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.