A Northwoods Almanac for July 19 to August 1, 2024
The Great Wisconsin Birdathon Counted 280 Bird Species!
This year's Great Wisconsin Birdathon sponsored by the Natural Resource Foundation of Wisconsin involved 86 teams statewide, with 600+ dedicated birders participating across 37 Wisconsin counties. There were teams and individuals watching their backyard feeders, teams birding solely by boat, and teams even birding for a full 24 hours! Mary and I counted for “The River Raptor” team, which included 9 teams from around the state who only counted birds by canoe or kayak along a river (the teams racked up 157 species). We also counted for our 2nd annual bird count in Iron County.
Overall, a total of 280 bird species were counted, including 37 species considered special concern in Wisconsin, 12 species considered threatened, and 8 species considered endangered.
Importantly, the event raised more than $116,000 for critical bird conservation. Proceeds support high priority bird conservation projects through NRF's Bird Protection Fund including conservation of Wisconsin’s most threatened and endangered bird species; creation and protection of critical breeding, stopover, and overwintering habitat; research and monitoring; and education and outreach.
Lake Wabasso – An RNA and SNA
Several weeks ago I paddled Wabasso Lake with 25 women from the “Lady Yakkers,” a women’s kayak group that paddles an area lake every week, and has a blast doing it. I choose Wabasso for the group because it is designated both as a State Natural Area (SNA) and is within a Federal Research Natural Area (RNA), which is relatively rare.
Relative to SNAs, the Wisconsin legislature established the State Board for the Preservation of Scientific Areas in 1951, the first such state-sponsored program in the United States. Its purpose was to highlight and protect the last remaining vestiges of Wisconsin’s native plant communities. With initial guidance from eminent scientists such as Aldo Leopold, Norman Fassett, and John Curtis, a council of 11 conservationists began a systematic review of landscapes throughout Wisconsin, looking for exceptional natural areas, all of which harbored features essentially unaltered by human-caused disturbances, or that had substantially recovered from past disturbance.
As of 2017, 687 State Natural Areas (SNAs) have been designated, encompassing a total of nearly 400,000 acres. Each SNA protects one or more natural communities, geological formations, and/or archaeological sites as refuges for biodiversity and endangered or threatened species. They also serve as research sites for determining the baseline ecological functions of a particular natural community.
RNAs, on the other hand, are relatively few. The Chequamegon/Nicolet National Forest contains around 1.5 million acres, and out of all of that, only 30 sites have been given the “Research Natural Area” status.
Like SNAs, federal Research Natural Areas (RNAs) are considered the “crown jewels” of national forests and other federal lands. They conserve a representative array of all significant natural ecosystems and the processes that maintain them, and are protected against human activities that might directly or indirectly alter or impair their ecological integrity.
RNAs serve as controlled baselines or benchmarks that provide a way to track some of the effects of management practices. Managers can’t monitor their practices unless they can compare what they do to something that is unaltered. RNAs also offer outright protection for natural communities, special habitats, aquatic features, rare species populations, and as a reminder of what once was. “The more we do nothing, the more value these areas will have,” says Connie Millar, a research geneticist for the US Forest Service.
So, what’s so special about Wabasso Lake? The 49-acre lake is located within the 779-acre Headwaters Lakes RNA, which features a variety of high quality plant and aquatic communities, as well as a complex of wild lakes including Wabasso Lake. The submerged aquatic plants are the principal features of interest in the lake, with several specialized sterile rosette species well represented including pipewort (Eriocaulon septangulare) and waterwort (Elatine minima). Rare plants and animals found here include Robbins’ spikerush (Eleocharis robbinsii) and wood turtle (Glyptemys insculpta).Uplands surrounding the lake contain patches of old-growth eastern hemlock with high quality stands of pine and northern white cedar.
All of that adds up to the simple beauty of the place. We all need food and water, yes, but we also need beauty, and that’s what the Yakkers and I shared in spades that morning.
Fall Migration Underway – Say It’s Not So!
Hard to believe, but the initial wave of southbound shorebirds begins moving through our area in the last days of June or first week of July. These early birds are adults, which depart their far northern breeding grounds first and leave young of the year to figure it out on their own.
Mary and I were walking on a dike at Powell Marsh on July 9th when we heard the distinctive “tu-tu” call of a lesser yellowlegs, and then had the bird fly right over our heads. We were delighted to see it, and then not so delighted when we considered what it meant – migration has already begun.
Monarch Population Extremely Low
Several folks in our area have told me that they have no monarch butterflies feeding on their milkweed plants, while last summer the monarchs seemed to be everywhere. Mary and I have seen a few this summer, but I hadn’t realized that the Texas’ 2023 ice storm followed by the 2023 historic hot summer hit the monarch butterfly population hard. Eastern population monarchs migrate up and down the Interstate 35 corridor in Central Texas from Mexico to Canada, and this weather devastated them. The early 2023 migration from Mexico to Canada faced a devastating loss of milkweed, the host plant for monarch eggs, due to the ice storm in late January to early February. Later that year, a hot summer followed by a dry fall killed off sources of nectar needed as the butterflies made their way south, a time when they must fuel up for overwintering.
The result? Reports from overwintering sites for the monarch’s eastern population in Mexico showed a 59 percent decrease — the second lowest count in history, while the California population dropped 30 percent.
Orley “Chip” Taylor, founding director of Monarch Watch, wrote, “The depth of this decline is beyond our experience, and the implications for the future of the monarch migration are surely of concern. However, populations have been low in the past. This count does not signal the end of the eastern monarch migration.”
According to the World Wildlife Fund, which counts monarch butterflies in Mexico each December, the 2023-24 population occupied only 2.2 acres of Mexican forest. The previous season it covered 5.46 acres. In 2022-23, that number was 13.59 acres. The lowest was during the 2013-14 overwintering season, when monarchs covered only 1.65 acres.
The good news, or so we hope: “Catastrophic mortality due to extreme weather events is part of their history,” Taylor said. “The numbers have been low many times in the past and have recovered, and they will again. Monarchs are resilient.”
Baby Birds
We have been watching numerous baby birds being fed at our feeders. Juvenile purple finches, red-winged blackbirds, and downy woodpeckers have all been begging any adults around them for regurgitated sunflower seeds – it doesn’t seem to matter who is the actual mother or father.
When songbird chicks fledge, they only fly a short distance from the nest, and then beg to be fed for another two weeks or more while they learn how to feed themselves.
Those songbirds that will be migrating south in August have a very short window to raise their young into the full strength of adulthood, and they’re all hard at it.
Orchids!
Mary and I have come across three species of orchids in the first weeks of July: Rose pogonias and grass-pink orchids in bog mats around several lakes, and ragged fringed orchid in damp uplands on one of the dikes in Powell Marsh.
All three are uniquely beautiful. “Pogonia” derives from Greek pogon, meaning ‘beard,’ and describes the fringed, or bearded, purple and yellow surface of the lip. The lip is so distinctive that other common names include “snakemouth orchid” and “adders-mouth orchid.”
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| rose Pogonia, photo by John Bates |
The lip of the blazing pink to purple pale grass-pink orchid stands out because it sits above the rest of the flower – the lip of most orchids project from the lower part of the flower.
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| grass pink orchids, photo by John Bates |
And the lip of the ragged fringed orchid splits into three lobes, each one deeply fringed to the point of appearing torn.
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| ragged fringed orchid, photo by John Bates |
Nearly all orchids live in association with specific fungi that they require to germinate, sprout, grown and thrive. In fact, over 90% of land plants are thought to form mycorrhizal relationships with fungi, which is when fungal tissue and a plant's root tissue combine to help the plant grow.
The complexity of these relationships boggles the imagination sometimes, and explains why one should never try to collect orchids – the fungal relationships just don’t exist wherever they are transplanted, and the orchids rarely live. “Collect” them with photos, and leave them to thrill the next person who stumbles upon them.
July Wildflowers
July brings a plethora of wildflowers growing along roadways, in wetlands, and in open woodlands. The two most fragrant flowers I know, common milkweed and spreading dogbane, are now prolific, along with other commoners like our native yarrow and the non-native and invasive ox-eye daisy and bird’s-foot trefoil.
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| spreading dogbane, photo by John Bates |
In pine woods, round-leaf pyrola, partridgeberry, and pippsissewa have come into flower, all of which are natives. And in the wetlands, it’s a glory in particular of white water lilies, with an enormous array of other wetland flower species just now coming.
Beauty now abounds, and we simply have to open our eyes and pay attention.
Celestial Events
Tomorrow, July 20, marks the 55th anniversary of Neil Armstrong walking on the moon in 1969. I was 17 years old, and I remember it well.
The full moon – the “half way through the summer” moon – occurs on 7/21, and our days are now growing shorter by two minutes every day.
The peak Delta Aquarid Meteor Shower takes place in the predawn hours of 7/28.
Thought for the Week
“I dream of a world guided by a lens of stories rooted in the revelations of science and framed with an Indigenous worldview – stories in which matter and spirit are both given voice.” – Robin Wall Kimmerer
Please share your outdoor sightings and thoughts: e-mail me at johnbates2828@gmail.com, 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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