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.
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| 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.
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| 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.
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