A Northwoods Almanac for 10/17 – 30, 2014
Autumn Colors Waning
Autumn is a smorgasbord of cool temperatures, brilliant colors,
powerful winds, and pungent smells, all combining to make any hike a glorious
opportunity. While the winds propel literally millions of birds southward for
the winter, they also are workmanlike in their stripping of leaves so that any
walk presents a kaleidoscope of colors underfoot. If you focus too much on the
ground at this time of year, you can get dizzy!
The
last two weeks of October are a celebration of yellows and golds, with the
preeminent painter being any bog encircled by tamaracks. Just as spring is a
dazzle of seemingly endless shades of green, so autumn is its equal in yellows.
The
white canvas of winter awaits us not too far down the line, but its beauty
arises from a far more austere series of painters than those who seem to splash
color everywhere in in October. So, enjoy this last profusion, as well as the
last of our open water, which will be turning to ice in a month or so. Though
50 degrees for a high feels cool now, it will seem like a heat wave in March.
Breathe it all in while you can.
“For man, autumn is a time of harvest, of gathering
together. For nature, it is a time of sowing, of scattering abroad." Edwin
Way Teal
“Delicious
autumn ! My soul is wedded to it, and if I were a bird I would fly about
the earth seeking successive
autumns." George
Eliot
"Winter is an etching, spring a watercolor, summer an oil
painting and autumn a mosaic of them all." Stanley Horowitz
Sightings: A Standoff Between Blue Jays
and a Sharp-Shinned Hawk
Rolf
Ethun on Papoose Lake sent this email on 10/9: “This morning I had an
interesting encounter between a sharp-shinned hawk and half a dozen blue jays
at my feeder. The jays were totally oblivious to the hawk and even appeared to
be taunting it. The hawk would dive on them at the feeder, and they would
scatter to the nearest balsam branches. The hawk would land on an adjoining
branch where they would sit looking at each other as though taking time-out in
a game. Almost immediately the jays would go back to the feeder, and then the
hawk would dive on them, which went on over and over again. The jays seemed
completely unperturbed and the hawk would occasionally take out its frustration
going after a red squirrel with similar results.
“I was
secretly rooting for the hawk to get a squirrel and give up on the jays. After
nearly an hour of watching this on-going game I had to leave while it appeared
to continue . . . The jays had half emptied the feeder and I was entertained on
a cool and gray morning.”
Rolf’s
sighting illustrates how similar in size a sharp-shinned hawk is to a blue jay.
Blue jays average 11” long, with a 16” wingspan, and weigh 3 ounces. A
sharp-shinned hawk averages 11” long, but has a wider wingspan of 23” and
weighs 5 ounces. Males are much smaller than females, and may only weigh 3.5
ounces, so I’ll bet Rolf had a young male who thought he should be able to
handle those blue jays but forgot to look in the mirror and see that he was no
bigger than they were.
Sharp-shins
are known for hunting songbirds – they’re experts – but these jays apparently
were much more experienced at the importance of size than the sharpie was.
Sightings: Snapper Hatchlings
Bob Kovar
in Manitowish Waters sent me a photo of 11 snapping turtle hatchlings that he
and his daughter Addy found in the parking lot of Aurora Borealis restaurant on
10/3. He noted, “The parking lot there was littered with baby snapping turtles.
Half of them were run over by people eating breakfast. We rescued these 11 and put
them back in the river below the dam.”
It’s
pretty late for snappers to be hatching, but cool, wet summers slow down the
incubation process, and we certainly had a cool, wet summer.
Science in the Northwoods and the North
American Loon Symposium
This
will be a remarkable week for awareness of all the scientific research that’s
being done in our area. The third annual Science in the Northwoods Conference
began yesterday and ends today at Camp Manitowish with 93 different presenters
describing the ecological research they are doing in the Northern Highlands
region of Wisconsin and the Upper Peninsula. Sponsored by the Trout Lake
Station Center for Limnology, the Kemp Natural Resources Station, the US Forest
Service, the US Geological Service, and the Lac du Flambeau Tribe, this
conference brings together scientists in a vast array of fields. See www.scienceinthenorthwoods.org for abstracts of all the presentations.
A
week later from 10/25 – 26, the Sigurd Olson Environmental Institute is hosting
the North American Loon Symposium, convening researchers, wildlife experts,
state and non-profit agencies, and loon enthusiasts at Northland College in
Ashland, Wisconsin. A loon symposium of this size and scope has not taken place
in North America in more than a decade.
The
nation’s premier wilderness researchers will be presenting, including
scientists who have done extensive loon research in our area like Dr. Michael
Meyer, Dr. Kevin Kenow, and Dr. Walter Piper. Topics ranging from mercury and
lead toxicology, migration, behavior, loon banding, impacts of climate change,
habitat management, wintering habitat, citizen science, and many other critical
topics will be discussed by North America’s premier experts. This is the first
time a Loon Symposium of this magnitude has been held in this region.
Yellow-rumped Warblers and Juncos
Flocks
of both yellow-rumped warblers and dark-eyed juncos are coming through our area
on their way south. Yellow-rumps are perhaps the latest migrating warbler, in
large part because of their very diverse diet that allows them to winter inland
as far north as Indiana and Ohio, though many will travel as far south as
Mexico and the Caribbean (and who wouldn’t?). The yellow rump’s ability to
digest the waxes in bayberries (Myrica spp.) make it unique among
warblers, and allows populations to winter in coastal areas as far north as
Nova Scotia.
As
of 10/13, we still have them foraging in many of our trees, not only
fly-catching insects, but also eating various fruits.
If
you’ve been driving along the last few weeks and kicking up flocks of
dark-colored birds by the roadsides, you’ve probably been seeing juncos. As
seed-eaters, they can migrate later in the autumn than insect-eating birds, so
we’ll still be seeing them well into November. A junco’s plumage is
characterized by white outer tail-feathers that flash when the bird takes
flight and by a gray or blackish “hood” and dark back that contrasts with its
whitish breast and belly. A recent estimate set the junco’s total population in
North America at approximately 630 million, so it’s common to see lots of them!
Juncos
utilize “differential migration,” meaning females tend to migrate farther south
than males, while adults migrate farther south than hatching-year birds. The
sex and age classes that travel the farthest migrate the earliest. So, the
first flocks coming though are likely females, both juveniles and adults.
Juncos
can remain as far north as central Wisconsin – they’re hearty birds. On rare
occasions, a few are even seen on Christmas bird counts in the Northwoods.
Electrically-charged Spider Webs
From the file titled “What I love
about studying the natural world is the improbable things one learns all the
time,” comes this research on spider webs. It
sounds impossible that the threads of a spider web could actively reach out for
prey, yet recent studies show that it is yet another ingenious spider strategy
for capturing insects on the fly. How do webs do this? Static electricity. Flying
insects build up a static electrical charge on their bodies from the
friction of passing through the air the same way a
person can pick up a charge by shuffling in fuzzy socks along a carpet. Bees are known to pick up a charge of as much as 200
volts!
As these
insects fly through a normally safe space in a spider's web, the threads
of the web react to the insect's static electrical charge and snap shut
(as much as two millimeters) due to a phenomenon known as static induction.
This is the same effect that we've all experienced by
rubbing a balloon on our heads and sticking it to a wall.
Orb webs are particularly adapted to use electrostatic charges.
The silk is coated in a glue that tends to hold water droplets, which can build
up a lot of static charge. The silk in the webs is also especially stretchy,
and thus perfect for reacting to a passing insect.
Remarkably, pollen can also be positively charged and be caught
in their webs. Orb web spiders are especially fond of pollen, which can make up
as much as a quarter of their diet.
Celestial Events - Orionid Meteor Shower
The
Orionids meteor shower will peak during the evening of 10/20 and into the
morning of the 21st. The shower usually produces about 20 fast moving meteors
per hour and occasionally produces fireballs. Look near the star Betelgeuse in
the constellation Orion. The meteors are debris from the orbit of Halley’s
comet.
Mushroom of the Week – Bear’s Head Tooth
Last week, Mary and I found a large
bear’s head tooth fungi on the Lauterman National Recreation Trail near
Florence. The fungi looks like a cascade of little white icicles to me, though
some either very creative, or delusional, folks think it looks like a shaggy
bear’s head. The books say it’s delectable, but I would hate to cut it off and
deprive someone else from seeing this really remarkable mushroom.
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