Black-backed Woodpecker in the Bog

“It’s here.” My partner and I had barely stepped out of our car when another birder, perhaps getting a fresh camera battery from his car, confirmed the sighting we’d seen posted online. “Take the left fork on the boardwalk,” he added. And then, “You can follow me.”

We slung our much smaller cameras around our necks and prowled down the Bob Russell Memorial Boardwalk behind him into Winterberry Bog. This sweet little forest, trail, and parking lot is part of the Sax-Zim Bog Important Bird Area about an hour northwest of Duluth, Minn. Here, on about 300 square miles of public and private land, the clay soils of an old glacial lake plain hold water, and the cold, wet climate has perpetuated a thick layer of peat on top.

Bog species such as sedges, tamaracks, and black spruce give the landscape a scraggly look, and open areas provide good hunting grounds for rare species of owls. Aspen uplands, rivers, lakes, meadows, and farms join in the patchwork. According to the Friends of Sax-Zim Bog at saxzim.org, it’s a “’magic mix’ of habitats that boreal birds love.”

Although the tamarack trees along the boardwalk lacked the green needles that clothed their neighboring spruces, that was to be expected. Tamaracks, also known as the eastern larch, or Larix laricina, are a deciduous conifer. In an unusual combination, these trees have needle-like leaves and bear their seeds in cones like spruces and pines, but they lose their leaves in the fall like maples and grow them back each spring.

Signs of life did eventually appear, revealed by motion among the tree trunks. A few people dressed in bulky winter gear and peering through a spectrum of optical equipment from giant camera lenses to modest binoculars stood on the boardwalk. Everyone was focused low on the trunk of a tamarack tree only a few feet away.

I hardly needed to zoom in to see the bird’s black head, white face with black stripe, black-and-white barring on their flanks, and solid black back. Five years ago I’d seen an almost identical woodpecker in this same bog, but that one had a stripe of white down the middle of their back identifying them as a three-toed woodpecker. This was their cousin, a black-backed woodpecker.

I saw this three-toed woodpecker in the same bog in 2020. Photo by Emily Stone. 

Black-backed woodpeckers like this one have just three toes, while most woodpeckers have four. They grip tightly to bark while prying off flakes to get at beetle larvae underneath. Photo by Emily Stone.

Both species specialize in peeling flakes of bark off dead or dying trees to get at the plump, juicy larvae of wood-boring beetles. They often forage in burned areas, blowdowns, flood-damaged forests, and other places where insects have moved in. Here, the eastern larch beetle has provided them with a giant and long-lasting buffet.

This tamarack tree has been infested with eastern larch beetles. Black-backed woodpeckers are now prying off flakes of bark to get at the beetle larvae, leaving the snow beneath covered in litter. Photo by Emily Stone.

Eastern larch beetles are native to the United States, and have always produced small and short-lived outbreaks. Since 2000, though, Minnesota has seen 20 consecutive years of outbreaks, with more than 440,000 acres infested, and no end in sight. Climate change is implicated in the beetles’ surge.

Adult beetles emerge in spring, find a new tree to infest, burrow into the bark, mate, and lay eggs. The mother beetles go on to deposit one or two more clutches of eggs. In the past, these “sister broods” didn’t have time to fully develop before winter. Longer growing seasons now allow more beetles to reach maturity each year, and warmer weather results in less mortality for the overwintering larvae. It’s a perfect storm, and forest pathologists have not found a cure.

Flakes of bark rained down gently and scattered on the snow beneath the woodpecker’s perch in the dying tamarack. As I watched, the bird craned her neck to the side and wedged her beak under a loose piece of bark. A quick chipping motion soon freed the flake. This distinctive foraging style is characteristic of both black-backed woodpeckers and three-toed woodpeckers. They rarely excavate deep holes. When your lunch wiggles just under loose bark, there’s no need.

While many birds find food in Sax-Zim Bog, people come here to find the birds. This is a southern outpost for many beings typically found farther north. Protected areas like Winterberry Bog and a welcome center run by the Friends of Sax-Zim Bog have facilitated easy access to unusual species for a whole community of people interested in observing the interplay of life and death in nature. In the words of the helpful birder “It’s here!”

Author’s Note: Portions of this article are reprinted from 2020.

Emily’s award-winning second book, Natural Connections: Dreaming of an Elfin Skimmer, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. The Museum’s current exhibit “Anaamaagon: Under the Snow” is open through March 11. The Museum will be closed for construction March 12 through April 30. Our Winter Calendar is open for registration! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

The Breeze of Balance

After I silenced the beep of my alarm clock, the sound I noticed next was the wind roaring through the forest and around the eaves. It was not the first howling wind of this winter. Sometimes it wears on me—the constant battle, the whipping hair, and the unceasing noise—but some days it is invigorating and refreshing. What do you love or hate about the wind?

Wind crashes waves into rocks and ice at the mouth of the Cascade River on the North Shore of Lake Superior. Photo by Emily Stone.

The wind can be a symbol of unity, freedom, eternity and balance. It is as true ecologically as it is metaphorically.

The first time I encountered wind as a symbol of unity, I was on the south shore of Lake Superior, at a wedding on a piney point. A stiff breeze whipped through the trees and blew out the unity candle. With great aplomb, the minister launched into a beautiful and extemporaneous sermon on the wind as a symbol of unity. As the air swirled around all the guests and the happy couple, we imagined how our breaths came from and returned to the one body of air that surrounds us and the entire globe.

In some cultures, wind is personified as a divine messenger who is able to manipulate unseen energy. Indeed, wind is the main way that our Earth attempts to equal out differences in temperature. Energy from the Sun warms the Earth and the air above it, but it does not heat everything evenly. Some objects heat up more easily than others, and some areas of the Earth receive more energy from the Sun. As warm air rises, cool air flows in to replace it.

The stronger the difference in temperature, the stronger the winds. Think of it this way: in the summer time, the temperature difference between northern Wisconsin and southern Florida is not that big. In the winter, however, that temperature difference can get quite large. In order for our atmosphere to remain in equilibrium, the winds must speed up. Wind is the Earth’s attempt to find a temperature balance.

Wind disperses more than just heat. When strong winds carry away soil, microbes in the soil can act like hitchhikers and go along for the ride. Nutrients and organisms lost from one region may be deposited across the globe. The organisms may colonize otherwise inaccessible regions. The nutrients being blown around the globe may help forested areas obtain trace amounts of minerals. Some organisms in particular get a significant amount of nutrients from dust on the wind. Lichens and epiphytes (“air plants”) are two examples.

Insects also use the wind for long-distance travel. Just how high can they fly? In the book Insectopedia, Hugh Raffles wrote that researchers calculated that “on any given day, the air column rising 50-15,000 feet above one square mile of Louisiana countryside contained an average of 25 million insects.” At the upper limit, 15,000 feet, there was a ballooning spider who used his silk as a kite. Butterflies, dragonflies, gnats, water striders, leaf bugs, booklice, and katydids have been sighted hundreds of miles out on the open ocean, and aphids have been found on ice floes. Some wingless insects (and plankton!) are plucked from their earthly tethers by a sharp gust of wind, but very few are completely passive travelers.

Wind also helps lakes balance their nutrients and chemicals throughout various layers during fall and spring turnover. During fall turnover, when the surface water cools to about the same temperature as the lower water, the wind can mix the water masses together and even out the temperature and oxygen levels. A similar process occurs during spring turnover after ice-out, as colder surface waters warm to the temperature of bottom waters and the lake mixes. Water from the lake bottom brings nutrients up with it.

While Nature’s howling winds have their purpose, I would still prefer a gentle breeze. Liu Chi, a scholar in the Yuan and the Ming Dynasties, wrote about the wind in a pine grove. “Listening to it can relieve anxiety and humiliation, wash away confusion and impurity, expand the spirit and lighten the heart, make one feel peaceful and contemplative, cause one to wander free and easy through the skies and travel along with the force of Creation.”

With every breath, we invite the universe in. As the winter winds swirl around you, take a peaceful and contemplative moment to appreciate the wind’s role in encouraging balance and unity in our sometimes stormy world.

Author’s Note: A version of this article was originally published in 2013.

Emily’s award-winning second book, Natural Connections: Dreaming of an Elfin Skimmer, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. The Museum’s current exhibit “Anaamaagon: Under the Snow” is open through March 11. The Museum will be closed for construction March 12 through April 30. Our Winter Calendar is open for registration! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Frost Cracks

Fresh snow highlighted every twig, and more flakes floated down as we hiked through the Rainbow Lakes Wilderness Area on the North Country Trail (NCT). This intrepid group of women calls themselves the NCT Navigators, and they meet almost every Monday (when the mosquitoes aren’t out) to hike a section of trail. Most of them have completed the NCT’s 100-mile challenge. Most of them are retired, too, and I count myself lucky to fit in a hike with them even a few times a year.

Today the fresh snow was making the ski trails slow, and I was looking for inspiration, so I gave my friends an assignment: find me something to write about! Well, this artistic group had already gotten in the habit of noticing patterns in nature, and it wasn’t long before someone keyed in on an adorably squiqqly line snaking up the length of a tree.

A frost crack! Of course. What a perfect topic for a winter day. Long ago I learned that these cracks burst open with a noise like a rifle shot as a sunny day plunges into a frigid night. I couldn’t remember, though: was it the contraction of cooling wood, or the expansion of ice that caused the trunk to split? Both make sense. I pondered this as we hiked along, and also tried to spot more cracks throughout the forest. It wasn’t hard. While not on every tree, I could see a long, vertical welt from just about any point on the trail. Quite a few of the cracks had their upper terminus at a scar where a branch had fallen off, or some other blemish on the tree.

Back at the office, I sought a more complete explanation. My initial research was frustrating, though, since the sources all gave multiple explanations of frost cracks. Yes, it seems to involve the low-angled winter sun shining heavily on the southwest side of a tree. The bark and inner wood both warm up and expand. When the sun sets and the temperature drops, the outer bark contracts more quickly than the inner wood, and suddenly becomes too small a sheath for its core. The bark and first layer of wood split.

Another part of the explanation is that the heat causes the tree’s cells to break dormancy. Dead cells, which compose most of the wood, just freeze, but trees winterize their living cells in a few ways. Cell membranes become more flexible, which allows water to migrate out of the cells and into the intercellular spaces where it can freeze without harm. Trees also fill their cells with sugar in order to lower the freezing point of their remaining liquid. And, like magic, the syrup inside the cells supercools to a glass-like phase where it is so viscous that it appears to be solid, while not forming sharp crystals. In a sun-warmed tree, water may begin to move into places it shouldn’t. As the tree re-freezes, water shifts around and freezes quickly and unevenly, causing stress on the wood and opening the crack.

A few sources mentioned that frost cracks are often associated with previous damage to the tree, but the process didn’t fully make sense until I read an interview with a plant pathologist in Northern Woodlands magazine. Walter Shortler and his mentor, Alex Shigo, did a sort of forensic pathology for trees. They used a chainsaw to slice up thousands of logs to get to the bottom—or the top—of the frost crack issue.

The result? Shigo found that “All radial shakes [cracks along the radius of the tree] were associated with wounds, branch stubs, or basal sprout stubs, and with ring shakes [cracks that follow tree rings] at some point in the trunk.” Almost anything can create an area of weakness: fire, damage during logging operations, poor pruning techniques by humans, gnawing rodents, rubbing deer, root rot, basal sprouts, or branch stubs that didn’t heal. Trees that are damaged when young seem to be much more prone to later frost cracking than older trees that become damaged.

In any case, damage to the bark and underlying sapwood provides an entry for decay. Bacteria and fungi move in, and as they decompose the wood it absorbs extra moisture. The defective wood doesn’t expand and contract as well as healthy wood, and rapid freezing finally bursts open a significant crack. Repeated freeze-thaw cycles, coupled with stress from wind, can enlarge a crack, even as the tree tries to heal it.

So, a combination of all the forces I read about likely play a role in opening and widening cracks, but none of them alone would do the job without a prior injury. This all made sense to me, especially in light of my observation that many frost cracks we saw topped out at an old branch scar.

The tree will try to heal the wound, and the growth of new wood around the crack is sometimes called a frost rib. Indeed, we admired the raised scar that highlighted our squiggly crack.

Foresters, of course, are concerned with reducing damage to young trees so that frost cracks can’t gain a foothold in what could have been valuable timber. Naturalists might appreciate a different perspective. A little ways down the trail we spotted another tree with a convoluted scar. Nestled inside were two brown acorns. I suspect that naturally occurring frost cracks may provide valuable habitat for critters in their cavities and decay. In the words of Leonard Cohen, “There is a crack in everything. That's how the light gets in.”

Author’s Note: This article was originally published in January 2018.

Emily’s award-winning second book, Natural Connections: Dreaming of an Elfin Skimmer, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. The Museum is open with our brand-new exhibit: “Anaamaagon: Under the Snow.” Our Winter Calendar is open for registration! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

The Sweetness of Bitter Cold

You know it’s chilly when even Lake Superior can see their own breath. During a recent period of bitter cold, the sea smoke drifting across the shining gray wavelets near Grand Marais, Minn., looked like a giant version of the hot springs in Japan—the ones where the snow monkeys sit in steaming pools to get warm.

Lake Superior is not a hot spring, of course, but with air temperatures dropping to -17 degrees Fahrenheit overnight, and warming up to -8 when we were walking along the shore in mid-afternoon, even water at 37 degrees was warm enough to steam.

Sea smoke forms from humid air just above the lake surface. I think of evaporation as something that happens in summer, but winter is when the lake experiences the greatest rates of evaporation, due to the stark contrast in the temperature of the air and the water. When the humid air comes in contact with an icy breeze, the air cools, loses its ability to hold all the water vapor, and the water vapor condenses into a fog of ice crystals.

Lake water had also formed ice on the rocks near shore, and we circumnavigated Artist’s Point to admire Nature’s sculptures. Thick mittens kept my hands from freezing, while my face was protected by both a scarf and the hood of my fluffy down jacket. I’d pulled on a thick skirt over my ski pants for an extra layer of wind protection. And still, whenever the breeze wiggled its way inside a layer and brushed my skin, I felt the bite of cold.

All the while, a small flock of mallard ducks bobbed on the waves in East Bay, behind the protective curve of Artist’s Point in Lake Superior. Shouldn’t they be somewhere warm? As we watched, the flock paddled toward the shore and settled in among the ice-draped rocks along the shoreline. Some dipped their bills into the shallow water, likely finding some remnants of aquatic plants to eat. Others stood on submerged rocks and preened their feathers. Both the oils they secrete and the structure of their feathers keep the cold lake out of their warm down insultation. They probably have less trouble maintaining their 100-degree body temperature than I do my 98 degrees.

Sea smoke rises of the relatively warm water of Lake Superior while a flock of mallard ducks preens among ice-covered shoreline of Artist’s Point in Grand Marais, Minn.
Photo by Kevin Friedman.

My friend and I had lasted longer than I’d expected out there, but as the north wind found us, my resolve wore out. “Race to the car?” I grinned with stiff cheeks. We were just south of the Grand Marais city limits by the time the car warmed up.

At the crest of a hill, something large swooped across the highway in front of us and several feet above the car. The blunt face and tapered silhouette were unmistakable characteristics of a Great Gray Owl—my first one in the wild! It seems strange to say, but the owl looked like they were flying silently. Of all the owls, Great Grays have the longest fringes on the leading edges of their wings and the thickest layer of fuzz on their flight feathers. Together, these adaptations reduce wing noise to almost nothing.

Great Gray owl in flight. Photo by By Arne List - https://www.flickr.com/photos/arne-list/2363789109/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16987237

 

We tracked the path of the large bird as they maneuvered through a grove of trees on the far side of the road but lost them behind some spruce boughs. Beyond slender aspen trunks, we could see a strip of open ground and the metal sheds of a storage facility. Owls and other raptors often prefer to perch at the edge of an open area to hunt.

The road was clear and wide, so we “flipped a Louie” and parked on the opposite shoulder. This move, and my family’s term for it, always reminds me of my photographer father, who flipped many Louies to photograph hawks on fence posts during my childhood in Iowa. I knew he’d be jealous of this sighting! With just a slight change in perspective, we could see the shape of the owl on the far side of the trees, their posture hunched forward in hunting mode.

Great Gray Owls have come south from Canada to eat a share of our mice and voles. Since they live at latitudes where days and nights take turns being long, they don’t have the strong preference for night that our Barred and Great Horned Owls do. Great Grays’ excellent hearing can pinpoint mice in the dark, or the day, and even under the snow. This year, however, the snow in many places is too hard for them to punch through, even with strong talons. Plus they don't like to cross open water. The owls have congregated along the shore of Lake Superior where the warmth of the water has kept the snow cover more sparse.

Just a few miles down the road, a truck on the shoulder with a camera lens sticking out the window made us suspicious. Sure enough, a second Great Gray flew directly toward us, but high over the road. When I’d helped rescue an injured Great Gray on Christmas Day, I’d only seen their yellow eyes inside the protective box. Now, big yellow eyes stared right at me from above.

The big yellow eyes of a Great Gray Owl. Photo by Lisa Hupp/USFWS - https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=255653503348234&set=a.221378263442425, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=114622821

This day may have been bitter cold, but that made the beauty in it all the more sweet.



Emily’s award-winning second book, Natural Connections: Dreaming of an Elfin Skimmer, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. The Museum is open with our brand-new exhibit: “Anaamaagon: Under the Snow.” Our Winter Calendar is open for registration! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Second Grade Tracking Stories

Murmurs of interest rippled through the classroom as I spread a rectangle of green felt on the floor at the front of the room. The murmurs became questions as I placed two lines of life-sized animal tracks, printed and cut out of white paper, onto the felt. When I finally invited the second graders to come up and gather around the felt, I was amazed by the almost instantaneous formation of a perimeter of kneeling children, totally focused on the scene.

Three times a year I get to spend a few days at the elementary school in Drummond, Wisconsin, teaching kids my favorite nature facts using my favorite nature props. Once each season, in Fall, Winter, and Spring, I load seven plastic tubs filled with skulls, furs, graduated cylinders, strips of birch bark, and other oddities into the Museum’s minivan for a visit to each classroom in grades pre-k through six.

“Can you figure out what happened here?” I asked the class. They began sharing their observations, and building a story together. “There’s a rabbit.” “And a wolf!” “The wolf carried off the rabbit!”

I asked them to explain themselves. “How do you know those are rabbit tracks?” I prompted. A girl pointed out the very large hind feet, and the smaller front feet, but she indicated that the rabbit was going the wrong direction. Rabbit, hare, and squirrel tracks are all a bit tricky, because of the way these beings hop.

Rabbits leap forward and land with their front feet I explained to the kids, and awkwardly tried to demonstrate. Then their hind legs swing around and land in front of the front feet, where they push off into another leap. This creates groups of tracks where the hind feet are in front of the front feet—not what we’d typically expect,

With rabbits and hares, the big hind feet are usually paired, with the two front feet placed on a slight diagonal just behind and between them. Squirrels, deer mice, and other hoppers who spend a lot of time in trees, move in basically the same way, but their front feet land right next to each other instead of on a diagonal. As a class, we reassessed the direction the rabbit tracks were going.

Next, we moved on to the guess about the wolf tracks. The tracks I’d set out were only a couple of inches long—much too small for a wolf. “What makes you think they are wolf tracks?” I asked. “They look like my dog’s tracks, and dog and wolf tracks look the same,” offered the boy. Pretty good reasoning, I’d say! I love teaching in the rural communities of the Northwoods, where students have a broad range of outdoor experiences and observations to draw from in their learning.

I commended the boy on recognizing the symmetrical, four-toed tracks with visible claw marks as being related to dogs, but I challenged the class to think about the size. “Would wolf tracks be that small?” I asked. Some students shook their heads no, but looked a little unsure. I had everyone hold up their hand, fingers together. “A wolf track will be about the size of my palm, and as big as your whole hand!” I informed them. I love how small I feel when I find a wolf track in the snow and place my handprint beside it.

Again, I asked for guesses about the owners of the tracks. Immediately, students offered fox and coyote as alternatives. Either could have been correct for the simple tracks we’d printed for the activity. On average, foxes are quite a bit smaller than coyotes, but big fox tracks can overlap in size with small coyote tracks. In the snow, red fox tracks often look less distinct, because dense hair protects the bottom of their feet from the cold. Coyotes have bare toes that leave crisp track outlines. If you have a very clear track, it’s also possible to see that foxes have wide, chevron-shaped heel pads, and the hind feet of coyotes register with narrow little heel pads.

“So we have a rabbit or hare, and a coyote,” I summarized. “And what did they do?” Together, the kids explained that the coyote killed the rabbit and carried them off, and they knew this because the tracks came from different corners. After the tracks intersected, the rabbit tracks disappeared, and the coyote tracks continued to the edge of the green felt.

And then class was over. After work, I headed out to the ski trail, absentmindedly cataloging the animal tracks at the edge of the groomed snow. I saw the hopping tracks of squirrels leading to and from trees, the heart-shaped tracks of deer stepping right in the middle of the ski tracks, and even the daisy-chain of grouse tracks winding through the underbrush. I didn’t see a single live animal, but these tracks recorded the unseen activity for anyone to read.

Did any of the second graders do the same thing? Did they pause while climbing up the sledding hill to see what furry friend had run across it? Did they follow a being’s trail to find out what happened to them? My hope is that our classroom exercise will help them learn to read the stories of the forest.

Emily’s award-winning second book, Natural Connections: Dreaming of an Elfin Skimmer, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. The Museum is open with our brand-new exhibit: “Anaamaagon: Under the Snow.” Our Winter Calendar is open for registration! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Operation Owl Rescue

On Christmas Day, I found myself driving from Lutsen, Minn., to Duluth with a very unusual package next to my skis and duffle bag. On my way home from a short trip near Thunder Bay, Ontario, a Facebook post caught my eye. “…large grey owl on the side of the road. They stopped to investigate, and noticed that its wing appears to be broken. Given our location (Lutsen) and the date (Christmas Eve), what should we do?”

Minutes later, I passed a group of three people trudging up a snowy road ditch with a blanket and a cardboard box. As it turns out, that crew included Christine Salomon and her two teens, Ezra and Macy. When I met Christine and Macy the next morning in Lutsen to help transport the owl, they filled me in on the rest of the story.

This Great Gray Owl was injured by a car on Highway 61 near Lutsen, MN. The rescuers took this photo to help wildlife rehabilitators assess the owl’s identification and injuries and then quickly backed off. Photo by Christine Salomon.

Christine had called the hotline for Wildwoods wildlife rehab facility in Duluth and received instructions on how to rescue the owl. That explained the blanket for protection from the raptor’s sharp talons, and the box to carry the owl without further injuring them. “It was not that different than picking up one of my chickens,” explained Macy nonchalantly. “The owl was all puffy until I picked them up, and then they just deflated.”

Great Gray Owls, one of the tallest owls in the U.S., are mostly made of feathers. Living in the taiga of Canada, Scandinavia, Siberia, Mongolia, and Minnesota, they need lots of insultation. They also need lots of food, and this year more owls than usual have come south in search of tasty voles.

Macy and Ezra placed the owl, still inside the sturdy box with lots of ventilation, in an unheated sauna for the night. Being in quiet darkness is the least stressful environment for an injured bird. The owl’s need for transport to Duluth on Christmas Day fit with my own travel plans back to Cable, which is how I ended up in the empty parking lot of a liquor store in Lutsen making the handoff.

Macy and Christine Salomon with the Great Gray Owl in the box.
We made a quick and quiet hand-off.

To reassure ourselves that the owl was still alive, Christine opened one of the flaps on the box. Staring up at us were two giant yellow eyes nestled into satellite dishes of gray-patterned feathers that funnel sound into the owl’s hidden ears. Just like the more common Great Horned and Barred Owls, Great Grays use their excellent hearing to locate mice and voles beneath the snow and plunge in talon-first to grab them.

This owl probably had swooped down toward a mammal snack in the road ditch, and didn’t see an oncoming car. Both natural weed seeds and food scraps thrown out of car windows can attract small mammals to the road ditch and put wildlife in danger.

I was mindful of my precious cargo on the long drive as I reduced my speed on corners, eased into stoplights, and kept the radio off. Jessica LaBumbard, executive director of Wildwoods, met me outside the door of their little facility in Duluth. With another owl already in their care, the possibility of spreading avian influenza was a risk she didn’t want to take. Plus, she would have needed the help of another staff member to handle the owl safely.

Instead, a third car pulled into their lot, and two of Wildwoods’ long-time volunteers whisked the owl away to The Raptor Center in St. Paul for advanced care. I asked if they were already heading in that direction. “Nope,” they said with big smiles. They were just happy to help.

Jessica and the small staff at Wildwoods have been busy lately. They helped rescue five owls in the matter of just a few days around Christmas. All were injured by cars, and not all of them survived.

One owl in particular, a Snowy Owl found in the grill of a car in the parking lot at the Bentleyville Tour of Lights in Duluth, made the national news. I asked Jessica what she thought those stories overlooked. “I cringe at all the photos of the owls with lights and people,” she told me. “Owls are terrified of us, and the best thing we can do is get them somewhere quiet and dark, away from human voices, as soon as possible. Our roads are not designed for wildlife, which makes these injuries unavoidable. But if people can slow down a bit, that helps,” she added.

Even after I’d delivered my unusual package, I found myself driving in silence. My thoughts were with all the rescued owls, wishing that their injuries could be healed. I’d just seen my first Great Gray Owl, and even that tiny glimpse had been unforgettable. With any luck, and with the hard work of all the rehabilitators and their rescue volunteers, and conservationists, the next Great Gray I’ll see will be healthy and in the wild.

If you find an injured raptor, never try to help them until you have spoken with a licensed wildlife rehabilitator. Only move them if they are in immediate danger and you aren’t putting yourself in danger. It is illegal to possess a raptor unless you are transporting them directly to a licensed rehabilitator.

Here are a few places you can call about injured raptors in Minnesota and Wisconsin:

• Wildwoods, Duluth, MN, 218-491-3604
• The Raptor Center, St. Paul, MN, 612-624-4745
• The Raptor Center has an excellent guide to handling on their website.
• Winged Freedom Raptor Hospital, Spooner, WI, 715 781-2595
• Raptor Education Group, Inc., Antigo, WI, 715-623-4015
• Hoo’s Woods Raptor Center, Milton, WI, 608-883-2795
• WI DNR Wildlife Hotline 608-267-0866
• Wisconsin DNR Wildlife Rehab Directory

All these facilities have websites where you can find out more, sign up to volunteer, and donate to support their important work!



Emily’s award-winning second book, Natural Connections: Dreaming of an Elfin Skimmer, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. The Museum is open with our brand-new exhibit: “Anaamaagon: Under the Snow.” Our Winter Calendar is open for registration! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Wilson’s Warbler WOW

Gathered around a bonfire on the Winter Solstice, the hostess asked us each to share one moment from the past year that made us go, “Wow!” Being residents of the Northwoods, we had each experienced many such moments, she acknowledged, but in the interest of time, we must choose just one. “Wow” moments flickered through my memory with the same warmth and brightness of the campfire’s flames. Despite the fact that my year had included rafting the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, my favorite “wow” moment happened on a river much closer to home.

The Winter Solstice Fire

One lovely afternoon last May, I set out with a friend to paddle an upper section of the Namekagon River. Flights of “mackerel sky” clouds patterned the sky, but plenty of blue shone through. The white blossoms of highbush cranberries and wild cherry trees accented the bright greens of brand-new leaves.

Our goal was to experience the evening chorus of birds as they fueled up on insects before taking off on another night of migration, or defended their newly claimed nesting territory against intruders. Common Yellowthroat Warblers, with their rakish black eye masks, shouted witchety-witchety-witchety from deep within the alders. Dark gray Eastern Kingbirds darted off their perches to catch recently hatched insects. And Gray Catbirds announced their locations with loud mews.

As we reveled in the vibrant life coursing through the spring evening, while also gaining satisfaction from being able to identify so many birds, a Mary Oliver poem came to mind.

“Don't mind my inexplicable delight / in knowing your name, / little Wilson's Warbler” 

she wrote.

I quoted this poem to my friend, and then focused back on my steering, since we were coming up to a corner and then a potentially tricky slide down an old, submerged dam under a bridge. As I swung us wide into the corner to make it a straight shot, a burst of twittering, movement, and flashes of yellow in the alder shrubs drew my attention. Squinting, I thought I spotted a black cap on one of the tiny heads, and quickly pulled into an eddy.

Sure enough, our binoculars revealed a flock of half-a-dozen or more little birds, “yellow as a lemon, with a smooth, black cap…” as Mary Oliver described them. Laughing in delight, we felt like we’d just conjured these Wilson’s Warblers with her poem.

Wilson’s Warblers are bright yellow with a little black cap.
Photo by Rhododendrites - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=105248001

That poem, titled Bird in a Pepper Tree, must have been written on a trip to Mexico or Central America, where both the range of the pepper tree and the winter habitat of Wilson’s Warblers overlap. Each spring, the birds leave this narrow refuge and fan out across the continent toward breeding grounds in the far north. Males tend to migrate faster and earlier, rushing north to claim breeding territories ahead of the females’ arrival. Indeed, the little flock, each with a very distinct black cap, all appeared to be males.

As they bounced like fresh popcorn through the willow and alder thickets near the river’s edge, the Wilson’s Warblers perfectly matched the descriptions of their behavior in the bird guides. They tend to stick to the understory, unlike other warblers who will pause on a high perch to belt out a song. Surrounded by leaves, the Wilson’s Warblers pluck caterpillars and aphids off the bushes, and if a flying insect catches their eye, they’ll take to the wing to nab it, returning to nearly the same perch.

It was their greenish-yellow wings, black feathers on their crown, and darting behavior that earned these little birds their first English name: “Green Black-capt Flycatchers” in 1811. Alexander Wilson, an American ornithologist, called them this, following his preference for descriptive names. Ironically, after his death, other ornithologists changed the bird’s name to honor him.

The reason we can call this warbler by such a simple, alliterative name, instead of the harder-to-remember Cardellina pusilla, is that The American Ornithological Society (AOS) has standardized common names. Those standards may soon be modified. In 2023, the AOS committed to “changing all English-language names of birds within its geographic jurisdiction that are named directly after people (eponyms)…”

This decision is not without controversy, but I’m in favor of the change for the simple reason that it feels quite arrogant to call any wild being a possession of someone. Despite the name’s implication, Alexander Wilson doesn’t have any ownership over the Wilson’s Warbler, and never believed he did. Although Mary Oliver died several years before the AOS’s decision, I think she would have agreed. The last line in her poem, after delighting in observing the bird’s behavior and being able to identify them, was “a name is not a leash.”

And yet, by some magic, Mary’s poem and these handsome little warblers were tied together in a moment that made us say, “wow!”

Emily’s award-winning second book, Natural Connections: Dreaming of an Elfin Skimmer, is available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. The Museum is open with our brand-new exhibit: “Anaamaagon: Under the Snow.” Our Winter Calendar is open for registration! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.