A Northwoods Almanac for 11/24 – 12/7/23

 A Northwoods Almanac for 11/24 – 12/7/23  

 

Sightings – Common Mergansers, Wooly Bear Caterpillars, White Birch Seeds, Cougars

On 11/15, I was driving by Little Horsehead Lake in Presque Isle when I noticed a large flock of waterfowl lounging on the lake. I stopped, peered through my binoculars, and counted 72 common mergansers! Often the last waterfowl migrant to move south in fall and first to return north in spring, common mergansers may winter as far north as open water permits in the Great Lakes region. Their migration peaks in November and runs all the way into late December. 

common mergansers, photo by Will Conway

I’m still wondering why so many were gathered together on Little Horsehead, a relatively small lake at 56 acres, but one known for an abundance and diversity of fish. Perhaps the mergansers were feeding, or perhaps just resting. Common mergansers across North America reportedly eat at least 50 species of fish, generally foraging on whatever is most abundant and suitably sized. During the breeding season, they also eat an array of invertebrates including caddis flies, mayflies, backswimmers, flies, water striders, dragonflies, crane flies, beetles, freshwater sponge, spiders, caterpillars, snails, and mussels. 

When our lakes finally ice-up, they’ll have no choice but to move south. Average ice-up occurs on 37-acre Foster Lake in Hazelhurst now around 11/27. This is according to 47 years of data collected by Woody Hagge. But Woody notes that there have been wild swings in ice-up dates over the last 20 years. And in 2015, Foster froze November 28, reopened sixteen days later on December 14, and refroze on December 28. So, how does one adjust figures for that scenario? These days, predicting ice-up is anybody’s guess.

common merganser distribution map

Given our recent mid-November warm weather, a few wooly bear caterpillars (aka “woolyworms”) were still being seen. Folklore has it that they can forecast the severity of the upcoming winter – if their rusty bands are wide, it will be a mild winter. But the more black there is on the 13 brown and black segments of their body, the more severe the winter. 

For over forty years, Banner Elk, North Carolina, has held an annual Woolly Worm Festival in October, whereupon retired mayor Charles Von Canon inspects the champion woolly bear and announces his winter forecast. Similarly, there is a Woollybear Festival that takes place in Vermilion, Ohio, each October. This year, 100,000 people attended it!

Well, whether our winter becomes severe or mild, one thing is for sure – they'll all be frozen solid under leaf litter anyway. In the spring, these caterpillars will thaw out, pupate within cocoons and emerge as gorgeous adult Isabella tiger moths.

            Mary and I have noticed extensive catkins (they look a bit like “cones”) of white birch seeds on local white birch trees, which is good news for wintering songbirds like pine siskins, American goldfinch, and common redpolls. The mature female catkins hold tiny winged nutlets attached to three-lobed bracts. Mary Holland, an excellent naturalist from New England, writes, “The [bracts] of white birch look somewhat like soaring birds.” Look for them on snow-covered trails this winter.

A bowhunter killed a cougar Nov. 11 on private property in Buffalo County, according to the WDNR. Cougar sightings, though still rare, are no longer extremely rare. There have been 25 verified cougar reports in Wisconsin in 2023, according to the DNR. Importantly, however, of the more than 100 verified cougar reports in the state in recent years, none have resulted in a risk to human safety or the use of lethal force against the animal, at least until now.

There’s still no clear evidence cougars are breeding in Wisconsin. Most cougars spotted in Wisconsin have dispersed from out west and are young males apparently on a walk-about.

 

Latest NOAA Climate Report 

The Fifth National Climate Assessment, 2200 pages long, was issued on Nov. 14, a product of more than 750 experts evaluating thousands of studies over the last five years. Federal agencies have produced these assessments twice a decade or so since 2000, as mandated by a 1990 law.

Let’s start with the good news. Our country’s annual greenhouse gas emissions fell 12% between 2005 and 2019. This trend was largely driven by changes in electricity generation: coal use has declined, while the use of natural gas and renewable technologies has increased, leading to a 40% drop in emissions from the electricity sector. 

Eighty percent of new electricity generation capacity came from renewable sources in 2020. Further, the costs associated with wind and solar energy plummeted by 70% and 90%, respectively, over the past decade. Onshore wind and solar are now the cheapest source for building new power plants, costing less than gas, geothermal, coal, or nuclear.

Interestingly, since 2017, the transportation sector has overtaken electricity generation as the largest emitter of carbon dioxide. Emissions from transportation rose by nearly 25 percent between 1990 and 2018, even as vehicles became more energy efficient. The reason? Americans are driving more.

            The report points out that cost-effective tools and technologies exist right now to significantly reduce America’s contribution to global warming. No need to wait, and many people are appropriately responding. Around two in five states, as well as 90 percent of U.S.-based companies, have assessed their climate risks. Eighteen states have climate adaptation plans; another six are working on theirs.  

But, while the emissions decline is good news, the report finds US planet-warming emissions still need to more sharply decline to be in line with the international goal of keeping temperatures from increasing above 1.5-degree Celsius, a threshold beyond which scientists warn life on Earth will struggle to cope. To put that cut into perspective, US emissions decreased by less than 1% per year between 2005 and 2019 – a tiny annual drop. We need to to ramp it up to 6% annually. 

Why? Since 1970, the Lower 48 states have warmed by 2.5 degrees (1.4 degrees Celsius) while Alaska has heated up by 4.2 degrees (2.3 degrees Celsius), compared to the global average of 1.7 degrees (0.9 degrees Celsius). 

But what people really feel is not the averages, but when weather is extreme. The number and severity of storms are getting worse. As of October 10, there have been 24 weather and climate disasters with losses exceeding $1 billion in the United States this year. By comparison, between 1980 and 2022, the typical annual average for events like this was eight. For the most recent five years, the annual average has been 18 events.

There is no place immune from climate change, but some states – including California, Florida, Louisiana and Texas – are facing far more significant storms and extreme swings in precipitation.

Whether or not individuals accept that climate change has huge financial costs, the insurance industry sure has. Climate risks have hit the housing market in the form of skyrocketing homeowners’ insurance rates. Some insurers have pulled out of high-risk states altogether. The largest homeowner insurance company in California, State Farm, announced recently that it would stop selling coverage to homeowners everywhere in the state. 

In parts of eastern Kentucky ravaged by storms last summer, the price of flood insurance is set to quadruple. In Louisiana, the top insurance official says the market is in crisis, and is offering millions of dollars in subsidies to try to draw insurers to the state.

And in much of Florida, most big insurers have pulled out of the state already. Earlier this month, the insurance arm of AAA announced it would not renew some “higher exposure” home insurance policies in Florida, and Farmers Insurance announced it will stop offering new home insurance policies in the state and won't renew thousands of existing ones, in part because of rising losses from hurricanes.

Florida established a complicated system years ago in response to soaring insurance prices: a market based on small insurance companies, backed up by Citizens Property Insurance Corporation, a state-funded company, that would provide windstorm coverage for homeowners who couldn’t find private insurance. Citizens is now the state’s largest insurance provider! But Citizens won’t cover homes with a replacement cost of more than $700,000, or $1 million in Miami-Dade County and the Florida Keys.

Insurance costs are hitting the middle class hardest. An insurance company deciding not to renew coverage against risks like fires and flooding can instantly devalue a property. A Florida homeowner who is dropped by an insurer could see the property's value decline 19% to 40%. You also can’t get a mortgage if you can’t get house insurance. And families who don't have adequate home insurance struggle terribly after disasters.

The federal government created the National Flood Insurance Program in 1968, and it now provides the vast majority of residential flood insurance in the U.S. The program is backed by taxpayer dollars, but it is chronically in debt and is increasingly unaffordable for homeowners because it wasn't designed for the enormous climate risk that the U.S. now faces. The average price of home insurance has risen by 21% nationwide since 2015. In Texas and Colorado, the average cost of home insurance has risen about 40% since 2015. In Florida, the statewide average is 57% higher. And in some of the hardest-hit areas, premiums have doubled or even tripled in the wake of major storms and fires.

The problem, as insurance companies see it, is that they can't charge enough to cover their bills after these major disasters. Says one insurance analyst, the United States is "marching steadily towards an uninsurable future.”

            The report concludes that Americans’ efforts climate change initiatives have mostly been “incremental” instead of “transformative.” The best possible future will emerge only if our nation, along with all other nations, work collectively to confront this enormous challenge.

 

Celestial Events

            It’s dark every morning now when most of us get up, but brilliant Venus is always there to greet us in the southeast.

            And it’s also dark when most folks are coming home from work, so look after dusk for Jupiter high in the southeast and Saturn in the south.

            The full moon occurs on 10/27 – the “Beaver” or “Ice is Forming” or “Snow” moon depending on your tradition.

            By 11/29, we’re now down to less than 9 hours of sunlight with winter solstice only a little over 3 weeks away.

 

Thought for the Week

“As we grow old, the beauty steals inward.” – Ralph Waldo Emerson

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 Nov. 10-23, 2023

 A Northwoods Almanac for Nov. 10-23, 2023  

 

Science Research in the Northwoods – Rusty Crayfish, Eurasian Watermilfoil, Wild Rice

            I suspect most of us are unaware of the remarkably diverse array of scientific research that is ongoing in our area. To get a sense of it all, I attended a two-day conference in mid-October,  “Science in the Northwoods,” at Kemp Natural Resources Station. The conference is typically held every other year, and its format is quite unusual – each speaker is only given 5 minutes to summarize their research! These are called “lightning talks” for good reason, and it’s a tall task for most of the researchers to encapsulate what is often several years of work into such a tiny window of time.

            Fifty-three researchers presented to an engaged audience on topics ranging widely from the disturbing decline of wild rice to the encouraging decline in rusty crayfish; to synchronistic reproduction in conifers to the dynamics of pre-historic white pine sunken logs in lake zones; to weather factors on mating mice to wolf predation on CWD-infected deer; to long-term ecological research on our northern lakes to short-term fluctuations in zooplankton in those lakes.

            It was truly a potpourri of topics, and if one talk didn’t trip your trigger, you only had to wait 5 minutes for another presentation that probably would. Here are three talks that stood out for me.

            Invasive rusty crayfish first appeared in Wisconsin lakes in the 1970s and soon exploded in population. They denuded submersed aquatic vegetation, clearcutting plants rooted in the sediments, which in turn impacted fish populations. However, today, rusty crayfish are declining in many lakes in our area, and their decline is intensifying. In a 36-year study on 10 Vilas County lakes, many of those ten lakes have seen steady declines, with a handful of lakes falling to nearly zero. For instance, in Little John Lake (south of Boulder Junction), researchers only found two rusty crayfish in the whole lake. 

rusty crayfish distribution

        

Remarkably, the declines have occurred with no intervention by humans. Researchers have linked the declines in part to a fungal disease or to crayfish destroying their own habitat, but whatever the reasons, the bottom line is that native plants, snails and bluegill have recovered, helping restore the ecosystems in several lakes.

The question has now arisen if this is just a bust in a natural cycle – will the crayfish just boom again? Or will another invasive species come in to fill the empty niche? More importantly, perhaps, are there lessons here? Is our best management strategy for rusty crayfish to do nothing?

Another remarkable story involves Eurasian watermilfoil (EWM), which was first found in Wisconsin lakes in the 1960s. A study of over 1,113 lakes found EWM in over 700 lakes statewide, but in most lakes, it’s not abundant. Moreover, EWM populations have been found to vary over time. They may decrease over time, increase over time, or maintain a constant low level, and there’s typically substantial year-to-year variation. 

A more specific long-term EWM study on 12 lakes found that EWM is naturally declining on 10 of those lakes. Researchers also found that lake-wide herbicide treatments aimed at controlling EWM had a larger negative effect on native aquatic plants than the effects observed in lakes which did not actively manage EWM. Thus, in many cases, the cure was worse than the disease.

            Bottom line: EWM populations are complex! Management can and should vary, or the best management may be no management at all – should we be letting EWM run its course? 

            Lastly, a study continues on Spur Lake, a 113-acre muck-bottomed, soft-water drainage lake in Oneida County which once was a very important wild rice lake – Native Americans used this area for centuries. The lake and surrounding wetlands also provide habitat for black ducks, ring-necked ducks, osprey, and common loons, as well as migratory waterfowl.

By the 1990s, the rice began disappearing, and today the lake supports dense beds of emergent, submergent, and floating-leaved aquatic plants, but very little rice.

            It’s unclear exactly why the lake lost its rice and was overtaken by other aquatic plants, though possible causes include long-term high water, stable water levels (wild rice prefers some variation in water depths over time), reduced flows in and out of the lake, warmer air and water temperatures, and heavy precipitation events.

A restoration experiment has been underway on the lake to try and get the rice back to its historical robust abundance. Researchers have taken four areas of the lake and divided each one into four plots. On one plot, they have cut the aquatic plants and are seeding in the rice. On another, they are only cutting the aquatic plants. On another they have only seeded the plot. And on the fourth, they’ve left plot alone as a control.

It's an unfinished story. Stay tuned.

 

Winter Finch Forecast!

Those of us who feed birds eagerly await the “Winter Finch Forecast,” which originates from Ontario, Canada, and has been arriving in our emails every October since 1999. Ron Pittaway, who lived in Algonquin Park in Ontario, began the forecast, making it his mission to offer predictability to winter finch sightings by compiling data from a network of naturalists across Canada and the U.S. 

Pittaway made the connection between the summer cone crops of cedars, spruces, and pines, and the abundance – or scarcity – of siskins, crossbills, and grosbeaks in the winter. “When the conifer trees have bumper [crops] and the cones open, the birds just need to reach into them and pull the seeds out. There’s food everywhere . . . and the birds stay north,” said Pittaway. 

Eastern white pine, for example, produces a bumper crop every three to five years, but rarely has two good years in a row. Eastern hemlock, on the other hand, furnishes a good crop every couple of years. Because of the astonishing synchronicity of trees over long distances, the quality of the crop is usually stretched out over hundreds or even thousands of miles of forest, forcing the birds to travel long distances in response to the boom–bust cycle of their specific wintering food.

Weather conditions factor in as well. If there’s a drought, or a frost in June, or any other disruption that interferes with seed production, the seed crops fall below normal, and tens of thousands of finches flee the boreal forest and move south into the U.S. to search for food. 

The hard part is knowing which seed crops throughout all of Canada are in a boom or bust year in any given fall. But now dozens of scientists across North America send in their data, and the forecast is usually quite accurate based on the analysis of their combined seed observations.

The biggest finch story so far this year is the movement of pine siskins south out of the boreal forest dur to a poor white spruce cone crop. Migration monitoring stations at Hawk Ridge Bird Observatory in Duluth, Whitefish Point Bird Observatory in the UP of Michigan, and Observatoire d’oiseaux de Tadoussac, Quebec, combined as of October 21 for over 115,000 pine siskins counted. Peak days included 19,260 on October 21 at Whitefish Point! So far at Whitefish Point, almost 50,000 pine siskins have moved through, comprising nearly 41% of all the birds to have migrated through Whitefish Point this fall. 

At Hawk Ridge in Duluth this fall, 10,311 pine siskins migrated over the ridge, certainly less than Whitefish Point, but still a very large number.

Bottom line on pine siskins – it should be a banner year with “armies” of them eventually around our feeders.

pine siskin, photo by Bev Engstrom

The purple finch movement has continued to be strong in the Midwest States. Northeast of Duluth on Lake Superior, an impressive 3,750 passed by Stoney Point MN on October 2nd. Individuals have already reached as far south as North Carolina, Tennessee, and Arkansas. Don’t be surprised if, as winter progresses, a late movement in January-February occurs into the Carolinas as eastern crops are depleted.

As for red crossbills (there are 10 “types” of red crossbills based on their calls), “Type 2 and 4 continue to occur in the northeast in their best numbers in years, even decades for type 4. Check areas with bumper eastern white pine cone crops for crossbills this winter.” 

For pine grosbeaks, there is a widespread crop of mountain ash berries from Lake Superior eastward. So, most pine grosbeaks should remain “home” in the eastern boreal forest. However, west of Lake Superior, the mountain ash crop generally appears below average. Thus, areas in the upper Midwest states and cities in Western Canada may see flocks of hungry grosbeaks searching for fruiting ornamental trees and well-stocked feeders with black oil sunflower seeds.

Common redpoll numbers should be modest, says the forecast. “Across the whole boreal forest, a good alder crop has been reported. However, in the same areas, the spruce and birch crops are poor to below average. Expect a moderate flight south out of the boreal forest.”

            Evening grosbeaks have declined 92% since 1970, but we had a bumper year of them last winter, the first such winter in nearly 30 years! For this winter, however, things don’t look as bright. The finch forecast says, “Eastward from Lake Superior is a bumper crop of chokecherries, and above-average berry and deciduous seed crop . .  Expect most birds to remain in the boreal forest and adjacent areas of Central Ontario Southern Quebec, the Maritime provinces, and New England states.”

However, it adds, “Evening grosbeaks in northwestern Ontario westward should move out of the boreal forest, looking for feeders in towns or suitable food sources further south.” So, we may get some dropping down our way from those in NW Ontario – we’ll see!

Finally, for bohemian waxwings, perhaps the most beautiful of all our winter visitors, “Most Bohemians will likely stay in the north because native mountain ash berry crops are good, and other berry crops range from fair to good across the eastern boreal forest.”

 

More on Wake Boats and Proposed Legislation

Lakes at Stake Wisconsin (LASW) is a Wisconsin based organization concerned about the outsized impacts of wake sports on our inland lakes (https://www.lakesatstake.org). On October 19, 2023, a bill (LRB 3518/1) was introduced into the Wisconsin legislature that would prevent wake sports from operating within 200 feet from shore, which is still far too close – it needs to be 500 feet from shore. 

This bill doesn’t go far enough to protect our lakeshores, our lake sediments and aquatic plants, and our lake water quality. Check their website for further information.

 

Celestial Events

            Look for the peak North Taurid meteor shower before dawn on 11/12. This is a modest event – expect around 10 meteors per hour.

            The new moon appears on 11/13. 

The peak Leonid meteor shower occurs before dawn on 11/18 – look for an average of 15 per hour.

 

Thought for the Week

“The open fire is a thing of beauty, and as profligate, in its small way, as the coloring of the leaves. But there it is, and we cherish it and dream peaceful drama in its glow. The acrid

fragrance of its spiraling smoke is an evening symbol of home and hearthside. Its outdoor

counterpart is the curb fire of fallen leaves. But when . . . the maples have shivered in the frost and wind and bare branches lift against the stars . . . for another season, the bright flame of the woodland leaps and gladdens only on the hearth.” – Hal Borland, Sundial of the Seasons

 

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.