A Northwoods Almanac for May 22 - June 4, 2026

 A Northwoods Almanac for May 22 - June 4, 2026 

 

Sightings: First-Of-Years (FOY) and Others

            Is there a better time of year than mid-May when the birds are all returning, the wildflowers are blooming, and the mosquitoes have yet to wake up? This column could just be a long listing of FOYs - there are so many! Here’s a sampling.

5/4: We had our FOY rose-breasted grosbeak appear at our feeders. This was early! We usually don’t see them until around Mother’s Day.

5/6: A Harris’s sparrow showed up at our feeders and stayed around for a week. Harris’s are very uncommon visitors and always an exciting event. They nest in far northern Canada, and their spring migration usually takes them further west than here. 

            John James Audubon named the Harris's sparrow after Edward Harris, an American amateur ornithologist and financial supporter of Audubon. Harris accompanied him on an 1843 expedition along the Missouri River where the species was collected. 

5/8: FOY ruby-throated hummingbirds appeared today for numerous people: Pat Schmidt in Hazelhurst, Mary Madsen in Presque Isle, and Marlene Rasmussen in Lac du Flambeau. 

            Pat noted that she has been keeping records since 2007 with an average date of 5/11. Her earliest date was 5/6 and latest date 5/13.       

            Marlene noted that she walked outside to put up her hummingbird feeder, and the hummer buzzed right up to her face. It apparently had been waiting rather impatiently! 

            Banding studies confirm that hummingbirds often return to the exact same location where they were hatched or have previously fed. If you’re not out there with the feeders ready, they’ll let you know. Folks talk about hummers looking in their windows if they haven’t put out the feeders early enough. They can live up to 9 years (a typical lifespan is 3–4 years), meaning the same individual may know you, and your property, quite well.

5/8: Mary heard our FOY killdeer in Manitowish.

5/8: On a hike in The Nature Conservancy’s Guido Rahr Tenderfoot Preserve on the Michigan border, I had an experience I’d never had before. A friend and I were measuring a massive old yellow birch that had died and broken off about 20 feet up when suddenly out of the hollow top of the tree a turkey vulture leapt out and flew to a nearby tree. She stayed nearby and appeared anxious, so we surmised she had to be sitting on an active nest within the birch. We walked away quickly to allow her to return to her nest, but it was a first for me - I would never have guessed a turkey vulture would be nesting in the hollowed out top of a giant yellow birch.

5/9: Mary Madsen in Presque Isle reported a FOY Baltimore oriole. 

5/9: I heard my FOY ovenbird in the Frog Lake and Pines SNA.

5/12: Wood ducks have been back for many weeks now, but Bev Engstrom captured a great photo of seven wood ducks perched close together in a tree. One doesn’t think of ducks as perching birds, but wood ducks commonly perch and walk on branches, utilizing sharp, hooked claws on their webbed feet to grip bark and branches. They also commonly forage in uplands and have a particular affinity for acorns. They possess an extremely expandable esophagus, enabling them to swallow large acorns. As many as 30 small acorns have been found in one wood duck’s esophagus, and 20 large acorns in another.

photo by Bev Engstrom

5/13: We have a pair of evening grosbeaks and a pair of pine siskins still visiting our feeders. The question is whether either will stay and nest. Both have nested here in the past, but they are wildly inconsistent in doing so. We also finally got our FOY hummingbird today.

5/13: On a walk near the Manitowish River, Mary and Callie heard our FOY parula warbler and redstart, indicating the neotropical migrants are returning!

5/14: As further proof that many of the neotropicals are back, I heard my FOY Nashville warbler, yellow warbler, and common yellowthroat, and saw my FOY barn swallows. BTW, Nashville warblers nest in Wisconsin only as far south as the middle of the state, so the name “Nashville” has nothing to do with its habitat or nesting range. It was first named by an ornithologist who collected the bird during migration in Nashville, TN.

 

Sparrows!

            As of 5/15, we have five species of sparrows visiting our feeders and/or singing in the wetlands below our house: swamp sparrow, white-throated sparrow, chipping sparrow, song sparrow, and white-crowned sparrow (we had a 6^thspecies - a Harris’s sparrow - but it left on 5/13). Oh, and dark-eyed juncos are technically sparrows as well (part of the passerine family Emberizidae), so add them to the list.

            We had fox sparrows and American tree sparrows a few weeks back, too, but both species have moved on to their northern nesting grounds. 

            So, it’s been a sparrowy spring - 9 species!

            Sparrows can be a bird watcher’s nemesis because of their often subtle differences. Lots of people frustratedly refer to them as LBBs - little brown birds - or LBGs - little brown guys. 

            Learning their songs makes IDing them easier. The white-throated sparrow’s clear, crystal notes are perhaps the easiest and are often notated as “Oh, sweet, Canada, Canada, Canada.”

            Several other sparrow species nest in our area and are worth learning: Lincoln’s sparrow, Savannah sparrow, clay-colored sparrow, and Eastern towhee (part of the passerine family Emberizidae like juncos). 

            Most city folks are extremely familiar with the ubiquitous non-native house sparrow, but we rarely see them here given our contiguous woodlands.

            I appreciate sparrows (when I’m not complaining about how hard they are to ID) for their adaptive coloration - they know how to fit in, an evolutionary skill gained over millennia from being a desired prey species. They’re typically species of dense shrublands or grasslands where matching the vegetation, and using the vegetation as cover, makes survival more likely. You have to admire their evolution into small cryptic birds that can melt into their environment.

 

Alligators? No, Yellow Water Lily Rhizomes

            An old friend sent me a photo of something floating on the water that from a distance could be imagined to be a small alligator. She laughingly said it looked like a sea monster. Well, we have neither sea monsters or alligators in the Northwoods. What we do have, however, are the spongy and huge perennial rhizomes of the yellow or white pond lily, likely dug up from the sediments by a muskrat or beaver. They’re often the diameter of a baseball bat and can be many feet in length. The black spots on the rhizome are the former attachments of the stalks of the pond lilies that rise to the surface with their leaves and flowers in the spring, and then die back in the fall.

contributed photo 

 

Why Do Most Songbirds Migrate at Night?

1- Daytime air is more turbulent, which wastes energy trying to buck the wind and stay on course. Nighttime air is more stable and smoother, making for a straighter flight with less energy burned.

2- Navigation at night using the stars is remarkably accurate.

3- Most birds feed during the day and not at night, so it makes sense to fly long distances at night and fuel up during the day.

            

Conservation Congress Results on Funding the DNR and the Stewardship Program

            At the recent Conservation Congress meeting held around the state, voters supported (75% to 20% with 5% no opinion) adding a permanent 1/8-cent state sales tax (0.125%) to help fund all fish and wildlife conservation programs. Of all funding mechanisms for our DNR, this makes the most sense by far. Everyone benefits from DNR policies protecting our lands, water, and wildlife - we all need to pay in to support the work. 

            Voters also supported (81% to 9% with 10% no opinion) legislation to reauthorize the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship program for at least 10 years with up to $1 billion in funding:

4485 yes, 489 no. All 72 counties voted yes, zero counties voted no.

            The legislature needs to hear the people on these issues and act accordingly. 

 

A Brief History of the Clean Water Act

            Before the Clean Water Act, there were virtually no regulations governing water pollution, leading to severe impacts on both human health and wildlife. In New York City, hundreds of millions of gallons of untreated sewage were dumped into the Hudson River daily, and Ohio’s Cuyahoga River famously caught fire multiple times in 1969 due to oil and industrial waste, as did rivers in Baltimore, Buffalo, Detroit, and Philadelphia. Massive fish die-offs weren’t uncommon, which also had profound impacts on birds.

            In October of 1972, our U.S. Congress authorized the Clean Water Act, which passed in the Senate by a vote of 74-0 (26 not voting) and in the House 366-11. Thirteen days later, President Nixon vetoed it at midnight out of a stated concern for “spiraling prices and increasingly onerous taxes.” 

            By 2:00 AM that same night, the Senate voted 52-12 (36 senators not voting) and the House voted 247-23 to override the veto. Ninety-six votes came from Republicans in the House override vote. The Environmental Protection Agency had just been established two years earlier via near unanimous votes, too, in both houses of Congress.

            It’s hard to imagine such bipartisan effort today even with such an obvious need as clean water. The Clean Water Act has been an environmental, economic, and aesthetic success ever since, with the cleaning of the heavily polluted Wisconsin River watershed serving as the best example of this success in Wisconsin.

            The Clean Water Act accomplished the following:

*Established the structure for regulating pollutant discharges into U.S. waters.

*Gave EPA the authority to implement pollution control programs such as setting wastewater standards for industry.

*Made it unlawful for any person to discharge any pollutant from a point source into navigable waters, unless a permit was obtained under its provisions.

*Funded the construction of sewage treatment plants.

*Recognized the need to address the critical problems posed by nonpoint source pollution.

            Unless you’re an old gray hair like me, you might think our nation’s water has always been protected, and that this law always was on the books. But it sure wasn’t, and it was only through intense public pressure and a bipartisan Congress that it was passed.

 

Celestial Events

            May’s second full moon, the “blue moon,” occurs on May 31. It’s the year’s most distant moon, and thus the smallest of the year.

            By June 1, we hit 15 hours and 30 minutes of sunlight.

 

Thought for the Week

            “We forget that nature itself is one vast miracle transcending the reality of night and nothingness. We forget that each one of us in his personal life repeats that miracle. - Loren Eisley

 

A Northwoods Almanac for May 8-21, 2026

 A Northwoods Almanac for May 8-21, 2026  

 

Sightings - First-of-Year (FOY) and Others

4/19: We heard our FOY leopard frogs. Their call is likened to snoring, but I think of it more as the rumbling sound my stomach makes when its feeling a bit too acidy, or if I haven’t eaten in a long while. This was very early for them to be singing - they’re usually an early May event. 

4/20: We found our FOY trailing arbutus in flower in the Frog Lake and Pines SNA.

4/23: We had our FOY pine warbler, a normal sighting for this time of the year, but then a male Baltimore oriole briefly appeared at our feeder. That’s super early for orioles, but he hasn’t been seen since then. So, I think this one rode the south winds of one of our many storms we had during that time and then likely regretted his decision.

4/19: We heard our FOY toads chorusing in the wetlands below our home. We also observed our FOY swamp sparrows, yellow-bellied sapsuckers, and ruby-crowned kinglets.

4/22: We saw our FOY mourning cloak butterfly flittering about. 

4/29: Our FOY dandelions appeared.

4/26: On a hike in Powell Marsh, we saw our FOY tree swallows, sedge wrens, and green-winged teals. That evening, we heard our FOY Wilson’s snipe winnowing over the wetlands below our house.

photo by Bev Engstrom

4/27: A pine warbler briefly visited one of our sunflower seed feeders, a very odd behavior for any warbler given that most warblers are almost entirely insectivorous. However, pine warblers are the only wood-warbler known to regularly consume seeds (often pine seeds or seeds at bird feeders) in any significant amount. Remarkably, they undergo seasonal physiological changes in their digestive system to allow for digestion of seeds.

4/28: We saw our FOY palm warbler. However, most interesting of all, we got to see the exceedingly brief mating of a pair of merlins. When I say brief, I mean brief. It was just a two second mounting of the female by the male accompanied by some high-pitched chittering, and then the male departed. He should have least bought her dinner.

 

Hibernating Butterfly?

            Mourning cloaks are one of our very few butterfly species that hibernate over winter. They’ve just spent six months nearly frozen in tree cavities, beneath loose tree bark, in wood piles, or in unheated buildings. But the cold is not a direct hazard to mourning cloaks – rather, it is the formation of ice crystals in their body tissue that can quickly be lethal. To keep from freezing, mourning cloaks reduce the amount of water in their blood by as much as 30 percent and then thicken it with a sugar solution of sorbitol, outdoing any antifreeze we humans put in our cars. Using electrical conductivity, biologists in Alaska found that mourning cloaks do not freeze until the temperature reaches -220°F. 

photo by Mary Burns

Once they emerge, they are short on fat and need to eat, so they often seek out running tree sap or rotten fruit. As the days become longer and warmer, they’ll mate and lay eggs for the next generation, living only a few weeks. Still, mourning cloaks win the award for greatest longevity among butterflies, living 10 or 11 months from last summer till now. 

Butterflies need body temperatures close to ours to fly. All of our spring-active butterflies have dark-colored bodies and wings to aid in solar heating their bodies. Watch for mourning cloaks basking, opening their wings and angling their bodies toward the sun, to increase their body temperature prior to flight. 

The mourning cloak is found throughout most of North America and Europe and in a broad band across central Asia. So, they don’t just announce spring in Wisconsin, but around much of the world.

 

World’s Oldest Loons Return Once Again to Seney 

            I write every year about these two loons, and as long as they live, I will continue to highlight their remarkable lives.

            On April 25, a female loon known as “Fe,” who was first color-marked as a breeding loon in 1990, was seen on one of the pools in the Seney National Wildlife Refuge in the U. P. She will thus turn at least 40 this summer given that loons seldom mate until they are at least 4 years old, and often not until they are 6. Fe was seen with an unbanded male, who was likely her mate from 2025, as they initiated a circling round of bill dipping and jerk diving, aspects of courtship involved in forming, or re-forming, a pair bond for the season.   

            Nearby on another pool, Fe’s former partner of 25 years, “ABJ,” was scouting for potential nest sites with his current companion, “Aye-Aye,” with whom he bred unsuccessfully last year. Although ABJ, who will turn 39 this June, hatched a record 32 chicks with Fe, since their split in April 2022 he has failed to produce other young, and she remains the only mate with whom he has ever sired young. 

            Wow - this proves loons live as long as 40 years!

 

Winter Severity Index 

            We evaluate the severity of winter by a host of personal measures; from how often we had to shovel, how hard it was to shovel, the condition of the roads all winter, whether we were able to do the winter activity(ies) we love, if we ran out of wood, how much LP cost, if the lakes iced up early or late, how long the winter actually lasted as felt by our individual cabin fever index, et al. It’s a subjective tally based on a mix of objective experiences.

            As a means of more objectively evaluating the severity of winter, the Wisconsin DNR uses the “Winter Severity Index” (WSI), which measures how winter weather impacts the survival of one of our most valued species, white-tailed deer. The values are obtained by adding one point for each day the temperature is colder than 0 degrees Fahrenheit and one point for each day the snow is 18 inches or deeper.

            The data are recorded from Dec. 1 to April 30. At the end of the season, if the points total less than 50, it's considered a mild winter; 50 to 79 is seen as moderate; 80 to 99 is severe; more than 100 is very severe.

            The 2013-14 winter was the most severe in state history, at 143 points. But recent years have brought more wildlife-friendly winters across the northern portion of the state, including WSI values of 55 in 2021-22, 69 in 2022-23 (though it was much higher in a few of the far northern counties like Iron, Ashland, and Bayfield), 10 in 2023-24, and 32 in 2024-25.

            This winter, one that represented something more “normal” for northern Wisconsin, the WSI for the southern part of our area was mostly in the moderate range via statistics from Dec.1 through the end of March. However, northern portions of Vilas and Iron County led the state with the highest severity scores from 88 to 99.

            Go just a little ways south into Oneida County, and the score drops quickly to around 43, and into Lincoln County, it hits 35. The rest of the state, despite a blizzard here and there, is even lower in the mild range.

            These generally mild conditions over the past decade and more have played a large role in allowing the statewide deer herd to increase. The most current estimate released by the DNR is a state record of 1.89 million deer, and very likely the largest the state has ever seen prior to records being kept. Check the attached chart: Compared to 2011, the deer population has grown 79% (there’s more data on the DNR's Deer Metrics page.)

            The increase isn’t all about weather, of course. It’s also about political decisions like ending the “Earn-a-Buck” regulations and early antlerless-only gun seasons in 2011.

            It’s important to also note that the WSI is very general - it isn’t a “be all and end all” tool. It doesn’t, for instance, take into account the “TDER” factors: timing, duration, extremes, and repeatability of snow and cold. It’s vital to understand when the snow and cold occurred, how long they occurred, how extreme they were, and how often they happened. 

            As with all things in nature, there’s complexity!

            April is traditionally the transitional period of time when many animals are on the brink of starvation, and spring can’t come soon enough. Now, “green-up” has begun, and with plants burgeoning and insects hatching, the threat of starvation has receded to mostly a fever dream.

 

What About China?

            One common objection to the U.S. taking the lead in climate action is: “But what about China? China is doing nothing!”

            Well . . . that turns out to not be true.

* Last year, China installed a full half of all the world's new wind and solar energy.

* Over the past two years, China installed more new solar power each year than the U.S. has installed in total across its entire history.

* China is the world’s largest producer and consumer of electric vehicles (EVs), controlling over 70% of global production and dominating the battery supply chain. China produces nearly two-thirds of the world's EVs. In 2025, over 50% of new car sales in China were electric (including battery electric and plug-in hybrids).

* As of late 2025, China has the world's largest EV charging network, exceeding 19 million total charging facilities (including public and private).            

            Still, China is currently the world’s largest annual polluter, responsible for over 30% of global greenhouse gas emissions. China emits significantly more than double the CO2 of the US and has been the top emitter since 2006, though its per capita emissions are much lower than the U.S. China's population is around 1.42 billion in 2026, over four times larger than that of the United States, which is approximately 347 million. Of note, however, is that China’s population is decreasing. 

            So, China is the world’s largest producer of emissions, which are the main cause of climate change, but it’s also the global leader in the production of green technologies from wind and solar power to electric vehicles.

            Meanwhile, the U.S. is attempting to increase its use of fossil fuels while blocking new wind and solar projects, and our CO2 emissions are ticking up.

            Climate change is a global problem, and progress in one place helps everyone - no country can fix climate change on its own. We’re all in this together, because we have to be. 

 

Celestial Events

            For planet watching in May, look after dusk for brilliant Venus low in the WNW and Jupiter low in the W. Before dawn, look for Saturn rising in the East and Mars extremely low in the ESE.

            The new moon occurs on 5/16.

            On 5/18, look after dusk in the West for Venus 3° below the waxing sliver moon.

            On 5/20, look after dusk in the West for Jupiter to have switched places with Venus and is now about 3° below the crescent moon.

 

Thought for the Week

            Annie Dillard: “There is no shortage of good days. It is good lives that are hard to come by. A life of good days lived in the senses is not enough. The life of sensation is the life of greed; it requires more and more. The life of the spirit requires less and less; time is ample and its passage sweet . . . How we spend our days is, of course, how we spend our lives.”