A Northwoods Almanac for 10/15/21

 A Northwoods Almanac for 10/15 – 28, 2021  by John Bates

 

Sightings –Great Horned Owls and Blue Jays

            Carne Andrews sent me a note on 10/5 saying, “About 10 PM last night we heard two great horned owls exchanging their deep-throated hoots back and forth across Echo Lake for the first time since last January!” In Manitowish, we’ve been hearing a great horned owl as well. This fits what we should expect every fall, because the male typically begins what is called “advertisement hooting” in late September or early October. What’s most interesting to me about his advertising is that great horneds are believed to be monogamous. The literature says no polygamy has been observed: “Pairs may mate for at least five years and perhaps for life . . . monitoring by telemetry provided no evidence for extra-pair copulations,” which is the fancy way of saying neither the male or female is stepping-out on the other. 

            So, who’s he advertising for if he’s monogamous? 

            Beats me, though it may just be a way of shoring up the existing pair bond, sort of like a redo of your wedding vows, or maybe they’re just romantics.

            If you’re hearing them at night, you can tell the difference between the male and female calls. The male vocalizations are more prolonged and deeper, likened by one writer to the sound “of a distant foghorn, soft, somewhat tremulous, and subdued with little or no accent,” while the female vocalizations are higher in pitch. Despite the fact she is larger in size, she has a smaller syrinx.

            The paired couple often synchronize their songs, which is known as duetting, and the crooning can last over 60 minutes. The male begins calling during or within a few seconds after the female's song. In Wisconsin, territorial hooting ends in mid-February, in keeping with the laying of the first eggs, which typically occurs in late February and into March. 

            Great horneds don’t just make lovely mellow hootings. I hope you’ve had the chance to hear their various shrieks, hisses, soft cooing notes and tremulous cries, sounds that famed ornithologist Arthur Cleveland Bent described in 1938 as “weird, hollow-toned and idiotic laughter.”

            Well, that’s not all. Courting pairs are also known to indulge in high-pitched giggling, screaming, and bill-snapping, as well as much bowing and bobbing and posturing and bill-rubbing and preening, all leading finally to copulation, which usually lasts about seven seconds, thus concluding the courtship in little more than a few heartbeats. 

            As a last note, great horneds are adapted to survive in all climates, from deserts to grasslands to suburbs to forests, all that is except arctic-alpine regions. No other American owl has anywhere close to their extensive range and their variation in nesting sites – see the attached range map.

great-horned owl distribution map

            As for blue jays, on 10/3, a friend in Lac du Flambeau witnessed an interesting phenomenon. “It was around 7:30 on Friday a.m. and I looked up to see several blue jays fluttering around in the tops of oak trees, hopping from branch to branch, and shaking the leaves. I heard many acorns dropping to the ground as they did so, and it seemed they were intentionally shaking branches to make the acorns drop. It puzzled me as to why they would do this – do blue jays eat acorns? I didn't see any fly to the ground after dislodging so many acorns. Were they perhaps feeding the squirrels? I wondered if this is some kind of symbiotic relationship between blue jays and squirrels, with the birds feeding the squirrels – but to what purpose? Was it altruism, or do they depend on squirrels to help them somehow survive?”

            Well, I’d be surprised if blue jays had any altruistic feeling for squirrels, given that squirrels are known to raid bird nests, not to mention that both are very aggressive to other species when it comes to food.

photo by Bev Engstrom

            Rather, I think the blue jays inadvertently feed squirrels that are quicker to get to the acorns. Blue jays love acorns and cache thousands of them prior to winter. They prefer pin oak acorns over red oaks, apparently due to the red oak’s higher concentration of tannins. In one study in Virginia, a community of 50 blue jays moved and cached about 150,000 acorns harvested from 11 pin oak trees during one season. Each bird thus cached an average of 3,000 acorns by selecting and hiding an average of 107 acorns per day. 

            Blue jays typically bury seeds so that the seed is protected from drying. Of course, they don’t find them all, and their seed dispersal has often been discussed as a major force in the rapid movement of trees northward following the last glaciation of North America. Thus, when blue jays make choices about which tree nuts are harvested, they become the Johnny Appleseed’s of the bird world, often determining in part what our future forests look like.

 

Butterfly Strategies to Survive Winter 

            Winter is a true Armageddon for insects. I’ve often wondered how many insects die during the first hard frost of the fall – it must be millions/billions! But every insect species has had to evolve a strategy to make it through to spring, and dying, strange as this may sound, is actually one of the most commonly employed options! Think of mosquitoes, dragonflies, mayflies, and hundreds of other species that lay their eggs in or on the water, or on land in the leaf litter, in wood piles, or in cracks in tree bark and rocks. And then the adults die. The entire adult population dies, leaving the continuity of the species to their unborn young. Quite an act of faith!

            Let’s look at butterflies in particular. Most everyone knows that monarch butterflies are unique in utilizing a two-way migration to their overwintering sites in Mexico, many traveling 3,000 miles or more. 

            A few others, however, may make a partial migration south, species like common buckeye, American lady, red admiral, and question mark.

            A small number choose instead to overwinter in hibernation as an adult butterfly, like painted ladies, some questions marks, Compton tortoiseshell, and mourning cloaks, utilizing chemical compounds known as glycols to prevent ice crystals from forming in their body. 

            Others overwinter in hibernation in a chrysalis, like Canadian tiger swallowtails, American coppers, and spring azures.

            Still others overwinter in hibernation as caterpillars, like great spangled fritillary, Baltimore checkerspot, northern crescent, viceroys, and white admirals.

            Those that lay eggs that then must survive the winter include hairstreaks, bog coppers, and the European skipper.

            You can help overwintering butterflies in whatever form they take by not cutting down plants in your garden where they may already have formed their chrysalis, laid eggs, or are tucked in as a caterpillar or adult. Most folks want to “put their garden to bed” for the winter, but some butterflies, and other insects, may already be in bed in your garden. So, if you can withstand the need to tidy everything up, the insect world would be appreciative.

 

2020 Iowa Derecho – 7.2 Million Trees Damaged

            An update: The Iowa DNR released a new report last month on the August 10, 2020, hurricane-force derecho (da-ray-sho) that roared through cities in Iowa like Cedar Rapids, Des Moines and Davenport. Winds reached 140 mph in some counties, damaging thousands of homes, businesses and vehicles, along with millions of acres of cropland. The state cumulatively sustained $11.5 billion in damage, according to NOAA (National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration), which calls the derecho the “costliest thunderstorm in U.S. history.” Cedar Rapids alone lost 669,000 mature trees, roughly 70% of its urban canopy.

 

Frost?

            What frost? As of 10/12, we’ve yet to experience a frost in Manitowish. We’ve come close – we’ve had a couple nights where temperatures fell to 33° – but that’s the closest.

            So, we still have ripe tomatoes coming. Others tell me of still harvesting green peppers and other hot-weather plants.

            From a gardener’s point of view, this is pretty great. For a longer term perspective, however, we’ve lived in Manitowish for 37 years. For the first 15 years or so that we lived here, we always had a frost around August 20^th, and we were never able to plant hot weather vegetables until after June 12, which unfailingly seemed to be when we’d have our last frost of the spring. So, we had a 70-day growing season. That is, until the last decade. Now frosts hold off until mid-September, or in the case of this year, until at least mid-October. This isn’t just a local phenomenon – see the graph for the increase in the number of frost-free days nationally.   So, here’s climate change in motion – longer growing seasons. Of course, this benefit comes at a cost, and the balance sheet shows the negatives far outweighing the positives.

increase in number of frost-free days

 

Celestial Events

            The full moon (the “Hunter’s,” “Ice is Falling,” or “Falling Leaves” moon) occurs on 10/20. The moon will rise north of east for the first time since February.

            The peak Orionid meteor shower takes place in the predawn on 10/21, but the light of the full moon will make viewing difficult.

            Beginning 10/22, the average low temperature drops below 32° for the first time since April 22. Minocqua averages 183 days with low temperatures below freezing. 

            We’re down to 10 hours and 31 minutes of daylight as of 10/23.

 

Thought for the Week

            “The best and biggest benefits of water are all emotional . . . We love being in, on, under, around, or near it . . . Try as we might, no amount of scientific data, MRI scans, EEG readings, or carefully designed research projects can really show us exactly what we feel at those moments.” – Wallace J. Nichols, Blue Mind

 

Please share your outdoor sightings and thoughts: e-mail me 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.