A Northwoods Almanac for March 15 - 28, 2024

 A Northwoods Almanac for March 15 - 28, 2024  

 

Beware the Ides of March 

The “Ides of March” corresponds to today, March 15, a day notorious for the assassination of Julius Caesar in 44 BC when Caesar was brutally stabbed 23 times by some 60 senators at a meeting of the Roman Senate. The senators acted over fears that Caesar's unprecedented concentration of power during his dictatorship was undermining the Roman Republic.

According to Plutarch, a seer had warned Caesar that harm would come to him no later than the Ides of March. The Roman biographer Suetonius identified the seer as a “haruspex” named Spurinna.

If you’re not familiar with what a haruspex is, in the religion of ancient Rome, a haruspex was a person trained to practice a form of divination called haruspicy via the inspection of the entrails of sacrificed animals, especially the livers of sacrificed sheep and poultry.

So, perhaps Caesar had more than ample reason to shrug off this prophecy. On his way to the Theatre of Pompeywhere he would be assassinated, Caesar passed the seer and joked, “The ides of March have come,” meaning that the prophecy had not been fulfilled. The seer replied, “Aye, Caesar; but not gone.”

Over sixteen hundred years later, Shakespeare dramatized this moment in his play Julius Caesar, wherein the soothsayer warns Caesar, “Beware the Ides of March.”

That phrase has come down over centuries to signify a fateful day, one with a sense of foreboding that an unpredictable danger is in the air, that anything might happen.

For the record, however, “Ides” simply referred at the time of Caesar to the first full moon of a given month, which usually fell between the 13th and 15th. For the months of March, May, July and October, the Ides fell on the 15th day, while in every other month, the Ides fell on the 13th day.     

So, “the Ides of March” has a bad rap. In fact, the Ides of March once signified something quite positive – the new year, the spring coming, which meant celebrations and rejoicing.        Shakespeare stabbed that notion to death with just one line.

            Still, that Shakespearian curse pretty well summarizes normal March weather in the Northwoods. You just never know what’s going to happen, even in this crazy non-winter.

            More importantly, it also reflects the reality of how hard life normally is for most wildlife species in March. March is classically the month of greatest hunger for wildlife – the culmination of winter – and thus the month where death often overtakes those individuals weakened by constant cold and want since November. It’s now that individuals often die with the warmth of spring in sight just a few counties south and only a few weeks away.

BTW, the word “Ides” derives from a Latin word that means to divide, and perhaps that is most appropriate for March, a month with its attention truly divided between a lingering winter and a waiting spring. 

 

Sightings

            On March 3, Mary, Callie and I watched a flock of perhaps 150 snow buntings careening over Powell Marsh. It’s a sheer guess at the number – they were far too fast for me to accurately estimate. A week earlier we had seen a smaller flock of snow buntings wheeling and dealing also at Powell.

            This is notable, because snow buntings usually don’t migrate through our area until at least the beginning of April when the snowpack has deflated. In heavy snow years, we may not see them until late April or early May. They’re ground feeders, and if they can’t access the ground to feed, it’s a fool’s errand to head north.

            So, they’re doing what a lot of us have been doing – acting like spring is here when the risk is that we’re still in for some serious winter weather. 

            We’ll see. I’m not worried about humans. We have warm homes and grocery stores. But birds heading to their far north breeding grounds don’t have such luxuries, and I worry about their risk-taking.

            On March 6, I saw my first Canada geese flying down the Manitowish River. The next day, 3/7, on Powell Marsh, I watched 6 Canada geese land on a tiny patch of open water, and then two mallards, also my first sighting of the year, took off from behind some vegetation.

            And on 3/7, our FOY (first-of-year) common grackle appeared below our house in Manitowish. Red-winged blackbirds are sure to be close behind.

photo by Bev Engstrom

Signs of March if It Was an Ordinary Year

·      Creeks and rivers open.

·      The first robins and red-winged blackbirds appear around the equinox.

·      Eagles are incubating eggs.

·      Mud

·      Potholes

·      Pussy willows bud out.

·      The sun rises before you want to get up – in fact, you now have to get up early to see the stars.

·      Snow fleas surface by the millions on top of the snow. 

·      Seed catalogs get dog-eared, and we hallucinate that watermelons will actually ripen this year, and go ahead and order their seeds, when they never have ripened before.

·      Rotting ice gets chopped off of decks, steps, roofs . . . only to ice up again.

·      The travel bug hits big-time – Corfu, Crete, Arizona anyone?

·      Lady beetles appear by the dozens/hundreds on inside windows. 

·      Icicles drip, gutters drip, trees drip.

·      Sap rises.

·      Baseball is in the news while we still look out at a foot of snow.

·      One day a window is opened for the first time since October.

·      Spring cleaning/spring projects/spring garage sales all get envisioned.

·      The first chipmunk emerges. 

·      Trumpeter swans bugle on the little open water they can find.

·      Otters play on ice floes.

·      45° feels like T-shirt weather.

·      One day the wood stove stays cold because the sun is warmth enough.        

            This year, most of the above already happened, leaving us anxiously guessing what April could possibly do for an encore.

 

Shortest Ice-Cover Record

            Madison's Lake Monona saw its shortest-ever period of ice cover this winter – 44 days.  Nearby Lake Mendota also experienced a 44-day freeze duration, which was its second shortest on record. 

            Ice duration records have been kept on Madison’s lakes since 1852. The Feb. 28 date marks only the second time in the 171-year history that "ice off" was declared for Lakes Mendota and Monona in the month of February. The duration used to be a little over 100 days.

 

Deer Collisions Way Up

            We recently had to have our car in the body shop for some minor repairs, and I asked how business was – one would think there would have been less auto body work needed this winter because the roads have been good overall. Well, not so. I was told they were crazy busy with deer collision work. Our pittance of snow and ice has meant that deer have been able to easily forage as far and as often as they’ve liked, so it’s resulted in far more winter car/deer collisions than usual. 

            On the other hand, the shop had far fewer cars in for repairs due to ice and snow conditions. 

            So, a trade-off.

 

Celestial Events

            The spring/vernal equinox officially occurs on 3/19, but in our area, we actually experience nearly equal periods of day and night on 3/16. So, as of 3/17, we now begin to have days longer than nights. 

            Look on 3/21 for Venus to be barely above Saturn in the pre-dawn sky.

            Full moon in March occurs on 3/25. Called variously the “Sap Moon,” the “Hard Crust on the Snow Moon,” or the “Crow Moon,” most of the U.S. will be treated to a penumbral lunar eclipse. A penumbral lunar eclipse takes place when the Moon moves through the faint, outer part of Earth's shadow, the penumbra. It’s subtle. Penumbral eclipses never progress to reach the dramatic minutes of true totality. At best, at mid-eclipse, very observant people will only notice a dark shading on the moon’s face, while others may notice nothing at all. 

            If you’re so inclined, the maximum eclipse will occur around 2:12 a.m., with the dusky shading occurring for about 45 minutes on either size of the maximum.

 

Thought for the Week

            “You say that I use the land, and I reply, yes, it is true; but it is not the first truth. The first truth is that I love the land; I see that it is beautiful; I delight in it; I am alive in it.” - N. Scott Momaday (Kiowa) 

            Momaday passed away on January 24 at age 89. His novel House Made of Dawn was awarded the Pulitzer Prize for Fiction in 1969 – it was the first work of a Native American to be awarded the Pulitzer. Momaday received the National Medal of Arts from President George W. Bush in 2007 for works “that celebrate and preserve Native American art and oral tradition.”