NWA for 8/1/25

 A Northwoods Almanac for August 1 – 14, 2025  

 

Goldenrods!

            I found several stands of goldenrods in flower on July 18, which for me is a harbinger of the coming autumn. We are blessed with at least 10 species of native goldenrods in northern Wisconsin, which are somewhat challenging to identify, so I usually just default to the generalized ID of “goldenrod.” 

            BTW, goldenrod is insect pollinated, thus its pollen is NOT wind-dispersed and can’t be blamed, as it often still is, for anyone’s hay fever.

 

August

            “Sunrise comes later now, and dusk creeps over the hills earlier in the evening . . . Another month and the Autumn equinox will be here and daylight will equal darkness, briefly.  The year has turned, noticeably, and Summer is walking down the long hill toward Autumn and Winter beyond.  

            “If the season is already moving downhill, why do the temperatures remain here on the summit? The reason is that it takes the earth a time to warm up, and it does not cool off in a moment. But the trees show the true season, and so do the grasses in the meadow and the tall weeds at the roadside . . . Another Summer sweeps away as dusk settles in the valleys a few minutes earlier one day after another.” –  Hal Borland,  Sundial of the Seasons     

 

Monarchs, Viceroys, and Batesian Mimicry

            I’ve confused viceroy butterflies with monarch butterflies many times. They look alike, for sure, but viceroys have a black line crisscrossing the veins on both hind wings, and they’re smaller. Still, it’s a tough ID when they’re flitting around and not offering good looks of their wings. 

monarch on the left, viceroy on the right

            I’ve recently realized I’ve also confused the natural history of the viceroy. Viceroys have been characterized as a textbook example of “Batesian mimicry,” which is when a harmless species mimics the appearance or behavior of another species that’s distasteful or dangerous to predators. Monarchs taste terrible to predators and can make them ill because of a toxin occurring in their body via their consumption of milkweed plants. The story in ecology textbooks has always been that viceroys evolved as a close copycat of monarchs as a simple means to deter predators that would otherwise find them perfectly edible. The “Batesian” part comes from the English naturalist Henry Walter Bates (no relation, I assure you), who worked on butterflies in the rainforests of Brazil.

            Turns out, however, that viceroys are distasteful, too, and perhaps even more so than monarchs. Rather than eating noxious milkweed, viceroys feed on the leaves of willows and aspens, both of which contain salicin, which is converted into salicylic acid, the bitter ingredient in aspirin.

            Viceroys sequester the salicylic acid in their tissues, causing both the caterpillar and the adult butterfly to taste awful, too, but just in a different way than monarchs.

            So, viceroys aren’t a case of Batesian mimicry, but rather “Müllerian mimicry,” which is when two species evolved separately but converged in their appearance to mimic the other and thus reinforce a signal to predators to stay clear. Predators only need one taste of either species to quickly learn that anything that looks like one of these is worthy of avoidance. 

            Just to add a bit of complexity to the story, the two species don’t look alike in the caterpillar and chrysalis stages. The monarch butterfly’s caterpillar is boldly colored as another easy warning to a predator to cease and desist its attack. 

            But a viceroy’s caterpillar and chrysalis stages are cryptically colored, both looking a lot like bird droppings, which aren’t on anyone’s menu, so visual predators like birds don’t bother to even try them.

            Evolutionary adaptations! They never fail to amaze me.

 

Master Naturalist Programs

            Wisconsin’s Master Naturalist program promotes awareness, understanding, and stewardship of the natural environment by developing a network of well-informed volunteers dedicated to conservation service within their communities.

            To become a “Master Naturalist,” individuals complete 40 hours of expert-led training at locations across the state. Equipped with new knowledge, experiences, and connections, Master Naturalists then go on to serve citizen science and education efforts throughout Wisconsin. 

            Each training is unique based on the location, field experiences and the guest experts, but the key concepts remain consistent from training to training. Once trained, Wisconsin Master Naturalists record 40 hours of service and 8 hours of advanced training each year to maintain certification.

            Typically, 10 to 15 Master Naturalist trainings are held across the state annually, and their locations, dates, and schedules vary based on the host organization. In our area, both Trees for Tomorrow in Eagle River and the North Lakeland Discovery Center in Manitowish Waters host annual trainings.

            I get to lead hikes every year for both trainings, and last week I hiked the Star Lake nature trail with 19 participants, all of whom had to tolerate, and eventually be soaked by, rain.

            Still, we had a wonderful time together, in large part because of the many stories to be told of the logging history and ecology of the Star Lake area. 

            The first train ran from Minocqua to Star Lake in 1895, opening the area to intensive logging, but the site needed a sawmill. Well, a sawmill in McKenna, Jackson County, Wisconsin, owned by Williams and Salsich, had closed in September of 1894, was torn down, and then trained to Star Lake and reconstructed in 1895.

            The town of Star Lake rose in a breath, including a sawmill, a planing mill, warehouses, company offices, a hotel, a boarding house, 84 company houses, a general store, a railroad depot, a three room school, a town hall, a doctor's office, and a barbershop.

            The Star Lake mill was built on the peninsula jutting into the lake, and for 11 years ran like gangbusters. The mill sawed its last log in 1906 after turning out 525 million board feet in 11 years. 

Star Lake saw mill

            What does that number mean? On average, it takes 6.3 board feet of lumber to build one square foot of a house. For ease of the math, let’s use a house of 1,600 board feet, which would use about 10,000 board feet of lumber. Divide 10,000 into 525,000,000, and you get 52,500 homes that could have been built from lumber sawn at Star Lake.

         Extensive forest fires charred the area in 1903 and 1908, and a 1910 fire burned throughout the summer.

         Between 1908 and 1910, most of the town was torn down, packed up, and trained to Columbus, WI, where it began yet another life. 

            Thus in the course of 15 years, 1895-1910, the Star Lake area went from an old growth forest and boom town to a cutover forest and virtual ghost town, just one of the reported 155 ghost towns in Wisconsin.

            Today’s tiny town of Star Lake has a delightful general store, two state campgrounds, the Star Lake nature trail, and on the other side of the lake, the Plum Lake Hemlocks State Natural Area, all well worth visiting.

 

North Lakeland Discovery Center Annual Report 

            The North Lakeland Discovery Center began in 1995 when a group of community and school leaders envisioned repurposing the former Youth Conservation Corps Camp (YCC) at Statehouse Lake in Manitowish Waters into an environmental center. Initially leased from the DNR for $1 annually, the Center was established as a nonprofit in 1998 and has grown into a thriving outdoor learning facility with a wonderful diversity of innovative programs and citizen science initiatives,

            The Center recently issued an impressive annual report highlighting the impacts it made in 2024:

270 public programs serving 3,360 participants

19 Eco Series programs served 142 children from 4 to 11 years old

44 field education days serving 1,600+ students pre-K to high school

43 traveling naturalist programs serving 12,460 participants

            So, kudos to the NLDC, and to those who financially support the Center and those who serve as volunteeers, for making a difference in environmental awareness in the Northwoods! 

 

Wolves and Cattle – The Stats

            In the continuing discussion of the impact of wolves in Wisconsin, retired wildlife biologist Peter David related the following numbers (which I checked and confirmed): The number of cattle killed or maimed by wolves in WI in a typical year is about 40, which is the number that on average go to slaughter in Wisconsin every 20 minutes.

Cattle killed or injured by wolves in Wisconsin

             As of January 1, 2025, the total cattle and calf inventory in Wisconsin was estimated at 3.25 million head. The most recent statistics I can find for the Wisconsin harvest of cattle for beef was approximately 1,379,400 cattle in 2019. 

            A more recent statistic from 2023 shows wolf-caused livestock losses occurred at about 20 Wisconsin farms. Currently around 13,000 Wisconsin farmers engage in beef production.

            For anyone who loses any animal in any unfortunate manner, it’s a real loss. I don’t wish to minimize that. But the significance of loss via wolves to the overall beef industry is virtually nil.

            Peter noted also the fact that the losses for cattle have not trended upwards, since 2005 while the wolf population went from roughly 400 to around 1,200 today. This suggests that most wolves have learned how to avoid people.

 

Celestial Events

            From 49 years of Woody Hagge’s data on 37-acre Foster Lake in Hazelhurst,  August 6 marks the midway date between ice-out and ice-up. August 7 marks the midway point between summer solstice and autumn equinox.

            The full moon, known variously as the Sturgeon Moon/Corn Moon/Ricing Moon occurs on August 9.

            Every summer, Earth drifts through the dusty trail of Comet Swift-Tuttle, and the result is one of the most spectacular meteor showers of the year. This shower can produce up to 75 meteors per hour under dark skies. The Perseid meteor shower peaks on August 12, and even though there will be some moonlight washing the sky, it’s still worth taking the time to look for them. Find a dark sky, let your eyes adjust, and enjoy one of the best meteor showers of the year!          That same early morning look in the northeast for Venus and Jupiter just one degree apart.

 

Thought for the Week

            “When our eyes are graced with wonder, the world reveals its wonders to us . . . So much depends on how we look at things. The quality of our looking determines what we come to see. Too often we squander the invitations extended to us because our looking has become repetitive and blind. The mystery and beauty is all around us . . . When the imagination awakens, the inner world illuminates. We begin to glimpse things that no one speaks about.” – John O’Donahue, from the book Beauty: The Invisible Embrace 

 

A Northwoods Almanac for 7/18-31, 2025

 A Northwoods Almanac for 7/18-31, 2025  

 

World’s Oldest Known Loon Still Producing Chicks 

            Thirty-five years ago (1990), a territorial female on a remote pool in the Seney National Wildlife Refuge in the U.P. was color-banded as the sixth adult common loon ever banded on the Refuge. She later came to be known as “Fe,” and that year produced one chick. At the time, she had to be at least four years old, which is functionally the minimum age of reproduction for common loons. 

            During that same July in 1990, “ABJ,” who in 1987 was among the first three loon juveniles color-banded at Seney, had returned to the Refuge as a breeding adult, and was embarking upon his search for a territory and a mate. Seven years later in 1997, he finally found a home territory by forcefully evicting the resident male with whom Fe had produced seven young between 1990-1996. 

            Over the following quarter century, ABJ and Fe produced 32 hatchlings. However, they parted ways in 2022, with Fe quickly finding a new partner and raising a chick. She then failed to breed in 2023, but rebounded with two chicks in 2024. 

            This year, in Fe’s second nesting attempt, two chicks emerged after nearly a month of shared incubation between her and an unbanded mate, her 43rd and 44th chicks that researchers know about. 

            “That researchers know about” is a key phrase, because remember that when she was banded, her age was unknown, but she had to be at least four years old. In the late 1980s, before Fe was banded, her territory was a productive one, and researchers think it’s likely that these hatchlings were also hers. So, at this point Fe’s actual lifetime tally of chicks could well be in the 50s.

            And her true age is at least 39, but likely older. 

            Meanwhile, on a nearby pool, ABJ’s breeding season was once again less fruitful, but he’s still trying!

 

Black Terns

            Mary and I recently paddled 513-acre Wabikon Lake, a gorgeous, shallow lake just a few miles east of Crandon in Forest County. We were scouting the lake prior to a trip we’re leading today (7/18) for the North Lakeland Discovery Center. A creek connects Wabikon to the 220-acre undeveloped Riley Lake to its south, so we had miles of wild shoreline to explore (Wabikon is 98% undeveloped). 

Wabikon Lake SNA

            “Charismatic megafauna” abounded here, from bald eagles to great blue herons to common loons to trumpeter swans, but the best discovery was of a black tern colony on Wabikon. 

            Black terns are listed as endangered in Wisconsin, so seeing them is a privilege and a rare treat. They’re categorized as “S2,” which in the parlance of bird researchers means they are “imperiled in Wisconsin due to a restricted range, few populations or occurrences, steep declines, severe threats, or other factors.”

photo by Gordon Petersen

            In flight, they dart and flutter and zigzag like a swallow, and they don’t seem the least concerned to be around people. Their careening flight allows them to capture dragonflies, moths, and other flying insects, and they are adept at hovering over the water and then swooping down to pick insects from the vegetation or to capture small forage fish.

            One doesn’t want to get too close to their semi-colonial nesting territory, however. They can get loud and aggressive, and will mob perceived potential predators, sometimes striking them, and may “defecate in flight with unpleasant accuracy.”

            Needless to say, we avoided paddling close to the colony and tried to reassure them we were harmless and actually friends of the family.

            Systematic surveys of black terns in Wisconsin were conducted in 1980-82, 1995-97 and 2009-11, and the researchers found a 70 percent reduction in the number of birds observed, and a notable reduction or disappearance of sites that formerly held breeding black terns.

            A more recent four-year long survey found as of 2018 more than 2,300 black tern breeding adults at 115 colonies in 32 counties, with most of these colonies being from two to 25 breeding adults.

            Arthur Cleveland Bent wrote beautifully about black terns in 1921: [They are] “a restless waif of the air, flitting about hither and thither with a wayward, desultory flight, light and buoyant as a butterfly. Its darting zigzag flight as it mounts into the air to chase a fluttering moth is suggestive of a flycatcher or a nighthawk; as it skims swiftly over the surface of the water it reminds me of a swallow; and its true relationship to the terns is shown as it hovers along over the billowing tops of a great sea of tall waving grass, dipping down occasionally to snatch an insect from the slender, swaying tops.”

            Black terns nest amidst emergent vegetation in fresh-water wetlands, building flimsy, often floating nests that are easily destroyed by wind or changing water levels. On Wisconsin flowages and wetlands where water levels fluctuate, providing nesting platforms has proven to be really successful. In one study, black terns nested on 65% of nest platforms provided, and the platform-nesting pairs exhibited higher nest survival rates and hatching success during one year relative to natural nests.

 

Swarming Bees!

            Mary and I tend two bee hives on our property in Manitowish, and on 7/5, we looked out a window to see bees pouring out of one of the hives into a rising funnel of tens of thousands of bees. We stepped outside just on the edge of the swarm and listened and watched as they eventually congregated in a young balsam fir tree next to our house. The branches were literally dripping with bees, and it was all a bit unnerving as well as amazing. 

            We knew intellectually and from working in the hives, that a healthy colony contains around 30,000 to 60,000 bees. But knowing that and seeing much of that number in the air all at once is two very different things. No picture we took can do it justice, but we did take some video that gives a sense of the swarm – see https://www.facebook.com/100011449936447/videos/1460337101649802

            Swarms happen usually because the deeps where the queen and all the workers and drones reside become overcrowded. The queen typically then leaves with half of her offspring to relocate to a new home, leaving behind the other half to produce a new queen.

            The swarm flies to a nearby location as an interim place to rest, while scouts start checking the area for a suitable new location. The scouts soon return, and somehow communicate the options to the colony who then “vote” on where to go (read the book Bee Democracy by Thomas Seeley for the whole amazing story). 

            Our bees chose differently, eventually flying back into their hive, likely because the queen, often a poor flyer, hadn’t followed them or had been injured or eaten. A colony without a queen is lost and will return! 

            The next day we went into our hive and removed four frames that were full of honey and/or brood and replaced them with four emptier frames to give the colony room to expand. We also added a second “super” above the deeps to provide more room yet. Hopefully that will ease the crowding.

            Here’s some fun and amazing bee math. Each "deep" (just the name for the box where the queen and the rest of the bees live) has 10 frames in it. There are two sides to each frame, and each side if completely filled with bees could have 3,397 bees per side - that’s 6,794 bees per frame. If you had one deep 10-frame box filled with frames that were 100% covered with brood, then you would have 67,940 bees just in that one deep, and recall that there are two deeps per hive.

            LOTS of bees, in other words, could have been in our swarm.

            If that seems like a ridiculous number of bees, you need all those bees to make any substantial amount of honey. Last year, we spun out over 13 quarts of honey, about 39 pounds. How many bees did it take to produce this relatively minor amount of honey? Follow along. 

            One honey bee produces about 1/12th of a teaspoon of honey in her lifetime; 12 bees, therefore, can make a teaspoon; 36 bees can make a tablespoon; 576 will make a cup (16 tbsp in a cup); 2,304 will make a quart of honey (4 cups in a quart). A quart of honey weighs a little less than 3 pounds So, it takes 768 bees to make a pound of honey. 

            To make our 39 pounds last year? Around 30,000 bees worked to make that happen!

            One last rather crazy fact: It takes 2 million flowers to produce one pound of honey, which is really hard to imagine, I know, but that’s what the research says.

 

Great Success for the Great Wisconsin Birdathon 

            This year’s Great Wisconsin Birdathon raised over $126,000 for bird conservation, a record total.  

            More than 620 birders from 39 counties participated, setting new records in both categories. From backyard feeders to birding by boat, a record high 283 species were counted, including sightings of 39 Species of Special Concern, 11 threatened species, and 9 endangered birds. 

            Mary and I participated in two counts: One driving and walking in various spots in southern Iron County and the other paddling on the Bear River as one of numerous rivers statewide that were counted via kayak or canoe.

            The latest Wisconsin breeding bird atlas says that Wisconsin boasts 243 breeding species, so 40 of those species counted were still in migration, assuming every breeding species was found.

            Check out the full 2025 species list at WiBirdathon.org. 

 

Celestial Events

            On July 20, 1969, Apollo 11 lunar module Eagle landed on the moon, and Neil Armstrong left the first human footprint on the moon’s surface.

            The new moon occurs on 7/24.

            On 7/28, look after dusk for Mars about one degree above the waxing crescent moon. And in the pre-dawn hours of 7/29, the peak Delta Aquarid meteor shower occurs with an average showing of 15 to 20 meteors per hour.

            Our days are now growing shorter by two minutes/day. Enjoy the evening light while we have it!

 

Thought for the Week

            “There are some good things to be said about walking . . . Walking takes longer, for example, than any other known form of locomotion except crawling. Thus it stretches time and prolongs life. Life is already too short to waste on speed. I have a friend who's always in a hurry; he never gets anywhere. Walking makes the world much bigger and thus more interesting. You have time to observe the details . . . To be everywhere at once is to be nowhere forever, if you ask me.” – Edward Abbey

 

Please share your outdoor sightings and thoughts: e-mail me at johnbates2828@gmail.com, call 715-476-2828, snail-mail at 4245N State Highway 47, Mercer, WI, or see my blog at www.manitowishriver.blogspot.com

A Northwoods Almanac for 7/4-17, 2025

 A Northwoods Almanac for 7/4-17, 2025  by John Bates

 

Raptor Attack

            I received the following email from a friend on 6/24: “I'm emailing to tell you of an incident on Saturday [6/21] when a friend [Zoe] was harassed by some sort of raptor while she was hiking.

            “It happened on a hiking trail . . . [near Hidden Lakes Trail east of Eagle River]. The bird first hit her in the head from behind as she was walking on the trail, almost knocking her down and leaving a big bruise.  It then kept swooping down at her and wouldn't let up. She started running, and says the bird kept attacking her for almost a mile before it finally left her alone . . .

            “Based on the location indicated in the picture and your knowledge of that habitat, do you have a guess as to what species was harassing her? Have you ever heard of something like this happening before?”

            Yes, I have heard of this happening before, and I would bet the farm it was a female northern goshawk. 

            Twenty years ago I wrote about a man being attacked at night in February by what turned out to be a barred owl, and in trying to figure out what the bird was I received this note from Tom Erdman, an expert bird researcher with lots of experience banding raptors: “Goshawks typically make flying passes at an intruder, usually only using the hallux to rip. I've lost several hats, part of an ear . . . and a little blood to them over the years. Typically you can just face them and wave them off.”

            Cornell’s “Birds of the World” says about northern goshawks (now called “American” goshawk as of 2024): “Can strike and draw blood from persons approaching nests: attacks on a single person are usually more severe than those on two or more persons.”

            In a 1991 study (Speiser, Robert and Bosakowski, Thomas (2024) “Nesting Phenology, Site Fidelity, and Defense Behavior of Northern Goshawks in New York and New Jersey,” Journal of Raptor Research: Vol. 25), “Aggression to a single human intruder was ranked at 16 different nest sites . . . The most aggressive aerial attacks were initiated by the female if an intruder came within about 100 m of the nest during the early nestling stage. Furthermore, attacks became more vigorous if an observer moved in the direction of the nest . . . Stopping and watching the nest from the same trail was not tolerated and usually provoked aggressive attacks.

            “We also observed a direct relation between the magnitude of aggressive encounters and the number of observers in the party. Goshawks were noticeably less bold and aggressive when more than one observer was present. Visits to active nest sites have shown at least 15 extreme aggressive attacks during at least 80 single observer visits in comparison to no aggressive attacks during some 30 multiple observer visits . . . 

            “During the early brood period (nestlings less than two weeks in age) the female became most aggressive and was occasionally supported by protesting vocalizations of the male

who only participated in 18% of cases of nest defense . . . Nest defense usually began with protracted "cackle" alarm calls described as "cac, cac, cac" in Bent (1937). These calls were uttered by both adults if present. The cackling was quickly followed by repeated flyovers, then direct diving at the intruder primarily by the female. When young were more than three weeks old, adults rarely attacked an observer.”

            So, to summarize: When their chicks are less than two weeks old, female goshawks are known to attack solitary individuals who may be inadvertently walking by their nest site. After that, attacks are rare.

            And that seems like a reasonable hypothesis for what happened to Zoe on her walk.

            Please note: American goshawks are a very uncommon species, very secretive, and listed of “special concern” in Wisconsin, most often nesting in older, mature forests. The Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest conducts surveys for goshawk active nests prior to timber harvest projects, and where nests are known, maintains and protects areas of mature hardwood, hemlock, and white pine forests.

            Goshawk attacks are quite rare – lightning strikes to people probably occur on a comparable frequency. Like any wildlife species, they protect their young if one gets too close to them. I’ve only seen a few goshawks over all my years of birding, and I consider it a privilege when I do. 

American goshawk

Some Thoughts on the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program

            The Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program is up for renewal once again, and every time it needs reauthorization, there’s been a political fight to fund it despite longstanding bipartisan support as well as 9 out of 10 voters backing it. 

Nearly 700,000 acres have been protected over the three decades of the program, and as of 2020, more than nine out of ten Wisconsin residents live within 1 mile of a property that has received a Knowles-Nelson Stewardship investment. Over 4,200 grants have been awarded to local governments and non-profits to support protecting land, clean water, and outdoor recreation opportunities including hunting and fishing. 

One concern of those who wish to cut it is that it costs money. Well, true, but everything costs money that’s worthwhile. The real question is whether it’s a good investment of money. The weekly debt service for Knowles-Nelson is significant – about $1.23 million. That is a lot of money. But break down the cost per person in the state and the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program costs each Wisconsin resident less than $11 per year (far less than a fishing/hunting license or a state park’s pass). Or about 84 cents per person per month. This modest investment that we all make each year has yielded extraordinary returns. It costs money to build and maintain local parks, trails, playgrounds, campgrounds, boat launches, shorelines, et al. 

How does that investment stack up against other investments the state makes? Knowles-Nelson costs pale in comparison to other debts the state carries. For example, Wisconsin's debt service for transportation infrastructure costs about $8.5 million per week, or nearly seven times more than our weekly investment in conservation through the Stewardship Fund.

The program has been funded through bonding, which is how governments finance long-term purchases, just like when one of us buys a house. If an investment has a high upfront cost but provides benefits for a long time (think paving roads, building schools, or purchasing land), then it makes sense to spread the cost out over the life of the investment. That’s what bonding does.

But some ask can we afford it? In my opinion, we can. Wisconsin is in excellent financial condition, carrying less debt than at any time in the past 25 years. Wisconsin ended its 2024 fiscal year in June with a $4.6 billion state budget surplus. Really, there are no legitimate concerns about our state's debt load that would justify scaling back this exceptionally successful program.

If you want to see how the KNSP has been utilized over the years in your specific township or county, I encourage you to pull up this interactive map and read the many, many stories: https://knowlesnelson.org/an-interactive-map-of-knowles-nelson-grants/. 

 

Mosquito Buckets

            “Mosquito buckets” are a simple, effective alternative to toxic spraying to kill mosquitoes. The buckets protect pollinators, pets, and people by safely targeting mosquito larvae. Spraying kills adult mosquitoes (and all other adult insects in the area like butterflies, moths, dragonflies, fireflies, and various other pollinators), but not larvae, so you have to keep spraying throughout the summer. 

            Mosquitoes lay eggs in standing water, so that’s what we all need to target.

This super inexpensive method kills the aquatic larvae by adding a natural soil bacterium called Bti (Bacillus thuringiensis israelensis found in mosquito “dunks”).

            It’s easy-peasy. Get a five gallon bucket, fill it two-thirds full, add a handful of grassy vegetation to help the water stew a little, and then add one-quarter of a mosquito dunk, readily available at most hardware stores, to the bucket.

            Put some screen over the bucket to keep other critters out, and place the bucket in a shady area. Use several buckets if you have a large yard. Drill a hole in the bucket at the desired water line so rainwater doesn’t make it overflow.

            That’s it. 

            Dunks begin killing mosquito larva within hours; you should start to notice a difference in about 48 hours. Will they kill every mosquito? No, but they will help a lot.

            BTW, you also need to remove all other sources of standing water in your yard; otherwise, you’re just providing other areas for mosquitoes to lay their eggs. 

Give the bucket(s) a try and see what you think.

 

Summer Bounty

It’s late June as I write this, and everywhere wild plants are growing like crazy, as is our garden. While we clearly don’t spend enough time weeding, nevertheless, we’ve harvested asparagus and some spinach from the vegetable garden so far, and we have more rhubarb than the law should allow, allowing us to freeze numerous quarts without making much of a dent in it. 

I made rhubarb-cherry jam last week (we had been in Door County and bought frozen cherries), and soon we’ll be putting up rhubarb-strawberry jam. 

We canned a crate of peaches from Georgia on 6/24. 

Our Juneberry trees, too, have lots of ripening fruit on them, but the birds always beat us to them. Hopefully they’ll leave us a few cups to put on some pancakes in July.

            A few of our apple trees look loaded, so we’ll be canning many quarts of applesauce in August. 

            And our bees appear abundant (as long as they aren’t killed by someone spraying  pesticides for mosquitoes), so about the time we’re harvesting apples, we should get very sticky spinning out our honey frames and storing the liquid gold in quart jar.

              Hopefully you’re taking advantage of our lush summer, too, and harvesting from your property.

 

Sightings: July’s Roadside Flowers 

            The weather in late June and into July brings flowers galore along our roadsides. Some are show-offs while others prefer humility. Most belong in other countries, but a few belong here. Some want to take over the planet, and others just want to live a small life in a small landscape. 

            Here’s a sampler of what you are likely seeing everywhere (nn for non-native): Hoary alyssum (nn), fireweed, bird’s-foot trefoil (nn), bush clover (nn), red clover (nn), golden clover  or yellow hop (nn), bladder-campion (nn), wild roses, spreading dogbane, goat’s-beard (nn), yellow and orange hawkweed (nn), ox-eye daisy (nn), and yarrow. 

yellow hawkweed, photo by John Bates

fireweed, photo by John Bates

yellow hop, photo by John Bates

goatsbeard, photo by John Bates
 

Celestial Events

            Planets to view in July: After dusk, the only planet to look for is Mars very low in the west. But prior to sunrise (I know, it’s really early!), look for Venus brilliant in the northeast, Jupiter bright in the east, and Saturn high in the south.

            Full moon on 7/10 – the “Buck in velvet” moon, “Half way through the summer” moon, or “Thunder” moon.

 

Thought for the Week

            “I used to think that the top environmental problems were biodiversity loss, ecosystem collapse and climate change . . . I was wrong. The top environmental problems are selfishness, greed, and apathy, and to deal with these we need a cultural and spiritual transformation.”

James Gustave Speth, former U.S. Advisor on climate change

 

A Northwoods Almanac for 6/20 – 7/3/25

 A Northwoods Almanac for 6/20 – 7/3/25  by John Bates

 

Sightings – FOYs (First-of-Year) of Flowers and Others

            The first 10 days of June saw a host of wildflowers and flowering shrubs come into flower. Here’s a sampling:

6/3: FOY wild roses, columbines, and bunchberries

bunchberries, photo by John Bates

6/4: FOY nannyberries and pagoda dogwoods

6/5: FOY blue flag irises and high-bush cranberries

6/8: FOY blue-bead lily (Clintonia) and the first cultivated roses in our garden

6/9: FOY tick trefoil along roadsides

6/10: FOY spreading dogbane, and the first tiny fruits of wild strawberries

6/11: FOY mountain ashes in our yard 

            Other FOYs of ours in Manitowish include our first Canadian tiger swallowtail butterfly on 6/6, the first painted turtles laying eggs on 6/7, and a black bear destroying our bird feeders on 6/8 (awfully late for this sort of behavior!).

Canadian Tiger Swallowtail, photo by John Bates

            Several readers emailed with their sightings of red-headed woodpeckers. Jane Vinson-Kafura and John Kafura have had families of red-headed woodpeckers spend the summer in their yard on Flambeau Lake for at least 10 years. They noted, “They love our suet feeders and sometimes get into tiffs with our pileateds.” 

Al Toussant wrote to say he had a red-headed woodpecker as well, “an exciting first.” He noted, “This handsome bird is very much welcome at our feeder because it has wonderful table manners. Unlike the Red-Bellied that visits far too many times each day selecting only the most perfect seeds to eat while scattering the ‘imperfect’ ones to the ground, the Red-Head is comfortable in taking and eating the first seed encountered, thus leaving seeds for the other birds that visit our feeder.”

Kurt Justice sent me a photo on 6/3 of a yellow-headed blackbird eating corn in the parking lot of his sport shop (Kurt’s Island Sportshop) in Minocqua. The bird stayed around two days and moved on.

            And Bob Von Holdt sent me a photo of the six incredibly cute trumpeter swan cygnets that have hatched out on Presque Isle Lake on May 30.

trumpeter swan chicks, photo by Bob Von Holt

Apples – Non-Native but Non-Invasive

I’m always harping on the importance of planting native tree, shrub, and wildflower species because of their coevolution with native insects, which results in their serving important ecological functions, and because non-native species are often invasive. 

But not all non-natives are invasive, and with that in mind, decades ago, we planted apple trees (and crabapple trees) on our property, all of which have perfumed the air this spring as they have nearly every spring we’ve lived here.

Some folks are surprised to learn that apples are not native to the U.S. All apples, including many crabapples, are believed to have been domesticated from a wild apple, Malus sieversii, in the Tien Shan mountains in Central Asia some 4,000–10,000 years ago. From there, apples spread to western Europe along the Silk Road and eventually hybridized with a number of wild crabapples from other parts of Europe. 

Over those centuries, people learned how to graft and hybridize apples so successfully that many distinct varieties were recognized more than 2,000 years ago. And by the time European settlement rolled around in the Americas, hundreds of varieties existed in Europe. Now today, we have over 7,500 known apple cultivars.

Though it's not clear how they arrived here, at least three crabapple species are considered native to North America: Malus coronaria, M. fusca, and M. ioensis. Most of our other crabapple species, native to Europe and Asia, prospered when brought here as seeds or cuttings by colonists.

The difference between a crabapple and an apple?  Malus trees with fruit that's two inches or more in diameter are considered an apple, while Malus trees with fruit smaller than two inches are considered a crab. 

All crabapple fruits are technically edible, but only if you like bitter tasting fruits. Henry David Thoreau's essay “Wild Apples” says it best: “[Crabapples are] sour enough to set a squirrel’s teeth on edge and make a jay scream.”

Most important to Mary and me, crabapples are loved by birds in the late fall and winter, especially cedar waxwings, bohemian waxwings, and pine grosbeaks, that is if the migrating robins don’t completely rob the trees before the others arrive.

 

Lilacs –Also Non-Native but Non-Invasive

            We live in Mary’s grandparents’ home in Manitowish, which they purchased in 1924 from Widow Stone (we would love to know the story of the Stone family!), and at some point in her grandparents’ lifetime, they planted lilacs (Syringa vulgaris) in the yard. Those lavender lilacs still bloom every spring, and for 41 years we’ve cut sprigs from the colony to perfume our old home.

            Lilacs are native to woodland and scrub forests from what is today Serbia and Bosnia. Folklore offers two conflicting stories on just who brought lilacs to America in the late 1700s. One story suggests it was Sir Harry Frankland, a very wealthy Englishman, who had a mistress living in New England. She loved flowers, and Sir Harry would bring her exotic plants, including lilacs, to woo her.

            Another story says it was an English sea captain, name unknown, who brought lilacs from Persia. No love story with mistresses, unfortunately, is included.

            The oldest living lilacs in North America are thought to have been planted around 1750 at the Governor Wentworth estate in Portsmouth, N.H. 

That’s 275 year-old lilacs! Old-growth lilacs – who knew!

Lilac fragrances quickly became popular to all classes of people. Thomas Jefferson wrote about his method of planting lilacs in 1767, while George Washington transplanted lilacs into his garden at Mount Vernon in 1785. 

            If you were a pioneer with the dream of carving a home in the American West, you’d bring a lilac cutting along, or buy one from a peddler, to remind you of home.

            One of the world’s largest collection of lilacs can be seen at Harvard’s Arnold Arboretum, which houses 408 lilac plants representing 171 taxa (kinds), including 133 cultivars. Together they provide a five-week season of scented air that likely would knock your socks off. 

The Arnold Arboretum has celebrated lilacs and the arrival of spring with an annual celebration, “Lilac Sunday,” since 1908. Attendance is huge, with a peak of an estimated 43,000 visitors in 1941!

Lilacs were designated the state flower of New Hampshire in 1919, because they’re “symbolic of the hardy character of the men and women of the Granite State.” But there’s a story behind this. When the NH legislature met in February of 1919, some members suggested nine alternatives to the lilac, among them the apple blossom, purple aster, wood lily, water lily and goldenrod.

The Legislative Committee’s original recommendation of the purple lilac, however, was approved and sent on to the Senate for their approval. The Senate, although leaning toward approving the lilac as the state flower, also wanted their members to consider the buttercup. No flower could muster up majority support, so the 24 members of the Senate came up with a novel solution. They placed the names of three of three flowers in a hat: the purple lilac, the mayflower and the purple aster. They then put a blindfold on the Senate Clerk and ordered him to draw a name from the trio he had been presented with. The purple aster was the flower name that was drawn, not the purple lilac.

The Senate reported its decision to the House, which unfortunately was determined to have the apple blossom as the state flower. Thus, a 10-man “Committee of Conference” was formed to solve the issue, but they soon found themselves at an impasse and proposed yet another unique solution. They approached two botanists, professors Arthur Houston Chivers of Dartmouth and Ormond Butler of “the state university” to arbitrate this dilemma, agreeing to accept their decision, whatever it might be. 

Within only a few days the two botanists were deadlocked as well. 

So, the previously deadlocked conference committee agreed to convene yet again, and finally voted eight-to-two in favor of the purple lilac (the other two wanted apple blossom).

The Governor thankfully ended the flowery debate and signed the purple lilac into law on March 28, 1919. (Wisconsin designated the wood violet (Viola papilionacea) as the official state flower in 1909, chosen by Wisconsin's school children.)

BTW, lilacs aren’t considered invasive, but lilac roots do spread one and a half times the width of the shrub, and they do send up suckers which will form a clonal thicket. Just be aware.

 

Cottongrass Display 

Jane Vinson-Kafura and John Kafura sent me a note asking, “Have you seen the cotton grass along Hwy. 47 on the west side of the road in Powell Marsh?  We have never seen it so completely cover the area as this year. Truly stunning!”

Cottongrass on Powell Marsh, photo by John Bates

Cottongrass expands via underground rhizomes, often growing in the deep layers of peat found in open, acidic wetlands. The overall effect is akin to a snowstorm in June.

The name is a misnomer. Cottongrass has no relation to cotton and actually belongs to the sedge genus Eriophorum.      

But the fluffy heads of seeds have long, whitish bristles attached, so they definitely look like tufts of cotton on long slender stalks. The bristles act as parachutes, carrying the seeds on the wind.

 

Celestial Events – Summer Solstice!

            Summer solstice takes place today, June 20, providing us with 15 hours and 44 minutes of sunlight, our longest day of the year. The sun will rise later the next morning for the first time since Dec. 27 and the day will be shorter by 0.1 second.

            The new moon occurs on 6/25. Look after dusk on 6/29 for Mars just below the waxing crescent moon. 

            And on 7/3, the Earth will be at aphelion – its farthest from the sun at 94.5 million miles. July 3 also marks the mid-point of our calendar year.

 

Thought for the Week

I cross an ancient brush fence and am fairly within the old hemlocks, and in one of the most primitive, undisturbed nooks. In the deep moss I tread as with muffled feet, and the pupils of my eyes dilate in the dim, almost religious light. - John Burroughs, Wake-Robin