A Northwoods Almanac for 11/25 – 12/8/22
Snowy Owls Spotted In Wisconsin
As of Nov. 2, snowy owl season is underway across Wisconsin. One individual was found in Dane County in mid-July and regularly spotted into mid-October, marking a very rare case of an individual successfully over-summering in the state. The first likely migrants were spotted on Oct. 19 in Superior as well as atop the observation tower at Rib Mountain State Park. Another was photographed in Ashland on Nov. 1. It’s been quiet for snowies since then, but we should know more by the end of November when the birds typically begin to arrive.
Sightings: FOYs
First-of-the-year (FOY) birds in Manitowish included a flock of nine evening grosbeaks on 11/13 and a rough-legged hawk at Powell Marsh on 11/15.
 |
| evening grosbeaks on 11/15/22 |
This winter promises to be good for evening grosbeaks. Ryan Brady, avian conservation biologist for Wisconsin DNR, reported 130 at his feeders in Washburn on 11/17, this after observing over 1,000 pass over Herbster in southward migration along the Lake Superior shore on 11/3. The “24th Annual Winter Finch Forecast” from Ontario says “[the evening grosbeak’s] breeding population appears to be increasing in Eastern Canada westward to Manitoba due to increasing outbreaks of spruce budworm with large outbreaks in Northeastern Ontario and Quebec . . . Expect flights of evening grosbeaks into southern Ontario, southern Quebec, Maritime Provinces, and border states this fall.” That bodes well for our seeing more of these beautiful birds this winter!
Record Migration!
I love this quote from international bestseller Tom Clancy: “The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.”
Here’s one of the best examples that I know of how reality can eclipse fiction. A few years back, I’d written about “E7”, a bar-tailed godwit that had set the world migration record then of flying 7,200 miles non-stop for 8 days at an average speed of 40 mph to reach its wintering grounds in New Zealand. But this autumn, a four-month-old bar-tailed godwit known as B6 set a new world record by completing a nonstop migration of 8,425 miles from Alaska to Tasmania, Australia. This trip represents the longest documented nonstop flight by any animal!
After fattening up on the Kuskokwim Delta in southwestern Alaska , B6 left on October 13 and arrived in Australia on October 24, 11 days and one hour later, averaging about 32 miles per hour. The shorebird was tracked using a 5-gram solar-powered satellite transmitter that was attached to its rump.
“They don’t land on the water. They don’t glide,” said Dan Ruthrauff, a U.S. Geological Survey research wildlife biologist who helped tag B6. “This is flapping flight for a week and a half. It’s crazy, and I think is just tangible enough that we can appreciate it and have our minds properly blown.”
That pretty much sums up the near impossibility of B6’s accomplishment. “We can’t explain the physiology that allows them to do this,” one researcher said. “We know what the energy costs should be from wind tunnel experiments, but when we try to use our models, the energy costs we know they used are much lower.” The birds use half or less of the energy expected.
How do they do it? Long-distance migrators like the bar-tailed godwit enlarge their liver and intestines as they feed, so that they can convert food as fast as possible into large breast muscles to support the constant flapping the trip requires, and then convert the rest of their food to fat. They then shrink their internal organs to almost nothing – the gizzards, kidneys, livers. So, by the time the birds are ready to leave, a godwit’s body is at least 55 percent fat (in humans, anything more than 30 percent is considered obese), doubling its weight from one to two pounds before embarking on its trip.
Plus, they’re built for speed, with aerodynamic wings and a missile-shaped body. And their lungs are the most efficient lungs of any vertebrate, helping the godwits’ fly in the thin oxygen of higher altitudes. Bar-tailed godwits in Russia have recently been documented flying at altitudes of three to four miles above ground.
Put all this together and one researcher calls them “obese super athletes.”
Equally amazing is that juveniles migrate six weeks later than the adults. Crossing a nearly featureless Pacific Ocean without an adult to guide them and without navigational cues requires an internal map to define position as well as a compass to tell direction. Somehow the birds find their way back to the same specific sites, something they do each year for the 15 or 20 years of their lives.
“They have figured out the aerosphere they live in,” one researcher writes. “They can predict when to leave and when not to leave, how high to fly, and they know exactly where they are and they know their destination.” Some experts believe that they may be able to sense magnetic lines on the planet through a process called quantum entanglement (“the mechanism of [the bird’s] compass has been suggested to rely on the quantum spin dynamics of photoinduced radical pairs in cryptochrome flavoproteins located in the retinas of the birds”). Got that?
Lastly, the birds also possess superb weather forecasting. “They know what conditions to leave on that will not only provide wind at the start that is favorable, but throughout their entire flight,” says one of the researchers. “They can piece the puzzle together in terms of what the conditions are in Alaska and between there and Hawaii, between Hawaii and Fiji, and between Fiji and New Zealand.”
I try to be cautious in my using of the word “miraculous,” but this fits the bill.
Christmas Reads
Christmas will be soon upon us, and I’d like to recommend three new books from local authors for you to consider giving as gifts.
Manitowish Water’s Bob Kovar recently published Beneath the Eagle Tree: Early Morning Dreamscapes in Portrait and Verse. It's a self-published coffee-table style of book, full of pictures worthy of framing, with a poetic, highly creative kind of writing that describes what Kovar was thinking each day as he headed out into his backyard. Plus, Bob adds the two most often dismissed pieces in nature writing − humor and sheer fun (see www.bobkovar.com).
Ted Rulseh’s book Ripple Effects: How We're Loving Our Lakes to Death was published in October, and is an excellent companion to his earlier book A Lakeside Companion, both from The University of Wisconsin Press. In his engaging and conversational style, Ted draws on personal experience, interviews, academic research, and government reports to describe the state of our northern lakes, the stresses they are under, and avenues to successful lakeside living for a sustainable future. Its driving question is summed up by one of Ted’s interviewees: “We love this lake. What can we do to keep it healthy?”
If you are interested in bears, loons, wolves, or coatimundis for that matter, by all means purchase Jeff Wilson’s book, Wrong Tree: Adventures in Wildlife Biology. From Mercer, Jeff’s a born storyteller, and he shares many tales about his 40+year career studying and helping to manage wildlife with the WDNR. The book also features original excellent illustrations by his wife, Terry Daulton. Pre-order from www.wrongtreebook.com.
Winter Berries: Sumac, Winter Holly, Partridgeberry, Wintergreen, Highbush Cranberry
Five shrub species sport bright red berries throughout our winter, two of which grow close to the ground, and the other three on taller shrubs. Over the next two months, I’ll highlight one in each column I write, but for this column, let’s look at staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina).
Staghorn sumac can grow tall, reaching up to 15' tall, and has alternate, long, compound leaves with 11 to 19 toothed leaflets, making it easy to ID. The fall fruits grow in very large (up to 1 foot long), bright red clusters of fuzzy seeds.
The twigs and leaf stalks look and feel velvety, much like the downy antlers of a buck “in velvet,” hence the name “staghorn” sumac.
Staghorn sumac blazes red and orange and purple along many highways in the autumn, and because of its habit of growing in colonies, the visual display can be beautiful. The colonies are the result of sumac's ability to vegetatively reproduce through root suckers. Thus, all it takes is one parent plant, and the clones soon develop. Note how sumac clonal colonies often take the appearance of a rounded tent, the tallest and oldest stem in the middle and the shorter and younger stems then sloping to the sides.
Sumac needs full sun and doesn't mind poor, dry soils, so it's quite common along roads and fields and hillsides.
Sumac derives its name supposedly from a corruption of “shoe-make,” a reference to the tannin found in the leaves and twigs that was used historically in tanning leathers. The Latin name typhinia originates in the believed medicinal value of sumac as a cure for typhoid fever.
Sumac had a host of other historical uses as well. The cured leaves were a common tobacco mix for American Indians. A black ink is reported to have once been made from the boiled leaves and fruit. The Ojibwe used the flowers for a stomach pain remedy and the pulp of the stalk and inner bark as a dye. And young stems were cut, the pith removed, and the resulting spile used for collecting maple sap.
Sumac provides a particularly good winter source of food for wildlife because the fruits hang on well past the new year. The fruits have been found in the stomachs of birds like ruffed and sharp tailed grouse, mourning doves, and crows, and a host of Northwoods songsters such as bluebirds, flickers, catbirds, phoebes, robins, and thrushes. The twigs are browsed by deer, cottontail rabbits, snowshoe hares, and moose.
You can make sumac lemonade by steeping the fruit in boiling water and then cooling, or make sun lemonade in the summer by simply leaving the fruit in a jar of water in the hot sun for an afternoon. Add honey, lots of it, to ease the tartness.
Celestial Events
Many of our small, shallow lakes and marshes have already iced-over, but the average ice-up date for most of our lakes is around 11/27, at least according to Woody Hagge’s 46 years of data on Foster Lake in Hazelhurst.
On the evening of 11/28, look for Saturn well above the waxing crescent moon.
As of 11/29, the average high temperature for Minocqua falls to 32° for the first time since March 3. Minocqua averages 96 days with high temperatures at or below freezing.
December’s full moon – the “Cold/Long Night/Popping Tree/Little Spirit” Moon – occurs on 12/7, the year’s highest full moon.
Thought for the Week
“The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.” – Albert Einstein
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.
No comments:
Post a Comment