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.

 

  

A Northwoods Almanac for 10/28

 A Northwoods Almanac for 10/28 – 11/10/22  by John Bates

 

2022 State of the Birds

            The U.S. Committee of the North American Bird Conservation Initiative recently released their 2022 State of the Birds report, and their findings included this good news: Waterbirds and ducks in the U.S. have increased by 18% and 34%, respectively since 1970. Their increase is attributed to investments in wetland conservation, including the Federal Duck Stamp program and contributions from excise taxes and license sales to hunters.

            Now the bad news: More than half of U.S. bird species are declining. 

            Within that number, U.S. grassland birds are among the fastest declining with a 34% loss.

            Shorebirds, too, are down 33%.

            It was the first comprehensive look at the nation's birds since a 2019 study showed the loss of nearly 3 billion birds in the U.S. and Canada, about 1 in 4 birds, over the last 50 years. 

            What to do? Start here: America's Wildlife Act, a bill passed by the House of Representatives but awaiting a vote in the Senate, would provide about $1 billion annually to states and tribes for nongame wildlife management. The grants must be used for innovative recovery efforts for species of greatest conservation need, species listed as endangered or threatened, or the habitats of such species. 

 

Loon Migration

            In a lengthy study done primarily in our area and northern Minnesota, 232 common loons were captured and banded during the summers of 2009–2016, including 204 adult and 27 juvenile loons (Kevin Kenow, et al. “Migration patterns and wintering distribution of common loons breeding in the Upper Midwest,” Journal of Avian Biology, 6/9/21).Geolocator tags were attached to the adults and 31 of them (all males) received satellite transmitter implants. The researchers recovered 111 geolocator tags from 134 of the geotagged adult loons that were recaptured or discovered as carcasses. 

            The satellite telemetry and archival geolocator tags were used to determine the migration patterns and wintering locations of the breeding adults and young of the year. They found that the median date of adult loon departure from their breeding lakes was from October 16 to 22. Thus, most, if not all adult common loons from Minnesota and Wisconsin are now on their way south. But in the study, the researchers found that they typically first headed east to northern Lake Michigan off of Door County, and their length of stay there averaged 27 days, often not departing until late November. They then gradually worked their way south along the lake before typically making their overland journey to the Gulf of Mexico off of Florida. Many briefly stopped at reservoirs in southeastern states, though a few stopped in Illinois, Indiana, Ohio, and Pennsylvania, finally arriving in Florida around November 26.

            The chicks are left behind to fend for themselves, but the research showed that many fly from their natal lake to feed on a nearby lake which is richer in fish – they need all the energy reserves they can store up for migration. They then typically waited until close to ice-up to make the leap southward, foregoing Lake Michigan, their DNA telling them what direction to go and how far. Like the adults, however, most stopped briefly along the way at various lakes and reservoirs, and like the adults, they ended up arriving on their wintering grounds in the Gulf in late November to early December. Thus, the first fall migration of juvenile loons is much more direct and relatively quick compared to the fall migration in adults.

            The study found that among the adults (103) and juveniles (23) that completed fall migration, most wintered in the Gulf of Mexico (80% of the adults and 91% of the juveniles), with smaller proportions wintering off the southern Atlantic Coast or on impoundments in the southeastern United States.

            Given the likely wintering distribution of common loons breeding in the Upper Midwest coupled with the occurrence of the 2010 Deepwater Horizon (DWH) oil spill, the researchers were concerned about the effect of the spill on wintering loons. A separate study (done by Deepwater Horizon Natural Resource Damage Assessment Trustees) reported that common loon mortality was estimated from 530 to 812 individuals with additional lost productivity of 31 to 98 fledged loons during 2010 and 2011 due to the mortality of the breeding-age birds.

            An aspect of common loon life history that remains largely undocumented are the causes, timing and location of mortality among young loons following their departure from their natal lakes. Survival rates of loons during their first few years of life are much lower than that of adults. Band recovery data also indicated that while some of the juvenile loons may remain on wintering areas year-round their first two years, northward movement along the Atlantic Coast during summers was common, and included distant movements to places like the Gulf of St. Lawrence and Nova Scotia.

            It’s noteworthy that it’s believed that most (93%) of the breeding adult population of common loons occurs in Canada, with only 6% occurring in the United States. Of the proportion that occurs in the United States, about half are thought to occur in the Great Lakes states of Minnesota, Wisconsin and Michigan.

 

“Old-growth” Clubmosses

            At a recent talk I gave in Stevens Point, I asked eminent retired botanist Dr. Robert Freckman about literature I’d seen over the years stating that various species of clubmosses can be very old, well over a hundred years. He amended my time frame, saying that some are thought to live 1,000 years! This was a startling revelation to me.

            Nearly everyone in the Northwoods is familiar with clubmosses, but may not know them by that name. The most common is “Princess Pine,” which is absolutely not a pine, but rather, a clubmoss. All clubmoss species superficially resemble a conifer seedling to a casual observer, but clubmosses seldom grow taller than 6 inches, and they produce spores – not cones with seeds. Those who think clubmosses are tiny pine trees must wonder why they never grow up.

            Clubmosses are perennial evergreens, and vegetatively reproduce by sending out “runners” along or just below the ground surface that root down at intervals. New shoots may pop up at the roots, or the stem just continues to elongate further, walking itself slowly through the woods while the tail end dies off.

            In late summer and early fall, little club-shaped structures grow from the tips of the shoots in most species. Each of these “clubs” packs thousands of spores, and if you just tap one of them when they're ripe, a yellow powder billows out, catches any wind present, and the spores float to their new homestead site in the woods. Some of the clubs are on slender stalks that look like a candelabra setting for a romantic vole's dinner.

            Clubmoss spores found their way into a remarkable number of early products, but most remarkable of all was the creative person who discovered the spores to be explosive, and thought to use them to produce the pan flash for old time cameras.  

            The clubmoss reproductive cycle closely resembles the complexity of ferns, but clubmosses belong to a group of plants called “fern allies” (sounds like NATO or something), which have the same structural characteristics and general reproductive process as ferns. The difference between ferns and their allies is that ferns have large flat fronds with branching veins, while the allies have needlelike or scalelike leaves with just one unbranched vein. In other words, the fern allies don't look a bit like ferns, and each ally variety looks quite different from all the rest – clubmosses look a bit like mosses but really more like miniature conifer trees; horsetails look like a piece of jointed bamboo often with coarse hairs; quillworts might be mistaken for clumps of grass or the long stems of young onions.

            Of most importance though is the 17 or so years it takes clubmoss spores to grow through their alternate life stage and into the next generation of spore-bearing plant. Given the enormous numbers of clubmosses that are still picked every year for the wreath-making industry, clubmoss populations have suffered and their recolonization of forest areas lags well behind the harvest. If you pick them for wreaths, cut them off above the ground – do not pull them out. Better yet, make your wreaths out of balsam fir branches rather than the clubmosses. It seems only reasonable that we should not  be picking plants that may be up to 1,000 years old.

 

Tamarack Gold

            Tamaracks have fully turned gold by late October, and many are dropping their needles, or have lost all of them already. It’s the last brilliant flash of color in our rapidly fading autumn, and they’re much to be admired and grateful for. 

            As the oddball independent among the trees – a conifer that is deciduous – the question often arises as to why this is our only conifer that drops its needles in the fall, and it’s one that’s not easily answered. One thought is that the soft needles of tamaracks are more susceptible to snow damage and water loss than other conifers, so it makes sense to drop them. 

            The benefit to having needles rather than broad leaves is that they can withstand a great deal more abuse compared to leaves, and they aren't as attractive to insects. Conifers make small, sturdy leaves built for structural integrity. The leaves have a small surface area, and they’re coated with wax that reduces water loss. 

            The downside of this conservative strategy is that these leaves are relatively costly to make. And the structural components that make needles tough allows less room for the chemicals and cellular structures needed for photosynthesis, which is likely why evergreen needles tend to photosynthesize at lower rates than the leaves of broad-leaf trees.

            Do the softer, smaller needles of tamaracks allow it to photosynthesize more rapidly than other conifers, and make the needles easier and less costly to produce in the spring, thus balancing their loss in the autumn? I’m not sure, but we are certainly the benefactors of the colorful process.

 

Celestial Events

            To observe planets in November, look after dusk for Jupiter and Saturn in the southeast, and before dawn for Mars in the southwest.

            On 11/4, look for Jupiter just a few degrees above the waxing gibbous moon. The full moon occurs on 11/8.

 

Thought for the Week

            “An interesting question to ask yourself at night is, What did I really see this day?” –  John O’Donohue.