A Northwoods Almanac for Dec. 3 – 16, 2010
Christmas Bird Count
The 18th annual Manitowish Waters Audubon Christmas Bird Count is scheduled for Sunday, December 19. We need people to actively help us search for birds within the count circle, or to just count out their window the birds at their bird feeder that day. If you live within a 7.5-mile radius of the intersection of Highways 51 and County W, and want to get involved, please contact me through my e-mail at manitowish@centurytel.net or by phone at 476-2828. Counting birds at your feeder is simple, takes very little time or expertise, and is our area of greatest need. Winter birds concentrate around feeders, so we tend to get our best counts from folks watching from their windows.
A Christmas Bird Count for the Minocqua area, which uses the intersection of Hwy. 51 and 70 West as its center point, is organized through the North Lakeland Discovery Center, and is scheduled for Saturday, 12/18. If you want to help out on that count, please call Guy David at 588-3694 or Zach Wilson at 543-2085.
The first CBC was done on Christmas Day of 1900 as an alternative activity to an event called the “side hunt” where people chose sides, then went out and shot as many birds as they could. The group that came in with the largest number of dead birds won the event. Frank Chapman, a famed ornithologist at the American Museum of Natural History, recognized that declining bird populations could not withstand wanton over-hunting, and proposed to count birds on Christmas Day rather than shoot them.
Count volunteers follow specified routes through a designated 15-mile diameter circle, counting every bird they see or hear all day. All individual CBC’s are conducted in the period from December 14 to January 5, and each count is conducted in one calendar day.
The data collected by observers over the past century allow researchers to study the long-term health and status of bird populations across North America. When combined with other surveys such as the Breeding Bird Survey, it provides a picture of how the continent's bird populations have changed in time and space over the past hundred years.
For instance, CBC data shows that evening grosbeak numbers were stable or increased until 1980, when their numbers began to decline significantly. The rate of decline increased between 1990 and 1998, and the Northeast and Great Lakes region show the steepest declines in evening grosbeak numbers, while evening grosbeak numbers appear stable in the Rocky Mountain region.
The cause of the decline in evening grosbeak numbers is unknown, but there are several possibilities. The most obvious is that evening grosbeaks may simply not be moving as far south during the winter due to the hemispheric trend in warmer winter temperatures. The declines might also be related to food availability – large spruce budworm outbreaks have subsided since the 1980s and seed sources may be changing due to logging practices. Or evening grosbeak numbers in the East may simply be stabilizing after their colonization of the Northwoods. Prior to the late nineteenth century, the evening grosbeak did not occur east of the Great Lakes.
Manitowish Waters designated a Wisconsin Bird City
Manitowish Waters has been named as one of an initial class of 15 towns designated by the Wisconsin Bird Conservation Initiative as a “Wisconsin Bird City.” A celebration of this award will take place on Monday, December 6, at 6 p.m. at the Manitowish Waters Community Center.
Winter Fruit for Birds
All but one of the crabapple trees in our yard are already stripped bare of their fruit, as are our mountain ashes. We think the local robins are circulating a map of our house to other robins migrating through, because every year they arrive in October and take nearly all the berries and fruits we have.
This deprives us of some winter bird watching, but more importantly, winter berries are a major food source for many birds and mammals, and their early consumption will make life all the tougher for local wildlife come March. Ecologist Bernd Heinrich writes of collecting bagfuls of regurgitated pellets from under a winter crows’ roost, picking them apart, and finding the undigested remains of mostly berry seeds, like wild grape seed, wild holly, staghorn sumac, and various species of Viburnums. Abundant fruits can make a big difference in a long winter.
Heinrich notes that of the 38 species of berries native to his Maine home, only nine are “summer” berries, or those which ripen full of sugars and rot quickly, like strawberries and raspberries. This leaves 29 berry species that aren’t sweet but which have a staying power that makes them still edible the following March. Species like nannyberry, maple-leaved arrowwood, winterberry, highbush cranberry, hawthorn, even the invasive buckthorn, feed woodpeckers, ravens, grouse, fox, coyotes, and just about any other critter you can think of that’s trying to make its way through an interminable winter.
These fruits hang on through the winter because they’re very low in sugar, fats, and water content, but high in acids. Their very “tastelessness” is what makes them so dependably available in March.
Sightings
At our feeders in Manitowish on 11/17, we had 24 bohemian waxwings briefly visit our relatively barren crabapple trees, and then move on within an hour. On 11/18, a northern shrike was stalking our feeders, but numerous blue jays appeared to be harassing it, perhaps in an effort to drive it away though blue jays are larger than shrikes and not one of their prey species.
On 11/20, we still had a robin, several tree sparrows, a white-throated sparrow, a grackle, and a red-winged blackbird at our feeders, all species that typically are well south of here by now. On 11/25, we counted 50 goldfinches at our feeders, as well as two pine siskins and a female cardinal.
Rolf Ethun reported seeing four male evening grosbeaks at his feeders on 11/16. Linda Thomas also reported a small flock of evening grosbeaks visiting her feeders on 11/20. She also noted that her son saw a snowy owl just south of Boulder Junction, but I’ve not heard any other reports of it to date.
Dave Foster reported observing a flock of about 40 redpolls on Bear Trail in Natural Lakes, feeding in the tall birches. This is the first report of redpolls I’ve received this winter.
And as of 11/22, nearly all Wisconsin and Minnesota loons fitted with radio transmitters have crossed the state line and are heading south and/or east. To see a really fascinating time-lapse graphic display of these loons’ migrations, loons that specifically nested on Manitowish Lake and on the Turtle Flambeau Flowage, go to: http://www.umesc.usgs.gov/terrestrial/migratory_birds/loons/migrations.html The graphics show just how variable their departure dates are, as well as the variability in their migration routes and stopover sites.
Darkness
December specializes in short days, offering less than 9 hours of daylight on every day of the month. From 12/5 to 12/15, we experience the earliest sunsets of the year, all occurring at 4:14 p.m, which means most of us arrive home from work in the dark. The good news is that on 12/16, the sun will set one minute later for the first time since June 20th.
The latest sunrises, however, don’t begin until 12/27, when the sun deigns to finally arise at 7:40 a.m.
Celestial Events
The new moon occurs on 12/5, providing dark skies for stargazers. On 12/6, look after dusk for Mars less than one degree south of the day-old crescent moon.
December 13th marks the day that Jack Schmitt left the last human footprint on the moon in the 1972 Apollo 17 mission.
The Geminid meteor shower peaks in the early morning hours on 12/14, but is also active a day on either side of the peak. The Geminids average 75 meteors per hour, and can be very impressive. The waxing gibbous moon interferes early on, shining bright during the evening hours but finally setting around midnight. However, since this shower tends to gain strength after midnight with the climax roughly around 2 o’clock in the morning, you won’t miss the peak.
The Geminid shower radiates from the constellation Gemini, specifically from a point near the star Castor, one of the brightest stars in the sky. But you don’t have to locate Gemini to watch the shower since meteors in showers appear in all parts of the sky – just let your gaze wander.
If you do want to locate Castor, look fairly low in the east-northeast sky around 9 p.m. Castor and Gemini swing upward through the night, climbing nearly overhead by around 2 a.m. If you can stay awake this late, the meteors should then be raining down from nearly straight above you.
Injured Deer
Chad McGrath sent me a trailcam photo of a doe feeding on corn on his property in Springstead. The doe has two large round wounds in her side, each about four inches across, with no exit hole on her other side (from other pictures taken that night). The question is what would have caused these wounds?
I e-mailed Sue Drum, a retired veterinarian in Presque Isle, to get her thoughts, and she and her husband Al concluded this: “Al thinks someone shot the doe with birdshot. Birdshot would make two round patterns and would not penetrate much beyond the subcutaneous layer which would not kill or even cripple the deer. All those little pellets would cause infection and trauma and cause the dead tissue to slough (separate from the healthy tissue) and new tissue to re-grow. One wound is more healed than the other but I imagine they will both heal and the doe will be fine.”
Chad’s theory is that a buck gored her with his antlers. He notes, “The spacing of the two wounds is about right for several of the bucks that I have pictures of, taken by the same trail camera. By the way, I have pictures of at least 8 different bucks, all but one of good size, all taken within the last 40 days by two different trail cameras and I haven't seen but one in the flesh...and he was a scrawny fork buck who is in my freezer.”
Any other theories would be welcome!
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