A Northwoods Almanac for 8/21/20

 A Northwoods Almanac for August 21 - September 3 , 2020  by John Bates

 

Honey!

            Mary and I began the adventure of beekeeping with two hives in May. Three-and-a-half months later on 8/16, we extracted 40 pounds of honey, a modest amount, but given how much we learned over the last three months, we felt well-rewarded. 

The ecology and democracy of honeybees astonishes us, and no statistic knocks our socks off more than this: for every one pound of honey, honeybees visit two million flowers. So, for our 40 pounds of honey, 80 million flowers were visited. Many flowers were revisited of course, so how many individual flowers this represents is unknown. But consider that this number doesn’t take into account the approximately 50 pounds of honey every beekeeper has to leave in each hive for the bees to eat over the winter. So, “our” bees likely visited at least 100 million flowers this summer so far, and we’re a tiny bee operation. 

The average honeybee flies 15 to 20 flights per day and carries back to the hive from one-third to one-fifth of its body weight in pollen every trip, while an average hive contains at least 10,000 bees, and up to 60,000 bees. So, if you do all the math, the two million flower visits/pound figure doesn’t seem so crazy.

In an average hive, 58% of the bees forage just for nectar, 25% forage exclusively for pollen, while the rest collect water, propolis (a glue-like substance secreted by some plants), or bring back a combination of pollen and nectar. 

Adult bees only live an average of five to six weeks, three of which are spent initially inside the hive in a variety of roles including being “nurse” bees for emerging larvae, carrying nectar from incoming foraging bees into the hive and pre-digesting it, packing pollen into the hive cells, building the wax comb, capping honey-filled cells, cleaning the hive (carrying dead bees out is just one task), guarding the entrance to the hive against intruders like bumblebees and hornets, and eventually beginning orientation flights so they know where to go to find flowers. 

Once a worker bee finally begins its duties as a foraging bee, she only lives for 10 to 21 days, and then dies of old age. We’ve had to get used to the number of dead bees around our hive which at first alarmed us, but now we know it’s just the natural order for them. Wintering bees will live up to six months or more because they don’t have to work so hard or be eaten by predators in the summer.  

I would love to be able to analyze our honey and see what flowers became part of it. The literature says bees may visit 200 or more species depending on the availability in an area. 

It’s all remarkably complex, and we’re still just scratching the surface in understanding their behaviors. The bees do all the work. If we help them to live in the hives we provide, we get to share (steal might be the better word) some of their summer’s work, and what a sweet reward it is. 

 

Sightings

Very few of us have nesting red-headed woodpeckers on our property, but Greg Bassett in Hazelhurst has had a pair for the last two years. He sent me an update on 8/4: “We now have mom and dad and their two woodpecker contributions to the redhead population. After roundtrip after roundtrip by both mom and dad to our suet feeder for a couple of weeks (or more), they have now brought their babies to the feeder . . . The two babies are as big as the redhead we think is Mom . . . The nest in that tree must have been a very tight fit the last week or so when they all needed to be inside it to stay out of the rain storms. So now we can watch them as they get fueled up for their trip to wherever they go for the winter. Hopefully they will grace us with their presence again next spring!”

Pat Harkin sent me this note on 8/7: “I was sitting in my boat at the dock on Squirrel Lake and had a unique experience with a female hooded merganser . . . It was swimming about 75-100 feet offshore, and it appeared with a dark egg size object in its bill. It proceeded to shake its head vigorously and occasionally the object would fall into the water. It would quickly recapture this object and continue to shake it. It repeated this behavior while swimming closer to shore . . .

“The bird then returned to deep water and again had a large dark brown object in its bill. I asked my wife to retrieve my binoculars from the car to get a better look. With the binoculars I could clearly see that the merganser had a large crayfish in its bill. I then observed that the merganser was holding the crayfish by its legs and shaking it. The merganser then captured the crayfish from the water by the legs and again shook it vigorously until the legs detached. This continued until I couldn’t see any legs or claws on the crayfish, and it tipped its head up, opened its bill, got it in its bill and with difficulty gobbled it down. I could see a large bulge in its throat as it swallowed the legless crayfish.                                                                                                                “At 73 years of age and a lifelong hunter, fisherman and trapper, I had never heard of or seen a merganser learn to ‘disarm’ a crayfish meal. I’m curious if you have heard and/or observed anything like this.” I certainly haven’t observed this, but it makes sense to not eat the pincers!

Sarah Krembs in Manitowish Waters sent the following: “We've had a family of pileateds coming to the suet feeder the last few days. There are two very large babies. In the picture where the two are on the tree, the juvenile is on the left. His little red hairdo looks a bit thinner, and that's about the only way you can tell he's still a baby. OTHER THAN THE FACT that he is such a beggar! The babies make this constant sort of raspy grunting noise . . . I finally figured out what they are saying . . . The secret code is: "FEED ME, FEED ME, FEED ME!

“The poor parent is busy filling her [crop] . . . with suet and then the closest baby gets a snack . . . I swear, they are just like human teenagers. They might look like adults, but they sure have a lot to learn about being self-sufficient.” 

Angie Fox sent me a great photo of a northern tooth, or shelving tooth, mushroom (Climacodon septentrionale) that she came across while taking a big tree limb into the woods as part of her work at Nicolet College.

Northern flickers are now gathering along roadsides to forage for ants - look for a woodpecker with a white rump in flight.

Common nighthawks have begun their migration. Look for them near dusk flying low and erratically over open areas or along roads. Their long, angled and pointed wings, along with a white bar on the underside of their wings makes for easy identification.

This is the time of year for orbweaver spider webs to be commonly seen in the early morning with the sun pouring through their dewy webs. Due to their poor vision, the orbweavers have to sit in or near their webs to feel their captives caught in their webs. I love seeing their dozens of webs strung every morning in the wetland alders and willows below our house.

Leaves are turning, particularly in flooded wetlands and lakeshores where trees and shrubs have been stressed by high water all summer. Many of the silver maples below our house have already turned red and are dropping their leaves, while numerous alders have apparently died or are in some form of senescence. 

            Hummingbirds are tanking up at nectar feeders and will soon be migrating, with the males departing well before the females and juveniles. Cornell’s Birds of North America says that “Overland migration of individuals from northern latitudes in North America is nearly synchronous with peak flowering of jewelweed (Impatiens capensis), suggesting this flower is an important nectar source during this time and may influence the timing of migration.” That’s intriguing. We have many jewelweeds in flower all around our property, and the hummers are constantly nectaring in them. I’m curious to see if on our property there’s a correlation between the hummer’s departures and the decline of jewelweed flowers.  

            Speaking of hummers, Ron Winters sent me a photo of hummers practicing perfect social distancing at 6 centimeters on one of his feeders. Our hummers never cooperate like this, try as we have to teach the males to share and leave everyone alone. 

            Finally, turtleheads are now in flower in the wetlands, while various species of goldenrod are blooming in the uplands. These are last flowers of summer and the harbingers of autumn.

 

Weather Stats

July 2020 tied with July 2016 as the second-hottest month ever recorded for our planet, according to a report from the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. Only July 2019 was hotter, but only by a tiny fraction of a degree. “The July 2020 global land and ocean surface temperature was 1.66 degrees above the 20th-century average of 60.4 degrees, tying with 2016 as the second-highest temperature in the 141-year record,” NOAA said. 

July 2020 also marked the 44th-consecutive July and the 427th-consecutive month with temperatures above the 20th-century average, according to NOAA.

It was also very warm in the far north, as Arctic sea ice extent for July 2020 was the smallest in the 42-year record, 23% below the 1981–2010 average, according to an analysis by the National Snow and Ice Data Center. 

It's also the hottest year on record across a large portion of northern Asia, parts of Europe, China, Mexico, northern South America, the Atlantic, and the northern Indian and Pacific Oceans. 

 

Red-eyed Vireos

            Now that it’s late August, I think we’ve heard the last singing of red-eyed vireos, the most prodigious songster in the Northwoods. Called the “preacher” bird because of the male’s non-stop, monotonous singing, Bradford Torrey in 1889 had this to say about its speechifying, “I have always thought that whoever dubbed this vireo the ‘preacher' could have had no very exalted opinion of the clergy”. 

The adult male begins singing 30 to 35 minutes before sunrise and continues into late afternoon, no matter the heat index, singing up to 85 songs per minute, or an average of about 40 songs per minute. One researcher, Louise de Kiriline Lawrence, counted 22,197 songs by a red-eyed vireo over a 14-hour-day. Donald Kroodsma, author of The Singing Life of Birds, writes that only the whip-poor-will sings more songs per minute. Kroodsma counted the songs of one whip-poor-will over a 9-hour-night and estimated he heard 20,898 repetitions of the same phrase, enough to make him feel like he couldn’t get it out of this head the next morning.

Even though red-eyed vireo songs sound pretty much the same to me, individual red-eyed vireos don’t just sing one song - each has a large repertoire of phrases that are used alone or in combinations to form between 20 to 50 songs.

However, by the end of July, the male’s singing usually ceases by late morning, and by now he’s getting ready to migrate at night most often to the Amazon basin of South America flying either around or directly across the Gulf of Mexico.

 

Celestial Events

            On 8/28, look after dusk for Jupiter 1.4 degrees above the waxing gibbous moon. The next night, 8/29, look for Saturn in almost the same spot, but 2 degrees above the moon.

            September’s full moon occurs on 9/2, the Harvest/Acorn/Leaves Changing Color Moon.

 

Thought for the Week

“Bees do have a smell, you know, and if they don't they should, for their feet are dusted with spices from a million flowers.” - Ray Bradbury

 

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.

 

Stitching Continents Together: The Phenomenon of Bird Migration, 8/3/20

A Northwoods Almanac for August 7, 2020

A Northwoods Almanac for August 7 - 20, 2020  by John Bates

 

Of Wooly Bears and Life

Bob Kovar in Manitowish Waters sent this to me, and though it’s long, I thought it was worth sharing in its entirety because it speaks to so many things:

“Everyone knows how hard it is to grow vegetables here in the North - deer and other ravenous critters require fences or other drastic countermeasures, and big trees need to be pruned or cut down to allow enough sunlight into the garden. To avoid this dilemma, I have been growing tomatoes and peppers on my south-facing dock for many years, where my plants enjoy bright sunlight from dawn till dark. Like any good farmer taking pride in their work, I have several flowerpots planted to add color and beauty to the whole affair and to encourage the vegetables to grow as well-adjusted members of a larger community. When people venture by in their boats, there are many compliments muttered by people who know not how their voices carry on water about my giant tomato and pepper plants. 

“But the real oohs and ahhs are saved for my flowers. In each flowerpot, I plant several yellow giant marigolds and surround them with an assortment of begonias and impatiens. By the beginning of August, my flowers are several feet tall standing atop and gracefully hanging over the edges of their pots in proud cumulus clouds of color. 

“Now everyone knows deer won’t eat marigolds, and for many years I never had ONE plant on my dock touched by a deer during which time I grew to appreciate my genius for planting such a repellant flower there. That is until about four years ago. 

“One morning, much to my dismay, one of my flowerpots had all of the marigolds chewed to the nub. The next day, all of my other flowerpots had the same sad fate. On the third day, all of my flowers in all of my pots were gone. Now the first year this happened I just figured that some rogue deer had luckily called my bluff, and it was a one-time event. The second year, however, dispelled this new myth as the same thing happened again at the beginning of August. And the third year, despite me trying to train my golden retriever to become a stalwart defender of blossoms big and small, the same thing happened again. And woefully, despite pulling out all of the stops and waking before dawn and hiding in the woods starting in mid-July so as to scare the daylights out of my keen adversary thus sending it into the deep forest forever, the same thing happened again last year. 

“Now, I never did see the culprit in any of these years, but I was smart enough to know, with as much certainty as can be had by guessing and by goshing, that this animal had to be incredibly smart to outwit the likes of me. It HAD to be an animal with a long neck I surmised given the length of flower stems in the middle that were eaten to oblivion. A deer, maybe a goose (but there were never any goose droppings on the dock), maybe a beaver tired of popple and willow opting now for the thick lusciousness of the giant marigold trunks, or a muskrat trying to make a new start as a wedding planner . . . I had no idea. 

“So, like I do when I have no answers about so many things in this life, I called my good friend John Bates last year, and we assumed, inferred, calculated, pondered, guessed, predicted, deduced, inferred and opined like we were THE foremost experts in all matters of dock flower disappearance. But of course, we never came up with anything better than ‘Maybe we should put a trailcam out there?’ 

“Not the worst idea, but my ingrained human being privilege got the better of me and I concluded without a shred of evidence it had to be a deer. A very smart and sneaky deer in a cloaking device. I was the judge and jury and some deer was the problem - end of story.

“Well, yesterday (8/2), I walked down to the dock for the morning watering. I had long forgotten about the mystery of the disappearing flowers partly because I am now 65 and I don’t remember such things until they mysteriously happen again for the first time, and you have to give a guy a break what with pandemics, grandchildren, red squirrels, assorted hornet nests and mice in the garage taking up many of the most important hours in my days of late. As I emerged onto the dock, there it was - one of the flowerpots had been half-eaten alive. I cursed that deer -LOUDLY. I bent down to pick up the beautiful bodies of dead flowers scattered on the dock to pay them homage and administer their last rites before their burial at sea and Lo! and Behold! A wooly bear caterpillar! It was devouring a begonia leaf. In the two minutes I watched, it ate the WHOLE leaf! I was so focused on this one marauding insect, I didn’t realize that there was an entire platoon ambushing this one flowerpot. 

wooly bear caterpillar

    “I picked them off one by one, 40 in all, and threw them into the river where they floated motionless and where, I assumed, they would meet their rightful punishment of death by hungry sunfish. A few fish did snap at them, but then quickly spit them out. Moments later, realizing they were neither going to drown or be eaten alive, to my horror the platoon began swimming back to shore, now an understandably angry wiggling armada of death. I LEAPT into the water and started to grab them and throw them into my half-filled watering can, that would sadly have many less flowers to tend to in the coming mornings if this battle was lost. It turned out that upon further inspection of all of my flowerpots, there was more like a brigade of wooly bear caterpillars attending this flowerpot bender, and war, unfortunately, had to be declared to try and save the world down there on that dock. Suffice it say, as it is with any hostility, there were no real winners, but there sure were a lot of losers. In the fog at the end of that epic battle, I wondered if any of it was worth it.

“The moral of course is that it was my own silly bias that led me to make a false accusation, without a shred of evidence, against a whole community of critters, while for years another party was the miscreant doing the deed. Unless of course, the Woolly Bear caterpillar just happened to be in the wrong place at the right time this year. Who knows for sure? We human beings struggle with knowing what is real and what isn’t, don’t we? Usually because we either aren’t patient enough or, more likely, we may be blind as a bat or deaf as a board. Sometimes you just need to be humble and willing to wait long enough, years if it requires, to allow the right answer to show itself.”

 

Wild Lakes

            I’m working on a book that celebrates the last undeveloped, wild lakes of northern Wisconsin, which is really just an excuse for me to wander around and paddle lakes I’ve always wanted to explore. So, I’ve been paddling quite a number of lakes in the last few weeks, and I’d like to share just two of them with you - Mineral Lake, a 227-acre lake in Ashland County and McKinley Lake, a much smaller 48-acre lake in Forest County. 

Mineral Lake is one of the largest undeveloped lakes left in the state, and I had the whole lake to myself on a beautiful late morning despite its reputation as a popular walleye lake. This is bedrock country, so boulders and rock faces lined much of the shoreline. The surprise moment there for me was discovering scattered purple-fringed orchids along one of the shorelines, a species I rarely see. 

purple-fringed orchid photo by John Bates

McKinley Lake, east of Eagle River, offered a more intimate experience, and one loaded with floral highlights. Numerous old logs laid undisturbed in the water, clothed over the years by mosses and then bog plants, chief among which were hundreds of round-leaved sundews. I doubt I’ve ever seen so many sundews, and all were just about to flower. The carnivorous sundew attracts diminutive insects like mosquitoes with its attractive rosy coloration and its sparkling fluid-tipped tentacles, and traps them in the viscous droplets. The leaf gradually folds over the captive in 10 to 15 minutes, and then secretes an enzyme to digest the insect. I love that one late 19th century naturalist referred to the sundew as a “bloodthirsty little miscreant”, no doubt while he was having steak for dinner. 

round-leaved sundews, photo by John Bates

 

Fireworks - Enough Already 

It seems a number of people don’t realize July 4^th and its attendant fireworks is over. To make matters worse, it seems that the explosive thunder of fireworks now available to the public has vastly multiplied, so we now have the combination of people setting off extraordinarily loud fireworks day and night with no calendar end in sight. 

The result - “KABOOM” “KABOOM” - is the night sound many now hear rather than the hooting of owls, the wail of loons, or the yipping of coyotes. A few nights ago we even had some folks at the wilderness campsite downriver from our house setting off ear-shattering pyrotechnics as the full moon was rising. Why they didn’t perceive the disconnect between camping in a wilderness area and shooting off explosive fireworks is an unanswerable question. 

So, what’s the issue above and beyond my enjoyment of quiet? Pretty simple - the impacts on wildlife from fireworks are real, as well as the impacts on those who live and work here full-time. How real? Let’s allow Marge Gibson, the internationally-respected wildlife rehabilitator at the Raptor Education Group in Antigo, to make it clear: 

“It is a rare moment indeed when anyone hears me use the word “hate” and yet here it is. At this moment in time, I hate the 4th of July. Not what is stands for, but what is has become. I hate fireworks. I hate the crazed people that race around the pristine lakes and wild spaces of the northland, treat our landscape like their personal playground and have no sense of responsibility or consideration for what they are destroying.

“Last night we admitted yet another 5.5-week-old eaglet that jumped or fell from his nest in a resort town. We also admitted a cygnet Trumpeter Swan, and today . . . I have a message that loons in another resort town have abandoned their chicks, one chick reported to be huddled under a pontoon boat in shock.

“The day is young, and most fireworks have not yet begun for this actual day of “celebration”. Reality is the explosions and reckless behavior began at least a week ago and will continue through the end of July at a minimum. My reality is my wildlife center will fill with abandoned, injured and terrified wildlife all because of those that chose to think that in “this” playground they can do anything they want and then leave it broken to those of us that live here.

Another treat ... I get to shoulder all the financial responsibility for our patients as well.”

            I asked Marge for permission to print this, and in her response on 8/3 she noted: “Can you imagine, we have 750 patients here, thirty-two of which are eagles.” 

Marge Gibson with an adult bald eagle

As a birdwatcher, I notice in July and even into August that many birds are still raising young, or feeding young that have just fledged, or sitting on a second clutch of eggs, and when we create the thunderclap of fireworks in our yards and parks, do we even consider the impact on birds? As for mammals, just talk to any pet dog - nearly every one of them is petrified. What do folks think occurs for fox, deer, snowshoe hare, et al? 

From my standpoint, we need to celebrate our independence day in a manner that honors life, and not in some thoughtless competition to produce the loudest explosions that honor the sounds of war but fail to honor the place in which we, and wildlife, live. 

Years ago in this column, I suggested the formation of a group to be called the “Majority for Silence,” a take-off from the “Silent Majority” we heard so much about in 1980s politics. 

Apparently it’s time to dust the idea off again.

 

Thought for the Week

            The first words my daughter ever read were words printed on a spine of a book. I was there. It was evening. She was four years old. She ran her fingers along the spine of the book and sounded out the syllables and suddenly put them together into words and her mother and I sat there agape and my heart shivered and our daughter turned and grinned and nothing was ever quite the same. - Bryan Doyle, “Grace Notes”

 

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.