A Northwoods Almanac for December 27, 2019 – January 9, 2020 by John Bates
Christmas Bird Counts
We held the 27th annual Manitowish Waters Christmas Bird Count on 12/14 and the 13th 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.
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| 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 120th 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.
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| 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 6th 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.
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