A Northwoods Almanac
for 10/31 – 11/13/14
Halloween – A
Cross-Quarter Day
Despite the current-day emphasis on
costumes and candy, Halloween is really an astronomical holiday, a
“cross-quarter” day. A cross-quarter day is a day
more or less midway between an equinox and a solstice. In modern times, the
four cross-quarter days have morphed into Groundhog Day (February 2), May Day
(May 1), Lammas (August 1) and Halloween (October 31).
While we say that winter begins on
winter solstice around December 21, the Celts used cross-quarter days to mark
the beginnings of their seasons, in this case, the beginning of winter. Halloween is approximately the midway point between the
autumn equinox and winter solstice, though the true cross-quarter day falls on
November 7, a discrepancy of about one week.
Far from the ghoulish connotation
given it today, the word Halloween actually means “hallowed evening” or “holy
evening”. It comes from a Scottish term for All Hallows' Eve (the
evening before All Hallows Day). All Hallow’s Day (also known as All Saints'
or Hallowmas) came on November 1, with All Souls’ Day following on November
2. These three days are collectively referred to as Allhallowtide and are a
time for honoring the saints
and praying for the recently departed souls who have yet to
reach Heaven.
Halloween also marked the end of
the harvest season, the transition from light to dark, and for some, a time
when the space between life and death blurred. The Celts called it “Samhain,”
and it was seen as a liminal time, when the spirits or fairies could more easily
come into our world. To appease them, offerings of food and drink, or portions of
the crops, were left outside.
If trick
or treaters take the time to look up rather than into their shopping bags of
candy, they will notice Mars shining in the southwest at sunset along with a
half-moon.
Sightings – Trumpeter
Swans
From Arlene Bozicnik: “This afternoon (10/18) I got a call from a
friend that lives on Big Muskellunge Lake Rd here in Boulder Junction: “Swans are back.” I drove out and met her at the
rustic boat landing, and there they were. We counted 24 trumpeter swans. They
were big and noisy. They were like kids having a good time at the lake floating
around, and you could here them splash and talk to each other. They started to
swim in formation in a line and then they took off! What a sight: 24 of
the big white swans up in the air, talking amongst themselves. We saw them go
down the lake and they came over us just above the tree tops and you could hear
the swish of their wings . . . They only thing they left behind were feathers
floating on the lake.”
Since tundra swans are migrating
through at this time of the year and are nearly impossible to tell apart
visually from trumpeter swans, Arlene took the perfect action to determine what
species they were – she listened for their call. Trumpeters, as one might
suspect, sound like a gentle trumpet, albeit like a kid taking his first lesson
on one. Tundras sound like bugling, or like dogs barking or geese honking in
the distance.
As usual, words do a poor job of
describing sounds, so go to this website to hear the difference: http://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/tundra_swan/sounds
Science in the
Northwoods
I attended
the “3rd Science in the Northwoods Conference” held on 10/16-17 at
Camp Manitowish, a rapid-fire two days of five-minute-long presentations by
scientists, managers, and educators doing research in our region. Ninety-three
presenters did their best to summarize what for some was years of research, and
I walked out at the end of it all rather dizzy with the flood of scientific
lingo. It was an intellectual challenge to keep pace with the remarkable
breadth, diversity and scope of studies being done in the Northern Highlands. I
honestly wonder if there is any other geographical area in Wisconsin receiving
this much scientific attention.
It was a scientific blizzard of
info, from studies on walleyes, smelt, beavers, wild turkeys, songbirds,
dragonflies, crayfish, wood turtles, and wolves, to plant research on mosses,
aquatic invasives (Eurasian water-milfoil), wildflowers, algal blooms, black
ash wetlands, and hardwood forests, to topics like “Bridging spatial scales and
clarifying atmosphere-biosphere interactions with high-resolution tree
phenological data.”
One highlight was a study on the
Kirtland’s warblers and the effect of climate change on jack pine, the bird’s required
habitat. The great news was that the Kirtland’s warbler has recovered
sufficiently that it is being considered for removal from the endangered
species list! The other side of the coin was that its wintering ground in the
Bahamas is being affected both by drought and by sea level rise.
Other highlights included the ban
on lead tackle this spring on the Northern Highlands Fishery Research Area, an
area that encompasses only three lakes (Escanaba, Pallette, and Nebish), but
which has very high importance for its long-term research on fish populations.
Perhaps their research will help anglers and legislators to find the simple
resolve to ban lead tackle statewide.
One other encouraging study looked
at populations of the invasive rusty crayfish on 17 lakes in our area, nine of
which have gone from boom to bust. Why the rusties have diminished so
dramatically on these lakes remains unclear. Is it due to drought, parasites,
disease, change in habitat, management efforts, or combinations thereof?
If you’d like to look at summaries
of all of the sessions, go to http://scienceinthenorthwoods.org,
and click on “Presentations and Abstracts.” All the presentations were recorded
and will eventually be available on the Trout Lake Station’s website: http://limnology.wisc.edu/Trout_Lake_Station.php
North American Loon
Symposium
I also
attended the North American Loon Symposium held at Northland College on
10/25-26. This conference brought together top researchers from Alaska to
California, and from Nova Scotia to Florida and all the states and provinces in
between, to share their findings. Those of us living in the Northern Highlands
were perhaps best represented of all, because there’s more research being done
on common loons in our area than anywhere else in the world. Between studies
conducted for over two decades by Dr. Mike Meyer, Dr. Walter Piper and others,
over 3,500 individual loons have been captured and color banded in our area, a
prodigious effort that makes objective insights possible on reproduction,
territoriality, migration, nesting, dispersal, mercury impacts, function of
various calls, et al.
The
researchers have dispelled an array of myths, showing, for instance, that loons
do not mate for life, that territorial takeover by usurping males and females
is very common, and that loons have temporary vocal dialects that change if
they move to another lake – in other words, they can change how their yodel
sounds to better “fit” the new lake they are on and the neighboring loons that
surround them.
Dr. Piper
found that on average, loons delay settling on territories until they are
older. Males, for instance, on average delay 2.5 years, thus waiting until they
are larger and stronger at age 6 or so to forge their own territory. Dr.
Piper’s blog, loonproject.org, provides a great deal of information on his
findings. If you’d like to watch some vicious battles between loons for
ownership of a territory, go to “Findings,” then “How does a loon acquire a
territory?”
Loons from
the Upper Midwest are migrating right now, most of whom will first stopover in
northern Lake Michigan, rest and feed awhile, then move to southern Lake
Michigan. They eventually then take off for their wintering sites, which are
primarily on the Gulf of Mexico from Gulf Shores, Alabama, to Tampa Bay,
Florida.
Comings and Goings
Coming soon
in November or just now arriving: snow buntings, some waterfowl, deer into full
rut, muskrats building huts, amphibians/reptiles/insects nearly all
dead/migrated/hibernating/pupating/wintering over as adults, snowshoe hares and
weasels turning white, Canadian birds like bohemian waxwings/pine
siskins/redpolls/ pine grosbeaks/rough-legged hawks/snowy owls, wind rustling
through dead vegetation, snow, ice, and a white canvas.
Leaving
soon or already departing: last of songbird migration south like tree
sparrows/white-throated sparrows/red-winged blackbirds/grackles, black bears
into dens, loons, cranes, some eagles (some stay), some trumpeter swans (some
stay), crows (some stay), tamarack needles and all other deciduous leaves
(except oaks and ironwoods which hang on).
Robin Kimmerer
Callie,
Mary and I traveled to Northland College on Monday night to hear Dr. Robin
Kimmerer talk about her book Braiding
Sweetgrass, which won the prestigious Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award. I
couldn’t be more impressed with her person or her writing – she’s a treasure as
both a PhD botanist (expert on mosses) and a Potawatomi elder.
Here’s a
quote: “I sat once in a graduate writing workshop on relationships to the land.
The students . . . professed without reservation that they loved the earth. And
then I asked them, ‘Do you think the earth loves you back?’ No one was willing
to answer that . . . So I made it hypothetical and asked, ‘What do you suppose
would happen if people believed this crazy notion that the earth loved them
back?’ The floodgates opened. They all wanted to talk at once . . . One student
summed it up: ‘You wouldn’t harm what gives you love.’
“Knowing
that you love the earth changes you, activates you to defend and protect and
celebrate. But when you feel that the earth loves you in return, that feeling
transforms the relationship for a one-way street into a sacred bond.”
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