many locations. 

 

Wake Boats – Ban Them

Wake boats scour bottom sediments harming plant life and spawning grounds, stir up sediments creating murkier water and reintroducing phosphorous and other nutrients into the water promoting algal blooms, the waves erode shorelines, impact anglers and kayakers and pontooners, and on and on. Rather than continue with all the reasons why wake boats should be banned from all but our very largest and deepest lakes, just go to https://lastwildernessalliance.org. 

The science is robust on this issue. For two comprehensive resources, see: http://www.trpa.org/wp-content/uploads/2010-WI-Dept-of-Natural-Resources_UW-Boats-effects-on-ecosystems. Also see a lengthy report put out by citizens in Presque Isle: https://piwi.us/CMS/files/2021/Condition%20Report_%20Presque%20Isle%20Hazardous%20%20Wake%20Ordinance.pdf. 

            Due to space constraints, I’m going to jump to heart of the matter, which is the “what can be done” question. Towns can enact ordinances banning wake boats. Towns already ban motor boats from many undeveloped lakes in our area, and have enacted ordinances restricting water skiing, jet skis, hours of operation, and more. So, towns should be able to ban wake boats.

The lakes in our area are primarily small and shallow kettle lakes – 88% of Oneida County lakes are less than 25 feet deep, while 50% of Vilas and Oneida County lakes are less than 10 acres. We are also a globally important area for our concentration of lakes, which the Northern Highlands American Legion State Forest says draws 2 million visitors to our area every year.

            Let’s cut to the chase. There’s limits on virtually everything allowed in this world, from speeds on our roads, to zoning laws saying where one can build and in what manner, to allowable air/water/noise pollution, to how much harmful additives can be placed in our food,  etc. There’s a point where someone’s “rights” exceed that which the vast majority are willing to tolerate. When do our responsibilities for protecting these pristine lakes outweigh an individual’s right to do as one pleases? We’re there now.

 

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.