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.