Aurora Magic

My snowshoes sank into drifts softened by the warm day. At the frozen lakeshore, the view opened up to a curtain of lights.

Sometimes I’ve gone out to look for the northern lights and have squinted and wondered if that faint glow was really them. Last night there was no question. Vertical rays of light rose from an invisible line a hand’s width above the horizon. They formed a curtain that rippled as if in a breeze. Now and then a particular ray would brighten and reach higher, and the activity shifted from due north across the lake, to west down the channel, and back east toward a little resort on the point.

I imagined the solar winds out there, rushing toward Earth, transferring energy into our magnetosphere, and pushing electrons there down the magnetic field toward us. As those electrons encountered nitrogen and different forms of oxygen, the excited molecules emitted light like a neon sign.

Northern lights above the horizon of Lake Namakagon. 
10:39 p.m. on March 23, 2023

Although the auroras are always made of colored light, I saw only white…or maybe it was pale green? That’s just a function of my night vision and the sensitive rod cells around the outsides of my retinas picking up light but not color. Cameras, especially with long exposure times, can gather more light than our eyes and help us see the greens, reds, and purples of the aurora more vividly.

Standing out on the cold snow, I texted a few friends about the aurora and soaked it in. Soon there was a lull, and I headed inside.

While rinsing out my toothbrush, my phone buzzed. “The sky is dancing!” wrote my friend. I threw on a warmer coat and headed back outside. In just an hour, the temperature had dropped enough that the snow crust supported me firmly. And yes, the sky was dancing.

Pillars, curtains, and swirls of light danced along the horizon. As the beams strengthened and the flashing increased, the display shifted from the Little Dipper into Cassiopeia. This “Westward Traveling Surge” is a phenomenon associated with sudden brightening and activity in the aurora called a substorm. Substorms happen when a plasma flow short-circuits and is suddenly flung toward Earth causing a surge of activity.

My jaw dropped as the pillars shot upward, and then overhead and behind me. Light danced across even the southern sky. And directly above me, the curtains turned to curving bands that flashed, wiggled, and swirled. After almost losing my balance, I gave in and lay down on the snow to look straight up.

Substorms were first described in the International Geophysical Year of 1957-58 when scientists from all over the world coordinated their efforts to observe the aurora simultaneously. That same effort also led to the discovery of the Auroral Oval—imagine the northern lights originating from crowns sitting on top of the North Pole...and the South Pole, too!

When we are south of the Auroral Oval, we only see the sides of those faint curtains of light on the northern horizon. When the oval widens or shifts far enough south, the light curtains appear straight above us, and you can look up at the bottom of the curtains instead of at their side. Then, the corona appears. This psychedelic, converging pattern at the top of the sky is rare to see and highly sought after by aurora chasers.

I’ve long thought that auroras were most visible at night just because we can only see them when it’s otherwise dark, and most visible in winter for the same reason. As it turns out, the best northern lights occur around midnight, when the Sun is on the far side of the Earth. You may have seen a diagram of the solar winds hitting the Earth’s magnetic field, then curving around the planet and creating a tail on the far side. The best auroras come from that tail, and thus are visible around midnight. In addition, cracks that form in our magnetosphere near the equinoxes make impressive auroras more common in March and September.

I also thought that northern lights were always caused by coronal mass ejections (CME) of plasma, but this event came from a hole in the Sun’s corona where the magnetic field is open to space, allowing high-speed solar wind streams to escape. The coronal hole that caused this storm is reportedly thirty times the size of Earth. Luckily, the solar winds from coronal holes are less likely to interrupt radio communication, disrupt power stations, and damage satellites.

“The best of my life!” “An unbelievable experience!” “The sky was alive!” “Magia!” “Taika!” “Magic!” This was the most spectacular auroral display in many peoples’ experience. Thanks to social media, I could see photos and exclamations from Iowa, Indiana, Alaska, Canada, Poland, Denmark, Finland, Australia, Tasmania, and more.

The same Sun gives us all the energy we need to live, and the Earth’s magnetic field protects us when that energy becomes intense. Together, they make magic.

(If you'd like to be notified that you should go outside and look for the aurora, there are several websites and apps out there that can help. I had recently downloaded "My Aurora Forecast & Alerts" from Google Play, and it did indeed alert me just in time! I was also expecting the alerts because I follow Astro Bob's Astronomy for Everyone on Facebook. Bob King is in Duluth and posts about lots of neat stuff, including upcoming northern lights.)

Emily’s award-winning second book, Natural Connections: Dreaming of an Elfin Skimmer, is now 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 closed for construction of our new exhibit: The Northwoods ROCKS! It will open on May 2, 2023. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Facebook Post and Frog Phenology

A Facebook notification popped up on my phone screen and I tapped it absentmindedly, mostly to make it go away. Even as the post was loading, sound erupted. Wood frogs quacked, chorus frogs crrreeked, spring peepers peeped, leopard frogs snored, toads and tree frogs trilled, green frogs plunked, and finally bullfrogs hummed.

I grinned as I scrambled to turn down the volume. The animation continued without sound—a dark blue line moving to the right across a bar graph showing which Northwoods frogs sing in each month from March through August.

I created this audio and animation in the spring of 2020 while working from home. I thought it was a sad replacement for the in-person version of a frog call chorus I should have been teaching in first grade classrooms during MuseumMobile visits.

And yet, the post went viral.

From all over the country and the world, people who were spending more time at home, and outside, and with less traffic noise, heard the frogs and were eager to identify their newly noticed neighbors. They liked and shared the post, commenting about what they were hearing in their own backyard, how the audio had startled their dog, and what beautiful memories the frog songs revealed.

Each spring since 2020, the start of real frogs calling inspires people to begin sharing the post again. By this point, the post has a reach of more than 9.5 million. Just a few days ago, the phenomenon began again—which is what prompted the notification and sound erupting from my phone!

The steady stream of new comments the post is receiving is a little disheartening, actually. Those people are hearing frogs already! A commenter from southern Missouri wrote that their daffodils are almost finished, lilac buds are close to bursting, and sugaring season is long over.

Meanwhile, my daffodils are under a mountain of a plow pile. Last year they didn’t even get uncovered soon enough to bloom. The yardstick I stuck in the snow near my subnivean thermometer tells me that we still have 30 inches on the ground. Snow continues to be in the forecast. Temperatures will plummet into the single digits tonight.

Is it wrong to yearn for daffodils in March?

I don’t remember those feelings as a kid. The seasons progressed happily from sledding to mud pies to dandelion soup, and I had little awareness that other places experienced seasons differently. With the advent of social media, I now see images of crocuses, salamanders, sunshine, and gardening slide through my feed while I look forlornly out on snow.

We call some of the negative emotions triggered by social media the “fear of missing out (FoMO).” In 2013, British psychologists Przybylski et. al. defined FoMO as the “pervasive apprehension that others might be having rewarding experiences from which one is absent.” Most people apply the feelings to social connection, but in the Northwoods, I think FoMo should also be applied to weather.

Of course, we will experience spring eventually. And the annual arrival of spring—as it creeps up from the south—brings with it many phenological observations. Phenology is the study of when specific events happen in nature from year to year in a specific place. When do daffodils bloom? That answer will be different for each latitude, each yard, and even each side of the same house. (The south-facing side warms up faster, of course!) The answer will also differ based on the weather of that particular year.

Using my Facebook feed, I can compare the arrival of spring here to the arrival of spring around the country. Websites like JourneyNorth.org let us seek out that same information in a more organized way. They curate maps that show the arrival of robins, hummingbirds, monarch butterflies, loons, and more as they migrate back for the summer.

While the frog call animation that started my reflection on phenology indicates that we could hear wood frogs as early as the end of March, I expect that spring will be late.

Luckily, the frog call chorus already arrived at a first grade classroom near you! First the kids learned to imitate several frog sounds. Then I assigned each row of students to be a particular species. Finally, I directed the students in a full season of frog songs.

“Wood frogs begin, with peepers close behind. They keep going while leopard frogs start! Then the wood frogs and peepers stop. Bullfrogs begin. Leopard frogs go quiet, and finally in August all we’re left with are the bullfrogs. Hmm…Hmm…Hmm…Until even they are silenced by fall.” Snow comes, and we start the whole cycle over again.

Emily’s award-winning second book, Natural Connections: Dreaming of an Elfin Skimmer, is now 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 closed for construction of our new exhibit: The Northwoods ROCKS! It will open on May 2, 2023. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

MORE Bear Babies

My feet were just starting to get numb from standing on the snow-packed trail when the activity over by the den changed. Students with University of Wisconsin Stevens Point’s (UWSP) Wisconsin Black Bear Project, led by Dr. Cady Sartini, plus several other wildlife professionals, were working together around the mouth of the den.

A student broke away from the group and headed to where we non-researchers were stationed out of the way. Abby was cradling something small against her chest, and the adoring smile that lit up her face gave it away: she was carrying a bear cub.

Abby, a University of Wisconsin Stevens Point’s Wisconsin Black Bear Project student researcher, snuggles a tiny black bear cub to help keep him warm while his mother is anesthetized and other researchers collect data on her. Photo by Emily Stone.

Eager hands reached out to take the cub and nestle him into a puffy winter coat. Soon more students with more cubs headed our way. Four tiny cubs were distributed among the willing volunteers. Mama bear lay anesthetized in the den, and the cubs needed our warmth.

Back in January, Dr. Sartini allowed a group of Wisconsin Master Naturalists to join her team on a reconnaissance mission to find out if this den had cubs, yearlings, or just the collared adult. As I wrote, we saw the mom’s sleepy face, and heard the grunts of two cubs. Two cubs were all I’d been expecting when I lucked into joining Dr. Sartini and her students on this data collection visit to the same den.

One of the students held a cub out toward me, and I cradled him against my chest, trying to tuck him inside my puffy coat while his long claws tangled in nylon and wool. I’d forgotten to take my hood down, and soon the anxious cub was climbing up my neck, needle-sharp claws poking and wet nose nuzzling. It was adorable, funny, and painful all at once. Climbing trees to safety is a life-saving instinct in bear cubs, and although this was the first time outside their den, their long, sharp claws were ready to go!

Kris Dew, bear project supporter, shows off the adorable feet of a cub. Photo by Emily Stone. 

Startled by the cub’s climbing, and unable to untangle him alone, I enlisted Laura Schulte, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel reporter also covering the event, to help. Together, we got the cub off my neck and swaddled against her chest so that he was comfortable enough to stay put—although the little guy whined the entire time. Later, we discovered he was the runt of the litter at only 3.4 pounds to his brothers’ 4. They’ve likely quadrupled in size since birth just over a month ago.

A few minutes later, someone shared their cub with me. Paul Smith, a Milwaukee Journal Sentinel outdoor writer who has been covering this project for 30 years, helped me get the cub settled comfortably and remarked on just how perfect the little ones are. Paul will be writing about the 45-year history of this long-term research project.

You can barely see him against my gray sweater, but there is a little cub snuggled up in my coat! 

Taking off a mitten, I reveled in the softness and warmth of this tiny wild creature, and soon he became so quiet that I’m pretty sure he was sleeping. I felt honored by his trust. Despite bears’ excellent sense of smell, there’s no evidence that a mama bear will abandon her cubs if she catches a whiff of human. And despite rumors of animal babies being scentless, this cub had plenty of his own odor.

Disrupting a den like this is undoubtedly stressful for both mother and cubs, which is why protocols and safety measures are in place. But in the 45 years that the Wisconsin Black Bear Project has been collecting data and handling cubs, the impacts have been found to be minimal. And the data gathered has proven essential for learning about and managing black bears in Wisconsin, and training students in wildlife research.

After a few minutes, Abby and a volunteer weighed each of the cubs by placing them into a cozy stocking hat and attaching a spring scale through the knit. They were sexed (all boys) and students held a ruler up to the hair between their ears—a proxy for age. Then a wildlife biologist collected nasal and blood samples to screen for wildlife diseases.

Abby, a University of Wisconsin Stevens Point’s Wisconsin Black Bear Project student researcher, weighs a black bear cub. The cub is placed in stocking hat to keep him warm during the process. Photo by Emily Stone.

Measuring the hair of a bear cub to estimate age. Photo by Emily Stone

Meanwhile, back at the den, students and professionals struggled to get the limp, heavy female out of the ground. The entrance, tucked under the roots of a spruce tree, proved too narrow. She couldn’t be weighed or fully measured. With just her head out, they checked her collar, took vitals, and collected a tooth. Bear teeth record growth rings just like a tree. A cross section can tell researchers her age, and even record the years she gave birth and had less calcium to spare.

At the end of the day, the cubs were safely returned to the den with a drowsy mother, and the den entrance covered with balsam boughs. Researchers packed up samples and data for analyzing in the lab.

“It didn’t go the way we thought it would go,” said Dr. Sartini as we stuffed gear into vehicles, “but it went just fine. So many of the skills the students gain here will be transferable. Risk management, teamwork, and planning are useful for studying other wildlife and doing any kind of science.” John Tracey, the wildlife vet in charge of anesthetizing the bear, agreed, “As much as you want an event you’re running to go smoothly, it’s also beneficial for the students to see curveballs and challenges come up and get dealt with calmly.”

Researchers are always looking for new bears to add to the UWSP Wisconsin Black Bear Project, so if you know of a bear den in Ashland, Bayfield, Price, or Sawyer Counties, you can contact Dr. Sartini directly at csartini@uwsp.edu. Dens outside this area can be reported to your nearest DNR office for their statewide research project.

Want to learn more? Dr. Cady Sartini is giving a live/virtual lecture on March 16: “The Wisconsin Black Bear Project: Celebrating 45 Years of Bears in the North Woods.” The lecture is part of the UWSP College of Natural Resources Spring Seminar Series.

Emily’s award-winning second book, Natural Connections: Dreaming of an Elfin Skimmer, is now 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. Our Growing Up WILD exhibit will close on March 15, and The Northwoods ROCKS will open on May 2, 2023. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Snowshoe Field Trip

Thick clouds of snowflakes swirled as I climbed the steep hill. Behind me, a string of 20 third graders from Hayward Intermediate School padded along on the Cable Natural History Museum’s rental snowshoes. Their feet were quieter than usual—in many years the trails are hard-packed ice by the time we embark on this annual field trip. This year, fresh snow dampened the crunch of plastic and metal.

The students themselves were just as talkative as ever. Barely out of sight of the big yellow school bus, they’d started in with the cries of “I’m tired! I’m hungry! Are we there yet?” By age 9, they were already finding humor in what they knew to be cliché’ (even if that word has yet to appear on a spelling test).

When the upper branches of a freshly fallen tree appeared ahead of us, I took quick stock of the options. “Are you ready for an adventure?” I asked, and led the students through fresh snow, up a steep bank, onto the high angle of the hillside above the trail, and then back down. “Yes! More adventure!” cried the eager ones at the front of the line. While the less adventurous ones struggled with the hill, I texted Rich Jaworski, the new director of the Museum. By the time we passed that way again, the tree had magically disappeared, even the sawdust covered by snow.

This field trip is designed around the Mammal Tour at the North End Trailhead, a roughly 1-mile loop trail where we’ve placed life-size metal silhouettes of 25 Wisconsin mammals. But when we got to the start of the main loop, the first metal animal was nowhere to be seen. I gingerly stepped around the mound where I thought it should be, but no badger appeared. Forging ahead without the visual aid, I asked, “What are badgers really good at?” “Basketball and football!” was the response. Digging dens is what I’d been thinking.

The woodchuck and chipmunk were also deeply buried by crusty layers of snow and ice. But the wolf’s nose was howling out of a drift, and not far away the deer’s antlers beckoned, too. At the trailhead, I’d given two students backpacks to carry, and now their jaws dropped as I pulled a full, fluffy wolf pelt from one of the packs.

After petting the fur, we talked about how wolves’ big feet help them stay on top of the snow, especially crusty spring snow. In contrast, deer’s sharp hooves—well suited for running quietly and efficiently through the leaf litter—punch through the crust and allow their owner to be caught.

There was no crust on this day. The snow fell so fast that our tracks were obscured by the time we completed the loop less than two hours later. And the talk of venison for a wolf’s dinner must have made some kids hungry, because they scooped up big handfuls of fresh snow and ate messily. “Just so you can make an informed decision,” I told them, “every single snowflake has a piece of dust or bacteria at its center.” No one was deterred.

On the second morning (it takes four rounds to get 102 third graders out on trail!) sunshine beamed down instead of snow. Just before the corner of the missing badger, tiny tracks quilted the drifts. Mice had darted from tree to tree in last night’s moonlight. I couldn’t resist pointing them out. “Who made these?” I asked the kids. “Deer! Fox! Rabbit! Squirrel!” they shouted, clearly not computing that the track-maker’s feet were less than half an inch long.

“All winter,” I told them, “mice live in a magical space where snow and ground come together.” “I know what it’s called!” yelled a kid from the back of the line. “So,” I continued, “when you look out in the woods and see this blank snow, you can also imagine entire mouse cities and civilizations hidden underneath, where they are eating, sleeping, fighting, playing, and having babies all winter long. This magical place is called…” and I gestured to the kid…”The subnivean zone!” he yelled proudly. “I learned that from Wild Kratts” he added.

The mice often use the base of a tree as a gateway between the subnivean zone and the surface, I explained, but sometimes they just burrow straight into the snow. With eyes alert as we hiked, these portal holes appeared everywhere.

Back at the corner of the missing badger, we recapped. “Today we learned about things that animals have and do that help them survive the winter. And we put some adaptations on ourselves, too. What adaptations am I talking about?” I asked. “Snowshoes!” they yelled. And then we tromped down the hill to take them off.

Emily’s award-winning second book, Natural Connections: Dreaming of an Elfin Skimmer, is now 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. Our Growing Up WILD exhibit will close on March 15, and The Northwoods ROCKS will open on May 2, 2023. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Visiting Glaciers in Alaska and Wisconsin

Source

It was just a diagram on my screen, but the carefully drawn cross-section of a glacier with kettles, kames, and eskers being revealed as the ice melted drew me in like a treasure map. Then, lost in thought, I stared past my computer screen to the snow-covered hills, valleys, and lake surrounding my home. The diagram had come to life.

As I work with a committee to design and build our new exhibit “The Northwoods ROCKS! Where Geology is the Foundation for Fun,” (opening in May!) I have geology on the brain. Thinking about the glaciers that once covered Northern Wisconsin also has me reminiscing about walking on and paddling next to modern glaciers during my four-month trip to Alaska in the summer of 2018.

Exit Glacier: Kenai Fjords National Park

At the Marmot Meadows overlook we began to descend out of a lush field of wildflowers and straight down a rocky trail toward the white, blue, and brown wrinkles of the glacier.

The glacier’s surface was a gracefully sculpted expanse of luminous snow and ice, sprinkled liberally with brown dirt. Rivulets of water cut narrow ravines through the dirty surface and created small, white-walled canyons with intensely blue bottoms. Those small ravines probably flowed along the tracks of healed crevasses.

Our guide led us to the edge of a moulin. He held onto my harness, and I peered into the cavity. Water may have excavated this roughly circular, well-like shaft out of an old crevasse or found some other weakness in the ice. Either way, I watched a tiny stream glide over the surface and then cascade into the smooth, spiraling hole.

Moulins play an important role in carrying water and sediment from the surface of the glacier into its depths. Mount Telemark, a 380-foot-tall old ski hill in Northern Wisconsin, was probably built by water-born sediment that poured into a large moulin 14,000 years ago at the end of the continental glaciation. I was thrilled to see a much smaller version of this glacial feature in action.

Exit Glacier in Kenai Fjords National Park, Alaska, was the first glacier I ever walked on. At home in Wisconsin, though, I walk—and ski, bike, run, hike, and paddle—on the results of glaciers every single day. Photo by Emily Stone

A moulin (hole) in Exit Glacier.

Aialik Glacier: Kenai Fjords National Park

After a water taxi ride from the town of Seward southwest to another fjord, the group switched to kayaks and glided through a maze of mini-bergs. A half-mile from the glacier’s front we paused, admiring the huge, pale-blue tongue of ice that reached down out of the clouds and into the sea.

Suddenly, thunder rumbled. A little bubble of excitement rose in my chest. I love thunderstorms, and I’ve missed them while in Alaska. This was even better. The ice itself was rumbling. We watched a chunk of ice tumble into the sea. A small white avalanche of crushed ice poured in behind it, and a wave spread out from the glacier. We gasped and cheered.

Valdez Glacial Lake: Valdez, AK

We launched inflatable kayaks onto mirror-calm water in a dense fog. Huge icebergs loomed in the shallows. Someone made a joke about the Titanic, but that didn’t stop us from paddling up for a closer look. Most bergs were heaped with blankets and piles of wet, brown sediments, which indicated that they were floating upright, in the same orientation as when they’d been attached to the glacier. Where chunks had broken off to reveal their inner ice, though, the crystals were huge, sparkling, and made luminous patterns of white and blue.

After lunch, the fog burned off and revealed a brilliant blue sky. We scrambled up a canyon wall to get a better look at the glacier itself. The brown-and-white striped river of ice flowed from around a corner and into view. At the terminus lay a jumble of broken, dirty ice chunks, in the process of detaching fully into the lake. With bright sun illuminating everything, the lake seemed small; in the fog, we might have been on an endless sea.

Ever since I discovered how to read the glaciated landscape of Northern Minnesota and Wisconsin, I’ve been fascinated by these massive forces of nature. Admiring them from afar, seeing them up close, paddling among icebergs, touching their ice…glaciers are even more amazing than I’d expected…and I’m not done exploring them!

As we work on the new geology exhibit, I’m excited to help everyone understand how to see the footprint of past glaciers on our lakes, hills, trails, and Northwoods fun.

Note: Portions of this article were originally printed in 2018.

Emily’s award-winning second book, Natural Connections: Dreaming of an Elfin Skimmer, is now 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. Our Growing Up WILD exhibit will close on March 15, and The Northwoods ROCKS will open on May 2, 2023. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.