Prairie Chickens at Dawn

The sun had set on a lovely, summer-like afternoon…and now it rose on the cold, gray, damp of early spring. Well, at least I assume it did. The only sign of our star’s presence was a gradual decrease in my reliance on headlights.

Thanks to the magic of GPS, I managed to find the school bus parked in a soggy gravel lot in the middle of farm country. I darted through the raindrops and claimed a seat behind a few other groggy people. More straggled on, and as the 6:00 a.m. meeting time arrived, volunteer coordinators Sharon Schwab & Dan O’Connell introduced themselves and took attendance. Seven of about 20 registered participants had decided not to brave the cold rain for a rare chance to see prairie chickens.

This grassland birding bus tour was part of the annual Wisconsin Prairie Chicken Festival. I’d been invited to give a talk at the library in Wisconsin Rapids the night before, and couldn’t pass up an opportunity to see a new bird. While the greater prairie chicken’s cousins, the sharp-tailed grouse, live a little closer to me up in Northern Wisconsin, I’ve always been too busy building exhibits in April to reserve a dauntingly early spot in a bird blind.

April is the best month to view both birds because that’s when they dance.

Prairie chickens and sharp-tailed grouse both start their breeding season with the avian version of a night club. Males get together on open, elevated, flat areas with short grass and good visibility called a lek. These criteria make it easy to spot danger. It also makes it easier for the males to be seen.

Once a group of prairie chicken males has gathered, they all dance like crazy to attract the girls. Not only does dancing together attract more females, it also lets the males compete for attention, and the females can choose the best mate. First, the guys extend orange eye combs, lower their head, and raise two tufts of neck feathers that stick up like bunny ears. Then they stamp their feet, click their tails, and shake their wings to the ground. The most vibrant move comes when they channel their inner frog by inflating bright orange air sacs in their neck…and boom.

We bumped down gravel roads for about 20 minutes before the bus rolled to a stop. The Paul J. Olson Wildlife Area was to our backs, but Sharon and Dan were using binoculars to scan the farm field across the road. “One just flew!” someone exclaimed. And we all looked harder.

Can you see any birds???

Voices called out like popcorn with sightings, and eventually Dan said he could see seven males. I’d forgotten my binoculars, and was relying on the zoom lens of my camera to get a better look. It took some doing, but eventually those bright orange air sacs caught my eye, and I focused on a displaying male prairie chicken.

Not my best photo ever, but that definitely shows a male prairie chicken!

Then someone asked the bus driver to cut the engine.

As the rumble quieted and everyone finished their last sentence, a ghostly sound filtered through the gray mist. Oooo-oooo-oo…the sound of prairie chickens booming.

Listen Here: https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Greater_Prairie-Chicken/sounds# 

Eerie though it was, the sound also reminded me of whimsical amusements like blowing across the top of a pop bottle, or swinging a hollow tube through the air. Males make the sound by passing air through their syrinx. The orange air sacs—which are extensions of the esophagus—amplify the sound. Another name for prairie chickens is Tympanuchus cupido pinnatus, or “drummer of love." Another name for this place is a booming ground.

4-21-2023 greater prairie chicken photo by Chrissy McClarren and Andy Reago, iNaturalist.com, CCO.

Whatever they’re called, there aren’t many left—of either the bird or the place. Prairie chickens used to roam the entire state, and now they exist only in a handful of counties in central Wisconsin. Market hunting in the early 1900s was hard on them, but habitat loss is the most critical factor in their demise—and their potential recovery.

We heard lots of red-winged blackbirds, but no more groups of prairie chickens on the remainder of the bus tour. Back at the site of the Prairie Chicken Festival, local famers, conservationists (often the same people), students, and families gathered to learn about efforts to restore habitat for these wild birds.

Greater prairie chickens require the largest grassland areas of any bird in Wisconsin. Within that, their habitat is diverse. In spring, open leks are key. During the summer, females need dense brush for nesting safely and open areas with lots of insects to forage with their chicks. They don’t move far for winter, but benefit from good cover and cropland for foraging. Like their cousins the ruffed grouse, they might also perch in aspen trees to nibble on buds.

For all the efforts being made to save the last several hundred prairie chickens in Wisconsin, their future here is uncertain. But the Wisconsin Prairie Chicken Festival shows that there are people who care.

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.

Spring Arrives with Lois Nestel

All the talk these days is about spring. When volunteers arrive at the Museum to paint or construct or hang up something for our new exhibit (also a sign of spring!) we spend the first few minutes talking about the unbelievable warmth, arriving birds, muddy driveways, the rapidly melting snow, and the plow piles that we suspect may never melt.

With all this chatter, I found myself wanting to contemplate more quietly the things we exclaim about every spring. Going to my bookshelf, I selected a slim volume on cream-colored paper: Wayside Wanderings by Lois Nestel. Lois was the Museum’s founding naturalist and director. Although we never met, I love reading her words, admiring her sketches and photographs, and learning from her quiet wisdom.

About spring, Lois wrote:

“Poor, weary, battered spring, after many reversals, seems to have finally arrived. The time of emergence is upon us. The hibernators are out. Chipmunks, tails straight up, scurry enthusiastically about as if checking up on last year’s unfinished business. Gophers and woodchucks search for succulent green spears or drowse dull-eyed in the sun. The deer have left their wintering yards. The tracks of bears once again mark the forest trails. Skunks dig for grubs in the softening soil and leave muddy imprints of slender paws on receding snow.

“The sap is rising in the trees. The pines have taken on a brighter, livelier hue and the buds of aspen and maple are swelling. On a recent day I watched purple finches drinking sparkling sap droplets from winter-damaged twigs of the box elders. This member of the maple family has sap only slightly less sweet than the sugar maple.

“Insects bask on sun-warmed siding, a mourning cloak butterfly, emerging from winter quarters, flutters aimlessly by and, by night, an occasional moth flutters against a lighted window.

Mourning cloak butterflies spend the winter as adults and are some of the first to emerge in spring. Photo by Emily Stone.

“A swirl of warm, aroma-laden air from a hillside, a draft of cool cleanliness from a hollow may awaken vague stirrings of the spirit; yet we can only appreciate but cannot interpret, as do animals, all that the scented air contains. But thus may we, at no cost and little effort, enrich our lives; if we fail to do so we have deprived only ourselves.

“In this season, when one is keenly aware of the scents of the earth, the fragrance of spring flowers is expected and perhaps taken for granted: The delicate perfume of arbutus and the tiny white violets that grow on moist soil, the richness of wild roses and, later, the heavy fragrance of pyrolas. But there are drifts of odor so elusive that, caught with one breath they are gone the next. The faint tang of newly opening leaves defies description—a touch of spiciness, an intangible freshness that is purity, yet something more.

“There’s a new note in the woodlands these days. It comes, in part, from those noisy beauties, the blue jays. Their extensive repertoire includes the usual raucous cries of “jay, jay” intermingled with clickings and grindings, a shrill hawk-like cry, strange bell tones, and a variety of whistles. Now, though, we hear in addition low, sweet warblings and see the swaggering showoff sidling up a branch to diffidently offer a choice seed or other tidbit to another of their kind. The reason is obvious. The courting season is at hand and neither snow nor cold can long discourage it.

“Other of our resident birds are sharing the same inclination. Increasingly as spring comes on we hear the sweet two-toned call of the chickadee, a drawn-out sound that seems to say “phoebe,” but in a different way from the bird of that name.

“There will be days when spring turns her face away, but her feet are set firmly upon the path and she will progress in her own time. Who are we to insist that the weather meet our demands? We would appreciate the warmth and beauty less if we had not endured the harsher elements. To be aware of the joy and beauty of each day, each season, is the fulfillment of a rich and exciting life.”

Thanks for sharing your wisdom, Lois. May all of our lives be as rich and exciting as the one you once lived day by beautiful day.

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.

The Glowing Attraction of Spiders

The muggy air turned cool as darkness fell. Armed with two flashlights and a camera, I crept from the quiet street into the yard and hoped no one would see me. Turning on the bigger of the two flashlights, I swept the beam from side to side. Bright stripes glowed, dark circles sucked in the light, and glitter covered everything.

Black-eyed Susan in 365 nm UV light. Photo by Emily Stone.

Illuminated by ultraviolet light, the Museum’s pollinator gardens were magical on that July evening in 2021. Juggling my camera, regular flashlight, and UV flashlight, I captured photos of the patterns on flower faces that are usually invisible to human eyes. While black-eyed Susan petals look yellow in daylight, my UV flashlight revealed a black hole at their center. Impatiens flowers in a pot showed subtle lines that would guide a bee toward nectar. And everywhere, grains of pollen glowed like fairy dust.

Among all these colors and patterns, my eyes kept catching on tiny beings shining like stars. I looked closer. With eight legs and an adorably round cephalothorax each, the luminous spots revealed themselves as crab spiders. I knew that a couple of our local crab spider species camouflage themselves on blossoms by turning yellow or white, and then wait to ambush pollinators. But fluorescent crab spiders? That was new. I stored away the observation and moved on with a busy summer.

Cab you spot the crab spider who is perfectly camouflaged with the flower? Photo by Emily Stone.

Flash forward to a couple of days ago. I’ve been listening to science writer Ed Young’s new book, Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us, which just won the 2022 Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award. In the chapter about sight, Young makes a passing reference to the fact that crab spiders may attract more bees to their flowers by fluorescing in UV light. The proverbial lightbulb went off in my head, illuminating memories of my nocturnal foray in the pollinator garden.

With just a little digging, and the help of Google Scholar, I discovered, for starters, that most (or even all?) spider blood fluoresces. It isn’t called blood, though. The technical term is hemolymph. It’s bluish-green in regular light, and sloshes around inside a spider without the constraint of veins.

I wasn’t seeing spider blood in the garden, though. Some spiders use the fluorophores from their blood to make their exoskeleton fluoresce. Since bees and many other insects can see UV light, but don’t necessarily have high visual acuity, the glowing crab spiders seem to appeal to them, and flowers with a crab spider attract more bees than flowers without.

(That particular research was done on crab spiders in Australia, but other studies have found that fluorescence has evolved multiple times in the crab spider family tree, so I’m going to assume that if someone studied our Northwoods crab spiders, they’d find similar trends.)

Spiders further exploit this tactic by making themselves as visible as possible. While we barely see a yellow spider on a yellow flower, some crab spiders choose to sit on a UV-dark part of the flower, so a bee would see a bright spot on a dark background…and mistake it for a nectar guide. Being camouflaged to mammal eyes and highly attractive to insect eyes at the same time is quite a trick!

Not every spider fluoresces on the outside, though. They seem to be able to choose whether or not to let their fluorophores shine through from their hemolymph based on age and sex. Adult male crab spiders don’t fluoresce brightly. They prioritize reproduction over food, and spend most of their time wandering in search of females. They are likely safer being incognito.

Immature crab spiders of both sexes do fluoresce brightly. I saw tons of these tiny ones on flowers in my flashlight beam that night, and knew I could never find them again in daylight. A study from 2017 hypothesized that these small spiders seek out places on flowers where their fluorescence matches the background in order to hide from their UV-focused predators—jumping spiders.

Tiny, immature crab spiders may be able to use their fluorescence to camouflage themselves against similarly fluorescent flowers. Photo with 365 nm UV light by Emily Stone.

Following the original study that Ed Young mentioned in his book, adult female crab spiders are big and bright. They are using their fluorescence to attract the large prey necessary to fuel the production of a large clutch of eggs.

The luminous fluorescence of adult female crab spiders attracts more insects to the flowers where they wait in ambush. Photo with 365 nm UV light by Emily Stone.

There’s more, I’m sure, to be learned about the crab spiders and their glowing blood. For now, I’m thrilled that a single sentence in a book led me to a better understanding of a mystery I’d almost stopped wondering about. Many months after I ventured into that garden with a UV flashlight, it is still illuminating my world.


“The majesty of nature is not restricted to canyons and mountains…To perceive the world through other senses is to find splendor in familiarity and the sacred in the mundane. Wonders exist in a backyard garden…”

--Ed Yong, An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us



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.

Wings in Winter

Now is not the time of year I usually think about butterflies. So the brown, leaf-like shape on the giant snow pile outside my kitchen window caught me by surprise. I had to strap on snowshoes to go check it out in the late afternoon sun.

Lovely shades of brown and cream, combined with the rough line of the trailing edge of the wings would have given this butterfly excellent camouflage against fallen leaves on the forest floor. Even the big notch on the wing, likely removed by a bird’s beak, just served to further disguise the insect’s shape.

With temperatures near freezing, the butterfly wasn’t moving. I crept right up to their face with my macro camera and captured bunny-level fuzz from antennae to chest. Photos uploaded to the iNaturalist website suggested an identification of Compton tortoiseshell, Nymphalis l-album. If it had been warm enough for the butterfly to open their wings, I would have seen beautiful orange and brown markings and scalloped edges.

A closer look at my photos showed only four legs instead of an insect’s typical 6 legs. Compton tortoiseshells are part of the brush-footed butterfly group in which the first pair of legs are small, fuzzy, and tucked up against their body. They are sometimes used to clean the butterfly’s antennae.

As I read more about the Compton tortoiseshell’s life history, their appearance so early in spring began to make sense. The caterpillars of this species munch on aspen, birch, and willow leaves during the peak of summer, and then metamorphose into adults in July. The adults rest and feed throughout the fall, storing up fat but staying in a state of diapause where they don’t become fully reproductive right away.

Like bears, butterflies will enter a hibernaculum in late fall. They might find shelter under shaggy pieces of tree bark, in cracks and crevices, or under the eaves of old buildings. The butterfly I found was very close to the eaves of an old, mossy shed, which seems like a cozy place to hide. Some members of this species may cluster in a group, and others may even migrate south to increase their chances at a warm bedroom for the winter.

When overwintered adults emerge in the spring (usually not until April) they are an incredible 10 months old! In contrast, many species of butterflies and moths only live a few weeks as adults. Compton tortoiseshells survive cold temperatures by being fuzzy, by basking in the sun (which is what the one I found likely was trying to do), and by filling their body with antifreeze.

Compton tortoiseshells get their energy by sipping on tree sap from sapsucker wells, juice from rotten fruits, and scat—instead of relying solely on flower nectar. The flexibility of their diet allows these butterflies to survive throughout the Northern Hemisphere from northern Wisconsin to Alaska, Canada, Romania, Ukraine, the Himalayas, and Japan.

They aren’t the only butterfly who overwinters in the adult stage. As I’ve written before, mourning cloaks, eastern commas, gray commas, and red admirals all join that group, as does the famous monarch butterfly. The big difference with the monarch, of course, is that the ones in Wisconsin fly south to Mexico instead of hiding out in the eaves around here.

No matter where the butterflies overwinter, finding shelter is essential. I witnessed that firsthand with a group of Museum members on our trip to the Monarch Butterfly Biosphere Reserve in Michoacán, Mexico, last December. We were amazed by the thick clusters of monarchs clinging to the boughs of oyamel fir trees on the mountain tops. The butterflies choose their winter home to ensure that they stay warm enough to avoid freezing and cool enough to slow their metabolism and conserve limited energy stores.

Monarchs in a cluster on an oyamel fir bough in Mexico last December. Photo by Emily Stone. 

While it would be almost impossible to count the monarchs individually, scientists estimate the population size by measuring the area turned orange by their wings. The World Wildlife Fund (WWF) and the National Commission of Protected Natural Areas in Mexico (CONANP) just released the winter 2022–23 monarch butterfly population counts: they declined 22% from last year.

Illegal logging in the Reserves is often blamed for the decline in the size of the winter population, but this year, more than half of the tree loss was caused by fires, storms, and pests—all symptoms of climate change.

Dr. Karen Oberhauser, director of the UW–Madison Arboretum, contends that the weather monarchs encounter during spring migration in Texas (happening now!) has the biggest impact on their ability to rebound their numbers through breeding. Summer habitat—reduced since the invention of herbicide-tolerant crops resulted in less milkweed—is also essential.

While we may not be thinking about butterflies during this long winter, they are out there surviving…hopefully.

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.