A Northwoods Almanac for Jan. 5-18, 2024 by John Bates
Christmas Bird Counts- Manitowish Waters and Minocqua
On 12/18, twenty-four volunteers counted birds in the Manitowish Waters area as part of Audubon’s 124thChristmas Bird Count. This was our 31st count year, and unique to the count was our warm weather and snowless landscape – it felt like October out there! Bird abundance was quite low in response to the weather, but we still found 25 species, which mirrored our average species count over all these years.
Some highlights: American goldfinch outpaced all other birds, including black-capped chickadees. We were thrilled to spot one rough-legged hawk, a result of our lack of snow – usually they are well south of us by now where they can hunt on open ground. And we were very lucky to get a common merganser, a result of open water still occurring on many rivers and creeks..
I was very surprised and pleased that we got one pine siskin and had one sighting of 28 common redpolls. Both species have been scarce so far this winter.
Bohemian waxwings were the only Canadian species present in any significant numbers. We had 50 or more feeding on our crabapple trees alone, and they’re still around as of this writing (12/28).
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| Bohemian waxwing photo out one of our windows |
Conspicuous by their absence, however, were other Canadian birds like purple finches, pine grosbeaks, evening grosbeaks, and both species of crossbills. The good news relative to their scarcity is that it means they’re doing well in Canada and have no reason to migrate south. Our loss in sightings means their gain in winter survival.
Conspicuous also was the continued absence of Canada jays – it’s over a decade since one appeared in our count area.
Overall then, this was a very quiet count. My thought on why is that birds don’t need to come to feeders, or come south from Canada, when it’s this warm and this snowless. Until we get heavy snows and intense cold, they’ll likely remain north.
The Minocqua Christmas Count took place on 12/28, and while I don’t have the final tally yet, the highlight for our count group was a small flock of snow buntings on a tiny stretch of sand on Big Arbor Vitae Lake. As ground feeders, snow buntings typically have no choice but to migrate far south of here to forage on open grasslands and soils. This count year, however, we had no measurable snow, so some have stayed north.
Cat Faces
Mary and I often hike in an area with fire scars on many of the big red and white pines. The term that I’ve always used for these scars is “cat faces.” Cat faces are usually found on the backside of the trunk where a fire burning up a slope has wrapped around the tree. As the fire passes by, the fire “eddies” on the backside and can sit there and burn while the rest of the fire continues forward. Thus, you can surmise the direction the fire was running by where the cat face is on the trunk.
Cat face scars in mature pines are often a legacy of multiple past fires, as well as the localized attacks of bark beetles within the scorched regions of the bole. Each wounding event expands the percentage of the trunk that could be exposed to future fires.
The largest cat faces I’ve seen in Wisconsin’s Northwoods are perhaps seven feet high on the trunk, but in California sequoias and coastal redwoods, the cat face can be astonishingly enormous. Over their lifetimes, a fire might burn a cave-like hole in the trunk up to a hundred feet off the ground. I’ve included a few photos of white pine, red pine, and redwood cat faces to illustrate what they look like.
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| Fire scar on white pine |
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| Fire scar on red pine in Frog Lake and Pines SNA |
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| Fire scar on a redwood |
Cat face is also a term used for the scars caused from the early use of Caterpillar dozers scraping the sides of the tree trunks with their steel tracks/blades, or from an overgrown knot or overgrown scar caused by a falling tree on the trunk of an adjoining tree.
A Tale of Two Winters
Our continued warm winter weather and lack of snow stands in complete contrast to last winter’s deep snows that lasted all the way into May. At this time last year, we were skiing on a two-foot base of snow and working extra hard to break snowshoe trails.
Deer Hunt/Wolf Population
The endless debate, as well as the endless repetition of misinformation, continues on both the impact of wolves on Wisconsin’s white-tailed deer and the reasons for why the 2023 deer harvest was lower than 2022, and what that all means.
So let’s start with some wolf math:
1- How many deer in Wisconsin? – 1.6 million was the estimate this fall.
2- How many of those deer live in the northern counties (north of Hwy. 64)? 400,000 is the estimate most frequently given.
3- How many deer does a single wolf kill in a year? All research says 15-19 per year. Let’s say 20 to make the math easy.
4- How many wolves do we have in Wisconsin? Current estimate is around 1,000.
5- So, how many deer do wolves kill on average currently? Around 20,000.
6- We have 400,000 deer in the North Country; the wolves kill 20,000. This leaves us with 380,000 deer.
7- If the DNR wolf estimate is low, as some allege, let’s up it to 1,500. Multiply by 20 deer eaten per year by each wolf – that’s 30,000 deer, and still leaves us with 370,000 in the North Country.
8- The only other kink in these statistics is that we may not have had 400,000 deer in the northern counties this fall due to the extreme snow conditions of last winter, which led to low fawn reproduction this spring.
Some deer math:
As of 12/28/23, the total deer harvest for all seasons (gun, archery, crossbow, youth, muzzleloader, December antlerless, and antler-less holiday) for Wisconsin was 284,203, according to the WDNR. Of that, hunters registered the final number of 175,060 white-tailed deer during the nine-day gun deer season, a decrease of around 18% from 2022. However, keep in mind that in 2021, the total nine-day gun deer season harvest was 175,667, almost exactly what was harvested this year.
Why is the deer hunt down from last year? Lots of possible reasons:
1- While the Wisconsin winter of 2022-23 was moderate overall in the northern forest region, it included “very severe” conditions due to heavy snows in five northwestern counties – Iron, Ashland, Bayfield, Washburn, and Douglas, according to the DNR's annual report on winter severity. The number one reason for annual deer population increases or decreases is weather – in particular, the severity and length of the previous winter.
2- The weather was mild statewide during the entire 2023 hunt, with most days featuring temperatures in the 40s, with light winds, and no snow on the landscape, making it more difficult for hunters to see and track deer.
3- A large acorn crop was reported in most of the state, providing more natural food for deer and helping reduce movement.
4- Deer baiting over the years has trained many deer to be nocturnal.
5- Predation is also a factor, and we have many predators on the landscape who eat deer. Coyotes rank #1 in predation of deer, bears #2, bobcats #3, and wolves #4, according to all the best studies conducted to date on deer predation.
Deer Harvest Comparisons
All this begs an additional evaluation: Compared to many previous deer harvests, how was the deer harvest?
A little lower than average. Harvests go up and down for a host of reasons, but overall they’ve been relatively consistent since 2009. Deer harvests were abnormally high from 1995 to 2008 due to an extreme overabundance of deer, so if you’re comparing harvests to those years, yes, deer harvests are down. But compared to years earlier than this period, or after this period, deer harvests are for the most part equal or compared to early years, much higher now.
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| Deer harvest stats from 1960 to 2022 |
Please look at the charts of the historical total deer harvests in Wisconsin since 1960, as well as the historical antlered harvests from 1960. Antlered harvests, for instance, have been pretty flat since 2009 after a concerted effort was made to reduce deer herd numbers due to their impacts on the landscape. The difference in the statewide antlered harvest for the 5 yr. average from 2018 to 2022 compared to the 2023 antlered harvest is only 5,307 (91,205 compared to 85,848).
The ultimate question is what should the hunting public and the rest of the non-hunting public expect as a reasonable number of deer to be harvested every year? That’s a highly debatable number depending on what you desire – high populations of deer to increase your personal harvest or low population numbers to reduce landscape-wide impacts of deer on forest reproduction, farm/garden crops, and home landscaping.
Currently, 11.7% of Wisconsin residents buy a deer hunting license.
Celestial Events
On Jan. 8th, the sun will finally rise earlier at 7:39 for the first time since June 9, 2023. The sun has been “stuck” rising at 7:40 from 12/27 to 1/7.
The new moon occurs on 1/11.
We hit 9 hours of daylight on 1/13 – recall that at winter solstice we were only receiving 8 hours and 39 minutes of daylight. So, there’s progress!
On 1/14, look after dusk for Saturn two degrees above the waxing crescent moon.
Quote for the Week
On the erosion of truth in societies: “It proceeds from open hostility to the truth, to overt lying, to endless repetition of those lies, to magical thinking (i.e., an open embrace of contradiction), to misplaced faith in one person or ideal (‘I am your voice’).”
An observation regarding the last step: “Once truth had become oracular [uttered as if divinely inspired or infallible] rather than factual, evidence was irrelevant.”
- From On Tyranny, by Timothy Snyder and Nora Krug.
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