A Northwoods Almanac for 12/23/22

 A Northwoods Almanac for 12/23/22 – 1/5/23  

 

Sightings – Merlin, White-throated Sparrow and Tree Sparrow, Cardinals, Robin, Tufted Titmouse, Bohemian Waxwings, Ruffed Grouse and More and More Evening Grosbeaks

            Unusual birds at our feeders in Manitowish include a pair of cardinals, a white-throated sparrow, a tree sparrow, 60+ evening grosbeaks, a northern shrike in late November but not seen since, and a merlin which appeared on 12/14 and scared the bejeesus out of the rest of the birds. And just now as I was writing this article (12/16 at 10 a.m.), at least 40 bohemian waxwings suddenly descended on the crabapple tree outside my office window – wow!

photo by Eowyn Bates

            Jason Schultz and Greg Bassett both report a pair of red-headed woodpeckers at their feeders in Oneida County. Each pair nested on their property this summer, but so far haven’t migrated south. Typically, red-headeds winter only as far north as central Wisconsin, so this is quite uncommon.     

            Red-headed Woodpecker populations have declined in most regions that support the bird, and the species is now listed as a species of special concern in Wisconsin, and as a threatened species in Canada and several U.S. states. Apparently, they can remain north in mild winters if acorn mast is plentiful. But this year’s acorn crop wasn’t particularly robust, and if whatever acorns we have are covered by heavy snow, I’m surprised any would remain. 

range map for red-headed woodpeckers

            Pat Perkins in Springstead observed an American robin on 12/15 along Hwy. 182. Robins, another unusual winter sighting for our area, though robins commonly winter not too far south in central Wisconsin.

range map for American robin

            Rich Robertson in Boulder reports he has over 100 evening grosbeaks at his feeders.

            A tufted titmouse is currently visiting a feeder north of Mercer. This is only the second record of a tufted titmouse in Iron County – the first record was in 1995. Tufted titmice are a species I expect we’ll be seeing more of as climate change continues to heat up.

            Bruce Bacon in Mercer has had up to nine ruffed grouse coming in to his feeders as well as eating high-bush cranberries in his yard.

                        

Rough-legged Hawk Migration

            Rough-legged hawks are a true Arctic species, nesting in far northern Canada and Alaska, but in winter, they migrate south to wherever there is open ground or only a light snow covering. We usually only see them in spring and fall migration, but if our snowfall comes late, sometimes a few individuals hang around open areas to hunt small rodents, their favorite menu item.

            Typically, however, they winter well south of here in snowless, open areas reminiscent of their tundra summer haunts, including pastures, marshy areas, and wet meadows – we last saw one in late November hovering over the wetlands of Powell Marsh. They’re well adapted to open country, and hunt from the wing, hovering in the breeze or in updrafts above hills and cliffs.

            I bring them up because of a recent finding regarding the migration routes of rough-legs that were outfitted with remote-tracking GPS devices. Since 2014, researcher have deployed 114 of these devices on rough-legged hawks, and have collected over 300,000 GPS or Argos location fixes. Past observational work on the wintering grounds has found adult females winter farther north on average than adult males, a pattern exactly opposite that found in most other bird species. This pattern would suggest adult females migrate shorter distances than adult males, but why this pattern exists remains unknown.

            What caught my attention was the migration map of an adult female they named “Dorothy” that was captured at Goose Pond Sanctuary near Madison last winter. The GPS date showed that Dorothy summered along the eastern coast of Hudson Bay in northern Quebec, roughly 1,175 miles from Goose Pond. However, her fall migration flight was directly across Lake Superior, which is very unusual for large hawks who normally soar southward on thermals coming off land. On 11/8, after spending the previous night on Caribou Island, Dorothy proceeded to make an incredible 114 mile open-water crossing and touched down on the Keweenaw Peninsula after the 4.5 hour journey. 

            I’ve attached the map showing her movements around and across Lake Superior. 

            As a sidenote, a separate research study suggested that rough-legged hawks use the ultraviolet signal of vole urine, which they can see, to identify choice foraging areas. 

            Nature never ceases to amaze me.

 

Wintergreen (Gaultheria procumbens)

            Several columns ago, I identified five species of northern plants that hold onto their bright red fruits over the winter – sumac, winter holly, partridgeberry, wintergreen, and highbush cranberry. Let’s look at wintergreen, a species very common in our sandy Northwoods soils. Wintergreen has a low to the ground (2 to 6 inches), creeping, woody stem which bears three green and glossy oval leaves that exude a wintergreen fragrance when crushed. In July, waxy nodding, bell-like white flowers with five teeth hang hidden beneath the leaves. The leaves are evergreen, and appear light green when young, but turn dark green and leathery as they grow older. The round red 5-celled fruits ripen in the fall and remain on all winter.  They are distinctive simply by their taste, possessing a delightful, soft wintergreen flavor.  

            The berries are said to be nutritious, and deer, bear, grouse, chipmunks, and mice are said to eat the berries and often the leaves, but given how often the berries and leaves are still intact in the spring, the plant can’t be a favorite.  

wintergreen

            We often partake of either the berries or leaves, and a particularly good combination is blueberries and wintergreen berries. Interestingly, the flowers also taste of wintergreen.

            Wintergreen oil (methyl salicylate) can be distilled from the leaves, but it takes one ton of leaves to produce one pound of oil, an effort hardly worth the human trouble and the harm to the woods. As a boy, I remember using a wintergreen tincture to rub on our sore muscles after a football or basketball workout. We smelled good, if nothing else.

            Commercial wintergreen oil is synthetic these days, but came originally from yellow birch trees, not from the humble wintergreen plants. According to Henry Gibson’s 1913 book, American Forest Trees, about a hundred small sapling yellow birch trees were required to be chopped and ground to produce a quart of oil.  Sold by the quart to country storekeepers, it would make its way in turn to wholesale druggists who would refine it and use it for flavoring in candies, medicine, and drugs.

            Wintergreen usually grows in large colonies, because it vegetatively reproduces by underground stems that send up shoots. The evergreen leaves are well adapted to the desert-like environment of winter with their waxy waterproof leaves that retain water.

            Neltje Blanchan said of wintergreen in her 1901 book Nature's Garden, “When the July sun melts the fragrance out of the pines high overhead, and the dim, cool forest aisles are more fragrant with commingled incense from a hundred natural (sources) . . . the wintergreen's little waxy bells hang among the glossy leaves that form their aromatic carpet.  On such a day, in such a resting place, how one thrills with the consciousness that it is good to be alive.”

             BTW, you can make an excellent tea from the dried leaves. Steeping with fresh leaves yields only a weak tea unless the mixture is allowed to sit for a day.

            Historical accounts say the Ojibwe made the leaves into a beverage too, commonly boiling water whose purity they were unsure of and flavoring it with plants like wintergreen, black cherry, and Labrador tea.

 

Celestial Events

            Well, winter solstice has come and gone, and we’re moving at an absolute snail’s pace toward more daylight. But on the move we are, and by 1/3, we’ll daily be receiving one minute more of daylight. By 1/18, we’ll be gaining two minutes per day, and by 2/14, our heart’s will be warmed not only by Valentine’s Day, but also by three minutes more per day of sunshine. And then around spring equinox, from 3/12 to 3/25, we finally reach our maximum gain of 3 minutes and 15 seconds of sunshine every day, something surely to look forward to.

            From 12/27 to 1/7, our latest of the year sunrises stall at 7:40 a.m., a full 3 hours and 32 minutes later than our earliest sunrises around summer solstice. Then, on 1/8, the sun will rise one minute earlier. And spring will be here in a jiffy, which if you believe that, I have a counselor recommendation for you.

            The best night for viewing the Quadrantid meteor shower will be on 1/3 to 1/4.  However, a nearly full moon will drown out our viewing until the moon sets shortly before dawn on the 4^th – look then for the best, but brief, period for viewing. At peak, they can produce up to 100 meteors per hour. 

            The full moon arrives the night of 1/6.

            I should note that our long dark nights of December and January are ideal, though very cold, for viewing stars. The unaided human eye can see stars as faint as 6.5 magnitude, which translates to 9,096 stars being visible from Earth. However, we see only half of the night sky, so divide by half, and we can see around 4,500 stars on our darkest nights with no light pollution. In cities like Chicago, visibility is reduced to stars with magnitudes of 2.5, which amounts to only 35 stars on the best of nights.

            Use a good pair of binoculars, and now 100,000 stars come into view. And with a three-inch telescope, 5 million stars can dazzle your eyes.

            Every star we see belongs to the Milky Way galaxy. We can see stars 6,000 to 8,000 light-years away – think of that.

 

Thought for the Week

            “The stories we tell literally make the world. If you want to change the world, you need to change your story. This truth applies to individuals and institutions.” – Michael Margolis

 

 

A Northwoods Almanac for 12/9/22

 A Northwoods Almanac for 12/9 – 22, 2022   by John Bates

 

Sightings – Evening Grosbeaks!

            We had 62 evening grosbeaks at our feeders as of 11/30! While the spectacle is wonderful, I worry about the cost of sunflower seeds which is now at $35 for a 50 lb. bag – this could be an expensive winter for those of us who love birds! 

            The local irruption we are experiencing was predicted by the Finch Research Network in its Winter Finch Forecast (see https://finchnetwork.org/winter-finch-forecast-2022). The forecast anticipated that evening grosbeaks and purple finches would travel farther south than usual this winter because of a spruce budworm population boom affecting spruce trees in their breeding range.

            Evening grosbeaks rely on the larvae from the budworm as a food source, so during years when the budworms explode, evening grosbeaks and purple finches experience population surges. When their populations soar, irruptions are more common because some of the birds have to travel outside their normal range to ensure a steady food supply.

            Irruptions like this never a given from year to year, because they are based on the scarcity, or extreme abundance, of northern food sources.

            Irruptions also can vary widely. Sometimes a flock will stick around a location for weeks, or even the whole winter, but other times just for a day. Enjoy them while they’re there!

male evening grosbeak, photo by Bev Engstrom

 

Finch Forecast

            According to the winter finch forecast, more species may join the ever increasing numbers of evening grosbeaks in making their way south into the Great Lakes region this winter. Those species include:

            Pine grosbeaks: Like evening grosbeaks, pine grosbeaks are attracted to fruiting ornamental trees, pine trees, and well-stocked feeders with black-oil sunflower seeds. 

            Redpolls: The forecast says to watch for flocks of common redpolls and their subspecies, hoary redpolls, on birches, in weedy fields and at feeders offering thistle and black-oil sunflower seeds, but I’ll be surprised if there are big numbers. If you recall last winter, folks had small armies of redpolls at their feeders later in the winter, and typically high redpoll numbers are an every-other-year phenomenon. 

            Bohemian waxwings: These birds will be looking for abundant mountain-ash berries and ornamental crabapples.

            Purple finches: Early movement of this species southward has been occurring for weeks.  

            Red-breasted nuthatches: Most folks don’t think of red-breasted nuthatches as a migratory species, but they can be. They’ve been irrupting south since July, and this apparently is continuing because of mostly poor cone crops in the eastern boreal forest. Nuthatches prefer black oil seeds, suet, and peanuts at feeders.

 

World Population Hits 8 Billion

            According to the United Nations, the world’s population reached 8 billion in mid-November, a mere 12 years since it passed 7 billion, and less than a century after the planet supported just 2 billion people. India is projected to surpass China as the world’s most populous country in 2023 – the Chinese statistics suggest there are already more deaths than births in China.

            The global population is growing at its slowest rate since 1950, having fallen under 1% in 2020. The latest projections by the United Nations suggest that the world’s population could grow to around 8.5 billion in 2030, 9.7 billion in 2050, and is projected to reach a peak of around 10.4 billion people during the 2080s and to remain at that level until 2100. 

            The rapid rise in population throughout the twentieth century was driven by advances in public health and medicine, which allowed more children to survive to adulthood. Global life expectancy at birth reached 72.8 years in 2019, an improvement of almost 9 years since 1990. Further reductions in mortality are projected to result in an average global longevity of around 77.2 years by 2050. At the same time, fertility rates (defined as the number of children per woman) stayed high in lower-income countries. 

 

Gun Deer Season Stats

            Hunters registered 203,295 white-tailed deer during the 2022 Wisconsin nine-day gun deer season, an increase of 14% from the previous year and 8% above the five-year average, according to a preliminary report issued on 11/29 by the WDNR.

            The 2022 kill included 98,397 bucks (up 15% from 2021) and 104,898 antlerless deer (up 14%).

            All four deer management regions showed higher deer registrations, with the highest year-over-year increase in the central forest (up 31%), followed by the northern forest (19%), central farmland (14%) and southern farmland (10%).

 

Christmas Bird Count

            Audubon’s 123rd Christmas Bird Count is being conducted from 12/14 to 1/5, the same calendar window they use every year. We’ve scheduled Saturday, 12/17, as the day for the Manitowish Waters Count, while Minocqua’s count is on Thursday, 12/15. 

            This will be our 30th year doing the MW count, having begun in 1993. Our count center is the intersection of Hwy. 51 and Cty. W in Manitowish Waters, and extends out in a 7.5 mile radius in all directions.

            One thing we’ve learned over the 30 years of this count is that winter is a very hungry time for wildlife, and the relatively few over-wintering birds here often concentrate around feeders. We frequently find the most birds by finding the people who are feeding birds! Thus, we’re looking to learn about folks who are feeding birds within our count circle, and either have them tally the birds they see at their feeders, or allow us to come and do a FBI (Federal Bird Investigation) stakeout of their feeders, and count the birds that way. 

            So, if you are feeding birds within the count circle or know of someone living within the count circle who feeds birds, please contact me – see the contact info at the end of the column. Thanks!

 

Highbush Cranberry (Viburnum trilobum) 

            Highbush cranberries grow in the wetland edges below our home, and in wet edges around the Northwoods, but I'm not sure what eats the berries. The shrubs often keep their fruits all winter with nary a soul eating them. The berries are said to be high in Vitamin C and historically were used to prevent or cure scurvy. The books say they are favored by bears, fox, squirrels, chipmunks, grouse, thrashers, thrushes, starlings, grosbeaks, and cedar waxwings, but possibly the critters around my place are illiterate. The twigs and leaves are seldom browsed either. 

photo by John Bates

            If you’re not familiar with highbush cranberry, it’s an arching shrub growing from 8’ to 17’ high with distinctive opposite, toothed leaves that sport three long-pointed lobes (“trilobum”), giving the appearance of a red maple. The fall leaves turn a lustrous scarlet.

            The white flowers bloom in umbrella-shaped clusters in June, measuring 3” to 4" across. The outer, larger flowers are sterile (they have no pistils or stamens), and the inner, smaller flowers are fertile. Perhaps the outer flowers serve as the billboard advertisement to wandering insects seeking pollen. The soft fruits begin as a yellow berry in September, eventually turn a brilliant red, and hang in drooping translucent clusters often well into the winter.

            Highbush cranberry belongs to the honeysuckle family and is unrelated to bog cranberry, the name confusion originating from the minor similarities of the fruits.  Some folks still make an exceptional jelly from the cooked fruit, but while the fresh berries are edible, they are rather bitter and distasteful –  I have tried them because they are so attractive it seems they have to taste good, but . . . they don't.

            Note how long into the winter the fruits of highbush cranberry remain. Since low quality fruits like highbush cranberry have a low fat content, the fruits rot very slowly, and can hang around patiently until late in winter when all the higher quality foods have been exploited and they are all that’s left (I suppose in human dietary terms, highbush cranberries and their poor nutritional mates equate to white bread – lots of volume with little substance). Then the winter birds and mammals turn to them and the fruits are consumed and dispersed, hopefully well away from the parent plant, to start new seedlings in the upcoming spring.

            A plant that has chosen the strategy of producing a high quality fruit  must invest a lot of energy into its creation, and then hope it’s found and eaten quickly before it rots. If all plants produced high quality fruits, they would all either be eaten or rot well before midwinter, leaving many animals little to harvest in the toughest months of the year. Both strategies of fruit production - low quality and high quality - have their pros and cons, but each have their necessary place in the timing of winter survival for animal species.

 

Ice-up Dates

            Woody Hagge sent me an email saying Foster Lake in Hazelhurst had iced over on 11/25. Woody has kept ice-on and ice-off records on Forster for 46 years now – the average length of ice cover is now 140.5 days, a little less than 5 months.

            

Celestial Events

            For planet watching in December, look after dusk for Mars rising in the northeast, Jupiter in the southeast, and Saturn high in the southeast.

            The peak Geminid meteor shower will occur in the predawn on 12/14 – look for an average of 50 to 100 per hour.

            The last of this year’s earliest sunsets occurs on 12/15 at 4:14 p.m. The sun begins setting one minute later on 12/16.

            Winter solstice takes place on 12/21. The sun is now 23.5° south of the equator. As you know, this is the shortest day of the year and our longest night. Look for 8 hours and 39 minutes of sunshine. On 12/22, we’ll only get less than a second of a longer day, but it’s a start! Our days will grow longer by one minute a day starting on Jan. 3.  

 

Thought for the Week

            “This is what you shall do; Love the earth and sun and the animals, despise riches, give alms to everyone that asks, stand up for the stupid and crazy, devote your income and labor to others, hate tyrants, argue not concerning God, have patience and indulgence toward the people, take off your hat to nothing known or unknown or to any man or number of men, go freely with powerful uneducated persons and with the young and with the mothers of families, read these leaves in the open air every season of every year of your life, re-examine all you have been told at school or church or in any book, dismiss whatever insults your own soul, and your very flesh shall be a great poem and have the richest fluency not only in its words but in the silent lines of its lips and face and between the lashes of your eyes and in every motion and joint of your body.” – Walt Whitman in his preface to Leaves of Grass, 1850.

 

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.

 

A Northwoods Almanac for 11/25/22

 A Northwoods Almanac for 11/25 – 12/8/22   

 

Snowy Owls Spotted In Wisconsin

            As of Nov. 2, snowy owl season is underway across Wisconsin. One individual was found in Dane County in mid-July and regularly spotted into mid-October, marking a very rare case of an individual successfully over-summering in the state. The first likely migrants were spotted on Oct. 19 in Superior as well as atop the observation tower at Rib Mountain State Park. Another was photographed in Ashland on Nov. 1. It’s been quiet for snowies since then, but we should know more by the end of November when the birds typically begin to arrive.

 

Sightings: FOYs

            First-of-the-year (FOY) birds in Manitowish included a flock of nine evening grosbeaks on 11/13 and a rough-legged hawk at Powell Marsh on 11/15.

evening grosbeaks on 11/15/22

            This winter promises to be good for evening grosbeaks. Ryan Brady, avian conservation biologist for Wisconsin DNR, reported 130 at his feeders in Washburn on 11/17, this after observing over 1,000 pass over Herbster in southward migration along the Lake Superior shore on 11/3. The “24^th Annual Winter Finch Forecast” from Ontario says “[the evening grosbeak’s] breeding population appears to be increasing in Eastern Canada westward to Manitoba due to increasing outbreaks of spruce budworm with large outbreaks in Northeastern Ontario and Quebec . . . Expect flights of evening grosbeaks into southern Ontario, southern Quebec, Maritime Provinces, and border states this fall.” That bodes well for our seeing more of these beautiful birds this winter!

            

Record Migration!

            I love this quote from international bestseller Tom Clancy: “The difference between fiction and reality? Fiction has to make sense.” 

            Here’s one of the best examples that I know of how reality can eclipse fiction. A few years back, I’d written about “E7”, a bar-tailed godwit that had set the world migration record then of flying 7,200 miles non-stop for 8 days at an average speed of 40 mph to reach its wintering grounds in New Zealand. But this autumn, a four-month-old bar-tailed godwit known as B6 set a new world record by completing a nonstop migration of 8,425 miles from Alaska to Tasmania, Australia. This trip represents the longest documented nonstop flight by any animal! 

            After fattening up on the Kuskokwim Delta in southwestern Alaska , B6 left on October 13 and arrived in Australia on October 24, 11 days and one hour later, averaging about 32 miles per hour. The shorebird was tracked using a 5-gram solar-powered satellite transmitter that was attached to its rump. 

            “They don’t land on the water. They don’t glide,” said Dan Ruthrauff, a U.S. Geological Survey research wildlife biologist who helped tag B6. “This is flapping flight for a week and a half. It’s crazy, and I think is just tangible enough that we can appreciate it and have our minds properly blown.”

            That pretty much sums up the near impossibility of B6’s accomplishment. “We can’t explain the physiology that allows them to do this,” one researcher said. “We know what the energy costs should be from wind tunnel experiments, but when we try to use our models, the energy costs we know they used are much lower.” The birds use half or less of the energy expected.

            How do they do it? Long-distance migrators like the bar-tailed godwit enlarge their liver and intestines as they feed, so that they can convert food as fast as possible into large breast muscles to support the constant flapping the trip requires, and then convert the rest of their food to fat. They then shrink their internal organs to almost nothing – the gizzards, kidneys, livers. So, by the time the birds are ready to leave, a godwit’s body is at least 55 percent fat (in humans, anything more than 30 percent is considered obese), doubling its weight from one to two pounds before embarking on its trip. 

            Plus, they’re built for speed, with aerodynamic wings and a missile-shaped body. And their lungs are the most efficient lungs of any vertebrate, helping the godwits’ fly in the thin oxygen of higher altitudes. Bar-tailed godwits in Russia have recently been documented flying at altitudes of three to four miles above ground.

            Put all this together and one researcher calls them “obese super athletes.”

            Equally amazing is that juveniles migrate six weeks later than the adults. Crossing a nearly featureless Pacific Ocean without an adult to guide them and without navigational cues requires an internal map to define position as well as a compass to tell direction. Somehow the birds find their way back to the same specific sites, something they do each year for the 15 or 20 years of their lives.

            “They have figured out the aerosphere they live in,” one researcher writes. “They can predict when to leave and when not to leave, how high to fly, and they know exactly where they are and they know their destination.” Some experts believe that they may be able to sense magnetic lines on the planet through a process called quantum entanglement (“the mechanism of [the bird’s] compass has been suggested to rely on the quantum spin dynamics of photoinduced radical pairs in cryptochrome flavoproteins located in the retinas of the birds”). Got that?

            Lastly, the birds also possess superb weather forecasting. “They know what conditions to leave on that will not only provide wind at the start that is favorable, but throughout their entire flight,” says one of the researchers. “They can piece the puzzle together in terms of what the conditions are in Alaska and between there and Hawaii, between Hawaii and Fiji, and between Fiji and New Zealand.” 

            I try to be cautious in my using of the word “miraculous,” but this fits the bill.

            

Christmas Reads

            Christmas will be soon upon us, and I’d like to recommend three new books from local authors for you to consider giving as gifts. 

            Manitowish Water’s Bob Kovar recently published Beneath the Eagle Tree: Early Morning Dreamscapes in Portrait and Verse. It's a self-published coffee-table style of book, full of pictures worthy of framing, with a poetic, highly creative kind of writing that describes what Kovar was thinking each day as he headed out into his backyard. Plus, Bob adds the two most often dismissed pieces in nature writing − humor and sheer fun (see www.bobkovar.com). 

            Ted Rulseh’s  book Ripple Effects: How We're Loving Our Lakes to Death was published in October, and is an excellent companion to his earlier book A Lakeside Companion, both from The University of Wisconsin Press. In his engaging and conversational style, Ted draws on personal experience, interviews, academic research, and government reports to describe the state of our northern lakes, the stresses they are under, and avenues to successful lakeside living for a sustainable future. Its driving question is summed up by one of Ted’s interviewees: “We love this lake. What can we do to keep it healthy?”

            If you are interested in bears, loons, wolves, or coatimundis for that matter, by all means purchase Jeff Wilson’s book, Wrong Tree: Adventures in Wildlife Biology. From Mercer, Jeff’s a born storyteller, and he shares many tales about his 40+year career studying and helping to manage wildlife with the WDNR. The book also features original excellent illustrations by his wife, Terry Daulton. Pre-order from www.wrongtreebook.com. 

Winter Berries: Sumac, Winter Holly, Partridgeberry, Wintergreen, Highbush Cranberry

            Five shrub species sport bright red berries throughout our winter, two of which grow close to the ground, and the other three on taller shrubs. Over the next two months, I’ll highlight one in each column I write, but for this column, let’s look at staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina). 

            Staghorn sumac can grow tall, reaching up to 15' tall, and has alternate, long, compound leaves with 11 to 19 toothed leaflets, making it easy to ID. The fall fruits grow in very large (up to 1 foot long), bright red clusters of fuzzy seeds.  

            The twigs and leaf stalks look and feel velvety, much like the downy antlers of a buck “in velvet,” hence the name “staghorn” sumac.  

            Staghorn sumac blazes red and orange and purple along many highways in the autumn, and because of its habit of growing in colonies, the visual display can be beautiful. The colonies are the result of sumac's ability to vegetatively reproduce through root suckers. Thus, all it takes is one parent plant, and the clones soon develop. Note how sumac clonal colonies often take the appearance of a rounded tent, the tallest and oldest stem in the middle and the shorter and younger stems then sloping to the sides. 

            Sumac needs full sun and doesn't mind poor, dry soils, so it's quite common along roads and fields and hillsides. 

            Sumac derives its name supposedly from a corruption of “shoe-make,” a reference to the tannin found in the leaves and twigs that was used historically in tanning leathers. The Latin name typhinia originates in the believed medicinal value of sumac as a cure for typhoid fever. 

            Sumac had a host of other historical uses as well. The cured leaves were a common tobacco mix for American Indians. A black ink is reported to have once been made from the boiled leaves and fruit. The Ojibwe used the flowers for a stomach pain remedy and the pulp of the stalk and inner bark as a dye. And young stems were cut, the pith removed, and the resulting spile used for collecting maple sap.

            Sumac provides a particularly good winter source of food for wildlife because the fruits hang on well past the new year. The fruits have been found in the stomachs of birds like ruffed and sharp tailed grouse, mourning doves, and crows, and a host of Northwoods songsters such as bluebirds, flickers, catbirds, phoebes, robins, and thrushes. The twigs are browsed by deer, cottontail rabbits, snowshoe hares, and moose.

            You can make sumac lemonade by steeping the fruit in boiling water and then cooling, or make sun lemonade in the summer by simply leaving the fruit in a jar of water in the hot sun for an afternoon. Add honey, lots of it, to ease the tartness.  

 

Celestial Events

            Many of our small, shallow lakes and marshes have already iced-over, but the average ice-up date for most of our lakes is around 11/27, at least according to Woody Hagge’s 46 years of data on Foster Lake in Hazelhurst. 

            On the evening of 11/28, look for Saturn well  above the waxing crescent moon.

            As of 11/29, the average high temperature for Minocqua falls to 32° for the first time since March 3. Minocqua averages 96 days with high temperatures at or below freezing.

            December’s full moon – the “Cold/Long Night/Popping Tree/Little Spirit” Moon – occurs on 12/7, the year’s highest full moon.

 

Thought for the Week

            “The important thing is not to stop questioning. Curiosity has its own reason for existing. One cannot help but be in awe when he contemplates the mysteries of eternity, of life, of the marvelous structure of reality. It is enough if one tries merely to comprehend a little of this mystery every day. Never lose a holy curiosity.”  – Albert Einstein

 

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.

 

A Northwoods Almanac for 11/11/22

A Northwoods Almanac for Nov. 11-24, 2022   by John Bates

 

Deer Browse

            Nearly eighty years have passed since “The Slaughter of ’43,” when, for the first time in the history of Wisconsin deer hunting, young bucks and does were harvested. Aldo Leopold, then a board member of the Wisconsin Conservation Commission (later to become the DNR), strongly advocated for the hunt and was vilified for his heresy until his death in 1949. Leopold’s sin was that he understood landscape ecology and dared to speak out against single-species management for the benefit of single-user groups, in this case, the deer hunters of Wisconsin.

            Leopold had seen firsthand the dramatic long-term impacts of high deer populations in Germany, the American Southwest, and areas of the eastern and midwestern United States. In his essay, Thinking Like a Mountain, he is most remembered for his depiction of shooting wolves in Arizona, but the essay is every bit as much about over-populations of deer: 

I have watched the face of many a newly wolfless mountain, and seen the south-facing slopes wrinkle with a maze of new deer trails. I have seen every edible bush and seedling browsed, first to anemic desuetude, and then to death. 

            Leopold’s admonitions were written a long time ago, and while Wisconsin’s landscape differs dramatically from Arizona’s, the lessons regarding deer are equally poignant today. Wisconsin deer numbers have profoundly increased in the last 30 years. Depending on the year, we now average over 1.5 million deer in the state, and while annual deer harvest totals now range between 300,000 and 400,000, we rarely have been able to knock the population back far enough to make a difference for the forest vegetation of Wisconsin. 

            The saddest part may be that some of the beauty and grace of white-tailed deer has been lost in their commonness. Indeed, familiarity breeds contempt. Our prodigal deer numbers are such that just the reported traffic collisions total around 19,000 cars annually. The number of deer crashes as a percentage of all yearly car crashes averages around 15%. Deer are the third most-commonly struck object in Wisconsin traffic crashes, after other vehicles and fixed objects. The state of Wisconsin is now at number 5 in the United States for deer vs. car accidents, according to an annual study done by State Farm Insurance. 

            So, it has come to this: in their appetite for agricultural crops, gardens, and ornamental plants, deer are discussed in the same vein as common thieves, with endless discussions on how to fence them out, repel them, or plant what they won’t eat. Deer have become like Canada geese, a native species that has exploded in population so dramatically that it has lost its favored status in many people’s hearts. Too much of anything is a bad thing, whether it’s ice cream, CO2, geese, or deer. 

            Unlike geese and ice cream, however, deer vitally impact the integrity of whole ecosystems. Called a “keystone” herbivore, like beaver (and humans), deer have the
ability to restructure whole ecological communities. Deer graze mostly on herbaceous plants in the summer and early fall, but in winter, they switch their diet to woody browse, eating an estimated five pounds of buds a day. In effect, deer eat cereal four months of the year, and the box the other eight months. 

In the woods, native orchids and lilies, white cedars, eastern hemlock, and Canada yew are the greatest casualties in this floral warfare, but a host of other species are eaten, often resulting in a profound change in the species composition and diversity of a forest. One study found that 98 species of threatened and endangered plants in the eastern U.S. are in jeopardy from white-tailed deer browsing. And while many woody species can often recover quickly from browsing, herbaceous species like spring wildflowers may require decades to recover fully, if ever.  

            Changing forest plant composition and diversity also changes the structure of the woods, reducing or eliminating the ground and shrub layers of the forest. Change forest structure, and the microclimate changes as well. By taking away understory and shrubby plants, the soil gets more sunlight, and thus warms up and dries more rapidly. Altering the physical architecture of the woods changes a whole array of animal/plant interactions. For example, as the plant layer thins, avian predation increases on small mammals because vision along the ground is improved. And, tit for tat, larger mammal predation (chipmunks, squirrels, weasels, etc.) of bird nests increases, too. 

            With the loss, or inhibition, of so many groundlayer and shrublayer plants, a “trophic cascade” occurs, a term used by ecologists to describe the waterfall of indirect effects that deer create through their voracious appetites. Grazing and browsing include the consumption of stems, flowers, leaves, buds, twigs, and fruits, all of which are physical sites on plants where other vertebrates and invertebrates feed, seek cover, lay eggs, mate, etc. Birds that nest from the ground up to 23 feet decline where understory vegetation has declined. They also find it more difficult to successfully nest, find cover, and find food where there’s limited plant life. Twelve species of warblers nest on the ground in northern Wisconsin forests, and ornithologists legitimately fear what their future may look like. 

            It’s not just nesting birds that suffer from excessive deer browsing. The loss of vertical complexity—the layering of a forest from herbaceous species to shrubs to small trees to large trees—has resulted in a reduction in the density of migrating birds as well. A migrating songbird needs food and cover after a long flight, and a depauperate understory of plants offers neither. 

            A significant proportion of invertebrate species may also decline in distribution and abundance due to chronic deer browsing. Whether through direct food competition, or indirectly by changing species composition or modifying the physical structure of the woodland habit, species like woodland butterflies have lost habitat.  

            Thus, while park-like understories make for great hiking and may appear aesthetically pleasing, they broach hard on the shores of sterility. The term “ecological desert” is usually reserved for poorly thinned red pine plantations in Wisconsin, but fairly applies to forests when deer reach unsustainable populations. 

            The oft-cited, most extreme example of too many deer is Sharon Woods Metro Park in Ohio, where 150 plant species were lost when the unmanaged white-tailed deer population reached densities over 110 animals per square kilometer. Unhunted parks and private properties that are posted “No Hunting” suffer the deepest botanical wounds, as deer come to understand the safety of a refuge and concentrate in numbers far exceeding the land’s carrying capacity. 

            Various studies have measured as high as a 60 to 80 percent loss of native species in old-growth stands with high populations of deer. Those remnant old- growth stands too small to prevent the mobile deer herds from invading have been termed “forests of the living dead” because of their lack of seedling reproduction. 

            As the old trees finally all come down, the new forest that comes up will look quite different from its predecessor. Sugar maple will replace the hemlock, and white cedar will be little more than a memory, while Canada yew will continue its role as the vegetative equivalent of the buffalo, a comparative ghost species on the landscape. There is some yew scattered out there, but too little ever to remotely exert the ecosystem influence they once had. 

            The winners have been those species that are unpalatable to deer, or those less vulnerable to their chronic browsing. Forests with long-term chronic browsing have changed from herb- and shrub-dominated understories to simpler communities now dominated by the grasses, sedges, and ferns least preferred by deer. 

            The losers have been those favored by deer taste buds, and those intolerant of chronic browsing. Consider trilliums, a genus universally known and loved by people throughout the Midwest. Several seasons of browsing have been shown to reduce trilliums in large numbers, and the surviving population is skewed towards smaller plants.

            In the very few forests where deer are exiled, the plant communities look very different. Canada yew thrives in astonishing abundance on islands in the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore that have no deer. Yew covers 60 to 70 percent of the ground surface in many areas, growing to over 8 feet tall. 

            Bringing deer numbers down appears nearly impossible if forestry practices remain as they are. Some have suggested wolves could do the job, but will bringing back more wolves turn the tide? The simple math says no. Wolf biologists universally agree that individual wolves eat on average somewhere in the range of 20 deer a year. Given that our wolf population is around 1,100, wolves will only take around 22,000 deer, a pittance in the estimated 400,000-plus deer in the Northwoods herd. 

            In all of pre-Euro-settlement Wisconsin, ecologists estimate deer were present on the order of five to 10 per square mile, totaling perhaps around 200,000 in number. Even then, habitat was the limiting factor of deer populations, not wolves. Young forests support large numbers of deer. Older forests support fewer deer. Harsher winters in the 1800s thinned the herd out even further, whereas warmer winters in the late 1990s and the twenty-first century are providing optimal conditions for deer survival.
            Recent studies indicate that Wisconsin’s higher wolf population has helped 

increase understory herb and shrub populations primarily by moving deer around rather than allowing semi-domesticated herds to stay in one place and devour the understory. In fact, there’s evidence that a trophic cascade of benefits may be occurring from Wisconsin’s higher wolf population.

            However, wolves will never pull down enough deer in Wisconsin to bring deer browsing fully into balance. And with Wisconsin’s legislatively introduced wolf hunting season soon to return, numbers of wolves will be suppressed in order to increase the number of deer, the biological reverse of what our ecosystem management should entail. 

            In the meantime, an aging hunter population and low recruitment of new hunters bodes ill for hunting to continue as the prime management tool. Areas without deer hunting experience plant species losses four times greater than elsewhere.

            Leopold wrote, “I now suspect that just as a deer herd lives in mortal fear of its wolves, so does a mountain live in mortal fear of its deer. And perhaps with better cause, for while a buck pulled down by wolves can be replaced in two or three years, a range pulled down by too many deer may fail of replacement in as many decades.”

            What to do? Change forestry practices from a hyper-focus on early-successional species like aspen to later-successional species like sugar maple, yellow birch, and white pine. By managing for older forests, forest communities will be repopulated by a diversity of native species. Build it, and the deer will come more into balance, as will the surrounding forest. 

 

Celestial Events

            Look later in the evening tonight, 11/11, for Mars a couple of degrees below the waning gibbous moon. 

            The peak North Taurid Meteor Shower occurs from midnight to before dawn on 11/12. It’s a modest shower, averaging about 10 meteors per hour, but the shower sometimes produces fireballs, which might make their cyclical reappearance in 2022.

            The peak Leonid Meteor Shower occurs on the evening of 11/17, averaging about 15 meteors per hour. 

 

Thought for the Week

            “The universe is a unity, an  interacting, evolving, and genetically related community of  beings bound together in an inseparable relationship in space and time. Our responsibilities to each other, to the planet, and to all of creation are implicit in this unity, and each of us is profoundly implicated in the functioning and fate of every other being on the planet.” – Chet Raymo         

 

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.