A Northwoods Almanac for October 27 –
November 9, 2017
Cheyenne Bottoms Wildlife Management
Area
Two weeks ago, Mary and I were
driving to a national conference in New Mexico to set up Mary’s Ancestral Women
weaving exhibit (see www.ancestralwomen.com) when the weather in Kansas forced us
to take a more southerly route than we intended. The wind was howling (25-35
mph with gusts to 50 mph), and our main goal was to keep our car and U-Haul
trailer on the road. We were also ooohing and aaahing at the hundreds of huge
wind turbines spinning among the corn and sorghum fields when suddenly we found
ourselves driving through wetlands and saw a large flock of unusual birds. Now
identifying birds while driving at 65 mph tests the best birders, but we could
see that these birds had long, decurved bills. And then we saw another flock,
and another flock of the same kind – at least a hundred or more – and I
wondered, are those ibises? Mary saw a sign for an interpretive center, so we
braked hard and swung in to see what this place was and what those birds might
be.
Well, we had stumbled upon Cheyenne Bottoms Wildlife
Management Area, the largest interior marsh in the United States, and one of
the most important shorebird migration stopover points in the Western
Hemisphere. Nearly one-half of all North
American shorebirds migrating east of the Rocky Mountains and up to one-quarter
million waterfowl stop at Cheyenne Bottoms to rest and feed during seasonal
migrations. In fact, 90%
of North America's population of Wilson's phalarope, long-billed dowitcher,
white-rumped sandpiper, Baird's sandpiper, and stilt sandpiper pass through
this 40,000-acre lowland, a giant, 65-square-mile
natural land sink in the prairie landscape which averages less than one foot
deep.
It turned
out that we were indeed seeing ibises, white-faced ibises, and while the fellow
behind the desk seemed not particularly impressed or surprised, I sure was.
I’ve only seen white-faced ibises a few times in my life, and only a couple at
a time, so a hundred or more next to the road was over-the-top for me.
Unfortunately, we were on a deadline to get to New Mexico, plus the howling
wind was forcing most birds to hunker down, so we vowed to come back that way
on our return trip five days later.
Return we did, but again the wind was cranking (there’s a
reason for Kansas to be the site for The Wizard of Oz). Still, in an hour of
birding, we found among other birds, hundreds of Franklin’s gulls, numerous
great blue herons and snowy egrets, dozens of shorebirds, and the best looks
we’ve ever had of two ferruginous hawks and a golden eagle. It’s clearly a
place we should return to and spend a few days during the spring migration.
Cheyenne Bottoms is the midway point along the Central
Flyway, a route birds use in traveling from the coastline of South America to
the Arctic. It’s been designated a “Wetlands of International Importance” by
the Ramsar Convention on Wetlands, and a “Western Hemispheric Shorebird Reserve
Site” and a “Globally Important Bird Area” by the National Audubon Society and
the American Bird Conservancy.
The Kansas Department of Wildlife, Parks and Tourism uses
dikes, pumps, and water diversions to control water levels on the nearly 20,000
acres it manages. The Nature Conservancy manages another nearly 8,000
acres, restoring grassland and marsh habitat with rotational grazing,
prescribed fires, and other management techniques.
The Franklin’s gulls that we saw undertake an astounding
migration. After nesting in the northern Great Plains, they fly to the Texas
coast and continue to Mexico's Isthmus of Tehuantepec. From there, they fly
overland to the Pacific coast, which they then follow to southern Peru and
northern Chile.
Wind Turbines!
We
certainly experienced why Kansas is the second windiest in the nation. Gov. Sam Brownback has called for 50
percent of Kansas electricity to come from renewable energy, largely wind, by
the end of his term, and it’s a goal they will likely reach in late 2018 or
shortly thereafter.
Seeing all those windmills
(in Iowa as well!) led me to research what impact windpower has on our national
energy needs. Wind is the fastest growing source
of new electricity generation in the U.S., currently producing 84,000 megawatts
of wind power which will grow to about 120,000 megawatts in the next four
years. At a national level, it’s now
enough to power 25 million homes every year. Nationally, the industry employs more than 100,000 people.
There are
over 52,000
large wind turbines in 41 states that now generate twice as much electricity as
in 2010, the result of lower prices
from more efficient turbines, federal and state tax credits, and state laws
that require a certain percentage of many states’ total electricity generation
to come from renewable energy.
Kansas has
the second highest wind potential in the U.S. next to Texas, with an estimated
952,000 MW possible capacity. Only Texas, Oklahoma, California and Iowa
currently produce more windpower.
Economically,
the state’s utilities continue to like wind power because, according to the
U.S. Energy Information Agency, it has become competitive with the least
expensive competing energy source, which is now conventional gas-fired
turbines.
Forecasts
indicate that for every 1,000 MW of wind developed in Kansas, cumulative
economic benefits will be $1.08 billion, with annual CO2 reduction estimated at
3.2 million tons, and annual water savings at 1,816 million gallons.
Windpower, however, still has controversies. Turbines kill an
estimated 140,000 to 328,000 birds each year, and some residents fight
their power lines and their visual impacts. Consider, however, that more than 1
billion birds are killed by domestic house cats, and another billion are killed
by flying into windows and buildings.
2016
numbers from the U.S. Energy Department show wind energy generated 6 percent of
America’s electricity. By comparison, 34 percent comes from natural gas, 30
percent from coal, 20 percent from nuclear, 6 percent from hydropower, and 1
percent from solar.
Bat Populations in the Northwoods
Grant Callow gave me a call to share that he hasn’t seen
any bats at his home on White Sand Lake in two years, and he used to see many
bats. He noted that he had called Paul White, a mammal ecologist for the
WDNR’s Bureau of Natural Heritage Conservation who has been studying the
decline in bats, and recommended I contact him.
Paul was raised in Mercer, and I knew him as a student at
the school, so I was pleased to have an excuse to email him. He wrote back
quickly, sharing a good deal of data. Here’s what he had to say: “The
testimonial of ‘my bats are gone’ is a report we heard throughout the
northwoods beginning this summer. The number reported to us from bat roost
sites in the summer (at least in the north) are now mirroring the losses
observed in the winter. These losses are strikingly evident at places where
summer roosts have been monitored over years with good baseline information to
compare to, but also now to the casual observer where they knew (and perhaps
took for granted) that bats were always “around”.
“The
statewide cave-hibernating population has dropped substantially from
pre-disease numbers, especially in the northern half of the state. Truth be
told, there aren’t many known hibernacula in northern Wisconsin, less than
five, and only one had large
numbers (<1,000 bats). However, the Upper Peninsula of Michigan has a
plethora of hibernating locations in the form of abandoned ore and copper
mines, and these sites likely harbored a great percentage of bats that use
northern WI in the summer.
“Like WI, the UP first observed white-nose syndrome (WNS)
in its hibernacula in the 2013-2014 hibernating season, so there have been
three to four (depending on the site) long years of infection taking its toll
on cave-hibernating bats (little brown, northern long-eared, eastern
pipistrelle and big brown bats). Evidence out east (where the disease has been
for a decade) indicates that years three and four of infection are where the
greatest population declines are observed from pre-WNS numbers, again strictly
speaking in terms of bats found in the winter. While I don’t have specific
numbers for the UP, this trend has, regrettably, held true-to-form in WI where
we have observed an overall percent change in all cave bat species from pre-WNS
numbers of -94.2% (n=8 sites) in year three of infection and in year four of
infection (only one site) we see a -98.1% decline from baseline information.”
If you’ve not heard of the deadly fungal disease called
white-nose syndrome, it was first documented in 2006 growing on the muzzles and
wings of hibernating bats in a New York cave. The disease causes mass mortality
in hibernating bats, and population die-offs of 90-100% are not uncommon. WNS
has spread to 29 states and five Canadian provinces, and over 6 million bats
have died from WNS since 2007. Over twenty sites in thirteen Wisconsin counties
are infected as of fall 2016.
Lipp Lake Trail
ICORE (Iron Country Outdoor Recreation
Enthusiasts) organized a trail clean-up last weekend on Lipp Lake Trail, a
half-mile loop that is marked as #14 on the Flambeau Flowage Auto Tour. Twelve
folks showed up with chain saws and hand tools, and in two hours, we had the
trail cleared. I went back the next day to measure some of the large white
pines along the trail, and found one that measured 42” in diameter, and many
others that were over 36” in diameter. If you want to take an easy hike to see
some big pines, I recommend the trail.
 |
| 42" diameter white pine photo by Mary Burns |
Sightings
Gold. That’s the landscape-wide
sighting right now – the gold of aspen leaves, birch leaves, willow leaves,
grasslands and wetlands, and tamaracks. Soon enough, all that gold will turn to
brown, and November will impose its austerity upon us.
Marlene Rasmussen in Springstead
reports that a female cardinal has just started coming to her feeders. I hope
it stays the winter for her – a cardinal at your feeder sure lights up an
otherwise ordinary day.
Celestial Events
For planet-watching in November, the
only visible planet after dusk is Mercury, low in the southwestern twilight.
However, before dawn, look for Venus low in the east, Mars very low in the
southeast, and Jupiter to emerge low in the east by mid-month.
As of 11/3, we’re down to 10 hours
of daylight.
The moon becomes officially full
just after midnight on 11/4.
The mid-point between fall equinox
and winter solstice occurs on 11/6.
Thought for the Week
Since Mary and I were in Kansas
recently, it’s only appropriate to quote from L. Frank
Baum’s The Wonderful
Wizard of Oz:
“No matter
how dreary and gray our homes are, we people of flesh and blood would rather
live there than in any other country, be it ever so beautiful. There is no
place like home.”
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