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.
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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!
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| 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
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