A Northwoods
Companion for April 29 – May 12, 2016
Snipe and Woodcock Aerial Displays
A snipe has been winnowing over our
house now for the last week, often throughout the day. The sound comes
typically from the male snipe who is sky dancing in hopes of proving his vigor
to a starstruck female on the ground. The male climbs several hundred feet into
the air, then dives at a 45° angle, spreading his outer tail feathers to capture
the wind and create a haunting, tremulous sound that is best described as
“winnowing.” Researchers have found that the female may also perform this
courtship display, and that the male may also attack an intruder into his
territory during his winnowing flight, or use his winnowing to drive off a
predator. The male’s winnow flights will last all the way through the female’s
incubation of the eggs and until the eggs are hatched.
The winnow flights are most often heard at dusk, the same
time as one might hear the “peent” call of the male woodcock prior to his
flight display. The woodcock male’s courtship dance
commences when the bird jumps off the ground and spirals up perhaps 100 feet
while softly twittering, then begins a melodious chirping that lasts for ten
seconds or so before he circles back down to the ground and resumes his nasal “peenting”
display. Aldo Leopold wrote beautifully of this sky dance in his Sand County Almanac, concluding that these
dawn and dusk sky dances are a living "refutation of the theory that the
utility of a game bird is to serve as a target, or to pose gracefully on a
slice of toast.”
Both
species are so cryptically colored that you are more likely to step on one than
see it on the ground. And both have long bills adapted to probing in the ground
for various invertebrates. They also share the same body shape: short and
stubby with their eyes located on the sides of their heads, presumably to help
them detect predators while they’re face-down probing for a meal.
These
flight displays are occurring right now, and will generally come to an end in
mid-May. So, if you want to watch some real “dancing with the stars,” try going
out at twilight near a natural clearing, meadow, or wetland – perhaps a woodcock
or snipe will do a dance for you.
Badger Tracking
Sondra Katzen, the Director of Public Relations at the Chicago
Zoological Society/Brookfield Zoo in Illinois, thought readers of this column
might be interested in a story they just did regarding a badger that was caught
and brought to the Brookfield Zoo to have a transmitter surgically implanted. Sondra
attached a link to a video they posted on their social media page: https://youtu.be/8l_VnUfW2K8
Sightings
4/8: We were skiing in 8
inches of new snow, but warm weather followed, and by 4/13, we heard our first
wood frogs with spring peepers soon following. On 4/15, it was 70°, and the
frogs in the woodland ponds were in a frenzy. Less than one week elapsed
between deep snow and chorusing frogs!
4/16: Anne and John Nesgaard in Winchester
saw an American white pelican on Birch Lake in Winchester. As a note, Mary and
I were in Green Bay on 4/14 and 4/15, and saw hundreds of white pelicans along
the Fox River. I don’t have statistics for 2016, but in 2013, researchers
counted 4,123 white pelican nests in eight nesting colonies in Wisconsin, a
remarkable comeback story for a species that just began nesting again in
Wisconsin in 1994.
4/16: Aspens, alders, and willows all
came into flower. We also heard our first chorus frogs.
4/17: Female red-winged blackbirds
arrived, over three weeks later than the males, as is common. FOY
(first-of-year) white-throated sparrows also appeared in Manitowish, as did our
first Wilson’s snipe. We hiked in the Porcupine Mountains today, and as we got
close to the lake, we saw our first spring beauties of the year.
4/18: Silver and sugar maples came into
flower, as did hazelnuts.
4/19: We were treated to four Eastern
meadowlarks on Powell Marsh, as well as our FOY greater yellowlegs,
rough-legged hawks, and savannah sparrows. While very common in open farm
country, meadowlarks are very uncommon to see in our heavily wooded counties.
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| greater yellowlegs photo by Nancy Burns |
4/19: We conducted our first frog count
of the year, traveling to the 10 specific spots on our route in Vilas County
that we have visited for over 20 years. The spring peepers were tumultuous! Our
one surprise was the calling of several leopard frogs in Whitney Flowage – it’s
awfully early for leopard frogs to be calling.
4/20: We heard our FOY yellow-rumped
warblers, but Carne Andrews and Katie Foley, who birded with us the previous
day on Powell Marsh, had been seeing yellow-rumps for several days before this.
 |
| yellow-rumped warbler |
4/22: We saw our first leatherwood
shrubs in flower at Van Vliet State Natural Area.
 |
| leatherwood flowers |
4/23: A barred owl serenaded us at one
point as we hiked around Clark Lake in the Sylvania Recreation Area. Sharon
Lintereur in Lake Tomahawk has a barred owl nesting in a nest box she and her
husband put up 10 years ago. She noticed the owl incubating eggs in late March,
so with an average 30-day incubation, the owlets should be hatching by the end
of April.
4/24: We found our first trailing
arbutus in flower near Frog Lake.
 |
| trailing arbutus flowers |
Birdathon – Northern Highlands Team
This
May, a few bird-loving friends and I are joining forces with the Natural
Resources Foundation of Wisconsin, Wisconsin Bird Conservation Initiative,
Wisconsin Society for Ornithology, and Madison Audubon Society to raise support
for bird conservation.
We are doing this through the fifth annual
Great Wisconsin Birdathon which aims to raise at least $70,000 for our state’s
breeding, migrating, and wintering birds.
Our Birdathon team, the The Northern
Highlands Team, will spend part of a 24-hour period on May 22 observing as many
bird species as possible. Our goal is to see 110 bird species and raise
$3,000. Funds we raise will support nine
statewide programs that meet the year-round needs of Wisconsin’s birds. You can view project descriptions at the
Birdathon website. Help us help our birds by pledging or donating to the Northern Highlands Team at www.wibirdathon.org!
Bark Stripping
Gray Squirrels
Mark Pfleiger in Harshaw wrote to ask if I’ve “noticed the population
explosion of gray squirrels and the damage that they are doing to the hard
maple trees? There are areas around here where many of trees have their bark
chewed off.”
This winter, a friend in Manitowish Waters had also showed me dozens of
small sugar maples that were stripped of bark. Apparently no one knows why they
do it, but I have two thoughts – one, the cambium layer just beneath the bark
is rich in nutrients and may be simply part of their diet. Two, they may be
stripping the bark for nest building materials. Whatever the explanation, this
behavior certainly isn’t good for the trees, though often the smaller maples
are growing so close together that their thinning may help the overall stand.
Ice Cover – 2015-16
Shortest Length in 40 Years
From Woody Hagge: “The ice on Foster Lake [in Hazelhurst] went off on
Friday, April 15, after 109 days of ice cover. While the ice-out date is only
one day earlier than the 40-year average ice-out date (16 April), the total
days of ice cover is the briefest in my 40 years of record keeping. The
previous shortest ice cover was 110 days during the winters of 98-99 and
99-00.”
Climate Change
Stats
March 2016 was by far the planet's warmest March since record keeping
began in 1880, according to NOAA's National Center for Environmental
Information. March 2016 came in a full 1.22°C (2.20°F) warmer than the
20th-century average for March, as well as 0.32°C (0.58°F) above the previous
record for March, set in 2015. This is a huge margin for breaking a monthly
global temperature record, as they are typically broken by just a few
hundredths of a degree.
The margin was just a shade larger than NOAA's previous record for any month of
1.21°C (2.18°F) above average, set in February 2016.
The past six months (as measured by departure from average in both the
NOAA and NASA databases) all set records for their respective months as the
warmest since 1880. NOAA’s global surface temperature for the year so
far (January-March 2016) is 0.29°C (0.52°F)
warmer than the previous record, set in 2015.
Celestial Events
Planets in
May: After dusk, look for Jupiter bright in the southwest, Mars in the south,
and Saturn in the southeast.
May 4 marks
the midpoint between spring equinox and summer solstice, and provides us with
14 hours and 30 minutes of sunlight. Also look for Saturn near the waning
gibbous moon.
The peak
Eta Aquarid meteor shower occurs in the predawn hours of May 5 and May 6. They
average 20 meteors per hour, and given that the new moon occurs the day before,
the sky will be a dark canvas. Although
the Eta Aquarid meteors will streak all over the sky, they appear to radiate
from a Y-shaped group of stars in the eastern sky in the constellation
Aquarius.
May
“Everything
is blooming most recklessly; if it were voices instead of colors, there would
be an unbelievable shrieking into the heart of the night.” Rainer Maria Rilke, Letters
of Rainer Maria Rilke.
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