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.