A Northwoods Almanac for 8/31/18

A Northwoods Almanac for August 31 – September 13, 2018   

Sightings: Nighthawk Migration, Green Herons, Northern Flicker Tongues, Oak Galls, Northern Tooth Mushroom, Changing Leaves

            Nighthawks began migrating last week and will continue to pass through our area for several more weeks. They migrate in greatest numbers in the early evening, but may be seen anytime during the day. Look for a white bar on the underside of their sharply-pointed wings, and note their often erratic, moth-like flight. Common nighthawks are usually solitary, but they often form large flocks during migration – flocks of a thousand or more on occasion!

Sarah Krembs has sent me an array of marvelous photos of two juvenile green herons that she has worked hard to photograph in Presque Isle. These uncommon and inconspicuous herons are hard to spot at any time, much less to get good photos of the young-of-the-year. The chicks fledge after 21 or so days in the nest, but the parents continue to feed them, as well as begin to teach them how to fish. Their independence is estimated to occur between 30 and 35 days. Green herons are known to use 15 different foraging techniques: standing, baiting, standing flycatching, head swaying, neck swaying, walking slowly, walking quickly, scanning, feet-first diving, foot stirring, foot raking, plunging, diving, jumping, and swimming feeding – eating everything from invertebrates to crayfish to snails to rodents to frogs to snakes to fish. 

photo by Sarah Krembs

Most intriguingly, they also have been observed to bait for fish using a variety of lures like crusts of bread, mayflies, and feathers. One bird dug earthworms from the mud and used them as bait, and twice birds broke pieces of stick to make bait, an example of tool-making. 

Hannah Dana in Arbor Vitae sent me a photo of a flicker that had unfortunately flown into her garage door and died. She observed that it had a “spaghetti-like coil which came from within its beak.” She did some research and “found that flickers (like hummingbirds) have a long tongue with a velcro-like tip for catching ants. It protruded 2-3" from its bill, and I wondered where the tongue goes when the bird is alive and not eating. There is a hollow area in the skull above the occipital area and the tongue coils up like a window shade . . . Every day I am amazed about the engineering of nature and this one is at the top of my ‘awe’ list.” 

On any given drive in September, you’re likely to kick up flickers alongside the road as they are “anting” – looking for ant hills – in the gravel. Ants are the primary food of flickers – they forage by probing and hammering in the soil with their powerful bills. But they also eat beetle larvae and a variety of berries like wild black cherry, poison ivy, dogwood, and sumac from late fall to early spring. 

We’ve been seeing numerous oak galls on the ground in recent weeks. These odd structures are typically initiatedin early spring and are caused by chemicals injected by certain kinds of gall makers, the majority of which are tiny wasps. All sorts of shapes and sizes of galls exist from the more than 700 species of gall wasps have been documented in North America. 

The galls provide a protected enclosure for the development of the insect larvae and a source of concentrated food for the developing larvae. Perhaps the most common oak galls seen in our area are oak apple galls. They’re large (1- to 2-inch diameter) rounded growths that are filled with a spongy mass, but which dry to a dry papery thin wall.  A single wasp larva is located in a hard seed-like cell in the center. 

            Sally von Zirngibl on Papoose Lake sent me a fine photo of a northern tooth fungus, or what is also called northern shelving fungus because it looks like a disheveled unit of shelving. Northern tooth causes heart rot in maples where it is most commonly found. Heart-rotted trees make for poor lumber, but make great habitat for cavity-nesting birds and denning mammals. As always, value is determined by what lens one chooses to look through.

            Leaves are changing, and acorns are falling! September is upon us, and the whole machinery of the plant world is starting to shut down or dramatically reducing its photosynthetic capacity. No frosts yet, which is great for gardens, but not an attribute historically in the Northwoods. Anyone need a zucchini?

Plastic Straw Ban

A plastic straw ban movement is sweeping through the country, in large part due to a disturbing video that went viral of a marine biologist extracting a crusty plastic straw from the nostril of a live sea turtle. 

In just the U.S., one estimate suggests 500 million straws are used every single day. One studyestimates as many as 8.3 billion plastic straws pollute the world's beaches. 

The real issue, however, isn’t straws, but single-use plastic. Plastic pollution is now a global environmental crisis, most notably in our oceans. To date, we have produced 9.2 billion tons of plastic, of which 6.3 billion tons were not recycled, and since plastic takes over 450 years to fully decompose, it’s a genuine problem.
            Many millions of pounds of plastic end up in the ocean every year, a number which is expected to double by 2025. Wildlife are killed by ingesting or becoming entangled in plastic, but plastics also decimate coral reefs.Plastics also create help create dead zones where nothing can live, and they damage human health in the form of microplastics entering the food chain. 

Some folks have derided banning straws as ineffectual or as environmentalists going off the deep end. They have a point regarding its effectiveness – of the tons of plastics that flow into the ocean every year, straws comprise only 0.025 percent. So, a straw ban won’t solve the problem of ocean plastics. We truly need a more ambitious, global solution.
            However, banning plastic straw bans is easy to do (non-plastic straws work fine), doesn’t cause any economic upheaval, and constitutes one step toward the ultimate goal of ending the circulation of single-use plastic. It’s a starting point.

Vanishing Loons

A recent blog post by Walter Piper (see: https://loonproject.org/2018/08/19/could-loons-vanish-from-wisconsin/): “Loons are hanging in there better than many other vertebrate animals . . . Breeding populations are now generally stable or even increasing across most of the northern tier of United States. My study area in northern Wisconsin is typical; loons have re-colonized many lakes in the past few decades from which they had retreated. So, loon populations are thriving despite extensive shoreline development, entanglements with hooks and fishing line, and increases in methylmercury levels, among many other challenges.”

On the other hand, “A new anthropogenic threat [climate change] now looms that is more extensive and unrelenting than others that loons have faced . . . The northern Wisconsin loon population (and abutting populations in Minnesota and Michigan's Upper Peninsula) exist on an isolated ‘finger’ that projects southwards from the heart of the range, which lies in Canada. The model (see http://climate.audubon.org/birds/comloo/common-loon) paints a very bleak picture of the future loon population in northern Wisconsin. According to the model, loons are projected to be much less abundant in northern Wisconsin by 2050 and gone altogether by 2080.

He offers a word of caution, as all good scientists should, about all projections: “It is difficult to project precisely how the geographic range of the common loon might be affected . . . Audubon scientists have attempted to distill the climate down to two main factors: temperature and precipitation . . . Their projection is likely to provide a crude estimate of the impact of climate change on loons, not a precise one. That is, loons are likely to cope with climate change better than most other birds – as they have other environmental threats. Then again, loons might be especially sensitive to climate change and retreat northward more rapidly than the study predicts.”

I recommend reading the entire blog post, because no species is more emblematic of the North Country than the loon, and its loss is not negotiable.

FSC Certified Products

Last weekend, as part of a group organized by Partners in Forestry, we paddled to the Tenderfoot Preserve, and I had the opportunity to paddle with Bob Simeone who was instrumental in establishing the certification of wood products via the Forest Stewardship Council. I’ve known about the FSC for a long time, but it was little more than an acronym to me. With Bob’s help, I’ve learned that the Forest Stewardship Council is an independent, non-profit organization that has established voluntary standards for responsible forest management. The FSC has used the power of the marketplace to protect forests through certifying responsibly managed forest products, and is considered the gold standard in forest certification.

Within its certification process, FSC has instituted a “Chain-of-Custody” paper trail which traces the path of wood products from the cutting of the forests through the supply chain. The chain-of-custody recognizes that between the forest and the final user, products typically undergo many stages of processing and distribution, and all the steps need to be certified as sustainable for consumers to be assured that what they are buying is being handled in the right way.

FSC forest management certification also specifically confirms that a particular forest is being managed in line with FSC principles and criteria, of which there are 10 principles and 57 criteria (see https://us.fsc.org/en-us/what-we-do/mission-and-vision)! Each forest is then regularly audited by the FSC to ensure that it is being managed to those standards. Today, more than 380 million acres of forest are certified under FSC’s system, including more than 150 million acres in the US and Canada. 

Bottom line: buy products when you can that have the FSC label on them. Examples include Kleenex, Office Depot Multipurpose Paper, and Cottonelle toilet paper, among many others.

Celestial Events

            Look for brilliant Venus, Saturn, and Jupiter all at dusk very low in the southwest, and Mars at dusk in the southeast.

            Say goodbye this month to our days being longer than our nights. As of 9/6, we’ll be down to 13 hours of daylight.

            The new moon occurs on 9/9. Look on 9/13 for Jupiter four degrees below the crescent moon.

Thought for the Week

From Bob Simeone, professional forester and co-founder of The Forest Stewardship Council: “The Forest Guild was borne out of . . . the idea that there is far more we don’t understand about the forest systems we manage than that which we do. The ideal behind ecological forestry is adaptive management, meaning that we must first identify our base assumptions, and then think about— 

·      the things we think we know; 


·      the things we don’t know; 


·      the things we don’t know we don’t know; 


·      the things we think we know but don’t know; 


·      the things we know but don’t want to know; and 


·      the things we don’t know but wonder about . . .”