A Northwoods Almanac for May 15-28, 2020 by John Bates
The B and B Bee Palace
Mary and I are beginning a new story at our home in Manitowish with the introduction of two hives of bees on May 9th. This bee business is complicated, and we would never have even tried if we weren’t mentored – handheld might be the better word – by John Donovan, an experienced bee keeper from Manitowish Waters who has taken us under his wing.
But the story of the bees, and our building of a house for them, is a story within a story. It begins in 1924 with Mary’s grandparents purchasing the house and land we live on now in Manitowish from “the widow Stone.” Of course, other smaller stories live within stories, and the story we have of Mrs. Stone is that she was married to “Peg-Leg” Stone, a Civil War veteran who built our house in 1907. We wish we knew more about them, but we simply don’t – hopefully, we’ll learn more one day.
Mary’s grandparents, John William Nutter and Ann Nora Gleason, moved here from jobs in northern Minnesota on the Rainy River, Summit Lake and Antigo where John was a logger and owned a sawmill. They owned 7 acres on the north side of the Manitowish River where we now live and 280 acres on the south side of the river where they cleared enough land to plant several acres of potatoes, kept heifers and a milk cow, planted a large garden, and logged additional acres. They built a summer cabin in 1934, a bridge across the Manitowish River to where Hwy. 51 runs today (Hwy. 47 and the 47 bridge across the river weren’t built yet), and a barn for the cattle and a horse.
The cabin and barn were torn down sometime around 1950, and the wood hauled over to their/our house in Manitowish where Grandpa Nutter built a shed with the boards. As John and Ann grew elderly, they sold all their property on the south side of the river to the DNR in 1966 and eventually moved to Wausau, leaving the house abandoned for 14 years until we moved in and brought it back to life in 1984 (and since erected three additions).
Grandma’s and Grandpa’s farmstead is now the site of a canoe campsite on the Manitowish River, and if you walk just a short distance east from the camp, you can find the remains of their old wood stove and their root cellar.
What does this have to do with the 6 x 10 bee palace we built? Well, I tore the shed down last fall, and we’ve repurposed a lot of the boards as inside paneling in the bee palace. Grandpa apparently thought using more nails was better than using too few, so it’s taken a labor of love to pull all the nails, cut out the rot in the boards, then haul, sand and finish those boards. The story goes that Grandpa cut the trees down and had them milled for the cabin and barn, making the boards nearly 90 years old and likely from “virgin” trees. The timber is all full dimension, so a 2 x 6 actually measures 2 x 6, rather than today’s 1 ½ x 5 ½. There are a number of boards 15 inches wide that were used for roofing the shed, which tells me how common those huge boards must have been then.
It’s meaningful to honor those who came before us, and we thought that Mary’s grandparents would appreciate our efforts to salvage the wood from the work they’d done nearly a century ago. While the bees won’t care about the history of the wood, we hope they’ll appreciate the warmth and dryness that will keep them out of our erratic Northwoods winters. Perhaps as important, I suspect John and Ann Nutter are now smiling on the bees as well.
Sightings – First-of-the-Year (FOY)
Overall, songbirds have been slow in returning to the Northwoods, likely due to our pattern of cold weather in early May and mostly northerly winds which have deterred migration. Still, some birds have returned:
5/6: Pat Schwai observed her FOY male rose-breasted grosbeak at her feeders. And later in the day, saw her FOY black-throated green warbler! She also noted, “We've had a hermit thrush under our feeder every day for the past 2 1/2 weeks. We're hoping it stays around and sings for us this summer.” This is an odd sighting given that hermit thrushes rarely visit feeders. On their breeding territory, eat almost entirely insects and other small invertebrates, while on migration and in the winter, they supplement their diet with a wide variety of fruits. But seeds? That’s not something they’re known to forage.
Mary and I also heard and saw our FOY black-throated green warbler near the Bear River on this day.
5/7: Joan Galloway on Clear Lake in Manitowish Waters reported a male hummingbird at her feeders – the first one reported to me this spring. She also noted that she has been hearing a whippoorwill in the early morning hours “when our old dog gets us up to go outdoors. We are fortunate to have one almost every year here on Clear Lake. Although one year it sang continuously for what seemed like forever next to our bedroom.”
5/8: Mary Madsen on Twin Island Lake in Presque Isle sent a note saying she usually plans on hummingbirds coming on Mothers Day weekend, but with the cold, she thought/hoped they'd wait. “Glad I hung out a couple of feeders - our first just showed up!”
5/9: Mary also reported her first oriole, happily enjoying the oranges/grape jelly she offered. “On a stranger note,” she wrote, “we have a blue jay hanging out with a grackle – even feeding it. Go figure. I can understand cowbirds, but thought this was quite strange!” To which I would agree – I’ve never heard of a blue jay feeding a grackle – usually they’re fighting for position at our feeders.
5/9: Judith Bloom on Lake Tomahawk sent me some beautiful photos of rose-breasted grosbeaks at her feeders. She also noted that she had observed her first Canada geese family – “They have 11 little ones; hatched probably on 5/3.”
5/11: I hiked some of the dikes on Powell Marsh with Artemis Eyster and Rebecca Rand from Conserve School, and while many birds have still not returned, we saw 26 species. Of particular interest were five pintail ducks, a species whose core nesting habitat is in Alaska and the Prairie Pothole Region of southern Canada and the northern Great Plains – Wisconsin lies at the far southeastern edge of their range. And we had our FOY sedge wren, who gave us some wonderful close-up looks, albeit very briefly.
5/12: Bob Kovar sent me some remarkable photos of a red fox family in the Manitowish Waters area, one of which shows the 7 kits all nursing.
Dan Jacoby Retiring
Every year, tens of thousands of us utilize boat landings, water access canoe sites, and cross country ski trails in the Northern Highlands State Forest, and we likely don’t give a moment’s thought to who maintains all those sites. Well, Dan Jacoby and his crew have been responsible for the work, and Dan is now retiring, completing a 38-year career with the Bureau of Forestry and lately with the Division of Fish Wildlife and Parks. Dan maintained 120 boat landings, 105 water access canoe sites, and groomed miles and miles of cross country ski trails – Dan conservatively estimates the miles of cross country ski trails he groomed using a snowmobile and pull behind drag at 15,000! Dan says it was a career he felt lucky to have, but I’d say we were the lucky ones.
Spring Ephemeral Flowers
Mary and I have been looking for spring flowers, but as of 5/11, they’ve been hard to come by. In the sandy soils of the Frog Lake and Pines State Natural Area across the Manitowish River from our home, we’ve found trailing arbutus open, but hepaticas closed to the cold. In better soils, we thought we’d do better, so we hiked the lovely trail at Pipke Park in Presque Isle, and found a grand total of two spring beauties closed up, and that was it!
We’ve heard from others that spring flowers were up in some areas with better soils, but our hard frosts every morning have been curtailing the usual bounty. Weather forecasters are saying we’ll be seeing 60° and better beginning on 5/14, plus be given some rain, so that should get the flower show really rocking.
As always, remember that in hardwood forests, these flower displays are truly ephemeral, lasting in general only as long as the trees overhead haven’t leafed out. Spring flowers have to get their flowering work done while the sun shines all the way to the forest floor. Shade is an enemy, so it’s a short window of time to flower and produce seeds – see them while you can.
Wild leeks follow a very different growth timetable from most other spring flowers. The leaves pop up early in the spring, then wither and die before the spokelike umbel of white flowers appears in June. The leaves smell like onions and offer an interesting addition to a sandwich, but it’s the bulbs that most attract wild food gatherers. Gather the bulbs prior to the appearance of the flowers to make a fine soup or add as a base for other soup recipes.
Wild leeks are hard to come by in the sandy soils of most of the Lakeland area, but where the glacier left loamier soils, leeks thrive in association with other richer soil plants like trilliums, bloodroot, and trout lilies.
Celestial Events
For planet watching in the rest of May, look after dusk for Mercury very low in the northwest, and brilliant Venus low also in the northwest, but lost by the end of the month.
Before dawn, look in the south and southeast for Mars, Saturn, and Jupiter, with Jupiter being the brightest of the three by far.
Tomorrow, 5/16, we’ll receive over 15 hours of sunlight – enjoy!
The new moon occurs on 5/22. Look after dusk on 5/23 for Venus about 4° above the waxing sliver moon. On 5/24, look after dusk for Mercury about 3° above the crescent moon.
Thought for the Week
“Once in his life a man ought to concentrate his mind upon the remembered earth. He ought to give himself up to a particular landscape in his experience; to look at it from as many angles as he can, to wonder about it, to dwell upon it. He ought to imagine that he touches it with his hands at every season and listens to the sounds that are made upon it. He ought to imagine the creatures there and all the faintest motions of the wind. He ought to recollect the glare of the moon and the colors of the dawn and dusk.” - N. Scott Momaday
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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