A Northwoods Almanac 2/5/10

A Northwoods Almanac for 2/5 -18, 2010

Sightings

Mary and I frequently showshoe in the Frog Lake and Pines State Natural Area, which rests across the Manitowish River from our home. On 1/31, we came across two very interesting tracks. One was made of three parallel lines in the snow. The middle line, tough unclear, looked like a grouse track. Our best interpretation is that a male grouse drooped its wings during a display, his wing tips dragging in the snow on either side of him as he walked along trying to impress a female.

The other track was a gutter-like pathway through the snow, about a foot wide, and running a short distance between a number of old-growth white pines and cedars. Along the path was the very obvious scat of porcupines, which looks like elongated sawdust pellets. We looked into the trees, and the more we looked at a “burl” on one of the pines, the more it took the shape of a fat porcupine. The other clue to the porkie’s presence were dozens of white cedar branches laying on the ground, obviously snipped off by some critter. I don’t know if porkies have a particular affinity for cedar, but they were certainly doing some serious pruning.

Birdlife was practically nil on this hike except for a few chickadees, but perhaps some of the irruptive finches that have been so elusive this winter are finally starting to show up. On 1/22, David Foster reported seeing two pine grosbeaks on the ground in his driveway and a small group of them a few days earlier just up the road, both on McCullough Lake in Natural Lakes, northeast of Boulder Junction. Then on 1/30, David reported seeing small numbers of redpolls and pine siskins for the first time this winter season at his feeders, mingled with the goldfinches.  

At our feeders in Manitowish, the one bird of considerable note was a merlin which appeared on 2/1. Our daughter Callie was the only one home at the time when she heard a rapid knocking on one of our windows. She came into that room and saw a small raptor hunkered on a branch right next to our largest feeder. She got a very close look at it before it flew and clearly could identify it as a merlin, which I believe is the first merlin we’ve ever seen in the winter up here. I suspect the knocking sound was either a bunch of birds scattering from the feeder and hitting the window as the merlin sailed in, or the merlin itself trying to capture a bird against the window.

Pine Barrens 

Mary and I hike in the Frog Lake and Pines State Natural Area because it represents one of the oldest white and red pine stands left in the state. The uncut portion of the site is totally dominated by pines, with numerous pines showing large fire scars at their base. The trees appear even-aged for the most part with some scattered very large pines, meaning that most of these pines began growing during the same period, and likely after a major fire.

I find the uncertain history of this stand  particularly intriguing. The site may well have been a pine barrens at one time, at least according to an article from Richard Vogl, a botanist, published in 1971 and titled “Fire and the Northern Wisconsin Pine Barrens.” He wrote, “The Manitowish River Barrens . . . occur on a series of scattered sand flats around the headwaters lakes, [and] become extensive in the vicinity of Boulder Junction where they stretch north to Grassy Lake, south to Trout Lake, and west to the Trout River, surround most of the Manitowish Waters chain of lakes, and end downstream near Manitowish in extreme eastern Iron County. The bracken-grasslands, frost pockets, and openings that once existed or still occur around the springs and streams that feed the Manitowish headwaters lakes, extending north to the Michigan border and south almost to Star Lake, are included as part of the Manitowish Barrens.”

Frog Lake SNA is situated a half-mile south of Manitowish on Hwy. 47/182, so it’s right at the edge of where Vogl believes the barrens ended, and thus it may have been a barrens at one time. Pine barrens are akin to oak savannahs in the southern part of the state, and were described by botanist John Curtis in 1959 as “true savannas, in that the dominant plants are grasses, forbs and shrubs, with a scattered stand of trees. The most usual tree is jack pine, although red pine may be the main species in unusual cases . . . The outstanding feature of the groundlayer in the pine barrens is the extraordinary development of shrubs . . . the blueberry . . . is of even greater importance.”

Vogl considers other areas within our locale to also have been barrens: “Additional barrens occurred on the Bear River upstream from where it joins the Manitowish River. They occupied reddish sandy benches and flats adjacent to the river and between and around the Lac du Flambeau chain of lakes, extending east of Fence Lake and south to Squirrel Lake in Oneida County. Most of these barrens are now gone with only coppiced oaks, decadent open-grown jack pines, scattered red pine stumps, lakeshore stands of red pine, large juneberry bushes, and dry openings remaining in a closed or planted forest.”

Pine barrens once covered 2.3 million acres, or 7% of Wisconsin’s presettlement landscape, but today these pine savannas with scattered large trees (2 to 8 per acre) are extremely rare because of fire control. Forest fires occurred on these barrens regularly, with return intervals to the same site of 50 to 75 years. It’s very likely that Native American tribes regularly used fire in these areas to maintain game habitat and enhance fruit and berry crops.

Barrens also were associated with the upper Wisconsin River in the vicinity of Land’O’Lakes and Conover. In Oneida County, barrens were associated with the Wisconsin and Tomahawk Rivers. Openings once spread in the vicinity of the Squirrel and Tomahawks Rivers from Pine Lake, Swampsauger Lake, and the now Willow Reservoir east beyond Hazelhurst and Bearskin Lake. 

Those of us who live on these sandy soils today don’t need to be told how nutrient-poor and droughty the soils are – our struggles to grow a garden prove it!

  

Bobcat

Bob Hart forwarded a photo he took on 1/6 of a bobcat hunting close to his deck on the Pike Lake Chain. He still saw the bobcat hunting in his yard as of 1/29, apparently trying to clean up the squirrel population, though I suspect if there were any snowshoe hares or cottontails in the vicinity, they were being given a run as well. Any muskrats, chipmunks, mice, voles, shrews or other small critters that ventured above the snow may also have regretted the day.

Wintering Golden Eagles in Wisconsin

Every summer I get calls from folks saying they just saw a golden eagle, when in fact they actually observed an immature bald eagle. It’s an easy mistake to make if you aren’t aware of the dark plumage of the young balds. And since golden eagles don’t breed in Minnesota or Wisconsin – to spot one, Wisconsin residents typically must travel 1,000 miles west – it’s usually a default assumption that a dark eagle in our area automatically means an immature bald eagle.

Well, that’s an assumption that doesn’t hold true in the winter. In the last decade, consistent reports have filtered down of goldens wintering along the Mississippi River, especially in the Wabasha, Minnesota area. So, six years ago, the National Eagle Center in Wabasha organized a volunteer survey program to count golden eagles using the coulees and bluffs along the river from Red Wing, MN to LaCrosse, WI. And this year the January survey found 85 golden eagles and 635 bald eagles. 

  What makes the golden’s presence along the Mississippi so compelling and mysterious is that no one knows the breeding origin of these wintering golden eagles, nor does anyone have any information about their migration routes or their habitat use and timing during the winter. Far from being off-course loners, these birds are turning out to be part of a population of 100 or so consistent visitors who make their home in the state from November through March.

Golden eagles are a threatened species in Canada, although not in the U.S. An estimated 10,000 to 15,000 pairs nest in the lower 48 states, so the ones in Wisconsin are a small subset of the total population. While bald eagles are large fish-eating birds that live close to water, sport white heads, and lack leg feathers at the base of their legs, golden eagles hunt mammals and reptiles, live in hilly, dry countrysides, and have completely feathered legs. Their name comes from the dull bronze feathers on the backs of their heads.

Last March, one of the wintering golden eagles on the river was equipped with a radio transmitter after being caught in a leg-hold coyote trap. Researchers expected that the bird came down from nesting grounds in northern Ontario near Hudson Bay, but when the bird migrated in the spring, it ended up above the Arctic Circle where no one expected it would go. Researchers are hoping this winter to capture and equip three more goldens with transmitters to help determine their migration routes and timing.

Very small numbers of goldens are usually seen during spring and fall migration in our area, typically at hawk-watch sites like Hawk Ridge in Duluth, the Great Lakes Visitor Center in Ashland, and Brockway Mountain in Copper Harbor, Michigan. 

Celestial Events

Today, 2/5, marks the average halfway point between ice-up and ice-out according to Woody Hagge’s 33 years of ice data on Foster Lake in Hazelhurst. On February 7, we become the recipients of 10 hours of daylight, and by 2/17 we will receive 10.5 hours of sunshine. The new moon occurs on 2/13.