A Northwoods Almanac for 2/18/22

 A Northwoods Almanac for 2/18 – 3/3/22  

 

Sightings – Redpoll Irruption and Nyjer Seed 

            Common redpolls have appeared in large numbers at local bird feeders over the last month. Bruce Bacon, master bird bander in Mercer, currently has 100 or more redpolls at his feeders, of which he banded at least 70 on 2/9. 

            This is an “irruption” year for redpolls, a phenomenon driven by widespread failures of the winter seed crops they favor – birch, alder, and spruce. Redpoll irruptions typically occur every other year, and given that their breeding range is in the far northern boreal forest, this is usually the only time they come into contact with human populations.  

            Redpolls are being seen as far south as Texas and Alabama, a long flight for these small songbirds!

            Black oil sunflower seed serves them well, but they have a real affinity for nyjer (thistle) seed. When I spoke with Bruce last week, he noted that he had a feeder of nyjer seed up all winter, and it had been untouched. He’d heard that other folks were having this problem, and that nyjer seed can quickly spoil. So, he bought a new bag, put up a new feeder, and voila, within 24 hours, he had redpolls eating the new seed while still avoiding the old seed. At $58 per 50 lb. bag, compared to $30 for a similar bag of sunflower seeds, this is a very expensive seed to offer birds, so it’s not something you want to see spoil.

            BTW, nyjer is a small, thin, black seed from the African yellow daisy (Guizotia abyssinica), so it’s not related to the thistle plant even though it’s often casually referred to as thistle seed. Some folks see a prickly thistle plant pop up in their yard, and blame it on this seed, but I repeat, it’s not thistle.  

            Additionally, the nyjer seed that is sold as birdseed is sterilized by heating the seed to almost 250°F, which also sterilizes any potentially noxious and invasive plant seeds that get mixed in with the nyjer seed. 

            Most nyjer seed that you can purchase is grown in places like Singapore, Burma, Ethiopia, and Myanamar. It’s all hand-harvested overseas because mechanical harvesters do a poor job with such a small seed. So, add together the import/tariff costs and the labor cost, and that’s why this seed is so pricey. The other reason for the high cost is that when ethanol speculation caused corn prices to soar, many farmers switched to growing corn rather than nyjer, or sunflowers for that matter. 

            Some nyjer seed, an adapted variety that matures at an earlier date, is grown in the U.S., but really very little.

            High in oil, nyjer is a nutritious source of energy for backyard birds, but for the money, we just stick with sunflower seeds. 

            

Great Horned Owls Nesting

Great horned owls are currently engaging in peak courtship, hooting back-and-forth in preparation for mating and laying eggs. In Wisconsin, territorial hooting ends generally by mid-February in keeping with the timing of first eggs being laid anywhere from late January in the southern counties to mid-March in the North Country.

            The female lays one to four eggs, but most commonly two, and she does all the incubating, maintaining her eggs at an incubating temperature near 98°F, even when the ambient temperature is more than 70° colder. 

            The male isn’t a total loss – he continually delivers prey to her through the night.

The eggs are incubated for a month or so, then the chicks hatch out naked with their eyes closed. They grow incredibly fast – in one study, the three young gained an average of over an ounce a day during the first four weeks after hatching. That may not sound like much, but adult great horned owls only weigh 2 to 5 pounds, the female usually weighing a pound heavier than the male. 

If food is in short supply, the youngest and weakest may be killed by the older, larger sibling, which always makes me less critical of the way my older brother treated me. 

            Is it necessary for great horned owls to nest so much earlier than other birds? Yes. Unlike robins, which incubate eggs for 12 days and fledge their young in two weeks, great horned owls watch over their owlets for months. Six weeks after hatching, the young birds test their wings, but only after twelve weeks will the owlets fly. Even after fledging, they are still fed by their parents well into July.

 

Great Backyard Bird Count 

            The Great Backyard Bird Count takes place beginning today and runs until the 21^st. Anyone from across the world can participate with as little as 15 minutes of time. Participating is easy, fun to do alone or with others, and can be done anywhere you find birds.

            Here’s the protocol:

1-     Decide where you will watch birds.

2-    Watch birds for 15 minutes or more at least once over the four days, February 18-21.

3-    Count all the birds you see or hear within your planned time/location and share your bird sightings using either the free Merlin Bird ID app, the free eBird Mobile app, or the free eBird website for desktop computer. 

            I use the eBird website, which can hold all my data from any birding trips I’ve ever been on, or simply from any daily observations I have at our bird feeders. 

In 2021, over 300,000 people from 190 countries participated, identifying 6,436 species of birds worldwide!

            The largest “flock” of birds reported was a gathering of 250,000 common murres on Southeast Farallon Island near San Francisco, California. A huge flock of 200,000 red-winged blackbirds near Boone, Missouri, was the second biggest group reported in the United States. One person even witnessed a gathering of 32,500 horned larks at one location in Utah.

            I don’t know how someone even begins to count numbers of birds that large. I’m hoping to see 13 or so species at our house, with the largest group likely being a flock of 30 or more redpolls.

 

A Couple Amazing Records on Aging 

            Currently, the oldest known living land animal is “Jonathon,” the Seychelles giant tortoise, who has lived for 140 years on St. Helena Island, a tiny volcanic British territory more than a thousand miles off the coast of Africa. He’s likely older, however. Jonathan, at 440 pounds and now blind, is thought to be around 190-years-old. He’s estimated to have hatched at the very latest in 1832, according to a letter that mentions he arrived as a gift “fully grown” on St. Helena in 1882 from the Seychelles Islands in the Indian Ocean. “Fully grown” for a land tortoise means at least 50 years, so he may be much older. A photograph dating from 1886 shows Jonathan four years after his arrival on Saint Helena. Measurements taken from the photograph show that he was definitely fully mature in 1886.

             And then there’s this story on old fish: Research in a set of unique Canadian lakes is backing up an evolutionary theory often predicted but never before shown that given the right circumstances, fish get old – decades old – but they don't age.

            Scientists have been working for over 50 years on Ontario’s Experimental Lakes Area, a series of isolated watersheds in far northwestern Ontario, that were set aside in 1968 as an open-air biological laboratory, yielding uniquely detailed long-term data sets. They’ve been catching the same individual fish there for decades, and what they’ve found in lake trout is that fish get old –  decades old – but they don't age. Getting old doesn’t seem to faze lake trout. In fact, it appears to make them stronger. Lake trout don't stop growing as they mature, meaning an older adult will be larger and more reproductively capable than a young adult.

            In the bottom of these deep lakes, there are basically no predators that can eat an adult lake trout. The researchers write, “Theory predicts aging should be minimal in species where they increase their reproductive potential as they get older because they get bigger, and they decrease their likelihood of predation as they get older, because they get bigger . . . What we found does pretty much what theory predicts.” 

            In fact, said one of the researchers, the theory goes one better. At a certain point, fish should – in a sense – get younger. “We think if you sampled other lake trout populations where they continue to grow to enormous sizes, there should be signs of negative aging.”

            The bottom line they say? Age, or what people might call aging, is not inevitable in all species. 

 

Saw-whet Owl 

            On a sad note, we found a dead saw-whet owl in our yard on 2/11. We’ve heard saw-whets nearly every spring that we’ve lived here in Manitowish, now 38 years, but we’ve never seen one. Finally seeing one, but only after it had died, makes it doubly sad.

The question I have is twofold – why did it die, and what was it still doing here in the first place? Let’s start with the second part. Most northern saw-whets migrate southward in winter, concentrating their migration routes along the Great Lakes, but range maps show that they can winter in the Northwoods. Tom Erdman, curator of the Richter Museum of Natural History in Green Bay and a long-time bird bander/researcher, wrote to me many years ago saying saw-whet owls do winter over in our area, as evidenced by dead saw-whets that have been turned in to him during a winter from Minocqua and Lakewood. Male saw-whets migrate first, beginning at the end of February, while females follow beginning in mid-March. So, most likely this was a saw-whet that remained the winter, given that their migration should not have begun this early in February.

So, why did it die? The two most likely possibilities are that it starved or it hit something solid (a wall, a tree?) while trying to capture prey at night. Unfortunately, I didn’t find the owl – our new Australian shepherd puppy did – and by the time I noticed her with this brown bundle in her mouth, the owl was pretty gummed up. She was mouthing it up next to our house and not far from one of our bird feeders, so perhaps it was unsuccessfully hunting the feeder for mice who come out at night to eat the seeds. It’s all speculation, of course.

I called Bruce Bacon, a friend and master bird bander who I mentioned earlier in the column, to come over and give me his thoughts on how it might have died. Feeling the fat on the bird’s keel, he thought it had recently died, hadn’t starved, and likely hit something.

 

 

Celestial Events

            Sixty years ago, John Glenn was the first American to orbit the Earth on Feb. 20, 1962.

            We hit 11 hours of sunlight on 2/27 (only three weeks now until spring equinox!). 

            On 2/28, look after dusk for Saturn about four degrees above the waning crescent moon.

            The first few days of March mark the first time our average high temperatures reach 32° since back in late November. Minocqua averages 269 days with high temperatures above freezing (74%). 

            The new moon occurs on 3/2.

            For planet watching in March, there’s no action after dusk, so you have to get up early instead. Look before dawn for Venus low in the southeast, Mars also low in the southeast, and Saturn, which rises right at dawn, in the east-southeast.

 

Thought for the Week

            In the depths of winter, I finally learned that within me there lay an invincible summer. – Rainer Maria Rilke

            

NWA 2/4/22

A Northwoods Almanac for February 4 – 17, 2022  by John Bates

 

Groundhog (Woodchuck) Hibernation

            I’ve written in the past how the idea of Groundhog Day always cracks me up, at least for Wisconsin’s Northwoods, given that groundhogs are deep in hibernation and are not in the least likely to poke their heads above ground to see if the sun’s shining. When a groundhog enters hibernation, its body temperature drops from around 99 degrees F to as low as 37 degrees, its heart rate falls from 80 beats a minute to 4 to 10 beats per minute, and its breathing rate falls to somewhere between two breaths a minutes and one breath every six minutes depending on what source you read. 

            But here’s the kicker, and something I didn’t know until recently. One assumes that once a hibernating animal’s metabolism is lowered, it remains lowered for the duration of hibernation. However, that’s not the case. All of the species of hibernators that have been studied wake up periodically throughout the winter and warm themselves up! Groundhogs wake up about 12 to 20 times in the hibernation season, usually for two to three days, and increase their body temperature to 98.6°F., its normal temperature during the summer. They don’t eat during these arousal times, but instead rely on deposits of stored body fat. 

            This is a major physiological problem because climbing back up to normal body temperature consumes a lot of energy, perhaps equal to 10 days of energy used up ordinarily during hibernation. The result is a loss of about 40 percent of their body mass before exiting hibernation. 

            These bouts of arousal must serve a crucial function or functions, but no one’s quite sure what. It may involve restoring nutrients in the blood, invigorating the immune system, eliminating toxic substances, and/or dealing with potassium loss. But again, it’s unclear.

            I was also surprised to learn that in Pennsylvania, a groundhog only averages about 100 days of hibernation, generally from November 17 to February 25, and that males often emerge before that to wander about in search of burrows belonging to females as a sort of pre-breeding dating ritual.

            So, maybe I should go a little easy on the whole Punxsutawney Phil schtick since a groundhog might indeed be wandering about at that time in Punxsutawney. But the whole shadow seeing thing? Nope, not buying that.

photo by John Bates

 

Sightings – Common Redpolls

            A flock of common redpolls finally arrived at our feeders last week, the first flock we’ve seen this winter. These tiny birds weigh less than a half ounce, but are perhaps the toughest birds that visit us in the Northwoods. They breed in far northern boreal and taiga regions from Alaska to Siberia and wander down our way only in winters when there’s widespread failure in the seed-production of spruce and birch trees.  They’re a jaunty looking bird with a red beret and a black goatee, and the male gets splashed with a burst of red on his chest.

photo by Bev Engstrom

            I proclaim them as the toughest bird we ever see because captive studies of common redpolls in Alaska show that they’re able to survive at temperatures of -65°F (hoary redpolls are even tougher, surviving to -88°F)! They accomplish this through a series of adaptations. First, they increase their plumage - Alaskan redpoll species have 31% heavier plumage in November than in July. Second, they focus on foods that offer high energy like birch seeds. Third, unlike most birds, they stay active in low light. Prior to complete dark, they store seeds in their diverticula, which are laterally expandable sections of their esophagus, and later regurgitate these seeds, husk them, and swallow them while sheltering in dense conifer cover. Their diverticula can hold up to about 15% of their body mass of seeds, which amounts to greater than 25% of their daily caloric requirements in winter.

             They also increase their muscle mass, a likely requirement given that they shiver most of the winter to create heat. And they retain heat by fluffing their feathers, remaining inactive when not eating, and allowing peripheral vasoconstriction, a fancy term for the narrowing of the blood vessels closest to the skin to prevent heat loss.

            Then, like ruffed grouse, they make roosting chambers in the snow when temperatures drop to extremes at night. They do this by dropping from a tree into the snow, and then making a tunnel from 2.5 to 4 inches below the surface of the snow and 10 to 15 inches long. They break the roof in the morning to depart. During winter, they leave their roosts and start foraging before dawn.

            Best of all, one study says, “Sunbathing reported.” So, if you see one laying on its back on a towel, you’ll know what it’s doing. 

 

Chocolate and Valentine’s Day

            We all know that Valentine’s Day and chocolate are inextricably linked, but I’m betting few of us know that chocolate comes from the 6- to 12-inch-long seed pods of the tiny cacao tree, and that roughly two-thirds of the world's cocoa is now produced in Western Africa, not Central America, with the countries of Ivory Coast and Ghana being the largest sources.

            And most of us are unaware that for about 95 percent of chocolate's 5,000+ year history, chocolate was strictly a beverage, and a bitter one at that. Etymologists trace the origin of the word "chocolate" to the Aztec word "xocoatl," which referred to the bitter drink brewed from cacao beans. Jose de Acosta, a Spanish missionary who lived in Peru and then Mexico in the later 16th century, described it as “loathsome to such as are not acquainted with it, having a scum or froth that is a very unpleasant taste.”

            Sweeteners were rarely used by the Aztecs or Maya, so the cacao paste was flavored with additives like flowers, vanilla pods, and chilies. Both the Mayans and Aztecs believed the cacao bean had divine properties, and so used it in sacred rituals of birth, marriage and death. Cacao beans were even used as currency – a rabbit, for example, was worth ten cacao beans, a slave about a hundred.

            Until the 16th century, the cacao tree was wholly unknown to Europeans until explorers came to the Americas and sampled it. Legend has it that the Aztec king Montezuma welcomed the Spanish explorer (and soon to be conquering invader) Hernando Cortes with a banquet that included drinking chocolate, having tragically mistaken him for a reincarnated deity. 

            Once someone in Europe tried mixing cacao paste with honey or cane sugar, chocolate quickly became popular, and by the 17th century, chocolate was a fashionable drink throughout the continent, believed to have medicinal and even aphrodisiac properties. By 1868, a little company called Cadbury began marketing boxes of chocolate candies in England. 

            In America, chocolate was so valued during the Revolutionary War that it was included in soldiers’ rations and sometimes used in lieu of wages.

             Chocolate has pleasant effects beyond its sugary taste. It contains a chemical called theobromine that is similar to caffeine, and another, phenylethylamine (PEA), that is a stimulant and facilitates the release of dopamine, the “feel good” chemical in our brain’s reward center. It also has three compounds that mimic the effect of marijuana, though in minute amounts.

            So, a tiny tree, all of 15 to 20 feet tall, and with bitter fruit, still rules the world of tree fruits, particularly in mid-February when love is on the wind and also in the taste buds.

            

A Cold January, Yes, But Not One With Extreme Cold

            I’ve heard many times over this January how we were having an old-fashioned cold winter like we used to. And I’ve agreed, but only half-agreed. Our high temperatures were consistently in the teens or lower, and so those temperatures were very much like winters in the past. But our low temperatures were consistently “only” down to around minus 20° at their worst (I know some places registered lower). In “old-fashioned” winters, we’d minimally hit minus 30°, and every other year or so hit minus 40°. So, we’ve been spared the extreme lows that historically were so characteristic of Wisconsin’s Northwoods. 

            Now, I know we could get hammered yet. We’ve had some extreme cold in February in the past, with the first week in February of 1995-96 taking the cake: on 2/1, temperatures at our house plummeted to minus 48°; on 2/2, minus 45°; on 2/3, minus 50°; and on 2/4, minus 46°. We heated up on 2/5 to minus 24°‚ and that felt rather warmish. 

            Heck, on March 7^th that year, we even dropped to minus 38°!

            The Wisconsin Initiative on Climate Change Impacts has, among its many maps, a map showing the change in minimum winter temperatures for December, January and February from 1950 to 2018, and the minimums for our area have increased around 7 degrees.

            So, I think we need to be cautious in how we now so quickly use the terms “bitter” and “extreme”. Minus 20° is still plenty cold – I’ll be staying inside next to my woodstove, thank you very much. But in the larger historical context of our area, it’s not extreme, nor is it normal.

 

Celestial Events

            For planet watching in February, look after dusk for Jupiter low in the southwest; however, Jupiter will be lost to our view by mid-month. Before dawn, look for Venus, Mars, and Mercury all low in the southeast.

            Yesterday, 2/3, marked the midway point between winter solstice and spring equinox. We’re up to 10 hours of sunlight as of 2/7, and by Valentine’s Day on 2/14, we’ll be receiving over three minutes more per day of sunlight, perhaps the best Valentine’s gift of all.

            February’s full moon occurs on 2/16 – the Snow/Hunger Moon.

 

Thought for the Week – “The Moment”, a poem by Margaret Atwood

The moment when, after many years

of hard work and a long voyage

you stand in the center of your room,

house, half-acre, square mile, island, country,

knowing at last how you got there,

and say, I own this,

 

is the same moment when the trees unloose

their soft arms from around you,

the birds take back their language,

the cliffs fissure and collapse,

the air moves back from you like a wave

and you can’t breathe.

 

No, they whisper. You own nothing.

You were a visitor, time after time

Climbing the hill, planting the flag, proclaiming.

We never belong to you.

You never found us.

It was always the other way round.

 

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 1/21/22

A Northwoods Almanac for Jan. 21 – Feb. 3, 2022   by John Bates

 

Sightings – Bobcat, Red Fox, Fisher, Lyme Disease, Pine Grosbeaks

            On 1/11, Mona Wiechmann in Manitowish Waters sent me several videos and a photo of a bobcat that in mid-morning was slowly walking up her driveway, and as a lover of wildlife, she said it “made my day.” She noted that it was the second year in a row she had seen a bobcat in her driveway, and that she currently has no squirrels, which is, of course, the likely consequence of having a bobcat ranging around her property. 

bobcat photo by Mona Wiechmann

            A reader in Lac du Flambeau also sent me night videos of a red fox walking past his security camera, and then a while later, a fisher following the tracks of the fox. The question, of course, arose whether a fisher is a predator of red fox. Mary, Callie, and I once witnessed a red fox chasing a fisher up a tree, and then jumping up again and again against the tree in an apparent effort to get the fisher. So, who’s the predator of whom? I think it’s a toss-up.

            Speaking of red fox, they are preyed upon by coyotes, or minimally chased away by coyotes, while coyotes are preyed upon, or chased away, by wolves. I bring this up because red fox are superb mousers, and there’s significant research showing that mice spread Lyme disease, particularly white-footed mice, which are the principal natural reservoirs for Lyme disease bacteria. 

            It works like this. Adult ticks, which mostly feed upon white-tailed deer, drop off and lay their eggs on the forest floor. The eggs hatch out the next year into larvae, and the larvae eventually get infected with Lyme when they feed on an animal that carries the bacteria, which is most often white-footed mice. The larval ticks then molt into infected nymphs that can infect humans and other mammals the following year.

            In eastern and central North America, the host most likely to transmit an infection to a feeding tick is the white-footed mouse, which infects between 40% and 90% of feeding larvae. Eastern chipmunks and shrews tend to be moderate sources, while most other mammalian, avian, and reptilian hosts are much less common sources.

            And mice reproduce very rapidly. White-footed mice reach maturity at about one month, and mother mice can have anywhere from three to six babies. After birthing a litter, female mice can be ready to reproduce again, meaning they may be nursing one litter while carrying another. These mice can do this again and again throughout their lives, which typically last about six to 10 months.

white-footed mouse

            Researchers say there are areas in the United States where Lyme disease is rare and, in those places, few or none of the white-footed mice are infected. But in areas out East and like our area with high rates of Lyme disease, at least half and sometimes up to 90 percent of the mice are infected with Lyme bacteria.

            So, fox eat mice; coyotes eat fox; wolves eat coyotes. As a general rule then, where coyote numbers are kept low, fox numbers increase, mice numbers then decrease, and Lyme disease decreases. Thus, the best way to keep tick numbers down is to keep both deer and mice populations low via keeping fox and wolf numbers high.

red fox photo by Bob Kovar

            Having had Lyme twice, I’m all in on this.

            Finally, action at area bird feeders is slow. In Manitowish, we have a small flock of pine grosbeaks visiting our feeders, and a couple of purple finches, but that’s it for the visiting winter finch population. No redpolls, no pine siskins, no evening grosbeaks. We did have a flock of 11 bohemian waxwings for one day last week, but they’ve moved on. Our lack of good fortune in seeing these birds usually means there’s good food resources further north, and these birds have little reason to risk the flight south. I suspect that’s the case.

 

Wintering Golden Eagles

            Mary and I’ve seen only two golden eagles ever in our area over the last 37 years. But in fact golden eagles are regularly present in the state, just not in our area, nor during any other season other than winter. 

golden eagle

            Golden eagles weren’t previously even considered regular inhabitants of Wisconsin. But 25 years ago, winter sightings in the far western part of the state led to a mid-winter survey to document what has turned out to be a regular wintering population of golden eagles in the Mississippi River blufflands of Wisconsin, as well as Minnesota and Iowa. The high count year was 2019 with 145, while 2021 yielded 126 individuals. The latest survey just took place on 1/15.

            Golden eagles are quite different from fish-eating bald eagles in that they feed on upland prey such as wild turkeys and rabbits. They really like to hunt open, south-facing sides of bluffs that are referred to as “goat prairies”. 

            No golden eagles nest in Wisconsin – their range is much further west, barely reaching into the Dakotas. But a small number somehow figured out the eastward migration route to the Mississippi River, and now they’re regular winter inhabitants. 

 

Do Older Forests Sequester More Carbon Than Younger Forests? Yes.

            The prevailing belief on the sequestration of carbon by forests has long been that younger forests do more to capture and hold onto carbon than older forests. However, many recent studies put this notion on its head. 

            One study in the western U.S. analyzed forest inventory data collected on 3,335 plots and found that large trees play a major role in the accumulated carbon stock of these forests. Large trees accounted for 2 to 4% of all stems among five tree species; but held 33 to 46% of the total above ground carbon stored by each species. Pooled across the five dominant species, large trees accounted for 3% of the 636,520 trees occurring on the inventory plots but stored 42% of the total carbon.

            Another study in unmanaged tropical forests in Suriname, on the northeastern Atlantic coast of South America, looked at three different species of trees that ranged in age from 84 to 255 years old. The study found that the older a tree is, the better it absorbs carbon from the atmosphere. In fact, the research suggests that almost 70 per cent of all the carbon stored in trees is accumulated in the last half of their lives. 

            Another study in New York modeled a 125-year old white pine for volume, and found that most of its volume was acquired after 50 years of age. In fact, 70% was added from 50 to 125 years. A full modeling of the an older pine would also need to include limb volume which favors the older tree even more, because white pines develop thick limbs that carry significantly more volume than their young counterparts. 

            The long and short of it? Planting new forests is good – we should be doing it worldwide whenever and wherever possible. But allowing existing forests to continue to mature is even better – it’s the simplest and most effective way through forests to mitigate climate change.

 

The Past Seven Years the Warmest on Record 

            The past seven years were Earth's warmest on record according to new research released this month. And July of 2021 was the hottest month humanity ever recorded.

            Back in 1988 during a record-setting hot summer, a NASA researcher testified before Congress the undeniable scientific truth: “The greenhouse effect has been detected,” James Hansen said. “And it is changing our climate now.”

            Global temperatures then were about 1.1 degrees Fahrenheit above the preindustrial average. It was, at the time, the hottest 12-month period scientists had ever seen.

            None of us, however, will ever experience a year that cool again. Nor our children or grandchildren.

            Why? Because carbon dioxide remains in atmosphere for 300 to 1,000 years. Whatever CO2 we continue to emit just keeps filling the bucket. So, even as we reduce our emissions over the next decades, the bucket will continue to fill with CO2. There’s no going back.

            Since 1981, average global temperatures have increased at a rate of about 0.18 degrees Celsius (0.32 degrees Fahrenheit) per decade. In the same period, the warming of oceans, which have absorbed about 90 percent of the additional heat trapped by human carbon pollution, is now eight times faster. 

            Which leads us to the goal of achieving net zero as quickly as we can. So, what is net zero?

 

The Concept of Net Zero

            There’s a serious misconception that net zero means zero emissions, and thus the end of all use of fossil fuels. That’s not what it means! We will continue to need fossil fuels for a host of applications, and we will continue to emit CO2 from other sources as well that are virtually impossible to stop. It’s not realistic to stop all emissions.

            Net zero instead means that the CO2 that we emit will have to be equally balanced by the methods we, and nature, employ to absorb or remove it. Added together the output and input will equal zero – no new CO2 added to the bucket. We can only accomplish this by first reducing as best we can the emissions we are sending into the atmosphere, and then capturing whatever carbon we’re still releasing.  The other term you may have heard to describe this is “becoming carbon neutral.” But again, it doesn’t mean no emissions. It means no more CO2 added to the bucket.

            It’s doable, and needs to be done at the very latest by 2050, or far better yet, by 2030, which by my advanced math, is not very far away. 

            If for no other reason, it’s an economic imperative. In 2021, there were 20 weather/climate disaster events in the U.S. with losses exceeding $1 billion each. These events included 1 drought event, 2 flooding events, 11 severe storm events, 4 tropical cyclone events, 1 wildfire event, and 1 winter storm event, all of which resulted in the deaths of 688 people. The 1980–2021 annual average is 7.4 events; the annual average for the most recent 5 years (2017–2021) is 17.2 events 

            Have we always had climatic disasters? Of course! But not close to this many, nor as destructive overall.

            We desperately need to cross all of our political divides on this and come together. It’s not political. Check what our military says about climate change, and what insurance companies say, both highly conservative entities. You can be very conservative politically, but still fully understand the implications of climate change and what it means for our future. I implore all of the good people of the Northwoods to independently look at the real data, and then consider how we can work together to keep the North the North, and create the best viable future for our kids, and all kids, worldwide.

 

from Berkeley Lab News Center

Celestial Events

            Before dawn on 1/29, look for Mars 2 degrees north of the waning crescent moon. The new moon occurs on 1/31. Look after dusk on 2/2 for Jupiter 4 degrees north of the waxing moon.

 

Thought for the Week

            Hope locates itself in the premises that we don’t know what will happen and that in the spaciousness of uncertainty is room to act. When you recognize uncertainty, you recognize that you may be able to influence the outcomes — you alone or you in concert with a few dozen or several million others. Hope is an embrace of the unknown and the unknowable, an alternative to the certainty of both optimists and pessimists. Optimists think it will all be fine without our involvement; pessimists take the opposite position; both excuse themselves from acting. It’s the belief that what we do matters even though how and when it may matter, who and what it may impact, are not things we can know beforehand. We may not, in fact, know them afterward either, but they matter all the same, and history is full of people whose influence was most powerful after they were gone. – Rebecca Solnit

            

 

A Northwoods Almanac for 1/7/22

 A Northwoods Almanac for 1/7 – 1/20/22   by John Bates

 

Bobcat vs Grey Squirrel, And the Winner Is . . . 

            Myrtle and Rod Sharka near Land O’Lakes watched the interactions between their local squirrels and a young bobcat over the course of several days at the end of 2021. Here’s Myrtle’s email from 12/29: “We have this young bobcat hunting just behind the house. He was watching a hole he chased a red squirrel into.  He has been watching the hole and I have been watching him.” Later that day, she updated me: “He did not get the squirrel. That squirrel has about ten snow exits. The bobcat dozed off and on, but it would not budge.” 

Bobcat watching squirrel hole, photo by Rod Sharka

            The next day Rod sent me this email: “‘Bobby’ was back this morning. At about 8:00 AM, I happened to look out the window. I noticed an agitated grey squirrel on an 8" dbh maple in the midst of the feeder area. Then I noticed the bobcat crouched under some balsam saplings about 7-8 feet back behind the same tree. The squirrel obviously knew the cat was there but apparently had little experience with these predators. The squirrel seemed to be teasing the cat like it was playing "catch-me-if-you-can". It would run down to the base of the tree . . . chattering and waving its tail at the cat. Then run up the tree a ways. Then back down to the ground, back up, etc. 

            “After about 5 minutes of this, when the squirrel was at the base of the tree and moved around to the front side away from the cat, the bobcat ran out, up the tree in a flash, and caught the squirrel about 20 feet up. Then shinnied down with the squirrel in its mouth and carried it off into the woods. 

            “I wish that I had been able to catch that on camera, but it happened so fast that I'm sure any pictures would have been a blur. I knew bobcats could climb trees, but never would have imagined that they could climb one as fast as a grey squirrel. Mother nature is amazing.”

            Just to add to the bobcat’s ability to climb, Mary Madsen in Presque Isle sent me a photo of a bobcat eating from her suet feeder that is well up a white birch tree.

Bobcat eating suet in a white birch tree, photo by Mary Madsen

 

The Quebec Maple Syrup Cartel – The OPEC of Maple Syrup

            As an unapologetic pure maple syrup addict, I follow the news relative to the sources of my drug. Recently I learned maple syrup producers in Quebec produce 73% of all maple syrup in the world, and its biggest customer by far is the United States, which accounts for around 60% of Canada's export volume. Quebec has 34 million sugar and red maple trees, and 11,300 producers of maple syrup!

            That was news enough, but then I learned that most global maple syrup output and prices are controlled by the Federation of Quebec Maple Syrup Producers (QMSP). Farmers selling containers of 5 liters (1.3 gallons) or less to a grocery store or restaurant need to have a production quota from the government-sanctioned agency. All bulk sales above 5 liters are sold to the agency or authorized buyer, and again, farmers must have a quota. 

            The Federation even stockpiles unsold syrup in a strategic reserve in Laurierville, Quebec, which it can tap in lean harvest years. The “Global Strategic Maple Syrup Reserve” spans 267,000 square feet, the equivalent of five football fields, securing syrup in sterilized 45-gallon barrels stacked five-high – 100 million pounds worth. 

maple syrup barrels in Laurierville, Quebec

    So prized is the province's golden syrup that in 2012 thieves stole $20 million worth of it – 3,000 tons – secretly siphoning it off from the barrels in the reserve in a theft known as the Great Canadian Maple Syrup Heist (Google it! Or watch the Netflix documentary series “Dirty Money,” Season 1, Episode 5). 

            Was this considered a serious crime? In 2017, accused ringleader Richard Vallières was sentenced to eight years in prison and given a $9.4 million fine. A few days earlier, his accomplice, Avik Caron, was sentenced to five years in prison and a $1.2-million fine. For stealing maple syrup.

            The QMSP operates a cartel that rivals OPEC in effectiveness and aggression, and its price-fixing has managed to create rising prices for its producers over the past two decades by controlling syrup supplies. A barrel is worth about $1,200 or $2.88 per pound which is 10-18 times the value of U.S. crude oil.

            Climate change is, however, raising its ugly head. The unusually warm spring this year resulted in a shorter syrup harvest, cutting output by 24%, while demand has soared since the pandemic began and led to more people eating at home. Worldwide demand for maple syrup has increased by about 20 per cent each year for the past two years! The result? The QMSP is releasing more than half of the world's strategic reserve – 45 million pounds – to meet the market demand. The QMSP is also approving 7 million new taps during the next three years, a 14% increase, to bolster production despite the fact that here are already 50 million taps in the province.

            Well, who knew that maple syrup had such a back story! It just makes me further resolved to keep buying my syrup locally.

 

Pecking Order at Our Bird Feeders

            Those of us who feed birds are acutely aware of how competitive life can be at our feeders. Disney-like cooperation and sharing is a rarity, but does occur, in a manner of speaking, via a pecking order. A 2017 study in Behavioral Ecology examined about 100,000 bird feeder interactions and created a continent-wide power ranking of 136 feeder species. The hierarchy shows that while size matters in most cases, there are clearly exceptions. For instance, pileated woodpeckers, despite their massive bill and impressive build, are relatively docile, while the tiniest birds of all, hummingbirds, are pugnacious and can hold their own with much larger birds. And mourning doves, while larger than blue jays, fall much lower in the pecking order than the more dominant jays, earning their symbolism as birds of peace.

            So, here are the top ten most dominant summer feeder birds for our area (note that highly dominant birds like common ravens and wild turkeys that seldom come to tube feeders are not included in this list):

Common grackle

Red-bellied woodpecker

European starling 

Blue jay

American robin

Red-winged blackbird

Hairy woodpecker

Mourning dove

Brown-headed cowbird

Northern cardinal

            The birds that get pushed around the most? The five at the bottom of the pecking order, from the bottom up:

Black-capped chickadee

American goldfinch

Purple finch

Dard-eyed junco

Red-breasted nuthatch

            The pecking order seems well understood by the individuals around our feeders. While many of us, including me, rail at the bullies, blue jays in particular, the pecking order is a useful tool in avoiding unnecessary, and potentially, injurious interactions. Everybody knows their place, waits their turn to flit in to the feeders and knows how quickly they need to grab and go, or whether they can hang out and eat to their heart’s content, oblivious to the needs of others waiting in the surrounding trees.

            The way to mediate between the power trippers and the serfs is not to moralize with them – I’ve tried and it doesn’t work – but rather to have numerous feeding stations spread out around your house, including hanging tube feeders, platform feeders, and seed placed on the ground. Your restaurant simply has to have lots of tables and various scattered seating arrangements. The jays and grackles (and squirrels) can’t be everywhere, and you’ll have thinned out the competition. 

 

More on Snowshoe Hares and Color Change

            In my last column, I wrote about the mismatch of autumn and spring molts in snowshoe hares as climate change makes snow arrive later in the winter and melt away sooner in the spring. I was surprised, however, to learn that in the Pacific Northwest, there are populations of snowshoe hares that don’t molt into a white coat during winter – they remain brown year-round. And then there are regions in the Cascade Mountains where both winter-brown and winter-white color phases of hares occur, apparently due to a genetic interbreeding with black-tailed jack rabbits, a species that stays brown year-round.

            Some researchers believe that as climate change intensifies, the western populations of hares that contain a mix of winter-brown and winter-white individuals are the key to the long-term survival of hares. But those hares are out West. Here in the Northeast, it’s more likely that genetic mutations in current winter-white populations will have to occur to favor more winter-brown hares in populations like ours. 

            Or perhaps the range of snowshoe hares will simply have to move north where snow will be more consistent in its timing and duration, leaving us with only cottontail rabbits. Hard to know! We’re in no man’s land as these changes continue.

 

Celestial Events

            The next three weeks are when we experience our coldest average high temperatures – just 21°. 

            By 1/13, we’ll be up to 9 hours and 1 minute of daylight. By 1/18, our days will be growing longer by more than 2 minutes per day.

            The full moon occurs on 1/17, the year’s most distant and smallest full moon.

            From 1/20 to 2/5, we’ll experience our lowest average temperatures – minus 1degree.

            Planets to watch after dusk in January include Jupiter and Saturn, both in the southwest. Saturn, however, is lost by mid-month, so look just for Jupiter in the second half of January. 

            Before dawn, look for Mars low in the southeast.

 

Thought for the Week

            Edward O. Wilson, world-renowned biologist, author, and above all, a naturalist in the classic sense, died last week. Here are two quotes from his work: “We are drowning in information, while starving for wisdom. The world henceforth will be run by synthesizers, people able to put together the right information at the right time, think critically about it, and make important decisions wisely.”

            “Destroying rainforests for economic gain is like burning a Renaissance painting to cook a meal.” 

 

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.