A Northwoods Almanac for 12/27/19

A Northwoods Almanac for December 27, 2019 – January 9, 2020  by John Bates

Christmas Bird Counts

            We held the 27^th annual Manitowish Waters Christmas Bird Count on 12/14 and the 13^th annual Minocqua Christmas Bird Count on 12/19. I don’t have the final numbers on the Minocqua count, but numbers of nearly all bird species were down on the Manitowish Waters count, with historically low numbers of black-capped chickadees and red-breasted and white-breasted nuthatches, three very common feeder birds. Conspicuous also by their absence were nearly all of the Canadian breeding birds that visit us in the winter when their food supplies further north are scarce. Apparently, food must be very abundant in Canada, because in both counts we found zero pine siskins, common redpolls, pine grosbeaks, evening grosbeaks, bohemian waxwings, and red and white-winged crossbills. We did, however, have 70 cedar waxwings eating crabapples in our yard, a record for us.

cedar waxwings photo by Jim Kerler

            Indeed, it was very quiet out there, and feeder counters are telling me the same story – the bird numbers of both local winterers and Canadian visitors are way down. As to why, I really don’t know. Conifer seed cone production appears relatively poor, but many other species of trees are bearing seeds and the birds are still not present. 

            This is the 120^th annual Audubon Christmas Bird Count, touted as the longest running and largest citizen science monitoring study in the world. Nearly 80,000 counters will participate, surveying over 2,600 sites in the U.S., Canada, Central America, parts of South America, some of the Caribbean islands, and some of the Pacific Islands. The count runs 23 days from 12/15 to 1/5 every year to provide consistency in the data. 

            Ornithologist Frank Chapman started the count in 1900 with 27 people monitoring 25 sites around the U.S., all in response to the custom of that time of contests to see who could shoot the most birds around Christmas. Hunters engaged in a tradition known as the Christmas “Side Hunt” where they would choose sides and then go afield with their guns—whoever brought in the biggest pile of feathered quarry won.

            Chapman thought it more beneficial to count the birds than to wantonly kill them. 

            The data collected over the past century has allowed researchers to study the long-term health and status of bird populations across North America. When combined with other surveys, it provides a picture of how the continent's bird populations have changed in time and space over the past 120 years. For instance, analysis of the last four decades of North American data show that 58% of the birds counted have extended their winter ranges north, while 60 species have moved over 100 miles north, indicating the impact of warmer and shorter winters.

            Individual species’ populations can also be analyzed with this long-term data, with many birds showing declines, while others show gains. See http://www.stateofthebirds.org/2009/. 

Final Ice-up

            Woody Hagge noted that ice-up on Foster Lake in Hazelhurst took place on 11/25, near the 43-year average of 11/27. The Manitowish River beneath the Hwy. 47 bridge in Manitowish iced-over on 12/11.

Wolves on Isle Royale

            On June 7, 2018, the National Park Service released a long awaited “record of decision” calling for the introduction of 20 to 30 wolves over a three-to-five-year period onto Isle Royale National Park in Michigan. You may recall that the wolf population had been declining for years, dwindling to just two wolves by 2018 that were incapable of breeding, leaving the population of over 1,500 moose without a predator. In order to restore balance, the NPS staff put a restoration plan in motion beginning with the capture and transportation of four wolves from the Grand Portage Indian Reservation in Minnesota during fall 2018. The Park Service then partnered with the Ontario Ministry of Natural Resources and Forestry to transport more wolves from Canada and with the Michigan Department of Natural Resources to bring additional wolves to the park in 2019. The wolves were captured in the wild and set loose on the island with tracking collars for monitoring.

            Isle Royale National Park now has nine male and eight female wolves, and in a study just released in December by the Park Service and the State University of New York – College of Environmental Science and Forestry, researchers found the remains of 60 prey, which included moose, beavers and snowshoe hares. Over half of the prey were moose, which meets the Park’s goal of beginning to reduce the skyrocketing moose population. 

Ironwood Seeds

            In my last column, I noted the prolific seeds this year of black ash and white birch, forgetting to mention that ironwoods (Ostraya virginiana) are also loaded with seeds. 

            The fruits of ironwoods bear a resemblance to the fruit on hop vines, thus the other common name of hop hornbeam. 

            The seeds come enclosed in an inflated sac a little less than an inch long that provides buoyancy and enhanced dispersal by the wind. 

            The buds and catkins of ironwood are an important winter food for ruffed grouse, equal to the value of aspen and birch. The seeds are a secondary food in the fall, but are a preferred food for sharp-tailed grouse and wild turkey, and are eaten to a lesser extent by red and grey squirrels, cottontails, white-tailed deer, purple finch, rose-breasted grosbeaks, and downy woodpeckers. 

Sightings

            Mark Pflieger and Mary Adams-Pflieger near McNaughton had a new bird experience on 12/19. A tom turkey flew up and started feeding on one of their deer carcasses, and it didn’t take long for two hens to learn the new food source. Typically, wild turkeys forage on the ground in flocks, scratching the forest floor for mast (acorn and nuts) in fall, winter and early spring. Insects and snails are shown in studies to comprise about 10% of their year-round diet, but I don’t find any reference to turkeys feeding on carcasses. 

turkeys eating carrion, photo by Mark Pflieger

            Some turkeys starve during winters when powdery, deep snow covers the ground for a period of several weeks. According to one researcher, they can scratch through a maximum six inches of fluffy snow, and about a foot of packed snow. When the ground gets covered with a powdery snowfall, flocks will congregate in stands of hemlock, pine, and other conifers because the trees hold snow in the canopy, with far less on the ground than in the open. 

            Other research states that the average survival of wild turkeys during mild or average winters ranges from 70 to nearly 100%, but severe winters can reduce this survival rate to 55-60%. Still, wild turkey populations can recover in one breeding season and their overall population is more dependent on the previous summer's reproductive success than winter survival. 

End of Year – Looking Back on Two Good News Stories

            A recent study in the journal Science found that the overall population of North American birds has plunged by 3 billion since 1970. Still, there were some significant success stories in 2019, stories that we need to celebrate and honor.

            The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service announced in October that the Kirtland’s warbler has been removed from the federal list of endangered species. Populations had dipped to a low of 167 pairs in 1974, and when the Endangered Species Act was passed into law in 1973, the Kirtland’s warbler was on the initial list of endangered and threatened species. The Kirtland’s warbler population is now estimated to be over 2,300 pairs, more than double the recovery numerical goal. Said Noah Greenwald, endangered species director at the Center for Biological Diversity, “This bird flew off the endangered species list because the Endangered Species Act works.” In 2018 in Wisconsin, 11 pairs successfully hatched chicks, up from 2009 when the first confirmed successful nest in Wisconsin was ever found. 

            A little further afield, there’s the least tern, our smallest member of the tern family. In the late 19th and early 20th centuries, least terns were decimated by harvest for their feathers, which were used for making hats. Their nesting habitats were also flooded or degraded by dams and other forms of large river channel engineering during the mid-20th century. When it was listed under the Endangered Species Act in 1985, there were fewer than 2,000 birds and only a few dozen nesting sites scattered across a once-expansive range that covered America’s Great Plains and Lower Mississippi Valley. 

            Today, however, there are more than 18,000 interior least terns at more than 480 nesting sites in 18 states, thanks to decades of innovative conservation efforts, and the species no longer faces the threat of extinction. Consequently, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is proposing to delist the species from the ESA due to its recovery. 

Celestial Events

            Look tonight, 12/27, after dusk for Saturn about one degree above the waxing sliver of a moon. Look the next night, 12/28, after dusk for Venus also about one degree above the crescent moon.

            As of 12/30, our days now begin to grow longer by one minute per day.

            The peak Quatranid meteor shower occurs in the predawn of January 4. The Quatranids average 40 meteors per hour.

            On 1/5, the Earth will be at perihelion, the closest it will to the sun in 2020, a mere 91.4 million miles away. At aphelion on 7/4/2020, the sun will be 94.5 million miles away. The difference in distances amounts to only about a 7 percent difference in sunlight reaching Earth, which goes to show you that the Earth’s temperatures has very little to do with how close or far away the sun is. What matters is the tilt of the Earth’s axis – sunlight striking head on versus glancingly at an angle.

            January 6^th marks the last of the year’s latest sunrise. The following day, 1/7, the sun will rise one minute earlier for the first time since June 10. 

Thought for the New Year

            “What is a river’s truth? That we are all in this world together. That the earth, its water, and all its creatures are part of a single, complicated, interdependent, and dynamic system – one beautiful thing. That the survival of the whole depends on the well-being of its parts. That some parts of that system are too essential, too important, too elemental – some might say too sacred – to be traded away. Rather the resources of the earth – water, air, genetic information, seeds – are a sacred trust, to be held in common and stewarded for future generations of humans and all living things.” - Kathleen Dean Moore

Please share your outdoor sightings and thoughts: e-mail at manitowish@centurytel.net, call 715-476-2828, snail-mail at 4245N State Highway 47, Mercer, WI, or see my blog at www.manitowishriver.blogspot.com. 

A Northwoods Almanac for 12/13/19

A Northwoods Almanac for 12/13-27, 2019  

Celestial Events 

            The peak Geminid Meteor Shower will occur tonight, 12/13, through the predawn hours of 12/14. The Geminids are advertised to be the best meteor shower of the year with the likelihood of 50 to 100 meteors blazing per hour, though the glare of the waning gibbous moon will make viewing a lot like living in the light pollution of a city.

            The Geminids emanate from a “rock comet” called 3200 Phaethon, a 3-mile-wide asteroid-type object. Every December, the debris shed by 3200 Phaethon crashes into Earth’s upper atmosphere at some 80,000 miles per hour and vaporizes as colorful Geminid meteors.

            Dress warm to give yourself at least an hour of observing time, because it takes about 20 minutes for your eyes to adapt to the dark. And note that meteors often come in spurts, interspersed with lulls, so don’t give up quick if you’re not seeing any. 

            The Geminids will be best around 2 a.m. when the shower’s radiant point – the point in our sky from which the meteors seem to radiate – is highest in the sky. Look toward the constellation Gemini, the Twins, for the best viewing. 

            Another meteor shower, the Ursids, peaks in the predawn of 12/22. They’re a modest affair, averaging about 10 meteors per hour.

            On the early evening of 12/22, look for Mars about 4 degrees below the waning crescent moon.

            

Winter Solstice 

            December 21 marks the shortest day of the year at 8 hours and 39 minutes for us, or if you prefer, the longest night at 15 hours and 21 minutes. But at 10:19 p.m., it also marks when the sun reaches its farthest southward point for the year, and so begins its long walk back toward summer solstice. 

            If the Earth wasn’t tilted, life would be very, very different, but instead the planet lists on its axis at 23.5 degrees. On this day of winter solstice in the Northern hemisphere, the earth leans the furthest away from the sun for the year. Look, for instance, early today at your noontime shadow – it will be your longest shadow of the year. 

            Think of the earth’s tilt this way: If you are warming your hands by the fire, you want them at a 90-degree angle to the fire to catch the most light and heat. If you tilt them away from the fire, your hands won’t get nearly as warm or catch as much light. 

            Same deal with the sun. So, now the tilt starts righting itself, and we’ll be blessed with longer days and, eventually, warmer days. 

            Just to make matters confusing, however, our latest sunset for the year occurs at 4:14 p.m. on 12/15, and the following day the sun begins setting one minute later. Our year’s latest sunrises (7:40 a.m.) won’t occur until 12/27, and the sun won’t budge to an earlier sunrise time until January 7 of 2020. 

            Average this out, and our days don’t actually grow longer until 12/25 – the first time since June 17! This is another good reason for celebrating Christmas!

            There’s a rather technical explanation for all of this if you wish to understand why – see https://earthsky.org/?p=2951. 

            

Seeds on the Snow

            While skiing this week, we’ve noticed an abundance of both ash seeds and birch seeds on the snow surface. Ash seeds look like tiny canoe paddles, while most notable about birch seeds are their bracts. These look like a little fleur-de-lis with a single little winged seed nestled within each bract.

            The birches hope their seeds will be dispersed by wind as they skitter over crusted snow, while the ash seeds float down as rigid, single-winged helicopters and hope the wind carries them a short distance from the tree. The wing typically has a slight pitch (like a propeller or fan blade), causing the seed to spin as it falls. 

            Basswood seeds were also present on the trails. Look for the pea-sized seeds that hang on a stem from a narrow parachute-like structure that looks like a little hang glider.

Sightings

            In Manitowish, we’ve recently had three unusual birds at our feeders: a common grackle, a red-bellied woodpecker, and most unusual of all, a young-of-the-year rose-breasted grosbeak. We’ve never had a rose-breasted grosbeak visiting our winter feeders, and indeed, we’re unhappy about it because rose-breasted grosbeaks belong in Central and South America in December, not in Manitowish! It appears to fly adequately, but it may be injured or ill. We haven’t seen it this week, so it may have moved on, hopefully southward.

            Common grackles typically winter from southern portions of Minnesota, Wisconsin, and Michigan, south through central portions of Nebraska, Kansas, and Oklahoma, and even to Texas, New Mexico, the Gulf Coast, and southern Florida. This individual doesn’t belong here either.

            The red-bellied woodpecker, on the other hand, is doing quite the opposite: expanding its winter range into northern Wisconsin. Since the 1950s, they’ve been expanding to the north, probably due to maturing forests and a continued increase in backyard bird feeding. However, the red-bellied is among the most climate-sensitive species in the eastern U.S. (along with the yellow‐bellied sapsucker, tufted titmouse, Carolina wren, white‐throated sparrow and northern cardinal). Its distribution is strongly limited by the average minimum temperature each winter, and once that average falls to near 5°F, red-bellieds tend to stay south. Minocqua’s average minimum temperature in January has historically been 1°F, but as our winters continue to moderate in temperature, we will likely see more and more red-bellied woodpeckers at our winter feeders.

Greenhouse Gases

            Carbon dioxide levels hit an all-time high of 407.8 parts per million in 2018, according to a report released by the World Meteorological Organization. The last time the Earth had comparable concentrations of carbon dioxide in the atmosphere was approximately 3 million years ago, when the temperature was approximately 5.4 degrees Fahrenheit warmer and sea levels were up to 65 feet higher.

            Data is obtained by a suite of over 100 monitoring stations around the globe. As of 12/7/2019 at the Mauna Loa Observatory in Hawaii, CO2 is at 411.4 ppm.

Northern Highlands “Ecological Landscape”

            In 1995, an effort was begun by the Wisconsin DNR to identify ecoregions within Wisconsin with the goal of producing a book that assessed each region’s ecological resources and socioeconomic conditions. A combination of physical and biological factors, such as climate, geology, topography, soils, water, and vegetation, were used to differentiate the ecological regions, and ultimately, 16 ecological landscapes were mapped within the state. The goal then was to determine how to sustain these resources by highlighting ecological management opportunities best suited for these landscapes. In simpler terms, the planning team wanted to ensure all species and habitats found in Wisconsin were maintained somewhere in the state.

            This enormous book was finally published 20 years later, and unfortunately is only available online, but what a wealth of information it contains! The chapter on the Northern Highlands Ecological Landscape is 83 pages alone with numerous maps, photos, graphs, appendices, citations and references.

            Winter provides lots of reading time, and if you want to know more about where we live, and the opportunities we have for honoring it through our best management, I can’t think of a better source to read. 

            Check https://dnr.wi.gov/topic/landscapes/Book.html for the entire book on the 16 ecological landscapes of Wisconsin.

            Go to https://dnr.wi.gov/topic/Landscapes/documents/1805Ch14.pdf#view=Fit for the specific chapter on the Northern Highlands Ecological Landscape.

Gratitude

            While Christmas has devolved largely into consumer mania, I hope there’s still room for simply expressing our gratitude for this life we’ve been given and this remarkable place we’re so fortunate to live in. I hit my 68^th birthday a few days ago, and over the last few years, I’ve been challenged to come up with anything I “need” for my birthday or for Christmas. We certainly don’t live an extravagant lifestyle, and yet we have more than enough of just about everything I can think of. In fact, we’re at the point like many folks of similar age where we’re trying to figure out how to give away things, not accumulate more. Not only that, but we’re trying to be aware of how lucky we are, and to be grateful in every moment. Getting old, of course, lends itself to such reflection.

            Wendell Berry, writer and farmer from Kentucky, has written 25 books of poetry, 16 volumes of essays, and 11 novels and short story collections, and he has this to say about wanting more: “As Thoreau so well knew, and so painstakingly tried to show us, what a man most needs is not a knowledge of how to get more, but a knowledge of the most he can do without, and of how to get along without it. The essential cultural discrimination is not between having and not having or haves and have-nots, but between the superfluous and the indispensable. Wisdom, it seems to me, is always poised upon the knowledge of minimums; it might be thought to be the art of minimums.”  

            Growing older also slows one down, or at least is supposed to – some of us have to-do lists that keep us busier in retirement than we were in our work life! Mary and I continue to try and live in the most balanced way we can, though we often find ourselves still caught in the hurry of accomplishments. Herman Hesse, the Nobel Prize-winning German writer best known for books like Siddhartha and Steppenwolf, wrote, “The high value put upon every minute of time, the idea of hurry-hurry as the most important objective of living, is unquestionably the most dangerous enemy of joy.” (Hesse lived a moral life: He reviewed and publicized the work of banned Jewish authors in the mid-1930s, and from the end of the 1930s, German journals stopped publishing Hesse's work, with the Nazis eventually banning all of his writings.)

            So, for this Christmas, Mary and I wish you the deepest feelings of gratitude and joy in your life and for this place we call the Northwoods. 

            

Thought for the Week

From Albert Einstein: There are only two ways to live your life. One is as though nothing is a miracle. The other is as though everything is a miracle.