A Northwoods Almanac for 11/13/20

 A Northwoods Almanac for 11/13 - 26, 2020  

 

Sightings - Spotted Towhee, Pine and Evening Grosbeaks, Snow Buntings 

11/3: At our feeders in Manitowish, we’ve had continuous visits since early November from evening grosbeaks as well as a few pine grosbeaks, with evening grosbeaks concentrating on our sunflower seeds and the pine grosbeaks taking seeds and feeding on our crabapples. Numerous people have observed evening grosbeaks in the last week, so be on the lookout at your feeders. Ryan Brady, avian conservation biologist for the WDNR in Ashland, writes that “east of Wisconsin they're seeing a full-blown irruption [of evening grosbeaks], with birds down into North Carolina and Tennessee already and big numbers in the northeast U.S. Here in the western Great Lakes, birds are moving, yielding sightings already south to Iowa, Illinois, and southern WI, but numbers are substantially lower, especially here in the north.”

11/4: Gale and Dave Fisher observed a single bat catching insects, which is quite unusual in November! Along those same lines, Mary, Callie and I saw a garter snake on 11/8, which is equally unusual. Bats should have migrated or hibernated by now, and snakes should be also hibernating. I suspect our very warm weather in early November brought a few hardy souls of various species out to explore, but that was an anomaly. By the time you read this, we will likely be back to full-blown snow-cover, and all hibernators should be tucked in where they belong for the winter.

11/7: Bob Kovar photographed a spotted towhee underneath one of his feeders in Manitowish Waters on 11/7. This is a rare sighting in the Northwoods! The only other spotted towhee ever confirmed north of Hwy. 29 was in 2007. Mary and I have seen these birds in scrubby habitats in Arizona where they nest, but they are a true western bird and are well out of their range here in northern Wisconsin.

photo by Bob Kovar

Spotted towhee range map 

11/7: Snow buntings are currently migrating through and are often being seen along roadsides. The males are entirely black and white, while the females are more brownish with much less contrasting black and white plumage. No other songbird is so extensively white, so that’s the feature to key in on.

 

Wilderness Walking

            Our remarkably warm early November weather made for excellent hiking conditions, and Mary, Callie and I tried to take full advantage of the heat. Our two most interesting hikes took place in designated federal wilderness areas, the first in the 4,446-acre Porcupine Lake Wilderness Area in Bayfield County, and the second in the 18,327-acre Sylvania Wilderness Area in the Upper Peninsula. 

Both areas are part of the National Wilderness Preservation System, a network of over 109 million acres of public land comprised of more than 760 wilderness areas. These areas were designated through the efforts of people like Howard Zahniser who wrote the first draft of the Wilderness Act in 1956. Nine years, 65 rewrites, and 18 public hearings later in August 1964, and after the Senate had passed it for the second time, the House of Representatives overwhelmingly passed the Wilderness Act of 1964 with only one dissenting vote. It was signed shortly thereafter by President Lyndon Johnson.

In Wisconsin, five wilderness areas have been designated, comprising a total acreage within the Chequamegon-Nicolet National Forest of 42,415 acres, or about 3% of the entire 1.5 million-acre forest (the Chequamegon side of the National Forest comprises in total about 858,400 acres in Ashland, Bayfield, Sawyer, Price, Taylor and Vilas counties, while the Nicolet side includes nearly 661,400 acres in Florence, Forest, Langlade, Oconto, Oneida and Vilas counties). 

Designated in 1984, the Porcupine Lake Wilderness was mostly cut over beginning in the 1880s, with cutting continuing sporadically up to 1977. Windstorms have also left their mark with fallen trees common throughout the wilderness. The North Country National Scenic Trail runs the length of the area with posts marking the trail location at some intersections, but otherwise the trail is unmarked. 

We hiked a four-mile long section of the NCT that touches the north end of 75-acre Porcupine Lake, a long, sinuous, spring-fed lake. Nothing remarkable happened on our hike, but we hiked in a completely silent place where nature again is primary and humans secondary, and that alone meets my definition of “remarkable”. 

Two days later, we hiked a 9.8 mile-long trail in Sylvania, which is within the one-million-acre Ottawa National Forest. Here you can also paddle or simply rest next to 34 named wild lakes. And here, for the most part, remains an old-growth hemlock-hardwood forest, the second largest in the Upper Midwest. We didn’t see another person throughout our five hours on the trail, nor again did we have anything “remarkable” happen, that is if you don’t consider solitude, pristine lakes, and old-growth hemlocks, yellow birches, sugar maples, and white pines  particularly remarkable. We, of course, do, and that’s why of all the places we could have chosen to go to that last day of foreseeable warm weather, we chose to go there. With sore feet, and nearing sunset, we drove home in quiet gratitude. 

on the trail in Sylvania

These places, these wildernesses, are now sanctuaries for species adapted to the North Country where they can live out their full lives without the incursions of modern development and resource-driven pressures. As the federal website for wilderness states, “They are places where law mandates above all else that wildness be retained for our current generation, and those who will follow.”   

 

Loon Decline: Article by Walter Piper

            Since 1993, Walter Piper has coordinated research on common loons on over 100 breeding-lake territories in Oneida County. I write about his work frequently in my columns, but now the results from his investigation of loon survival during the chick and early floater stages has been published by the American Ornithological Society. His study sample is large - according to estimates by LoonWatch, the loons he’s studied comprised 9.8%, 7.1%, and 8.6% of the statewide loon population in 2005, 2010, and 2015 respectively.

            His work reveals two major results. One, “compared to the late 1990s, 31% more chicks now perish before they reach five weeks, and 82% more chicks die after reaching five weeks of age.”

            Two, and more shocking by his own words, was his discovery that “the population of young adult floaters had plummeted to less than half of its size in the 1990s.” Floaters are young adults loons, future breeders, that either replace or evict older loons from their territories. Piper’s population model “projects a decrease of 6% annually in the northern Wisconsin loon population” and a “loss of roughly one-third of all loon breeding territories in northern Wisconsin by 2031.” 

            This is a startling projection and thus worthy of your time to read more in-depth. For the summary, see https://americanornithology.org/the-cryptic-decline-of-an-iconic-northern-species/. To read the entire paper, see https://academic.oup.com/condor/advance-article/doi/10.1093/condor/duaa044/5897435.

            A study in Ontario appears to be finding much the same results. See https://tla-temagami.org/wp-content/uploads/2020/06/Drivers-of-Decline-in-Common-Loon-Productivity-in-Ontario-Science-of-the-Total-Environment-2020.pdf

 

High Waters

The paddling season has come to a close, and the overriding takeaway for me this year has been the crazy high water on so many lakes. We’ve had five years now of historically wet weather, and the impact on shoreline vegetation has been dramatic. On lake after lake, I saw what were shoreline trees like white pines, white cedars, and white birches in three feet or more of water. Many were dying or had died from the stress of their roots being underwater for several consecutive years or from the stress weakening the trees enough that insects and diseases were able to get the upper hand. Shoreline shrubs like leatherleaf, sweet gale, and tag alder were all inundated, and emergent aquatic plants like pickerelweed and bullrushes appeared to me to be far less abundant. High water levels also increased the amount of nutrient runoff, and the result was reduced water clarity.

Limnologists tell me that in our area we’re typically on a 13-year cycle of high water to low water. Our current higher water period began in 2013, so if we’re on that cycle, we’re still in for more years of high water. And with the one of the impacts of climate change being more intense rain events, deluges where runoff into our lakes happens more rapidly than during gentle rains, then we’re in for even more water well into our future. 

 

Celestial Events

            New moon occurs on 11/14. The peak Leonid meteor shower takes place before dawn on 11/17 - look for an average of 15 meteors per hour. On 11/19, look after dusk for Jupiter two degrees above the waxing crescent moon, and Saturn three degrees above the moon. As of 11/26, the average high temperature in Minocqua now drops to 32° for the first time since March 5. Minocqua averages 100 days, or about 27% of the year, with high temperatures at or below 32°.

 

Thought for the Week

“Things mysteriously change, leaving me wondering with no clues.” - Lynn Rogers, Biologist, Wildlife Research Institute and North American Bear Center, in a blog posting on 10/19/20.