A Northwoods Almanac for 2/18/22

 A Northwoods Almanac for 2/18 – 3/3/22  

 

Sightings – Redpoll Irruption and Nyjer Seed 

            Common redpolls have appeared in large numbers at local bird feeders over the last month. Bruce Bacon, master bird bander in Mercer, currently has 100 or more redpolls at his feeders, of which he banded at least 70 on 2/9. 

            This is an “irruption” year for redpolls, a phenomenon driven by widespread failures of the winter seed crops they favor – birch, alder, and spruce. Redpoll irruptions typically occur every other year, and given that their breeding range is in the far northern boreal forest, this is usually the only time they come into contact with human populations.  

            Redpolls are being seen as far south as Texas and Alabama, a long flight for these small songbirds!

            Black oil sunflower seed serves them well, but they have a real affinity for nyjer (thistle) seed. When I spoke with Bruce last week, he noted that he had a feeder of nyjer seed up all winter, and it had been untouched. He’d heard that other folks were having this problem, and that nyjer seed can quickly spoil. So, he bought a new bag, put up a new feeder, and voila, within 24 hours, he had redpolls eating the new seed while still avoiding the old seed. At $58 per 50 lb. bag, compared to $30 for a similar bag of sunflower seeds, this is a very expensive seed to offer birds, so it’s not something you want to see spoil.

            BTW, nyjer is a small, thin, black seed from the African yellow daisy (Guizotia abyssinica), so it’s not related to the thistle plant even though it’s often casually referred to as thistle seed. Some folks see a prickly thistle plant pop up in their yard, and blame it on this seed, but I repeat, it’s not thistle.  

            Additionally, the nyjer seed that is sold as birdseed is sterilized by heating the seed to almost 250°F, which also sterilizes any potentially noxious and invasive plant seeds that get mixed in with the nyjer seed. 

            Most nyjer seed that you can purchase is grown in places like Singapore, Burma, Ethiopia, and Myanamar. It’s all hand-harvested overseas because mechanical harvesters do a poor job with such a small seed. So, add together the import/tariff costs and the labor cost, and that’s why this seed is so pricey. The other reason for the high cost is that when ethanol speculation caused corn prices to soar, many farmers switched to growing corn rather than nyjer, or sunflowers for that matter. 

            Some nyjer seed, an adapted variety that matures at an earlier date, is grown in the U.S., but really very little.

            High in oil, nyjer is a nutritious source of energy for backyard birds, but for the money, we just stick with sunflower seeds. 

            

Great Horned Owls Nesting

Great horned owls are currently engaging in peak courtship, hooting back-and-forth in preparation for mating and laying eggs. In Wisconsin, territorial hooting ends generally by mid-February in keeping with the timing of first eggs being laid anywhere from late January in the southern counties to mid-March in the North Country.

            The female lays one to four eggs, but most commonly two, and she does all the incubating, maintaining her eggs at an incubating temperature near 98°F, even when the ambient temperature is more than 70° colder. 

            The male isn’t a total loss – he continually delivers prey to her through the night.

The eggs are incubated for a month or so, then the chicks hatch out naked with their eyes closed. They grow incredibly fast – in one study, the three young gained an average of over an ounce a day during the first four weeks after hatching. That may not sound like much, but adult great horned owls only weigh 2 to 5 pounds, the female usually weighing a pound heavier than the male. 

If food is in short supply, the youngest and weakest may be killed by the older, larger sibling, which always makes me less critical of the way my older brother treated me. 

            Is it necessary for great horned owls to nest so much earlier than other birds? Yes. Unlike robins, which incubate eggs for 12 days and fledge their young in two weeks, great horned owls watch over their owlets for months. Six weeks after hatching, the young birds test their wings, but only after twelve weeks will the owlets fly. Even after fledging, they are still fed by their parents well into July.

 

Great Backyard Bird Count 

            The Great Backyard Bird Count takes place beginning today and runs until the 21^st. Anyone from across the world can participate with as little as 15 minutes of time. Participating is easy, fun to do alone or with others, and can be done anywhere you find birds.

            Here’s the protocol:

1-     Decide where you will watch birds.

2-    Watch birds for 15 minutes or more at least once over the four days, February 18-21.

3-    Count all the birds you see or hear within your planned time/location and share your bird sightings using either the free Merlin Bird ID app, the free eBird Mobile app, or the free eBird website for desktop computer. 

            I use the eBird website, which can hold all my data from any birding trips I’ve ever been on, or simply from any daily observations I have at our bird feeders. 

In 2021, over 300,000 people from 190 countries participated, identifying 6,436 species of birds worldwide!

            The largest “flock” of birds reported was a gathering of 250,000 common murres on Southeast Farallon Island near San Francisco, California. A huge flock of 200,000 red-winged blackbirds near Boone, Missouri, was the second biggest group reported in the United States. One person even witnessed a gathering of 32,500 horned larks at one location in Utah.

            I don’t know how someone even begins to count numbers of birds that large. I’m hoping to see 13 or so species at our house, with the largest group likely being a flock of 30 or more redpolls.

 

A Couple Amazing Records on Aging 

            Currently, the oldest known living land animal is “Jonathon,” the Seychelles giant tortoise, who has lived for 140 years on St. Helena Island, a tiny volcanic British territory more than a thousand miles off the coast of Africa. He’s likely older, however. Jonathan, at 440 pounds and now blind, is thought to be around 190-years-old. He’s estimated to have hatched at the very latest in 1832, according to a letter that mentions he arrived as a gift “fully grown” on St. Helena in 1882 from the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean. “Fully grown” for a land tortoise means at least 50 years, so he may be much older. A photograph dating from 1886 shows Jonathan four years after his arrival on Saint Helena. Measurements taken from the photograph show that he was definitely fully mature in 1886.

             And then there’s this story on old fish: Research in a set of unique Canadian lakes is backing up an evolutionary theory often predicted but never before shown that given the right circumstances, fish get old – decades old – but they don't age.

            Scientists have been working for over 50 years on Ontario’s Experimental Lakes Area, a series of isolated watersheds in far northwestern Ontario, that were set aside in 1968 as an open-air biological laboratory, yielding uniquely detailed long-term data sets. They’ve been catching the same individual fish there for decades, and what they’ve found in lake trout is that fish get old –  decades old – but they don't age. Getting old doesn’t seem to faze lake trout. In fact, it appears to make them stronger. Lake trout don't stop growing as they mature, meaning an older adult will be larger and more reproductively capable than a young adult.

            In the bottom of these deep lakes, there are basically no predators that can eat an adult lake trout. The researchers write, “Theory predicts aging should be minimal in species where they increase their reproductive potential as they get older because they get bigger, and they decrease their likelihood of predation as they get older, because they get bigger . . . What we found does pretty much what theory predicts.” 

            In fact, said one of the researchers, the theory goes one better. At a certain point, fish should – in a sense – get younger. “We think if you sampled other lake trout populations where they continue to grow to enormous sizes, there should be signs of negative aging.”

            The bottom line they say? Age, or what people might call aging, is not inevitable in all species. 

 

Saw-whet Owl 

            On a sad note, we found a dead saw-whet owl in our yard on 2/11. We’ve heard saw-whets nearly every spring that we’ve lived here in Manitowish, now 38 years, but we’ve never seen one. Finally seeing one, but only after it had died, makes it doubly sad.

The question I have is twofold – why did it die, and what was it still doing here in the first place? Let’s start with the second part. Most northern saw-whets migrate southward in winter, concentrating their migration routes along the Great Lakes, but range maps show that they can winter in the Northwoods. Tom Erdman, curator of the Richter Museum of Natural History in Green Bay and a long-time bird bander/researcher, wrote to me many years ago saying saw-whet owls do winter over in our area, as evidenced by dead saw-whets that have been turned in to him during a winter from Minocqua and Lakewood. Male saw-whets migrate first, beginning at the end of February, while females follow beginning in mid-March. So, most likely this was a saw-whet that remained the winter, given that their migration should not have begun this early in February.

So, why did it die? The two most likely possibilities are that it starved or it hit something solid (a wall, a tree?) while trying to capture prey at night. Unfortunately, I didn’t find the owl – our new Australian shepherd puppy did – and by the time I noticed her with this brown bundle in her mouth, the owl was pretty gummed up. She was mouthing it up next to our house and not far from one of our bird feeders, so perhaps it was unsuccessfully hunting the feeder for mice who come out at night to eat the seeds. It’s all speculation, of course.

I called Bruce Bacon, a friend and master bird bander who I mentioned earlier in the column, to come over and give me his thoughts on how it might have died. Feeling the fat on the bird’s keel, he thought it had recently died, hadn’t starved, and likely hit something.

 

 

Celestial Events

            Sixty years ago, John Glenn was the first American to orbit the Earth on Feb. 20, 1962.

            We hit 11 hours of sunlight on 2/27 (only three weeks now until spring equinox!). 

            On 2/28, look after dusk for Saturn about four degrees above the waning crescent moon.

            The first few days of March mark the first time our average high temperatures reach 32° since back in late November. Minocqua averages 269 days with high temperatures above freezing (74%). 

            The new moon occurs on 3/2.

            For planet watching in March, there’s no action after dusk, so you have to get up early instead. Look before dawn for Venus low in the southeast, Mars also low in the southeast, and Saturn, which rises right at dawn, in the east-southeast.

 

Thought for the Week

            In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. – Rainer Maria Rilke

            

NWA 2/4/22

A Northwoods Almanac for February 4 – 17, 2022  by John Bates

 

Groundhog (Woodchuck) Hibernation

            I’ve written in the past how the idea of Groundhog Day always cracks me up, at least for Wisconsin’s Northwoods, given that groundhogs are deep in hibernation and are not in the least likely to poke their heads above ground to see if the sun’s shining. When a groundhog enters hibernation, its body temperature drops from around 99 degrees F to as low as 37 degrees, its heart rate falls from 80 beats a minute to 4 to 10 beats per minute, and its breathing rate falls to somewhere between two breaths a minutes and one breath every six minutes depending on what source you read. 

            But here’s the kicker, and something I didn’t know until recently. One assumes that once a hibernating animal’s metabolism is lowered, it remains lowered for the duration of hibernation. However, that’s not the case. All of the species of hibernators that have been studied wake up periodically throughout the winter and warm themselves up! Groundhogs wake up about 12 to 20 times in the hibernation season, usually for two to three days, and increase their body temperature to 98.6°F., its normal temperature during the summer. They don’t eat during these arousal times, but instead rely on deposits of stored body fat. 

            This is a major physiological problem because climbing back up to normal body temperature consumes a lot of energy, perhaps equal to 10 days of energy used up ordinarily during hibernation. The result is a loss of about 40 percent of their body mass before exiting hibernation. 

            These bouts of arousal must serve a crucial function or functions, but no one’s quite sure what. It may involve restoring nutrients in the blood, invigorating the immune system, eliminating toxic substances, and/or dealing with potassium loss. But again, it’s unclear.

            I was also surprised to learn that in Pennsylvania, a groundhog only averages about 100 days of hibernation, generally from November 17 to February 25, and that males often emerge before that to wander about in search of burrows belonging to females as a sort of pre-breeding dating ritual.

            So, maybe I should go a little easy on the whole Punxsutawney Phil schtick since a groundhog might indeed be wandering about at that time in Punxsutawney. But the whole shadow seeing thing? Nope, not buying that.

photo by John Bates

 

Sightings – Common Redpolls

            A flock of common redpolls finally arrived at our feeders last week, the first flock we’ve seen this winter. These tiny birds weigh less than a half ounce, but are perhaps the toughest birds that visit us in the Northwoods. They breed in far northern boreal and taiga regions from Alaska to Siberia and wander down our way only in winters when there’s widespread failure in the seed-production of spruce and birch trees.  They’re a jaunty looking bird with a red beret and a black goatee, and the male gets splashed with a burst of red on his chest.

photo by Bev Engstrom

            I proclaim them as the toughest bird we ever see because captive studies of common redpolls in Alaska show that they’re able to survive at temperatures of -65°F (hoary redpolls are even tougher, surviving to -88°F)! They accomplish this through a series of adaptations. First, they increase their plumage - Alaskan redpoll species have 31% heavier plumage in November than in July. Second, they focus on foods that offer high energy like birch seeds. Third, unlike most birds, they stay active in low light. Prior to complete dark, they store seeds in their diverticula, which are laterally expandable sections of their esophagus, and later regurgitate these seeds, husk them, and swallow them while sheltering in dense conifer cover. Their diverticula can hold up to about 15% of their body mass of seeds, which amounts to greater than 25% of their daily caloric requirements in winter.

             They also increase their muscle mass, a likely requirement given that they shiver most of the winter to create heat. And they retain heat by fluffing their feathers, remaining inactive when not eating, and allowing peripheral vasoconstriction, a fancy term for the narrowing of the blood vessels closest to the skin to prevent heat loss.

            Then, like ruffed grouse, they make roosting chambers in the snow when temperatures drop to extremes at night. They do this by dropping from a tree into the snow, and then making a tunnel from 2.5 to 4 inches below the surface of the snow and 10 to 15 inches long. They break the roof in the morning to depart. During winter, they leave their roosts and start foraging before dawn.

            Best of all, one study says, “Sunbathing reported.” So, if you see one laying on its back on a towel, you’ll know what it’s doing. 

 

Chocolate and Valentine’s Day

            We all know that Valentine’s Day and chocolate are inextricably linked, but I’m betting few of us know that chocolate comes from the 6- to 12-inch-long seed pods of the tiny cacao tree, and that roughly two-thirds of the world's cocoa is now produced in Western Africa, not Central America, with the countries of Ivory Coast and Ghana being the largest sources.

            And most of us are unaware that for about 95 percent of chocolate's 5,000+ year history, chocolate was strictly a beverage, and a bitter one at that. Etymologists trace the origin of the word "chocolate" to the Aztec word "xocoatl," which referred to the bitter drink brewed from cacao beans. Jose de Acosta, a Spanish missionary who lived in Peru and then Mexico in the later 16th century, described it as “loathsome to such as are not acquainted with it, having a scum or froth that is a very unpleasant taste.”

            Sweeteners were rarely used by the Aztecs or Maya, so the cacao paste was flavored with additives like flowers, vanilla pods, and chilies. Both the Mayans and Aztecs believed the cacao bean had divine properties, and so used it in sacred rituals of birth, marriage and death. Cacao beans were even used as currency – a rabbit, for example, was worth ten cacao beans, a slave about a hundred.

            Until the 16th century, the cacao tree was wholly unknown to Europeans until explorers came to the Americas and sampled it. Legend has it that the Aztec king Montezuma welcomed the Spanish explorer (and soon to be conquering invader) Hernando Cortes with a banquet that included drinking chocolate, having tragically mistaken him for a reincarnated deity. 

            Once someone in Europe tried mixing cacao paste with honey or cane sugar, chocolate quickly became popular, and by the 17th century, chocolate was a fashionable drink throughout the continent, believed to have medicinal and even aphrodisiac properties. By 1868, a little company called Cadbury began marketing boxes of chocolate candies in England. 

            In America, chocolate was so valued during the Revolutionary War that it was included in soldiers’ rations and sometimes used in lieu of wages.

             Chocolate has pleasant effects beyond its sugary taste. It contains a chemical called theobromine that is similar to caffeine, and another, phenylethylamine (PEA), that is a stimulant and facilitates the release of dopamine, the “feel good” chemical in our brain’s reward center. It also has three compounds that mimic the effect of marijuana, though in minute amounts.

            So, a tiny tree, all of 15 to 20 feet tall, and with bitter fruit, still rules the world of tree fruits, particularly in mid-February when love is on the wind and also in the taste buds.

            

A Cold January, Yes, But Not One With Extreme Cold

            I’ve heard many times over this January how we were having an old-fashioned cold winter like we used to. And I’ve agreed, but only half-agreed. Our high temperatures were consistently in the teens or lower, and so those temperatures were very much like winters in the past. But our low temperatures were consistently “only” down to around minus 20° at their worst (I know some places registered lower). In “old-fashioned” winters, we’d minimally hit minus 30°, and every other year or so hit minus 40°. So, we’ve been spared the extreme lows that historically were so characteristic of Wisconsin’s Northwoods. 

            Now, I know we could get hammered yet. We’ve had some extreme cold in February in the past, with the first week in February of 1995-96 taking the cake: on 2/1, temperatures at our house plummeted to minus 48°; on 2/2, minus 45°; on 2/3, minus 50°; and on 2/4, minus 46°. We heated up on 2/5 to minus 24°‚ and that felt rather warmish. 

            Heck, on March 7^th that year, we even dropped to minus 38°!

            The Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts has, among its many maps, a map showing the change in minimum winter temperatures for December, January and February from 1950 to 2018, and the minimums for our area have increased around 7 degrees.

            So, I think we need to be cautious in how we now so quickly use the terms “bitter” and “extreme”. Minus 20° is still plenty cold – I’ll be staying inside next to my woodstove, thank you very much. But in the larger historical context of our area, it’s not extreme, nor is it normal.

 

Celestial Events

            For planet watching in February, look after dusk for Jupiter low in the southwest; however, Jupiter will be lost to our view by mid-month. Before dawn, look for Venus, Mars, and Mercury all low in the southeast.

            Yesterday, 2/3, marked the midway point between winter solstice and spring equinox. We’re up to 10 hours of sunlight as of 2/7, and by Valentine’s Day on 2/14, we’ll be receiving over three minutes more per day of sunlight, perhaps the best Valentine’s gift of all.

            February’s full moon occurs on 2/16 – the Snow/Hunger Moon.

 

Thought for the Week – “The Moment”, a poem by Margaret Atwood

The moment when, after many years

of hard work and a long voyage

you stand in the center of your room,

house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,

knowing at last how you got there,

and say, I own this,

 

is the same moment when the trees unloose

their soft arms from around you,

the birds take back their language,

the cliffs fissure and collapse,

the air moves back from you like a wave

and you can’t breathe.

 

No, they whisper. You own nothing.

You were a visitor, time after time

Climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.

We never belong to you.

You never found us.

It was always the other way round.

 

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.