A Northwoods Almanac for May 22 - June 4, 2026
Sightings: First-Of-Years (FOY) and Others
Is there a better time of year than mid-May when the birds are all returning, the wildflowers are blooming, and the mosquitoes have yet to wake up? This column could just be a long listing of FOYs - there are so many! Here’s a sampling.
5/4: We had our FOY rose-breasted grosbeak appear at our feeders. This was early! We usually don’t see them until around Mother’s Day.
5/6: A Harris’s sparrow showed up at our feeders and stayed around for a week. Harris’s are very uncommon visitors and always an exciting event. They nest in far northern Canada, and their spring migration usually takes them further west than here.
John James Audubon named the Harris's sparrow after Edward Harris, an American amateur ornithologist and financial supporter of Audubon. Harris accompanied him on an 1843 expedition along the Missouri River where the species was collected.
5/8: FOY ruby-throated hummingbirds appeared today for numerous people: Pat Schmidt in Hazelhurst, Mary Madsen in Presque Isle, and Marlene Rasmussen in Lac du Flambeau.
Pat noted that she has been keeping records since 2007 with an average date of 5/11. Her earliest date was 5/6 and latest date 5/13.
Marlene noted that she walked outside to put up her hummingbird feeder, and the hummer buzzed right up to her face. It apparently had been waiting rather impatiently!
Banding studies confirm that hummingbirds often return to the exact same location where they were hatched or have previously fed. If you’re not out there with the feeders ready, they’ll let you know. Folks talk about hummers looking in their windows if they haven’t put out the feeders early enough. They can live up to 9 years (a typical lifespan is 3–4 years), meaning the same individual may know you, and your property, quite well.
5/8: Mary heard our FOY killdeer in Manitowish.
5/8: On a hike in The Nature Conservancy’s Guido Rahr Tenderfoot Preserve on the Michigan border, I had an experience I’d never had before. A friend and I were measuring a massive old yellow birch that had died and broken off about 20 feet up when suddenly out of the hollow top of the tree a turkey vulture leapt out and flew to a nearby tree. She stayed nearby and appeared anxious, so we surmised she had to be sitting on an active nest within the birch. We walked away quickly to allow her to return to her nest, but it was a first for me - I would never have guessed a turkey vulture would be nesting in the hollowed out top of a giant yellow birch.
5/9: Mary Madsen in Presque Isle reported a FOY Baltimore oriole.
5/9: I heard my FOY ovenbird in the Frog Lake and Pines SNA.
5/12: Wood ducks have been back for many weeks now, but Bev Engstrom captured a great photo of seven wood ducks perched close together in a tree. One doesn’t think of ducks as perching birds, but wood ducks commonly perch and walk on branches, utilizing sharp, hooked claws on their webbed feet to grip bark and branches. They also commonly forage in uplands and have a particular affinity for acorns. They possess an extremely expandable esophagus, enabling them to swallow large acorns. As many as 30 small acorns have been found in one wood duck’s esophagus, and 20 large acorns in another.
photo by Bev Engstrom
5/13: We have a pair of evening grosbeaks and a pair of pine siskins still visiting our feeders. The question is whether either will stay and nest. Both have nested here in the past, but they are wildly inconsistent in doing so. We also finally got our FOY hummingbird today.
5/13: On a walk near the Manitowish River, Mary and Callie heard our FOY parula warbler and redstart, indicating the neotropical migrants are returning!
5/14: As further proof that many of the neotropicals are back, I heard my FOY Nashville warbler, yellow warbler, and common yellowthroat, and saw my FOY barn swallows. BTW, Nashville warblers nest in Wisconsin only as far south as the middle of the state, so the name “Nashville” has nothing to do with its habitat or nesting range. It was first named by an ornithologist who collected the bird during migration in Nashville, TN.
Sparrows!
As of 5/15, we have five species of sparrows visiting our feeders and/or singing in the wetlands below our house: swamp sparrow, white-throated sparrow, chipping sparrow, song sparrow, and white-crowned sparrow (we had a 6thspecies - a Harris’s sparrow - but it left on 5/13). Oh, and dark-eyed juncos are technically sparrows as well (part of the passerine family Emberizidae), so add them to the list.
We had fox sparrows and American tree sparrows a few weeks back, too, but both species have moved on to their northern nesting grounds.
So, it’s been a sparrowy spring - 9 species!
Sparrows can be a bird watcher’s nemesis because of their often subtle differences. Lots of people frustratedly refer to them as LBBs - little brown birds - or LBGs - little brown guys.
Learning their songs makes IDing them easier. The white-throated sparrow’s clear, crystal notes are perhaps the easiest and are often notated as “Oh, sweet, Canada, Canada, Canada.”
Several other sparrow species nest in our area and are worth learning: Lincoln’s sparrow, Savannah sparrow, clay-colored sparrow, and Eastern towhee (part of the passerine family Emberizidae like juncos).
Most city folks are extremely familiar with the ubiquitous non-native house sparrow, but we rarely see them here given our contiguous woodlands.
I appreciate sparrows (when I’m not complaining about how hard they are to ID) for their adaptive coloration - they know how to fit in, an evolutionary skill gained over millennia from being a desired prey species. They’re typically species of dense shrublands or grasslands where matching the vegetation, and using the vegetation as cover, makes survival more likely. You have to admire their evolution into small cryptic birds that can melt into their environment.
Alligators? No, Yellow Water Lily Rhizomes
An old friend sent me a photo of something floating on the water that from a distance could be imagined to be a small alligator. She laughingly said it looked like a sea monster. Well, we have neither sea monsters or alligators in the Northwoods. What we do have, however, are the spongy and huge perennial rhizomes of the yellow or white pond lily, likely dug up from the sediments by a muskrat or beaver. They’re often the diameter of a baseball bat and can be many feet in length. The black spots on the rhizome are the former attachments of the stalks of the pond lilies that rise to the surface with their leaves and flowers in the spring, and then die back in the fall.
contributed photo
Why Do Most Songbirds Migrate at Night?
1- Daytime air is more turbulent, which wastes energy trying to buck the wind and stay on course. Nighttime air is more stable and smoother, making for a straighter flight with less energy burned.
2- Navigation at night using the stars is remarkably accurate.
3- Most birds feed during the day and not at night, so it makes sense to fly long distances at night and fuel up during the day.
Conservation Congress Results on Funding the DNR and the Stewardship Program
At the recent Conservation Congress meeting held around the state, voters supported (75% to 20% with 5% no opinion) adding a permanent 1/8-cent state sales tax (0.125%) to help fund all fish and wildlife conservation programs. Of all funding mechanisms for our DNR, this makes the most sense by far. Everyone benefits from DNR policies protecting our lands, water, and wildlife - we all need to pay in to support the work.
Voters also supported (81% to 9% with 10% no opinion) legislation to reauthorize the Knowles-Nelson Stewardship program for at least 10 years with up to $1 billion in funding:
4485 yes, 489 no. All 72 counties voted yes, zero counties voted no.
The legislature needs to hear the people on these issues and act accordingly.
A Brief History of the Clean Water Act
Before the Clean Water Act, there were virtually no regulations governing water pollution, leading to severe impacts on both human health and wildlife. In New York City, hundreds of millions of gallons of untreated sewage were dumped into the Hudson River daily, and Ohio’s Cuyahoga River famously caught fire multiple times in 1969 due to oil and industrial waste, as did rivers in Baltimore, Buffalo, Detroit, and Philadelphia. Massive fish die-offs weren’t uncommon, which also had profound impacts on birds.
In October of 1972, our U.S. Congress authorized the Clean Water Act, which passed in the Senate by a vote of 74-0 (26 not voting) and in the House 366-11. Thirteen days later, President Nixon vetoed it at midnight out of a stated concern for “spiraling prices and increasingly onerous taxes.”
By 2:00 AM that same night, the Senate voted 52-12 (36 senators not voting) and the House voted 247-23 to override the veto. Ninety-six votes came from Republicans in the House override vote. The Environmental Protection Agency had just been established two years earlier via near unanimous votes, too, in both houses of Congress.
It’s hard to imagine such bipartisan effort today even with such an obvious need as clean water. The Clean Water Act has been an environmental, economic, and aesthetic success ever since, with the cleaning of the heavily polluted Wisconsin River watershed serving as the best example of this success in Wisconsin.
The Clean Water Act accomplished the following:
*Established the structure for regulating pollutant discharges into U.S. waters.
*Gave EPA the authority to implement pollution control programs such as setting wastewater standards for industry.
*Made it unlawful for any person to discharge any pollutant from a point source into navigable waters, unless a permit was obtained under its provisions.
*Funded the construction of sewage treatment plants.
*Recognized the need to address the critical problems posed by nonpoint source pollution.
Unless you’re an old gray hair like me, you might think our nation’s water has always been protected, and that this law always was on the books. But it sure wasn’t, and it was only through intense public pressure and a bipartisan Congress that it was passed.
Celestial Events
May’s second full moon, the “blue moon,” occurs on May 31. It’s the year’s most distant moon, and thus the smallest of the year.
By June 1, we hit 15 hours and 30 minutes of sunlight.
Thought for the Week
“We forget that nature itself is one vast miracle transcending the reality of night and nothingness. We forget that each one of us in his personal life repeats that miracle. - Loren Eisley
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