A Northwoods Almanac for 9/29 - 10/12/23

 A Northwoods Almanac for 9/29 – 10/12/ /2023  by John Bates

 

Historic Fledging of Bald Eagles

Three eaglets fledged from two nests in Milwaukee County this summer – the first recorded fledglings there in over 120 years! Eagles now nest in all 72 Wisconsin counties.

 

Hawk Ridge – Blue Jay Numbers!

            In September, I always pay attention to the hawk count at Hawk Ridge in Duluth, however, the counters not only record raptors as they pass over the ridge, they also count songbirds. The songbird of particular note this fall has been blue jays! On 9/10 alone, 14,054 blue jays flew over. And as of 9/21, over 73,000 had been counted with more to come!     

Wow! So, what’s the deal with blue jays? Well, from 1966 to 2015, the Blue Jay experienced a population decline along the Atlantic coast, but a greater than 1.5% annual population increase occurred throughout the northern part of its range, including Labrador, Nova Scotia, southern Quebec, and southern Manitoba. Partners in Flight estimates a global breeding population of 17 million.

Cornell’s “Birds of the World” says that much about their migratory behavior remains a mystery. Some are present throughout winter in all parts of their range, while some individual jays migrate south one year, stay north the next winter, and then migrate south again the next year. “To date, no one has concretely worked out why they migrate when they do. Likely, it is related to weather conditions and how abundant the winter food sources are, which can determine whether other northern birds will move south.” So, the high migratory numbers this year may be due to poor winter food sources, but basically, no one really knows.

What’s the #2 songbird? Cedar waxwings. Nearly 14,000 have coursed over the ridge as of this writing.

Broad-winged hawks are the usual draw at the ridge, but as of 9/21, the largest count has “only” been 4,601, a pittance for this species. The record daily high occurred on 9/15/2003: 101,698! The record seasonal high for just broad-wings alone was that year as well: 160,703.

Hawk Ridge averaged 76,000 migrating raptors every fall from 1991 to 2013, so this autumn’s numbers are well below that average. But it’s mostly about the weather, and if some strong north winds occur over a number of days in the last week of September, those numbers should grow considerably.

 

Flickers and Fruit

Jane Lueneburg in Tomahawk sent me this note on 9/11: “Do you ever associate robins and flickers forming a small flock of maybe 3 to 4 of each kind and flying around together?  Have been watching them in both our neighbor's yard and then ours.”

            My initial reaction was that I had never heard of this before and that it was odd. Robins eat fruits, but flickers? As I thought about it more, however, I realized flickers eat not only ants, their primary food, but also berries in the autumn. I looked up studies on their diet and found that flickers are a specialist on ants – their sticky tongue can dart out as much as 4 cm (1.5 inches) beyond the bill tip to lap up adult and larval ants.

But they’re also a generalist – they eat ground-dwelling insects or larvae such as beetles, and in late fall and winter, they supplement their diet with fruits. The ten seeds and fruits most frequently recorded in one southerly study based on stomach contents were (numbers refer to frequency in 684 sampled stomach contents): poison ivy (Rhus radicans, 82), bayberry (Myrica carolinensis, 48), sour gum (Nyssa sylvatica, 32), black cherry (Prunus serotina, 30), hackberry (Celtis occidentalis, 24), frost grape (Vitis cordifolia, 22), flowering dogwood (Cornus florida, 16), blackberry and raspberry (Rubus spp., 15), smooth sumac (Rhus glabra, 11), and sumac (Rhus sp., 11). They also ate the berries of woodbine and elderberry.

Northern flickers rely heavily on finding food on the ground, so that means that flickers migrate away from areas with deep and persistent snow cover in winter – the Northwoods, in other words. They’re currently feeding heavily on ants along roadsides, as well as fruits, but will be heading southward relatively soon. 

Northern flicker range map

 

Cedar Waxwings and Our Mountain Ash Trees

            Mary and I have planted a dozen or so mountain ash trees in recent years ostensibly to feed winter birds visiting us from Canada. But the word has gotten out to migrating cedar waxwings that a couple of our older trees in our yard are flush with berries, and the waxwings are hard at the process of stripping them bare.

cedar waxwing photo by John Bates

            This makes me irrationally upset – I want the berries to be there this winter for visiting Canadian birds who will be struggling to find limited sources of food. In the autumn, fruits of all sorts are available for migrating birds, so I think the migrating birds should focus on other species and leave our mountain ashes alone. 

            Well, I’ve tried speaking with them about the issue, but I don’t speak waxwing, and even if I did, I doubt they’d concur.

            In the meantime, we are awash in cedar waxwings, and if I can just let go of my winter desires, I will find myself thrilled with the beauty and spectacle of these exceptionally handsome birds.

            Next on my list of frustrations with migrating birds will be American robins. They’ll be coming through in October to strip our crabapple trees, which we also planted to provide food for “our” wintering birds. I’m certain to want to shoo them away, which is both fruitless (get the pun?), and laughable. 

Enjoy the moment, I always tell myself. Obviously, I still have work to do in living that maxim.

 

Air Conditioning

This year, Jeep rolled out a new edition of its popular four-wheel-drive SUV Jeep Wrangler JL. For the first time in the car’s 35-year history, air conditioning wasn’t an option, it was standard. And thus we have come to the end of an era: “The last car in the U.S. without standard air conditioning,” read the headline of the Autopian, an automotive magazine, “finally gives up the fight against refrigerant . . . the final holdout against the tyranny of condensers, compressors, driers, evaporators, and R1234yf refrigerant.”

Do you remember when getting air conditioning in your car was a luxury, and an expensive one? Now, apparently, you can’t buy a car without air conditioning.

Air conditioning is becoming the norm in homes as well, and in many areas where heat is becoming unbearable, a necessity. From a recent article in the Washington Post: “This summer, all across the torrid globe, air conditioning was a necessity for billions of people, though less than a third of households have it. In the Northeast and Mid-Atlantic, it offered defense against not just the heat but also the eerie orange smoke from Canadian wildfires exacerbated by climate change. In Phoenix, where the temperature rose above 110 degrees for weeks on end, temporary cooling centers were a lifesaver for homeless people, though hundreds of heat-related deaths were confirmed or suspected throughout the metropolitan area. In Europe, where air conditioning is evolving from an eccentric, American-style indulgence to a standard amenity, AC offered a critical defense against a heat wave so powerful and persistent that the Europeans gave the high-pressure system causing it a name, ‘Cerberus,’ after the mythological three-headed hellhound who guards the gates of Hades.”

Like the article states, “As the danger zone for excess heat creeps into once clement zones, the air conditioner joins the furnace as an essential system for ever more people.”

There’s an electrical energy cost, of course, to providing cooler buildings in summer, which adds to warming climates. As the author concludes, “We want to live beyond or without weather, because the weather we made is killing us.”

 

First Frost – September 14

            Summers are lasting longer, and often past the autumnal equinox in many places where it never had before. We had our first frost in Manitowish, and our only frost of September so far, on September 14, though many folks on higher ground were frost-free. We covered our garden, and everything came through fine.

We’ve lived here 40 years, and in our first two decades, our first frost was remarkably always around August 21. We never had ripe red tomatoes. But that’s all changed. Ripe red tomatoes are still coming as of this writing on 9/21, just as they have for the last decade or more. We now have at least one month more growing season than we had in the 1980s and 90s.

 

Frog Bay Tribal National Park

            On 9/20, I hiked the 1.7-mile loop trail in Frog Bay Tribal National Park, the first tribal national park in the United States, in glorious 79° weather. If you’re not familiar with Frog Bay, the 300-acre site comprises a rare boreal forest ecotype, over a mile of riparian corridor, nearly 120 acres of wetlands and freshwater estuary habitat, and almost 4,000 feet of undeveloped Lake Superior shoreline, all on the Red Cliff Reservation in Bayfield County.

The original 89-acre parcel of former Red Cliff Reservation land was successfully reacquired in 2012, and a second, 86-acre private parcel was acquired in 2017. This 175 acre area comprises FBTNP and permanently protects a large tract of at-risk boreal forest, the lower estuary and mouth of Frog Creek. And, importantly, it restored former reservation lands back to tribal ownership.

To protect the headwaters of the Frog Creek watershed and preserve historical and cultural use of this place, in 2017, the Red Cliff Tribal Council then formally adopted the Frog Creek Conservation Management Area (CMA). The 300-acre CMA consists of Frog Bay Tribal National Park, 40 acres of land that was already in tribal ownership, and 80 acres of repatriated Bayfield County forestry land.

The park is managed by Red Cliff’s Treaty Natural Resources Division, The trail system is rooty and rocky, but well-maintained, and includes interpretive signs, wooden crossings over wet areas, and a bridge over a ravine. Oak, Basswood, Hermit, Raspberry and Stockton Islands are visible from the sand beach.

            The trail leads through older white cedars and hemlocks, some of which are 30” in diameter, though most average around 24”. Mature red oaks are also numerous, but the keynote of the site may be its upland white cedars near the shore, which, while not giants, appear quite old and add substantially to the ancient feeling of the area.

 

Celestial Events

            The full moon occurs tonight, 9/29. This “Harvest” or “Leaves Changing Color” moon will rise north of east, the first time since March.

            For planet watching in October, look for Saturn after dusk in the southeast. Before dawn, look for Venus high in the southeast and Jupiter in the east.

 

Thought for the Week

“After you have exhausted what there is in business, politics, conviviality, and so on – have found that none of these finally satisfy, or permanently wear – what remains? Nature remains.” – Walt Whitman

 

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 9/15/-28, 2023

 A Northwoods Almanac for 9/15-28/23   

Yellowjackets!

            If there’s an insect hovering around your soda can or brat this time of year, chances are it’s a yellowjacket. Yellowjackets are actually wasps, and there are 13 species of them in Wisconsin, most distinguishing themselves via their slender shiny bodies with yellow and black banding. 

            Yellowjackets are often mistakenly called bees, but bees can usually be recognized by their densely hairy bodies. Yellowjackets and hornets have less conspicuous and relatively few hairs in comparison.        

            During the spring and summer, yellowjacket colonies send out foragers to collect sugar and protein to support their growing larvae, the worker bees, and the new queens. In particular, yellowjackets search out the sweet secretions of aphids and scale insects, called “honeydew.” They also are predators, hunting for caterpillars, spiders, centipedes, flies and damselflies, among others, to provide the colony with protein, and they’ll also feed on carrion alongside vultures, crows, and eagles. 

            By August, however, the queen quits her egg laying (save for a few) and no longer releases the pheromone that causes the workers to work. Food sources became more scarce, and the workers set out to forage for themselves. Starving, thousands seek out easy to find nectars and sugars, bringing them often into contact with humans. One researcher says, “Yellowjackets use soda and other sweeteners as a sort of ‘aviation fuel’.” 

            The timing couldn't be better for them, or worse for us.

            They can be aggressive and they can sting multiple times without dying, so one trapped in your shirt can wreak havoc. For comparison, when a bee stings, her reverse-barbed stinger works like a fish hook: it goes in but won’t come out, so she only stings once. On the other hand, a yellowjacket can sting again and again.

            The worst thing you can do is try and swat them. The problem is that these workers have their own pheromone, which helps protect the nest from attack earlier in the year, and that's essentially a chemical rallying cry to other workers that the nest is under attack. So, when you swat that annoying wasp and it feels under attack, that rallying cry will go out, and more wasps will start arriving in aggressive mode, ready to defend their nest

            The best advice? Stay calm and cover your food.

            The good news is they don’t last long up here. An early hard freeze kills them (another good reason to stop climate change), all except the queen who finds a snug place to hibernate and waits out the winter before starting a new colony in the spring.

Honey!

            Mary and I extracted honey from our two bee hives on 9/1. It’s an involved process, requiring us to take out ten frames from each “super” (a box on top of the hive base where the queen is excluded so there are no eggs and brood, but the worker bees will still make honey). We have to shake and brush the bees off each frame before we can take the frames over to the manual extractor. We then put the frames into our extractor and spin it by hand at high speed to fling the honey off the frames via centrifugal force and into a stainless steel barrel. 

            Both hives did reasonably well! We got 14 quarts – 3.5 gallons – which weighs around 48 pounds. This is a modest total harvest for two hives, however. In much better bee habitats, and if we were better beekeepers, we might get three times that amount. 

the honey harvest in Manitowish

            In September, the trick now becomes to help the bees make it through the winter. We leave two “deeps” (brood boxes) in each hive. Each deep is loaded with honey – about 70 pounds worth. So, the bees have somewhere around 140 pounds of their own honey in each hive to feed on to get them through the winter. 

            Nevertheless, we will soon start feeding the bees sugar water so that they don’t eat too much of their own honey before winter sets in, and thus starve if we have a late spring. 

            We’re hoping both hives make it to May, and we have an earlier “spring,” such as it is, than we had this year.

            We’re still learning. When all is said and done, we’re really not much more than landlords for the bees. We provide a safe home for them, but they do all the work, and we get some of their honey as a rent payment.

 

Wild Rice

            As is normal, the rice is good this year on some lakes and rivers and absent on others. Rice goes through an average cycle of one good year, two modest years, and one bust year, and every lake and river is on a different schedule within this general cycle. 

            Off reservation, around 60,000 pounds of green rice is harvested every year in Wisconsin, with the finished rice ending up a little less than half of that.

            Note that the “wild rice” you see advertised in gas stations and supermarkets for around $4 a pound is cultivated farmed rice, not true wild rice harvested from our lakes and rivers. Up until 75 years ago, only true wild rice could be purchased or harvested. But in 1950, the first cultivated rice was grown in Minnesota, and by 1958, that one acre had grown to 120 acres. Soon, the University of Minnesota began breeding new strains that were more easily harvested by large combines, and by 1975, 18,000 acres were being farmed in Minnesota.

            California farmers got into the act in 1977, even though the region was far outside of the natural range of wild rice, and by 1986, California passed Minnesota in commercial wild rice production.

            Bringing us up to current times, California now grows 90% of all the commercial wild rice in the U.S. 

            So, check your labels if you want to buy true wild rice, though labeling  is very inconsistent, and producers don’t have to say whether the rice is cultivated or not. 

            The easiest way to know if you’re buying true wild rice? It should cost you $12 to $15 per pound and be hard to find. 

 

Lapland Longspurs

            Our best bird sighting of the last couple weeks was a flock of Lapland longspurs on the dikes at Powell Marsh. They’re notable because they breed across vast areas of the Arctic, where they are often the most visible and abundant bird, and sometimes the only nesting songbird. They’re primarily a seed eater, though they also forage for invertebrates. They frequent prairies, open fields, grain stubbles, shores, and any open ground where they have access to seeds. We only see them as they pass through here to their winter grounds, which are wherever they can find little to no snow on open, weedy ground.  

lapland longspur range map

 

Leaf Change: Coming Soon To A Forest Near You

            I should know better than to try and predict our fall colors, but our dry spring and summer, and last year’s relative dryness, has led to many forests being stressed. And that leads me to believe we’ll have early colors and an early leaf fall. 

            Hal Borland in his book Twelve Moons of the Year writes about this time of year:

“September is more than a month, really; it is a season, an achievement in itself.  It begins with August's leftovers and it ends with October's preparations . . . In the goldenrod's gleaming glory is the certainty of greater glory in birch and maple and aspen. Scattered bursts of flame in the sumacs light fires that will spread to woodbine and swamp maple and dogwood and chokeberry. Asters frost the roadsides, reminders of frosty mornings ahead, and milkweed floss and thistledown are glinting reminders of chill, misty dawns to come . . . The green urgency is past, its ripeness almost complete. Even the days and nights near their time of balance as we approach the equinox and harvest moon. Deliberate September, in its own time and tempo, begins to sum up another summer.” 

 

Beaver Creek Hemlocks

            To celebrate the protection of old-growth forests, Beaver Creek Hemlocks in Springstead was inducted into the national Old-Growth Forest Network (OGFN) on September 7, 2023. By joining the national registry (the 7th in Wisconsin to do so), this special property connects people of all generations to the beauty of and history behind old-growth forests. The registry not only builds a network of the nation’s oldest forests, but also an alliance of people who care about them.

Beaver Creek Hemlocks Dedication

            The Northwoods Land Trust (NWLT) purchased the property in 2021 from the Board of Commissioners of Public Lands (BCPL). In the 1800s, the federal government granted Wisconsin millions of acres of land to be held by BCPL. Most of the land was sold and the proceeds created the School Trust Fund to support public education.

            BCPL still owns widely scattered parcels. Some have been sold or traded to other conservation agencies and organizations such as NWLT because they are not compatible with BCPL’s forest management directive. 

            In recent years, NWLT has worked with BCPL to identify parcels of interest, many containing remnant pieces of old-growth forests. The Beaver Creek Hemlocks and Sack Lake Hemlocks in Iron County are two of NWLT’s acquisitions that were original BCPL lands. They conserve a rare feature of Northwoods biodiversity, our old-growth hemlock forests.

 

Celestial Events

            On 9/16, look just after dusk low in the west for Mars right below the waxing sliver moon.

            The official autumn equinox occurs on 9/23 when the sun rises nearest due east and sets nearest due west. As of 9/26, nights start to become longer than days, the first time since March 17.

            On 9/26, look after dusk in the southeast for Saturn 3° above the waxing gibbous moon.

 

Quote for the Week

            “Solitude isn’t where you find yourself necessarily, but where you find everything else.” – Author unknown