A
Northwoods Almanac for 1/20 – 2/2/17
Sightings
– Northern Pintail, Great Blue Heron, Evening Grosbeaks, Great Horned Owls
Vanessa Haese-Lehman sent
me a photo of a northern pintail hanging out on the Wisconsin River in
Rhinelander. Pintails most commonly winter far south of here in much of the
southern U.S. interior, through Central America, and into Bermuda and Cuba.
Their core nesting habitat is in Alaska and the Prairie Pothole Region of
southern Canada and the northern Great Plains, well west of here. Wisconsin is
on the southeastern fringe of the pintail’s North American breeding range. Like
many ducks, most pintails pair up and mate prior to their return migration in
the spring, so this isolated male will likely be a bachelor this coming year.
 |
| photo by Bev Engstrom |
John Wilke reported seeing a great blue heron
on 12/31 while cross country skiing east of Phillips. The heron was wading in
the open water of a small stream flowing into Dardis Lake. John noted
that the heron looked healthy but he rightfully wondered whether it would
survive our northern winter.
I consulted the Atlas of
Breeding Birds of Wisconsin which
says: “In southern Wisconsin individuals are found nearly every
winter on CBCs [Christmas Bird Counts], but the vast majority of Wisconsin's
breeders are migratory.” Indeed, it’s very uncommon to see a great blue
heron up here in the winter, although occasionally one has been reported in a
northern Wisconsin Christmas Bird Count. Some individuals have even been
recorded on Christmas Bird Counts in Canada each year – only in areas that
remain ice free, of course – but many great blues fly as far south as the
Caribbean. Why this one has remained north is a mystery.
Kim Dumask in Presque Isle reports that two
dozen evening grosbeaks have been visiting their feeders every day since
January 1.
Great horned owls are being
heard more regularly now. Their peak egg laying period occurs during February.
Remarkably, the females can maintain their eggs near 98 °F, the necessary
incubating temperature, even when the ambient temperature is more than 70°
colder.
A great horned owl’s
typical “song” consists of a deep-toned hooting of 3 to 6 notes, likened by
some to the sound of a distant foghorn. Paired birds often synchronize
their territorial songs, which is known as duetting. The female sings six
notes, or more often a 7-note song, lasting about three seconds. The male
responds within a few seconds with a 5-note song also lasting about three
seconds. Duetting most commonly begins one to two months before the first egg
is laid, so January is often the best time to hear great horned owls.
Robins
in Winter
We continue to see a robin
or two eating crabapples from our trees, and several other birdwatchers in our
area have said they, too, have robins currently in their yard. So, what gives?
Don’t robins migrate south every winter? One way to answer the question is to
consult national Christmas Bird Count (CBC) data that has been collected for
over a century. The data shows that robins are quite uncommon from central to
southern Wisconsin in most winters. The variable in where they will be any
given winter is they follow the food, so they can’t be counted on to be a
regular visitor in most areas. I’ve attached a graph showing the winter density
of robins during the 2003 CBC which shows how few robins typically remain even
in southern Wisconsin.
Scatter-hoarding
Gray Jays
In the autumn, gray jays become “scatter-hoarders,”
preserving food by mixing it with super sticky saliva and then tucking it in
woodpecker holes, amongst spruce needles, in a crevice, a broken-off stump, or
under loose bark within their territory. They cache insects, berries,
mushrooms, and strips of flesh that they’ve pulled from carcasses, sometimes
caching up to 50 pounds per bird. Gray jays create literally thousands of food
caches, with one study estimating up to 8,000! Remarkably, they are later able
to remember where they stashed all these morsels and retrieve some 80% of
them.
The caches allow the jays to begin nesting as
early as February in cold, snowy, and apparently foodless conditions, incubating
eggs at temperatures as low as -22°F. Why gray jays nest so incredibly early is
a mystery. They’re only able to do it because of all the food they cached. Most
songbirds struggle mightily to survive the last months of winter, but the gray
jay’s thrift in putting up a winter storehouse puts them in another league, and
obviously pays enough dividends to raise a healthy clutch of four or five
fluffy little jays.
Unfortunately, it appears the species is losing ground. A research
study in Ontario found fewer young were being raised following warm falls and
winters. The researchers theorize that warmer temperatures interfere with the
bird’s niche as a winter hoarder, resulting in more food spoilage, fewer young,
and a gradual retrenchment northward.
Old-growth Pines
I snowshoed with friends this week into two different
small stands of old-growth white pines. The largest pine we measured was 49 ½
inches in diameter at breast height, which is as large as any I’ve measured
over many years of looking for big trees. This particular tree had no lower
branches indicating it was not open grown, but rather had grown within a
relatively tight group of other pines.
 |
| 49.5" dbh |
Estimating
age for white pines is always a shot in the dark given how quickly they can
grow if given adequate sunlight, moisture, and good soil. White pines can live
400 years or more, but the only way to know is to core the tree and count the
rings, and I don’t have a corer big enough to do this! John Curtis in his book Vegetation of Wisconsin wrote that many of the big pines cut in the 1800's
were about 400 years old.
Equatorial
Vortex
My
hope during this current January thaw is that weather forecasters adopt the
term “equatorial vortex” and begin naming each warm spell as they do whenever
we get a cold snap. Temperatures have been averaging 15-20° above average this
week, sending them into the upper 30s if not 40s.
Of course, I’m kidding, but
whenever temperatures go below zero, we now want to make a seeming crisis out
of it, when in fact our area historically averages around 45 days of below zero
temperatures. And from 1971 to 200, our average minimum lowest winter
temperature has been -30°F, with -40° occurring on occasion.
So, a northern Wisconsin
winter is supposed to be very cold, very snowy, and very long. I’m afraid that
as we continue to have milder winters, we will see a “sliding baseline” of
expectations, where we diminish what we have historically considered “normal.”
And with that, we will see more hyperbolic newscasts about polar vortexes
whenever it gets below zero. However, our average temperatures will really be
no different than what our area has experienced since we began collecting
temperature data over a century ago.
Celestial
Events
We reach 9 hours and 30
minutes of daylight on 1/26 – 40% of our day will now be sunlit. By the end of
the month, our days will be growing longer by three minutes a day.
The new moon occurs on 1/26. Look after dusk
on 1/31 for Venus to be four degrees north of the crescent moon and Mars to be
halfway between it and the moon.
2016
Climate Summary
From NOAA, the National
Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration: The average annual temperature for the
contiguous U.S. in 2016 was 54.9°F, which was 2.9°F above the 20th century
average. This was the second warmest year of the 122 years on record, behind
2012 (55.3°F), and the 20th consecutive warmer-than-normal year for the U.S.
(1997 through 2016).
During
the year, the U.S. experienced 15 weather and climate disasters with losses
exceeding $1 billion, causing a total of $46.0 billion in damages. This was the
second highest number of billion-dollar events in the 37-year record
(1980-2016), one less than the 16 that occurred in 2011. Four of these were
inland flooding events not associated with named tropical storms, doubling the
previous record for number of billion-dollar inland flood events in one year.
Persistent
storm tracks led to the wettest year on record for the Upper Midwest. It was
the second wettest year on record for Minnesota and Wisconsin.
Alaska
had its warmest year ever on record.
Good
news included: Above normal annual precipitation in the West contributed to the
regional drought footprint being reduced from 45% at the beginning of the year
to 22% at the end. And based on data that go back to 2000, the 65,575 fires in
2016 were the sixth fewest on record and burned more than 5.4 million acres, which
is the seventh fewest.
Quote
for the Week
“A place is not a place until people have
both experienced it and shaped it, as individuals, as families, neighborhoods,
and communities, over more than one generation. Some are born in their place,
some find it, some realize after long searching that the place they left is the
one they have been searching for. But whatever their relation to it, it is made
a place only by slow accrual, like a coral reef . . . Neither the country nor
the society we built out of it can be healthy until we stop raiding and
running, and learn to be a quiet part of the time, and acquire the sense not of
ownership but of belonging.” – Wallace Stegner
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