A Northwoods Almanac for February 3, 2023

 A Northwoods Almanac for 2/3 – 16, 2023   

Saplings Bent Over by Snow

            On many of our snowshoe and ski outings this winter, we’ve seen hundreds of young trees bent over by snow and ice, many with their tips bowed so far over that they’re anchored in the snowpack. We frequently stop and try to gently pull them out, shaking the snow and ice off them as best we can without breaking the branches or the trunk. Sometimes, I’ll even push the trunk up to try and straighten the tree out, which usually works to a limited degree.

            The usual advice for handling branches bent under the weight of heavy snow or ice is to leave them alone. As the snow or ice melts, most branches are said to slowly straighten on their own. 

            But I think the timing matters. Young trees or branches bent over and anchored in the  snow for several months are less likely to straighten than those straining under a snow load for only a few days. So, we like to free them from the weight in hopes they will straighten more readily. I honestly don’t know if this effort really makes a significant difference, but at least we’ve tried.

            This situation is a bit different from summer hikes, when we often notice trees that are horizontally curved near their base, but which have then straightened out as they stretch up into the canopy. My belief is that these trees were likely bent over by another tree falling on them and holding them in that position, possibly for years, and once released, the leader stem has straightened out.

            On other occasions, we see trees, usually pines, that look like goalposts, with two or three upright trunks curved upward from near the middle of the tree. This is the result of the apical stem, the leader stem, being broken off, and the horizontal branches competing to take over the journey upward into the canopy. 

            The leader stem can be broken by a bird landing on it or a porcupine nipping it off or by heavy snowload. Or in the case of pines growing in full sun, the leader stem is frequently killed by white pine weevils, a native insect, that kills terminal shoots of white pines. The weevils deposit their eggs in the terminal leaders, and the hatching larvae then girdle the leader and kill it. The pine’s lateral branches then compete to replace the dead leader, sweeping upwards to form a fork, or since we live in Packer country, a goalpost. 

 

Chippies in Winter Torpor/Hibernation

            I’m sure most of you have noticed chipmunks in the fall filling their cheeks with seeds from your bird feeders, and then hustling off to their underground dens, only to return shortly thereafter for some more cargo. I’ve wondered how many seeds they ultimately store before they decide they have enough – it must be a small mountain of seeds in some of their dens!

            I’ve always thought that the chippies spend the winter in their dens in a reduced state of activity called torpor, where they drop their body temperatures a bit to reduce heat loss, and occasionally eat from their mountain of stashed seeds.

            I’ve learned, however, that when prolonged cold sets in, chippies curl into a ball and enter deep hibernation. Here, the chippie’s  heartbeat will slow from around 350 beats per minute to fewer than 10. Its breathing will decrease from around 60 breaths per minute to under 20, and its body temperature will drop from around 100 degrees to the mid 40s or even lower. 

            Throughout the winter, however, the chippie goes through regular periods of arousal, during which it warms up and becomes active in its burrow, pumping warmed blood around its body. The chippie may also spend time shivering, which generates heat through muscle contractions.            

            Once warmed up, it moves around its burrow, eats some of its stored food, voids its bladder, and defecates. Then it re-enters hibernation, just one of numerous times it will go through this cycle of warming and cooling. 

            The more food it has stored for the winter, apparently the shorter the hibernation periods. The scarcer the food, the longer the hibernation.

            In a few months on a warmer April day, we’ll look out our windows to see a chippie wandering on the deflating snow, looking for love.

 

Feeding Deer? The Reasons Not To

            I recommend reading a recent article on feeding deer from the November-December issue of Montana Outdoors Magazine (https://issuu.com/montanaoutdoors/docs/mond22) that is appropriate for Wisconsin, too. Entitled “Death by Feeding,” the article outlines all the reasons not to feed corn, hay, or grains to deer during the winter. These reasons are well known and well established over many years, but to summarize from the article, “All members of the deer family change diets with the seasons. In summer, the animals eat mostly high-carbohydrate leaves and forbs (flowering plants) to build and store fat for winter. As the days shorten and green foods become scarce, they eat less overall and transition to low-carb browse – shrubs, twigs, and tree bark. They also start burning more body fat for energy. 

            “Ultimately, this is what they’re adapted for . . . It’s natural for them to lose weight in winter. It’s also natural for some of the weaker animals to die, especially calves and fawns entering winter in poor body condition . . . 

            “But when people feed big game animals corn and other grain, birdseed, hay, or apples,

the high-carb foods can cause an overgrowth of bacteria in the stomach that produces lactic acid, which leads to inflammation, abscesses, and ulcers in the stomach wall . . . The inflamed wall can no longer absorb nutrients, and the lactic acid leaks from the rumen into the bloodstream, destroying cells and tissues and eventually causing death . . . It’s a mismatch of meals to gut microbes.”

            The caveat is that one can feed deer these foods if they’re introduced slowly and in small portions. Ron Eckstein, retired DNR wildlife manager tells me, “Deer can digest corn if fed starting in fall and going through the whole winter. [However], someone feeding corn to starving deer causes severe problems. The same thing is true for ‘hay.’  Hay comes in good and bad varieties ranging on quality. Some is poor quality and is more like straw than hay. So, feeding high quality hay to deer starting in fall and through the winter may not cause harm (their microfauna can digest it). Feeding hay, especially poor quality hay, to starving deer in late winter is a death sentence. 

            “The best winter deer food is a commercial deer mix designed specifically for deer. Because of CWD, and many other concerns, [however] it is best not to feed deer (and is currently illegal in many WI counties).” 

            As most of you already know, deer baiting and feeding is currently prohibited in 54 of Wisconsin’s 72 counties due to the presence of CWD.

            If you still want to keep feeding, and it is legal to feed in your county, the best option is to give deer more of the winter foods they are already adapted to eating: winter browse, which includes buds and twigs of woody plants. Get out the chain saw and drop branches laden with buds, doing so over numerous locations so you don’t concentrate deer at one site and enhance the risk of transmitting diseases, particularly CWD.

 

Celestial Events

            All the planet-viewing action in February occurs after dusk. Look for brilliant Venus low in the west-southwest, setting after 7 p.m. Mars will be high in the east, and then transits the sky to eventually set in northwest about 3 a.m. Look for Jupiter very low in the west-southwest, setting after 9 p.m.

            Today, February 3, marks the midway point between winter solstice and spring equinox. Take heart if the winter is already seeming too long!

            February’s full moon, the “Snow/Hunger/When Coyotes Are Frightened Moon,” occurs on 2/5. It will appear a bit smaller than usual, because it’s our most distant full moon of the year, 14% smaller than the closest full moon, which will occur on August 31.

            The average last-of-the-year coldest low temperature also occurs on 2/5. Given how fickle our winter weather is, this statistic means virtually nothing, but it at least says we’re headed the right direction.

            By 2/10, we’ll be up to 10 hours of sunlight from 7:13 a.m. to 5:13 p.m. The sun is now setting an hour later and rising 30 minutes earlier than it did at winter solstice. 

            And 2/14, of course, marks Valentines Day. If you think your heart beats fast when you’re close to the one you love, consider the ruby-throated hummingbird. When it comes to hearts, hummingbirds drive Ferraris, their hearts racing at a maximum of 1260 beats per minute, or twenty beats a second. No other animal can match the intensity of a hummingbird’s metabolic rate, even at rest. Hummers have the largest known relative heart size of all warm-blooded animals – 2.5% of their total body mass – yet place a hummingbird’s heart in your palm, and you would hold an engine about the size of a dull pencil point. 

            To put those figures in perspective, the human heart accounts for only 0.3 percent of our total body mass, and our resting heart rate is around 72 beats per minute.

 

Comet ZTF

            Newly-discovered Comet ZTF is coming the closest to the Earth in 50,000 years – though still 26 million miles away – and will be visible to the unaided eye from late January into early February. Astronomers recommend going outside and looking northwest at approximately 9 p.m. local time no matter where you are. If you have a star mapping app on your phone, you can track the exact night-by-night locations. 

            

Thought for the Week

            It seems reasonable to believe — and I do believe — that the more clearly we can focus our attention on the wonders and realities of the universe about us the less taste we shall have for the destruction of our race. Wonder and humility are wholesome emotions, and they do not exist side by side with a lust for destruction. – Rachel Carson, Silent Spring

 

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 Jan. 20, 2023

 A Northwoods Almanac for 1/20 – 2/2/2023   

 

Warm And Cloudy January 

            If you think it’s been uncommonly warm so far in January, you’re absolutely correct. The average high for Manitowish Waters in January is 20° with an average low of 0°, while Minocqua is virtually the same at an average high of 20° and average low of 1°. To date in 2023 (Jan. 1 through January 12), the average high for Minocqua has been 32° with an average low of 13°.

            The days have been really cloudy, too. The easiest way for me to see this is to look at our computer printout for the solar energy we’ve produced this month in Manitowish (see the attached graph). It shows we’ve had one day of total sunshine, one day of perhaps half a day of sun, and 10 days of total or near total clouds.

            So, warm and gray sums it up.

            Are there consequences for wildlife? Well, one species that is almost certainly to be impacted by these higher temperatures is the Canada jay (aka gray jay). Why? In the early 1960’s, a researcher by the name of Walter Brock was examining Canada jay corpses when he discovered that they have massive salivary glands on par with the ones found in woodpeckers – no other songbird has such large salivary glands. But unlike woodpeckers, gray jays not only can make lots of saliva, they make lots of sticky saliva.

            When they eat, the jays move food around inside their mouth, covering it with this sticky spit, and once coated, the bird deposits the food blob (called a bolus) onto the trunk of a tree, behind flakes of bark, under lichens, or in conifer needles. The dried spit rivals some of our best glues, so the food is safely secured for later use in the winter. 

            The also stash their food high in the trees instead of burying it into the ground like other corvids do, so Canada jays can thrive in areas with much heavier snowfall, giving them the title of the furthest nesting jay in North America. 

            And finally, they’re really smart. They have a good success rate remembering where they stored the food, a very necessary skill given that one researcher reported individual jays in north-central Alaska making over 1,000 caches in a 17 hour day – more than 1 per minute. That’s a lot to remember!

            So, here’s the connection to our current warm winter days – higher temperatures hasten the degradation of these perishable foods, foods that are used to feed nestlings in late February and March, which is when Canada jays nest. They’re our earliest nesting songbirds, and if the food they stored to feed their nestlings has rotted, those nestlings will starve.

            Thus, with our warmer winter temperatures over the last decade, there’s significant evidence that Canada jays are declining at the southern edge of their range, which includes the Northwoods of Wisconsin. 

            Canada jays stay with their mates as long as both birds are alive, and the members of a territorial pair rarely leave each other’s sides. But as our winter temperatures have continued to warm, they’ve been packing their bags and moving further north. Finding breeding pairs of Canada jays in northern Wisconsin has become harder and harder. As I wrote in my last column, we haven’t counted a single Canada jay on our Manitowish Waters Christmas Bird Count since 2011. 

            One person we know, Denise Fauntleroy in Watersmeet, MI, has a pair of Canada jays still coming to her feeders. She writes, “When I purchased this house 7 years ago the previous owners asked me to take over feeding them (I think the sale of the house hinged on my agreement!). I feed them an assortment of breads, leftover meats, suet, peanut butter and rendered fat from cooked foods. They particularly like bacon-fat-soaked French bread! This fall they would not only come around in the morning but in the afternoon when I was attending to outside chores. There’s a part of me that wants to believe that they came looking for me, but truth be told, they were training me. I would rush home if I was out to see if they were around! 

photo by Denise Fauntleroy

            “It’s so much fun watching the young ones fine tune their landing skills, head for the porch and miss . . . then try again until they get it, perch on the edge of a glass pie plate and dive into the goodies I leave out for them. They very quickly become accustomed to my presence and will land next to me if I sit on the porch stairs.  I’ve seen 1 to 3 young each year since I’ve lived on the river.”

            Well, those jays are really spoiled! But if that’s what it takes to keep a pair around, I’m all for it. But given warming winter temperatures, the overall scenario for Canada jays looks poor. 

 

Black Bears Giving Birth!

            Mature black bear females typically give birth to their cubs in late January into early February. However, it’s been a long time since they mated, which occurs back in June. Black bears utilize delayed implantation, which means the male’s sperm fertilizes microscopic eggs in the uterus, and each egg quickly develops into a tiny ball of cells called a blastocyst. The blastocysts don’t immediately implant in the uterine walls and begin development, instead remaining free-floating in the uterus for about 5 months until they implant in November. After implantation, the blastocysts develop rapidly and become the cubs that are born in late January.

     

photo by North American Bear Center

      

            The litter size most common these days is three. In a study in northern Minnesota, researchers found that a litter size of three contributed the highest number of surviving cubs (2.45) to the next generation, and was also the most common litter size. Out of 35 litters examined, 22 (63%) were 3 cubs.

            Newborn cubs are smaller, relative to their mother’s size, than the young of any other placental mammal, and are totally dependent on their mothers. The cubs have little fur and weigh less than a pound – they’re about the size of a chipmunk.

            Bear dens are no warmer than the outside air because most den entrances are open. The mother has to keep the cubs warm, thus her metabolism is only slightly reduced. She maintains a body temperature between 94° and 98°F and keeps the cubs warm by hovering over them and breathing on them. She helps the cubs find her six nipples, licks them to stimulate defecation, and eats their feces to keep the den clean. Milk is the cubs’ only food, and they nurse frequently, making a motor-like hum.

            Mother and cubs remain together for 16 to 17 months until May or June of the following year, and then the family members separate, the mother mates again, and the 2-year cycle repeats.

            

Tree Data

            The oldest tree ever known grew on Wheeler Peak in what is now Great Basin National Park. After a graduate student researcher in 1964 tried and failed to extract a complete core sample, he decided with permission of a forest ranger to cut it down. Originally labeled “WPN-114,” this bristlecone pine was posthumously renamed “Prometheus,” and was determined to be around 4,900 years old.         

            The oldest surviving tree grows in the Ancient Bristlecone Pine Forest in the White Mountains of eastern California. This pine was originally cored in the 1950s, but the innermost rings are extremely suppressed and partly eroded, making dating difficult. The oldest extracted ring from “Methuselah” is from around 2500 B.C.E., making this tree well over 4,500 years old today.

            However, if one includes in this listing clonal tress that can regenerate from a single root system, the upper age limit of trees could be ten thousand years or more. Such superorganisms, including the famous aspen grove in Colorado nicknamed “Pando,” are made up of genetically identical trunks. These colonies are impossible to date, because the oldest part of the root system decomposed long ago. Thus, Pando’s age is unknown, with estimates ranging from 8,000 all the way to 80,000 years.

            The world’s largest tree measured by volume is the General Sherman sequoia. It stands 275 feet (83 m) tall, and is over 36 feet (11 m) in diameter at the base (that’s 113 feet in circumference), but it’s “only” 2,150 years old. Who knows how much bigger it will get?

            However, if again one allows clonal tree systems to be included in the discussion, Pando is considered the world’s largest tree and also one of the largest living organisms on the planet. It spans roughly 106 acres within Fishlake National Forest in south-central Utah, weighs more than 6,600 tons and contains approximately 47,000 genetically identical stems. 

 

Climate Data

            Last year, 2022, was the fifth-hottest ever recorded on the planet. Europe experienced its hottest summer on record and its second-hottest year overall. And in February, Antarctic Sea ice reached its lowest minimum in the 44 years of satellite records. 

            The United States was lashed by 18 catastrophic extreme weather and climate disasters costing at least $1 billion each in 2022. They came in the form of tornadoes, extreme heat and cold, deadly flooding and hurricanes and a climate change-fueled drought in the West.

            When taken together, the country’s disasters inflicted at least $165 billion in damage last year, surpassing 2021 disasters in cost, and caused at least 474 deaths, Over the last seven years, 122 separate billion-dollar disasters have killed at least 5,000 people and cost the US more than $1 trillion in damages.

            The records show that the last eight years have been the hottest recorded in human history. Despite the urgency to change our ways, the world’s output of carbon dioxide and other planet-warming emissions continues to rise as U.S. greenhouse gas emissions ticked up by 1.3 percent in 2022.

 

Celestial Events

            The new moon occurs on 1/21. The moon will be at perigree, its closest distance to the earth in 2023 at 221,562 miles.

            Look after dusk on 1/22 for Venus just below Saturn in the southwest.

            On 1/23, Venus will be 3° above the emerging sliver of moon, and Saturn will be 4° above the moon. 

            On 1/25, look after dusk for Jupiter to be 1.8° above the crescent moon.

            On 1/30, look after dusk for Mars to be just barely above the waxing gibbous moon.

 

Thought for the Week

            “There is no repetition in a landscape. Every stone, every tree, every field is a different place. When your eye begins to become attentive to this panorama of differentiation, then you realize what a privilege it is to actually be here.” – John O’Donohue in Walking in Wonder

 

 

A Northwoods Almanac for Jan. 6, 2023

 A Northwoods Almanac for 1/6 – 19/2023  

 

Chickadee Winter Survival

            Saving energy is the key to survival for those relatively few birds who choose to remain here over the winter. Black-capped chickadees, weighing only a half an ounce, use a number of adaptations to get them through. Like many songbirds, they cope with freezing temperatures by fluffing out their feathers into an insulating puffball, a process called “pilo-erection.”        

            And like waterfowl, they allow their feet to remain near freezing by placing the artery that brings warm blood to their feet next to veins of cooled blood returning to their core. Heat is transferred between the outgoing and incoming veins, which allows chickadees to save a lot of energy regulating their temperature.  

            Chickadees also utilize winter nighttime roosting cavities. University of Alaska-Fairbanks biologist Susan Sharbaugh attached radio transmitters weighing less than 0.5 grams to some chickadees to discover where they roosted at night. One night she followed their beeping signals to a birch tree with a broken top, and the following day she watched a chickadee fly into a cavity the size of a quarter. Sharbaugh found other bird roosts, too, all of which were in birches, suggesting that birches provide the best nighttime quarters for roosting birds, at least in Alaska. Perhaps the waterproof and windproof bark provides the best insulation qualities, or a dying birch tree is most easily excavated. We’ve likely all noticed how a downed birch limb can be totally punky on the inside – perfect for easy drilling even by a little chickadee – while the outside bark remains perfectly intact.

            Perhaps most important of all, chickadees go into a nightly regulated hypothermia, dropping their temperature 12 to 18 degrees below their normal daytime temperature of 108°F, providing a 25 percent decline in energy expenditure. That sounds fine except chickadees then have to shiver all night to keep warm, and they use up all the body fat they built up during the day, the equivalent of a 170-pound man spending a winter night outside and stepping on the scale in the morning 17 pounds lighter. 

            The next morning they have to gain as much as 10 percent of their body weight to replenish their body fat, eating twenty times more food than they do in summer (60% of their total body weight!).

            Their need for so much food during winter has forced chickadees to become very efficient at finding food. They form flocks to forage together, sometimes with other species such as nuthatches, woodpeckers, and creepers. They not only seek seeds, but also invertebrates, including eggs and pupae, that are hidden in the ground or under bark.  

            Chickadees also store in autumn a vast number of seeds in hidden places and have the ability to remember the location of thousands of caches. They “scatter hoard,” stashing each item in a different spot. A single chickadee can store up to one thousand seeds a day, or eighty thousand a season! The remarkable memory needed to find all these seeds is possible because chickadees grow new neurons in late fall, while they are storing food. They also have the ability to discard cells that hold old memories and replace them with new cells. 

            And by the way, UW wildlife ecologist Margaret Clark Brittingham kept track of 576 black-capped chickadees in a winter study in the 1980s. Her research showed that during milder winter weather, chickadees that had been exposed to feeders as a supplemental food source did not become dependent on the feeder food, surviving at the same rate when the feeder food was removed as did chickadees that had never been exposed to feeder food.

            On the other hand, however, Brittingham’s research did find that during harsh weather (below 10 degrees F), black-capped chickadees benefited from supplemental food they obtained at feeders. The survival rate of her subjects, compared to those birds that obtained less-accessible food from the wild during severe winters, nearly doubled when they consumed sunflower seeds at feeders.

            So, if you can, be sure to feed chickadees during the really cold winter days and nights. However, if you want to go on a vacation but feel guilty that “your” birds are dependent on you and may not survive, see if you can choose some more moderate winter days and nights to be gone. 

            No matter what, though, remember that chickadees are masters at winter survival. Rest assured, some will find a way to survive.

 

Manitowish Waters Christmas Bird Count

            We conducted our 30^th annual Manitowish Waters Christmas Bird Count on 12/17. We did our best to cover a circular area with its center at the intersection of Hwy. 51 and Cty. W., and with a radius of 7.5 miles. For the most part, this is relatively wild woodlands and wetlands with few homes, so we tend to find relatively small numbers of birds compared to other more urban counts where bird feeders are frequent.

            Still, between our 21 volunteers, we found 30 species, and 1,512 individuals. Most numerous, as always, were black-capped chickadees, with 391. Next in line, however, were two surprises. Second in total at 200 were bohemian waxwings, a Canadian species that only occasionally graces our area in winter. And just behind them in third were 173 evening grosbeaks, our highest total ever in our 30 years of counting.

            Another surprise was the number of American tree sparrows we found – 30 – also, our highest number ever! Our previous high was 6. This species breeds in remote northern areas, often north of the treeline. I always think of them as ground feeders, foraging among weeds and grasses for seeds. So, given our deep snows, I expect them to migrate well south of here. But in researching them further, I’ve learned they also feed along branches and twigs, and will beat weeds with their wings and then fly to the snow surface to retrieve the seeds. Plus, they consume berries and catkins directly from trees and bushes up to 50 feet above the ground, and they readily feed on seeds from ground feeders. So, apparently I shouldn’t be as surprised by their presence as I am.

photo by Bev Engstrom

            Notable by their almost total absence were pine siskins and common redpolls, both of which were in good numbers last year.

            Also notable was our failure to find a single gray (Canada) jay. We consistently found them from our first count in 1993 onward, but not anymore, last counting one in 2011. We’ve always been at the southern edge of their breeding range, but they are clearly receding north as our winters warm. A few are still seen now and again, but not with any consistency. 

gray jay range map

            Finally, we continue to find wintering trumpeter swans on an open stretch of the Manitowish River, a phenomenon first observed on our count in 1999. Most trumpeters migrate, but a consistent band of a dozen or more choose to remain the winter here for reasons only they can explain. 

photo by Jim Schumacher

 

Celestial Events

            The full moon (the “Wolf/Frost in the Teepee/Great Spirit” Moon) occurs tonight, 1/6.     For planet viewing in January, the action is all after dusk. Look for brilliant Venus (-3.9 magnitude) low in the southwest, Mars (-0.9 magnitude) high in the east, Jupiter (-2.3 magnitude) high in the southwest, and Saturn (0.8 magnitude) low in the southwest. 

            Recall that a difference of 1 magnitude corresponds to a brightness factor of about 2.5 times. Thus a difference of 5 magnitudes corresponds to a brightness factor of a hundredfold (multiply 2.5 five consecutive times). So a 1st-magnitude star is 100 times brighter than a 6th-magnitude star. A difference of 10 magnitudes corresponds to a brightness factor of 10,000 times. Thus, Venus at nearly -4 magnitude is 10,000 times brighter than a 6^th magnitude star, which are the faintest stars we can see with our naked eye.

 

Patridgeberry  (Mitchella repens)

            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 partridgeberry, an unassuming, native perennial common throughout the forest understory of Eastern North America, ranging from Newfoundland to southern Florida and eastern Texas. Its glossy, dark green evergreen leaves hug the ground on stems that often spread into colonies and form a dense carpet on the forest floor.

            In spring and summer, small white tubular flowers grow in pairs along the stem. The flowers attracts a variety of pollinators, but most notably bumblebees. And here’s where partridgeberry does something I’m unaware of any other flower in our area doing. One flower in the pair has a short pistil and long stamens, while the other has a long pistil and short stamens, an adaptation that prevents self-fertilization. If both flowers in the pair are fertilized by bumblebees, the ovaries of both flowers fuse together to produce a single oval-shaped scarlet fruit with two dimples. 

            The two small depressions where the two flowers join led to the old common name of “two-eyed berry.” 

            The plant's generic name, Mitchella, was a nod by Linnaeus to Dr. John Mitchell, an 18th-century Philadelphia botanist and physician. The species name, repens, is derived from the Latin for “creeping.”

            The tiny red fruit ripens by late summer, and can persist throughout the winter. The fruit may be consumed by ruffed grouse, turkey, fox, racoon, skunk, white-footed mouse, and white-tailed deer, though it doesn’t seem to be a favorite of anyone’s. The berries are edible for us, too, but I think they’re really bland.

            Lots of folks are looking for native ground-layer landscaping plants, and the non-aggressive partridgeberry works really well for small areas. It’s best used in woodland, shade, or border gardens, or along paths and in rock gardens. It transplants well, and just a few cuttings will create a nice-sized evergreen mat.

 

Thought for the Week

            “Every human has four endowments – self-awareness, conscience, independent will and creative imagination. These give us the ultimate human freedom … The power to choose, to respond, to change.” – Stephen Covey

 

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.