Sharp-Tailed Grouse

Rain splattered my windshield as I drove the dark country roads, but a break in the storm arrived at the designated intersection just moments before me, and many minutes before dawn. The emphatic call of a whip-poor-will told me I was in the right place.

Less than 24 hours earlier, Eddie Shea, a Wisconsin DNR wildlife biologist, asked me to help complete the final sharp-tailed grouse survey of the spring. The only catch was that I had to be on the Barnes Barrens at least 45 minutes before sunrise. After I saw prairie chickens dancing last month, and told you all that “I’ve always been too busy building exhibits in April to reserve a dauntingly early spot in a bird blind” to see sharp-tailed grouse, I had to say yes. The open spot in the bird blind had finally found me.

Eddie and Sam Lau, a Ruffed Grouse Society biologist, introduced themselves, with the first gray light of dawn just barely illuminating faces. After a quick review of the plan, they headed to opposite ends of the core sharp-tailed grouse habitat to count birds. Mike Amman, a Bayfield County forester, led me into a blind situated near the lek.

The smell of doused campfire hung on the damp air as Mike strode off into the darkness with long-legged speed. I hurried to keep up over uneven ground, which I soon realized was a logging two-track through burned scrub. Just 10 years ago this was a jack pine forest, Mike explained. Last year they conducted a fall burn to knock back the pin oak and bur oak even more. Sharp-tails need open space.

We had to be quiet, but Mike told me how he was improving sharp-tail habitat here on the county forest. The grouse had long been attracted to a narrow strip of brushy habitat the foresters called “the bowling alley.” It had been maintained as a firebreak, but was no longer needed. The low scrub was good for the grouse, but the narrow shape meant perches for hungry hawks in nearby trees. Plus, the existence of that fire break is a symptom of a management regime that is loath to let a fire burn. Without either natural fires or targeted management, sharp-tail habitat will disappear from the landscape. Currently, less than 1% of Wisconsin’s original barrens ecosystems remain.

That’s where the Northwest Sands Habitat Corridor Plan comes in. According to that plan, Mike is expanding the Barnes Barrens into a circle instead of a line. The result will be no net loss of timber, with significant gains for the grouse. Plus, private, state, and federal land managers are creating and maintaining other patches of barrens habitats within 3.2 miles of each other—the average distance that a sharp-tail will disperse— which will allow birds to move between larger core barrens properties such as Crex Meadows, the Namekagon Barrens, the Douglas County Wildlife Area, and the Moquah Barrens.

Beyond our whispers, I heard another conversation in the darkness. Sweet-sounding coos, goofy gobbles, and the flapping of wings accompanied ghostly movements. These were good signs.

I ducked inside the nylon pop-up blind, found the folding stool, and listened to Mike’s footsteps recede. Quickly, the natural sounds filled back in. The whip-poor-will had stopped, but a clay-colored sparrow buzzed, a towhee sang “drink your tea,” and a brown thrasher shared his commentary on the morning—repeating each opinion twice.

All of these birds need the same scrubby, open, barrens habitat that sharp-tails prefer. “To the county’s credit, they recognize the larger role they can play as land managers to meet the needs of wildlife that require underrepresented habitat types such as barrens,” Eddie told me. Barrens-specific rare plants like wild lettuce also ride the coattails of the charismatic sharp-tails. And sharp-tails may ride the coattails of Connecticut warblers—who share the designation “species of Special Concern” in Wisconsin. Foresters are managing some nearby jack pine forests with short understory where the warblers like to nest, and the grouse have been tracked to those same habitats in winter.

Through the gray dawn, I heard the grouse clucking and their feathers rustling as they returned to the lek and began to display. I could see their sharp tails spiked vertically as they spread their wings stiffly and stamped their feet. Wings flapped aggressively when two rivals came together. More rain arrived with daylight, though, so I never got a clear view of the best displays.

By the time the sky cleared again, the guys were more subdued. Mostly, the 11 males on the lek paired up, lunged at their buddy, and then crouched down in a staring contest, sometimes even closing their eyes. Over and over they repeated this basic dance. The purple patches of skin on the necks that inflated when they cooed, and the yellow combs over their eyes did add to the effect. But the displays were half-hearted with no gals around. Presumably, the females had already chosen a fancy-dancing mate during an earlier contest and were off in the shrubs sitting on a nest.

In the end, the most impressive thing about my visit to the lek wasn’t the dancing birds, but the knowledge that land managers are coming together to prioritize the habitat of a fascinating but declining bird. And it’s working. The sharp-tails I helped to count are part of a population that has almost doubled since last year. With any luck, I’ll say that again next spring.



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. Our new exhibit: “The Northwoods ROCKS!” is open now! Our Summer Calendar of Events is ready for registration! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Balsam Poplar: Tree of the Far North

We were supposed to be focused on birds as the group walked along the gravel road north of Grandview, but in the damp air I smelled something. Thick, sweet, and spicy, the scent hung in this one spot where tall trees gathered instead of the scrubby alder brush. I inhaled deeply, filling my lungs with an aroma that reminded me of lovingly cooked food, or carefully chosen perfume, or new life. I couldn’t quite place it.

Looking around the small patch of forest, I noticed olive-green bark near the top and gray-brown furrows at the bottom. Aspen, I thought. But wait. On a hunch, I jumped a wet spot in the ditch to get a better look at some lithe young twigs sprouting out of an injury in the base of one of the trees. The buds were almost an inch long and encased in shiny brown scales just beginning to expand. I pinched one, and the aroma intensified. Another birder walking near me looked curious, so I broke off the bud and handed it to her. “Hmmm…Oh!” she exclaimed as she caught the scent, too.

The buds of balsam poplar were releasing their magic.

In Wisconsin, Populus balsamifera aren’t as common as their cousins the quaking and big-tooth aspens. Their numbers increase as you head north, and their groves catch my eye with a distinctive golden cast to leaves and bark whenever I head up Scenic Highway 61 along the North Shore of Lake Superior. Reaching peak performance on the damp soil and extreme cold of Alaskan and Canadian floodplains, balsam poplars survive the farthest north of any American broadleaf tree.

Similar to a big-tooth aspen, balsam poplars have pale young bark and furrowed older bark. The leaves, though, have finely serrated teeth and rusty blotches on the undersides. Their winter buds, as we noticed, are reddish brown, up to an inch long, and glossy.

As spring sunshine coaxes open the buds, that gloss becomes airborne. According to scientist Diana Beresford-Kroeger (“The Jane Goodall of trees,”) those aerosols act like “a health shield for all life on the planet.” The aromas wafting in the breeze contain a myriad of chemicals. They are anti-inflammatory, anti-bacterial, and anti-fungal. Often included in wild-crafted soaps and salves, balsam poplars have earned the nickname “Balm of Gilead,” after a rare, medicinal perfume mentioned in the Hebrew Bible.

The more scientists dig into the chemistry of balsam poplar, the more impressive it gets. In the poplar’s pharmacopeia, scientists have identified vasodilators that are important for heart health, and oxytocins that reduce blood pressure. These trees of the far north manufacture the molecular building blocks of the brown fat that humans use to shiver and stay warm. Tree bodies contain the same chemicals that the human body deems essential for brain, liver, and glandular development.

For years the Cree Nations have used balsam poplar sap to treat diabetes, and now scientists are expanding on that traditional knowledge. An article in the international, peer-reviewed journal of Evidence-Based Complementary and Alternative Medicine states “The results clearly demonstrated that the plant extract substantially attenuated weight gain and the development of insulin resistance [in mice].”

In fact, balsam poplars, who belong to the Willow Family, Salicaceae, have seemingly figured out the key to eternal life. Roots, stumps, and even stems and branches buried during autumn logging can sprout into whole new trees. Even 15-year-old cuttings regularly sprout new roots and shoots when planted in damp soil. Each spring, balsam poplar produces thousands of tiny seeds attached to silky parachutes—they are often called cottonwood like their southern cousins—but they mainly rely on vegetative reproduction, not those seeds.

So where do these trees get their super powers? Unlike the northern conifers, balsam poplars have taproots that dive deep into the soil, right down to the nutrient-rich permafrost layer (wherever there is one). The tree draws up minerals, concentrates them into the waxy green leaves, and generously drops them onto the ground every fall. This enriches the topsoil for all the neighbors. Beresford-Kroeger suspects that these habits, and their pharmacopeia, are all adaptations to surviving the harsh environment of the cold, dry North.

Somewhat ironically, this cold-adapted tree may win bigtime as the climate changes…at least for a while. As summers warm and lengthen, balsam poplars are intruding on formerly treeless areas at the northern end of their range. They are making fundamental changes in the tundra. In a journal article from 2016, Carl A. Roland (the botanist I studied with in Denali when I visited Alaska!) and his colleagues from the National Park Service declared, “It appears that poplar may thus act as the ‘leading edge’ of landscape change in this region…leaving a substantially altered, boreal landscape in its wake.” Meanwhile, they will disappear from the southern end of their range—like the gravel road near Grandview, Wisconsin.

That’s a lot to take in on a damp spring day.

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. Our new exhibit: “The Northwoods ROCKS!” is open now! Our Summer Calendar of Events is ready for registration! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

The Fantastic Fox

My eyes felt dry and tired after an early morning and a long, windy day. When an orange blur streaked across in front of my car, though, suddenly my eyes were wide open. A fox!

I slowed down and pulled onto the wide, gravel shoulder to see if I could get a better look, but I was fully expecting the fox to melt into the shadows. Instead, it trotted along the opposite shoulder, and then paused on the top of a steep bank that plunged into a dark forest. I dug my camera out of my backpack and started clicking away. The fox’s nose was deep into something delicious lying just over the edge. When I finally looked away from the viewfinder, I discovered that a second fox had joined the first.

Both were youngsters. Fox kits are generally born in mid-March, so at about two months old, these curious hooligans are almost fully weaned and eating plenty of solid food brought to the rendezvous site by both parents. I guessed that the parents were off in search of said food.

This fox sighting fits well into the bigger picture of animal observations I’ve been making over the past winter. Fox tracks were common on my driveway. While I spotted a lone coyote last fall, I’ve been seeing only wolf sign—and lots of it—since mid-winter. It’s like one of those brain teasers about who is sitting next to whom. Coyotes don’t tolerate foxes. They’ll chase or kill them. Wolves don’t tolerate coyotes, but they generally don’t bother foxes. So when you have plenty of wolves around, they push out the coyotes, and the foxes can thrive.

After tugging and biting at the snack, one kit lifted its head with a mouthful of fur. Gray squirrel? Cottontail? These are favorite foods for both foxes and coyotes (which is one reason they don’t play well together), but foxes also feed heavily on mice and chipmunks.

That fox sighting gave me a new spark of energy, so after arriving home, I hopped on my bike for an evening ride in the other direction. When another orange blur zoomed across in front of me and paused for a moment before diving into a culvert, I let out a shout of delight followed by an irrepressible string of baby talk inspired by the kit’s cuteness.

Then I let out another shout as I spotted the leggy black dot of a deer tick crawling up my pantleg.

The trouble with deer ticks is that they carry diseases—Lyme, anaplasmosis, babesiosis, ehrlichiosis, and more. Each disease has its own life cycle, and Lyme is currently the most common. Larval ticks—the first life stage that hatches from eggs—don’t carry Lyme disease. They do need a blood meal, though, and may acquire the Lyme bacteria while feeding on their first host. Ninety-percent of the time, ticks pick up the Lyme-causing Borrelia burgdorferi bacteria from mice and chipmunks. If they feed on humans as nymphs or adults, the Lyme may be transmitted to us.

Foxes can interrupt the Lyme bacteria’s cycle by reducing the numbers of mice and chipmunks available for the ticks to feed on. The ticks may find a different host—one who doesn’t carry Lyme—or they may just starve to death. The effect is so powerful that one area of western New York with unusually high numbers of foxes had no reports of Lyme.

A reduction in the number of foxes may actually be linked to the rise of Lyme in recent decades. One study of harvest records found that fox numbers in Minnesota declined by 95 percent from 1991 to 2008, while coyote numbers have increased 2,200 percent since 1982. Wisconsin showed similar trends. The rise of Lyme mirrors the rise of coyotes. Wolf numbers have increased, too, though, and I’m hoping that they’ll bring in an era of more foxes and fewer ticks.

An era where I have more chances to watch adorable fox kits and fewer chances to contract a tick-born disease? That’s a future I’m looking forward to. In the meantime, I made sure to throw both my outdoor clothes and myself in the wash to get rid of any ticks before going to bed.

Author’s Note: Portions of this article were originally published in 2019.

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. Our new exhibit: “The Northwoods ROCKS!” is open now! Our Summer Calendar of Events is ready for registration! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Tune Up Your Ears for Spring

Cheerily, cheer up, cheer up, cheerily, CHEER UP!

Nothing makes a person madder than being told to cheer up when they don’t want to, and yet the robin outside my window has been shouting at me to CHEER UP for weeks. I might appreciate the sentiment more if the admonitions didn’t start at the faintest hints of dawn light, long before my alarm goes off.

American Robin photo by Emily Stone

Once the alarm does go off and my morning routines are complete, I jump in my car to head to work. A second after the key turns, the singing begins again. Cheer up, cheerily…here I am…over here…in a tree. This song is a little different than the robin’s. The rhythm within phrases is similar, but there’s more space between them, and they feel less like the bird is shouting.

In early spring, my car’s CD player is always occupied by “Who Cooks for Poor Sam Peabody?” a Bird Song Ear Training Guide by John Feith. It’s available on Spotify, too, if you’ve graduated from actual CDs. The name is a combination of two common bird song mnemonics—lyrics we put to bird songs to help us remember them.

Each spring as the northward migration takes flight, I use the CD to re-train my ears to identify the songs of the birds who have been away all winter. The robins, bless their loud hearts, are pretty helpful with this, too. There are several birds whose songs are described in comparison to the robin’s.

The red-eyed vireo, mentioned above, is slower than a robin’s frantic pace, but weaker, and not as squeaky. These small, olive-green birds are hard to spot in the treetops, but they sing more incessantly than any of their neighbors. One red-eyed vireo sang 22,197 songs in a single day, as counted by naturalist Louise de Kiriline Lawrence in 1952.

Red-eyed Vireo photo by Emily Stone

Rose-breasted grosbeaks—those delightful gents with snappy black backs, white chests, and bright red cravats—are often said to sound like “a robin who has had singing lessons.” Their notes alternately rise and fall also, but the tone is sweeter and the songs longer.

Rose-breasted Grosbeak Photo by Emily Stone

And then there’s the burry voice of a scarlet tanager. The raspy phrases are usually described as a “robin with a sore throat,” but to my ear their whiskey voice is the sexiest of all the birds. Scarlet tanagers spend their time hidden high in the forest canopy and are almost impossible to see. Their distinctive “chick-burr” call will interrupt my thoughts and automatically send me scanning the treetops for a glimpse of this handsome heartthrob.

Scarlet Tanager Male
By Bmajoros - Own work,
CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=47481226

Any birder will tell you that practice and repetition are key to identifying birds by their songs. The CD is helpful, but real birds are better. So, even though the robin outside my window thinks the Sun won’t rise if he gives me just one day to sleep in, I appreciate that he’s helping me tune up my ears for spring.

I just learned that the birds themselves tune up their ears in the spring.

Chickadees, writes Ed Young in his book “An Immense World: How Animal Senses Reveal the Hidden Realms Around Us,” change their forte in the fall. As winter approaches, chickadees need to be able to glean complicated information from their friends’ chick-a-dee calls in order to successfully navigate the social hierarchy in a big winter flock. Their hearing speeds up, and they are able to distinguish the fine structure of each other’s rapid-fire calls.

A chickadee’s spring is like the end of a party when couples start pairing up and sneaking into the woods—ladies’ choice. Male chickadees sing “fee-bee, fee-bay” sweetly and purely, and females judge his attractiveness based on how consistently he can sing these notes. Their ears’ focus switches from speed to pitch.

Nuthatches are the opposite. They hear faster in the spring, and are more sensitive to pitch in the fall. The changes are driven by estrogen, which influences the length of the hair cells in their ears. In house sparrows, males don’t alter their hearing, but females make the same springtime shift from speed to pitch that chickadees do.

Well, the robin’s early morning shouting did nothing to cheer me up today, but learning something new about chickadees sure did! We’re all tuning up our ears for spring!

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. Our new exhibit: “The Northwoods ROCKS!” is open now! Our Summer Calendar of Events is ready for registration! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Find a Puddle and Some Happiness

Author’s Note: This article was originally published during the first week of April 2021. I think it’s a testament to how late spring is coming this year that the mood feels the same one month later in 2023.

Inhaling deeply, I looked out across the sunny expanse of frozen lake. Squeezing my shoulder blades together, I corrected my computer-hunched posture and felt tension release from the muscles. A vigorous gale tossed through the treetops, but here, on the leeward shore, I felt only a hint of breeze on my cheek. With another deep breath, I began to turn to leave, but an oak leaf caught my eye.

With pointed tips curled up like a cupped hand, the tan-colored leaf had become a tiny boat on a clear puddle at the edge of the ice. As I watched, a sliver of wind snuck down and sent the leaf spinning gracefully to the left. A darker brown birch leaf, diamond-shaped with finely serrated edges, traced the same path across the puddle, and its tip slid in to catch a lobe of the oak leaf. Like a pair of dancers, the two leaves twirled and glided on the puddle, pushed by the chaotic wisps of breeze. Such playful movements made me smile.

When I’d stood up from my computer in a huff a few minutes earlier, vexed by the trickle of spam emails that kept interrupting my thoughts and cursing the people who sent them, I wasn’t sure that a walk would help. Research shows that people tend to underestimate how good a simple walk outside will make them feel. But, as I climbed up from the shore, I caught myself smiling at the sunny carpet of mosses who had wasted no time in waking up from winter.

Research also shows that people tend not to ruminate on the bad stuff that causes anxiety while in nature, especially when gazing softly at something like this beautiful moss.
Photo by Emily Stone.

That warm fuzzy feeling I was having toward the moss actually has a name: biophilia.

Edward O. Wilson, a revered ecologist and champion of biodiversity, made the term popular, and defined it as “the innately emotional affiliation of human beings to other living organisms." He hypothesized that our love of nature has helped humans survive, and helps us feel connected to all life.

As I sauntered down my long, winding, woodsy, driveway, even more benefits of this biophilia were at work on my brain. The way my eyes scanned the forest, noticing the red buds of a maple tree against the blue sky, the gentle curves of the forest floor that will soon be hidden by new growth, and the patterns of moss and lichens that carpet the side-hill, leads to something that scientists call “soft fascination.”

Soft fascination—as opposed to the “hard fascination” of something like a sports event or movie that demand full attention—requires no effort and leaves space for reflection without risking boredom. Soft fascination leads to clearer thinking, reduces anxiety, and restores our ability to focus on tasks later. While our mind wanders, we may end up solving problems or coming up with creative ideas. Research also shows that people tend not to ruminate on the bad stuff that causes anxiety while in nature.

In addition to watching leaves dance on a breeze-tickled puddle, sunsets, rain showers, parks, and forest paths are all opportunities to experience the brain-resting effects of soft fascination. Just be sure to leave your phone out of reach: talking while walking ruins the effect.

The benefits of time spent outside, especially in green nature, are especially noticeable for people who have attention-deficit/hyperactivity disorder (ADHD). During an experiment at the University of Illinois, kids who took just a 20-minute walk in a park had their symptoms of ADHD reduced by threefold. That improvement was roughly equal to the difference in having ADHD or not having it, or of not being medicated vs. experiencing the peak effects of a common medication.

Not only do kids show improvement in focus and memory when they get to be outside, they may also show less anxiety, depression and aggression than when they are indoors in a restrictive environment. Erin Kenny, founder of a nature school, put it this way: "Children cannot bounce off the walls if we take away the walls."

Adults aren’t much different. I’d been bouncing off my mental walls at the computer all afternoon, and now a short walk was completely changing my mood. The chickadees were helping. “Hey Sweetie!” came their cheerful whistles from the hemlock twigs above my head. I’ve been using the calls of chickadees to cheer me up ever since a particularly stressful week back in college.

I’m not the only one. Psychologists have found good evidence that bird songs improve mood and mental alertness—listening to recorded bird songs helped reduce that post-lunch slump in elementary students. And in a different study, scientists found that a 10 percent increase in neighborhood bird songs translated into an increase in life satisfaction usually equated with a 10 percent increase in income.

It’s not really breaking news anymore that relaxing in nature makes us happier, but it is worth repeating. Nature relieves mild depression, reduces stress, and increases happiness for both adults and children. And, without the icy winds of January or the mosquito hordes of July, this is the perfect season to walk slowly through nature. Go find a puddle, a leaf, a breeze, and some birdsong, and you will also find an increase in well-being.

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. Our new exhibit: “The Northwoods ROCKS!” is open now! Our Summer Calendar of Events is ready for registration! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.