A Northwoods
Almanac for April 13-26, 2018 by
John Bates
Sightings – Northern Saw-whet Owl
On
4/2, Martha Pierpont in Mercer sent a photo of a tiny owl she saw in her yard,
wondering if it was a barred owl chick. It turns out that she had taken a
picture of a northern saw-whet owl, an owl that stands 8 inches tall and weighs
only as much as a robin, and thus could be mistaken as a chick of a larger owl.
 |
| photo by Martha Pierpont |
To
this day, I’ve never seen a saw-whet, so Martha is one-up on me. However, I’ve
heard them sing many, many times. Their distinctive advertising call is a
monotone bell-like “singing” on one constant pitch (the “toot” call). It’s
utterly distinctive, and this is the time of year when the males are
vocalizing. One Wisconsin study found that males gave their advertising call
from 2/10 – 4/27. I suspect most of us don’t hear them in February and March
because we’re not out listening on those cold nights.
Saw-whets
sing from within a half hour after sunset until sunrise, with their calling
peaking at two hours after sunset. Some studies have correlated more
frequent calling by saw-whets with
years of higher prey abundance, perhaps because they are more likely to successfully
raise young in a year with ample resources to feed them.
Saw-whets
are very difficult to study because they’re secretive, nocturnal, and have
irregular movement patterns, so the exact limits of their breeding and winter
ranges are not well known. I’ve never heard a saw-whet singing during the
winter in our area, but the range maps clearly show that some remain the winter
while others migrate. When individuals do migrate, they do so during the night,
and in the spring, may still be migrating as late as the end of May.
 |
| Northern Saw-whet Owl Range Map |
Saw-whet
owls appear to be nomadic, settling to breed in areas where prey are most
abundant and where nest cavities are available. Generally, they seem to breed in
forests with both dense conifers for roosting and deciduous trees for nesting
and foraging.
Sightings
– FOY (First-Of-Year) Woodcock, Lots of Waterfowl, Grackles
We saw our
first American woodcock on 4/8 foraging beneath one of our feeders. Last year,
we heard our first one on 4/11, and in 2016, we saw our first one on 4/8,
though Bruce Bacon had banded one in Mercer a few weeks earlier on 3/24.
Woodcocks
return awfully early for a bird that feeds on invertebrates by probing with its
long beak into soft ground. It seems too early, but woodcocks have been on the
planet for many thousands of years and have done just fine without my judging
their lack of caution regarding April snowstorms.
Waterfowl
are appearing on whatever open water we have, which right now is solely rivers
and creeks. With a foot or two of ice on our lakes, ice-out will be a long-time
coming. So, this constrains waterfowl to rivers and creeks. We have numerous
hooded mergansers right now on the Manitowish River near our house, along with
many geese and trumpeter swans.
The bald eagle pair across the river
from our house are incubating eggs now. The nest is too high for us to look
down into, so all we can do is watch for incubation exchanges between the male
and female.
Our FOY common grackles appeared on
3/29 in Manitowish. I never celebrate their return, a value judgement that I
need to work on given that they are a native bird and quite beautiful with
their striking iridescent plumage and bright yellow eyes. My problem with
grackles is that they have earned
a reputation for eating other birds' eggs and nestlings, and they occasionally
kill and consume adult birds. They’re also semi-colonial, preferring coniferous
trees like the big white pines in our yard, and they’re one of the first
species to begin nesting in the spring. So, we have a lot of them in our yard,
and they’re quite aggressive at our feeders.
 |
| photo by Bev Engstrom |
Their
“song” also doesn’t endear them to me. It’s a sharp, harsh call, often
described as sounding like a rusty gate and written phonetically as readle-eak or kh-sheee. Melodious is not a word anyone
would use to describe it.
As
with most animals, grackles kill but are also killed. Fox squirrels, gray
squirrels, and raccoons eat their eggs and nestlings; eastern chipmunks and
domestic cats eat their young; and remains have been found in stomachs of northern
harriers, Cooper's hawks, red-tailed hawks, short-eared owls and in the nests
of great horned owls.
Grackles are harbingers of the
return of songbirds, which should start pouring in when the weather warms. Reports
of phoebes, winter wrens, yellow-rumped and pine warblers, song sparrows, and a
host of others are now common in Madison and Milwaukee. These early migrants
usually winter in the southern U.S, and hop their way north as the weather
permits. Unlike many of the neotropical migrants that are hard-wired to arrive
in mid-May based on the amount of light, they’re not hard-wired, instead
considered “plastic,” meaning they conform most of their movements to the
vagaries of local weather.
Marching into Spring?
Weather is Local, Climate is National and Global
While it
sure has been snowy and cold in northern Wisconsin (Mary,
Callie, and I have been skiing every day on the WinMan trails), March weather was a mixed
bag nationally. NOAA reports show that relatively cold weather dominated the
eastern U.S. – in many cases, the weather was colder than February – but
conversely, the Southwest and Southern Plains were unusually warm.
Nationwide, according to NOAA, the month ended up as the 55th
warmest and 55th wettest March out of the last 124 years of recordkeeping for
the contiguous U.S. Despite all the nor’easters that New England experienced,
it was relatively mild there for the month as the weather systems pulled warmer
marine air across the region. In the Northwest and Northern Plains, March ended
up near average for temperatures.
The year thus far, January to March, is the 24th warmest on
record for the U.S., and the 10th warmest for Arizona, New Mexico, and Maine. After
its 6th-driest October-to-February period on record, California finally got some
moisture with its 23rd-wettest March. Several strong storms increased the
Sierra Nevada’s snowpack, but only up to around half of its average by April 1.
Extreme to exceptional drought continued over much of the
Southern High Plains in March. As an example, Amarillo, Texas, got a quarter
inch of rain on March 27, but during the preceding 163 days, Amarillo saw just
0.01” of moisture.
Several
of the prolonged bouts of March cold have been associated with late-winter
weakenings of the stratospheric polar vortex that typically keeps colder air
locked up at higher latitudes. Some research suggests that these weakenings are
becoming more common because of a warming Arctic. Check out the following
article: www.wunderground.com/cat6/models-coming-agreement-widespread-effects-arctic-sea-ice-loss
Celestial Events
The Manitowish River opened below our house on 3/27, 11 days
later than our 28-year
average of 3/16. Last year, the river opened
below our house on 2/21, 24 days earlier than the average.
 |
| air photo of the Manitowish River on 4/11 by Dean Gustafson |
I’m still trying to get used to how late the sun stays up now!
As of 4/14, we’ll be receiving 13 ½ hours of sunlight, and as of 4/24, 14
hours.
The new moon occurs on 4/15.
According to 42 years of records
kept by Woody Hagge, the average ice-out date on Foster Lake in Hazelhurst is
4/16. What do you think the odds are of that happening this year? The latest date from his records for ice-out on
Foster Lake was May 7, 1996. We’re all hoping the record remains intact and our
ice leaves a lot earlier.
On 4/17, look after dusk for Venus
about 5 degrees above the waxing crescent moon.
From 4/20 to 4/22, the average low
temperature for Minocqua reaches 32° for the first time since 10/25/2017.
Minocqua averages 182 days with low temperatures above freezing, almost exactly
one-half of the year.
The peak Lyrid meteor shower occurs on the night of 4/21 and
continues until dawn on 4/22 – they average 10 to 20 per hour.
Thought for the Week
“Our lives are touched by those who lived centuries ago, and we
hope that our lives will mean something to people who won’t be alive until
centuries from now. It’s a great ‘chain of being,’ someone once told me, and I
think our job is to do the best we can to hold up our small segment of the
chain.” – Dorothy Day
Please share
your outdoor sightings and thoughts: call 715-476-2828, e-mail at manitowish@centurytel.net, snail-mail at 4245N State Highway 47,
Mercer, WI, or see my blog at www.manitowishriver.blogspot.com.
No comments:
Post a Comment