Orion, An Old Friend

The dark road curved beneath my headlights, and then straightened into a long trough between the trees. An old friend lay resting there, just above the pointed tips of spruce and fir.

Museum Member Vivianne Hanke sketched this image of the constellation of Orion to illustrate a chapter in my first book!

Orion has been my favorite winter constellation for many years. Sometimes subtitled “The Hunter,” it seems apt that Orion is lying on his side these days, perhaps resting up from early mornings of deer hunting. Traditionally, of course, his quarry was more mythical—chasing the beautiful seven sisters of Pleiades, doing battle with Taurus the Bull, fighting a scorpion sent to tame his ego, or hunting the constellation Lepus the Hare.

In Australia and New Zealand, Orion appears upside down, and his distinctive belt and sword are imagined instead as a cooking pot. Perfect for the end of hunting season! Closer to home, some in the Ojibwe culture call this constellation Biboonkeonini, the Winter Maker, as his presence in the night sky heralds winter. Indeed, he can be seen from November to February each year.

Of the four stars that form the rectangular shape of Orion’s body, Betelgeuse is my favorite. This reddish colored star forms Orion’s right shoulder. The red color is not an optical illusion, and it is not due to rusty iron, as is the color on Mars. Betelgeuse is a type of star called a red supergiant, and it gives off most of its light in the near-infrared wavelength, which we cannot see. It is at the opposite end of the spectrum from ultra-violet (UV) light, which is also invisible to humans. Only a small portion (13%) of Betelgeuse’s light is visible to our eyes. But we have built surrogate “eyes”—instruments that can “see” these wavelengths and translate them into beautiful images in the visible spectrum of colors.

Betelgeuse is one of the largest stars ever discovered, and it would be the brightest star in the sky—if we could see that infrared light. Instead, we only observe it as roughly the tenth-brightest star, and its brightness fluctuates.

With the help of powerful telescopes, astrophysicists have seen hotspots and other features on the surface of Betelgeuse. One astronomer characterized Betelgeuse as “an enormous seething restless cauldron of belching plasma.” In 2019, the star blew a huge chunk of its mass into space, and the dust cloud that ensued shaded us from its light. Betelgeuse dimmed by 60%, and then brightened again less than a year later as the dust cleared.

From NASA: “This four-panel illustration shows how the southern region of the rapidly evolving, bright, red supergiant star Betelgeuse suddenly become fainter for several months during late 2019 and early 2020. In the first two panels, a bright, hot blob of plasma is ejected from the emergence of a huge convection cell on the star's surface. In panel three, the outflowing, expelled gas rapidly expands outward. It cools to form an enormous cloud of obscuring dust grains. The final panel reveals the huge dust cloud blocking the light (as seen from Earth) from a quarter of the star's surface.” Credit: NASA, ESA, and E. Wheatley (STScI)

Something that violent can hardly last very long. At about 10 million years old, Betelgeuse is thought to be near the end of its life. It will likely explode into a supernova within the next 100,000 years, and maybe even within tens of years. When it does, it will be visible even in the day, brighter than the moon, and to an outside observer would outshine the entire Milky Way Galaxy.

I was never an astronaut-aspiring space kid, but I did become enthralled with stars once I learned that they, like us, are born and die. Stars arise from clouds of dust, where gravity brings the particles together. Mass builds and gravity increases until hydrogen atoms smashing into each other combine to form helium. Nuclear fusion begins, light shines, and a star is born.

As the star ages and becomes a red giant, helium fuses into carbon, oxygen, nitrogen, magnesium, and eventually iron. But where does the rest of the periodic table come in? Those elements can’t be created during a star’s life. They are conceived during its death.

The heat and energy involved in a large star’s death—in a supernova—are enough to synthesize many more elements, which are all hurled into space to form a supernova remnant, also called a nebula. Nebulas are the birthplaces of stars, and also of planets like Earth. The atoms who coalesced to form the Earth now cycle endlessly through her rocks, her air, her water, and her life. We literally are made of stardust.

Betelgeuse has already used up its supply of hydrogen for nuclear fusion. This means heavier elements are fusing together, and the star’s core is compressed into a hot, dense, ball, while other outer layers have expanded into the huge red mass we see today. Stars like this are rare—we only know of 200 in our galaxy—because they do not live very long.

While I admire the superlative nature of stars like Betelgeuse, I often think about how wonderful our own star is. Our Sun is just the right size, just the right distance, just the right age, and just the right brightness to make life on Earth possible.

This time of year, when gray clouds can hang low for many days in a row, a splash of sunlight on my face feels like wonderful gift. I am even grateful for when the Sun sets early. Crystalline stars and shimmering Northern Lights appear closer in these long winter nights. This time of year, Orion is really a perfect friend. He keeps me company on dark lonely drives, sparkles handsomely above my doorstep, and after hanging out with him, I can still get to bed early!

This world provides us with much to be thankful for.

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

A Lingering Loon

Gray skies bled into gray water as I snaked down the eastern shore of Lake Namakagon on County Highway D. After a hike with a friend, I’d decided to take the long way home. My dad used to tell us that drives like this were “shortcuts” although what he really meant is that they were the scenic route. He was usually looking for hawks on fence posts in the fields of Iowa. I spotted something quite different.

Out in the middle of Sugar Bay, a small shape interrupted the glimmering ripples. Even in the poor light at a fair distance from a moving car, I could tell that this was a loon by their distinctive silhouette. After a few seconds of indecision I swung into a gravel road and “flipped a Louie” which is what my family calls Uies or U-turns. Pulling safely off the road, I dug my new Natural Connections camera (thank you donors!) out of my backpack and zoomed in.

The loon’s gray-brown back, full white throat, and pale cheeks confirmed them as a juvenile, a young of this year. While this loon is on the late end of migration, I wasn’t worried for their safety. Juvenile loons have been navigating their fall migrations alone for millennia. The general schedule I’ve been told is that bachelor loons (without chicks for whatever reason) migrate in August, mother loons head out in September, the dad’s leave in October, and the juveniles fly south in November.

Here's a clearer image of a juvenile loon on a sunny day in a previous late October.
Photo by Emily Stone.

That’s just a general schedule, though, and individual loons are likely all over the calendar, as well as the map. That also doesn’t account for loons from Canada making pit stops here along their way. Early ice formation will shoo them south faster, and warm autumns like this one don’t give them any reason to hurry.

The ultimate destination for loons is saltwater that doesn’t freeze. Their main habitat requirements are plenty of fish to eat and clear water to hunt in. Southern inland lakes tend to have warm, shallow, murky water, and alligators (!), so the ocean provides a better option. There, loons face the challenge of transitioning from freshwater to saltwater. They’ve adapted by excreting salt out of glands in their skull between their eyes. The glands drip almost constantly during the winter…sort of like how my nose adapts to winter, too…

After making the big journey and coping with salt, loons gain access to a seafood feast. Wintering loons eat flounder, crabs, lobster, shrimp, gulf menhaden, bay anchovies, silversides, and more. The ocean bounty gives loons enough energy to molt and regrow all of their feathers, which carry them back north in the spring.

Those feathers carry important information, too. As loon researcher Walter Piper recently wrote on his Loon Project blog, once feathers are grown, they don’t continue to be living tissue. Just like our fingernails, they stop receiving a blood supply and become a time capsule. Inside the feathers are stable isotopes, or as Piper explained, “different versions of a chemical element with different masses.” By studying the stable isotopes of the feathers and matching them to the stable isotopes of various loon wintering locations, we can identify the place where the feather was grown. When scientists capture a loon in Wisconsin in July, studying a tiny clip of a feather can reveal where that loon spent their winter.

Early studies of loon migration using satellite transmitters suggested that many of our loons head to the west coast of Florida. Further information provided by recoveries and sightings of banded loons expanded that map quite a bit. We now have records of banded loons from Wisconsin and Minnesota wintering all along the west and east coasts of Florida, up through Georgia and the Carolinas, and even up into the Northeast, but that data is mostly based on luck.

Loon migration patterns from the Loon Project blog.

This new avenue of stable isotope analysis opens up a way for scientists to capture a loon on their breeding territory up here and figure out where they spent last winter without having to track them on migration. Why does that matter? Well, I for one, love talking to snowbirds about their winter adventures in warm places. But more importantly, this information may help scientists understand how challenges loons face over the winter may be impacting their ability to return north, or their breeding success once they get here.

Out on Sugar Bay, the feathers of that juvenile loon contain information from here, or maybe from Canada, wherever the kid molted out of their baby fuzz and into their first round of sleek feathers. After three or four years gaining strength and maturity on the ocean, this loon will molt into their striking black-and-white breeding plumage for the first time—feathers filled with the signature of saltwater—and fly home.

I wonder if they’ll take a “shortcut” or flip any Louies along the way!

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

November is a Sigh with Lois Nestel

“November is a sigh; a sigh of weariness after the tumult of summer, a sigh of resignation over projects yet undone, a sigh of regret for hopes unfulfilled. It is a sigh of frustration that no matter how we try, the world seems to be sinking deeper into the morass, and a sigh of sadness that neither we nor those around us seem to live up to our expectations.” So wrote Lois Nestel, the Museum’s founding director and naturalist, over three decades ago. It is a gray sentiment, to match the gray clouds and gray trees of this time of year. I feel it, too. With little daylight left after work, it’s hard to want to get out for a walk. When I do, the air is damp and chilled, and the landscape dreary.

Lucky for us, Lois had the fortitude to continue past her sigh and philosophize about a different perspective we could take.

She wrote, “Nature also sighs, but in a gentler mood. It is the sigh of relaxation as hibernating creatures slip into their long sleep. It is the gusty sigh of pines yielding to the cold north wind and the almost silent sigh of leaves and grasses settling closer to the bosom of the earth beneath the gentle pressure of the snow.

“We are in limbo. It is an in-between time when looking forward appears as pointless as looking back. The short gray days and long black nights are conducive to dark thoughts…yet, why?

“The badge of hope is pinned to every twig as tightly furled buds encase next summer’s glory. The cocoon, hung high in the tree, is a symbol of faith in a warmer, bright day. Courage and cheer are exemplified in the sprightly chickadee, who finds joy in just being alive. Patience marks the bed of seed and spore. So, why the gloom of human spirit?

“Perhaps we have strayed too far from our beginnings. The wall of human thought and intellect that should have raised us to the heights of glory has instead separated us from the beauty of simplicity and faith. We demand, we demand. We have set ourselves upon a throne, despotic rulers of all we survey. Man is such a small cog in this complex world. Biologists have found an average of 1356 living creatures in the top inch of a square foot of forest soil; and did you know that the average size of all living animals, including man, is about that of a housefly? Yet we are so big in our own eyes!

“A proper perspective is what we need, and perhaps a closer bond with nature could teach us. That lesson learned, how good it would be if our sighs of dissatisfaction could become sighs of contentment and peace.”

Lois must have been caught in this mood for several weeks, for a later essay of hers reflects these same themes of renewal and humans’ removal from it. Just as Lois saw hope in the form of a tree bud, she sees hope in demise of a rabbit, which might in fact provide nourishment for a future tree bud.

She wrote, “The first snow of the season blanketed the ground and reflected back the moonlight with unaccustomed brightness. Looking out, I thought the world seemed empty of life, silent and pristine. The illusion was soon shattered as from somewhere in the shadows of the trees came the piercing, quavering cry of a rabbit, rising to a shriek and then ending abruptly.

“My first thought was, “Oh, the poor thing—what a pity.” I believed it to be the work of a resident great horned owl, and I pictured the silent swoop, the clutch of talons and the great, tearing beak. Then, lying back, I mulled over the subject.

“The death was but a link in the chain and sad only for the rabbit. For the owl, as prime predator, it was cause for fierce pleasure and satisfaction, a sustaining of life. Lesser creatures would glean crumbs from his table, bits of flesh and bone to be gnawed by mice and shrews, to be picked by birds; nests would be lined in spring with scattered hair. Remnants of body wastes and liquids would sink into the earth to nourish next year’s blade or twig which in turn would nourish, perhaps, another rabbit in the passage of time.

“Left to its normal management there is no waste in nature. Part of the owl flying in the night sky and the beetle beneath dead leaves is the rabbit who ate the twig whose nutrients came from death and decay. Everything uses and is used, is changed and converted but never lost.

“I regret that human standards have removed us from the natural chain. Human civilization has come to mean constant taking, seldom returning. How long will nature tolerate us?

Lois’s perspective brings comfort in this gray season, and I resolve to take my next walk with eyes open to the life curled up inside buds, the cocoons protecting delicate moths-to-be, the chickadees indomitable cheer, and the renewal inherent in every bit of death. Hopefully you, too, will find ways to ensure that your November sighs indicate contentment and peace.

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

Snow Buntings and Needle Ice Foretell Winter

Tawny, dried weeds and their dusky shadows painted texture on the roadside border as I drove up Scenic 61 along Minnesota’s North Shore of Lake Superior. Suddenly, those colors came alive in a cloud of swirling beauty. Brilliant white, sharp black, brown, and blur; the flock of snow buntings ascended, swooped as if tossed by blizzard winds, flashed their colors in unison, then fluttered back to invisibility among the weeds.

These tough little visitors from the Arctic live up to their nickname of “snowflake birds.” Snow buntings nest on tundra all around the top of the globe, and are the most northerly recorded songbird in the world.

My toes get cold just thinking about it, but feathered feet allow snow buntings to spend most of their winter strutting about on the chilly drifts. They usually feed in big, gregarious flocks that seem to roll along chaotically as the birds in the back make short, fluttering flights to the front. Occasionally, the whole group will rise and fall in a flurry of motion at the suspicion and passing of danger. Feeding flocks are entertaining to watch, since these birds don’t submit to a defined hierarchy like chickadees do, and end up bickering continuously over seeds and space.

Deep snows cover up the seed heads of short tundra plants in their breeding territory, but here in the Northwoods, snowplows expose seeds in the gravel shoulder, and windswept fields of nodding stems offer good foraging, too. I was particularly happy to read that they eat seeds of the ragweed plant, which is a major cause of seasonal allergies!

While snowshoe hares turn white for the winter, snow buntings add brown and spend the season with rusty patches on their feathers. It helps them blend in on the bare fields and among the grass stems where they feed. By April, that color has worn off to reveal pure white plumage that will match their still-snowy Arctic breeding habitat. Since snow buntings nest in deep cracks and cavities in rocks to avoid predators, their nesting sites are limited. Not going too far south and arriving early back north to claim a territory is essential.

Their breeding is carefully timed so that chicks are hungriest right when insects are most plentiful. Warm springs that shift breeding earlier produce a mismatch with their food source. Hard winters seem to keep this timing well-matched. What type of winter will this one be?

Swirling flocks led me up the North Shore, all the way to the Cascade River north of Lutsen, MN. The trailhead was empty, and it looked like we were the first ones on that section of the Superior Hiking Trail. While cool, wet weather has made a lot of trails muddy recently, the ground was rock hard under my hiking shoes. Frozen! A novel experience for this fall, when September and October both set records for higher-than-average global temperatures.

Then: Crunch! Crunch! Crunch! The trail was filled with fragile clusters of ice, pushing up through the soil. My clumsy feet had pulverized some, but in several places the ice remained beautifully sculpted into ribboned clusters a few inches high. Squatting down for a better look, I noticed soil particles, moss fragments, and grass blades frozen into the ice.

“Needle ice” seems to be the most scientific term for this phenomenon, but I’ve also heard it called frost pillars, frost castles, and ice filaments. The Swedes, Germans, and Japanese have their own words for this circumboreal art form, too.

While not confined to one region or habitat, needle ice does require a certain set of conditions in order to form. First, the soil must not yet be frozen, at least beyond the first thin crust. In contrast, the air temperature needs to be below freezing. Finally, the soil needs to have plenty of moisture, and just the right sized pores between the grains so that water can flow toward the growing ice.

What draws the liquid water toward the ice is a process known as ice segregation. Supercooled water – held in a liquid state below 32 degrees F – moves toward ice and adds on to it. When the two meet, ice grows away from the ice/water interface. As the ice crystals expand upward, growing perpendicular to the surface, they may also push soil up or away, lift small pebbles into the air, and incorporate whatever debris is nearby. This fragile structure of ice and dirt is what crumbled under my hiking shoes.

I’m not the only source of destruction, though. Once these frosted soils melt, they are loose and susceptible to erosion. If the needle ice forms on a slope, even just the action of lifting soil particles up and letting them down again will cause them to descend in the process of soil creep. This is a challenge for trail maintenance.

The icy hike was beautiful, and “snowflake birds” swirled ahead of my car all the way home. Real snowflakes chased me from behind, and soon accumulated six inches of the white stuff. Snow buntings and needle ice foretold the coming winter, and as I write this, it has arrived!

Author’s note: portions of this article are reprinted from 2015, 2016, and 2022.

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

Fall Colors and Caribou

Woops! If you were directed here by the Museum's e-newsletter and were expecting snow buntings and needle ice, that will come next week. In scheduling things ahead before leaving for a conference, I got things switched around in our newsletter. The blog and podcast really are about fall colors and caribou. The others will come next week! Sorry for any confusion! --Emily

On my way to work on this damp morning, I enjoyed a rainbow in the ditches. While the fall colors of the canopy are losing their luster, many of the shrubs are just hitting their peak. Yellow, orange, and even pink leaves formed bands and blobs of color. Those fall colors near the ground reminded me of autumn on the Alaskan tundra, back when I spent the summer there in 2018. Of course, that far north, autumn was in August! Please enjoy this article from the archives while I write a major grant proposal instead of a fresh article.

If anyone had seen my erratic progress across the open tundra they might have assumed me possessed. Thankfully, rolling hills of glacial sediment hid me from the view of what little civilization hummed nearby at the Toolik Field Station. Careening from one burst of beauty to the next, I was reveling in the gorgeous rainbows that autumn (i.e. late August) had flung across the landscape. Scarlet carpets of alpine bearberry clustered around boulders. Thickets of dwarf birch sported leafy little doilies in gradients of red and orange. Willows claimed the most vibrant, glossy yellows for their own adornment, but sneakily retained all my favorite shades of green as well. Blue and purple found their homes in the berries and leaves of bog blueberry. Camera in hand, I raced to create a lasting record of my amazement.

The dwarf birches perfectly match my favorite sweater!

I aimed my camera high as well as low, since the colors at my feet spread clear out to the horizon. I’m no stranger to the magic of fall. From the river bluffs of Northeast Iowa, to the pastoral hills of Vermont, the cranberry fields of Maine, and now the red maples of Northern Wisconsin, I gravitate toward places with a kaleidoscope of seasons. Autumn on the Alaskan tundra was a whole new spectacle, though. With ground-hugging shrubs—all of them circumpolar species that grow around the top of the globe—instead of tall trees, it looked like the land itself was drenched in a rainbow swirl of melted crayon.

At my feet, wiry brown lichens clutched droplets of melted morning frost in their twig-like tips. Kneeling down to photograph them, I was soon lost in the miniature world of reflections contained in each drop. It’s not a good idea to be too enraptured by the foreground in grizzly country though, so after a bit I stood and scanned my surroundings carefully. A northern harrier floated by looking for voles. Nothing else moved.

So I moved. My purported destination for this walk was Jade Mountain, which still loomed a good distance away. As I neared the edge of the small knoll, something caught my attention in the swale. Brown. White. Skinny. A bull caribou stood with his rump patch toward me, his neck craned around to investigate, and his tree-like antlers towering above. I held my breath and snapped the shutter over and over as he stood on alert. When a sudden movement startled him into a trot, three smaller bulls followed him out of the vale and over the ridge. What a thrill!

Caribou were the official reason I’d come here, to the Toolik Field Station on the North Slope of the Brooks Range. My research partner, Tessa, had driven down to the snowshoe hare research site near Wiseman to pick me up a few days before. Since then we’d been cruising up and down the rough gravel of the Dalton Highway between Toolik and Prudhoe Bay looking for caribou.

Of the 32 caribou herds in Alaska, four of them have their calving grounds on the North Slope. Tessa and I were studying the Central Arctic Caribou Herd. Their population plummeted from a high of about 70,000 animals in 2010, to 22,000 in 2016. Hunters, hunting guides, and pilots noticed the population decline before it showed up in the wildlife manager’s data. Scott Leorna was already doing his master’s project on the caribou, so he added a citizen science component to his research to figure out how the hunters knew.

Scott worked with web developers to create a smartphone app that the public can use to record caribou observations in the study area. In order to calibrate the app and gauge the effectiveness of the public in spotting caribou along the road, he conscripted several pairs of fellow graduate students from the University Alaska Fairbanks. They and other volunteers drove through his study area at no more than 35 mph with the sole goal of seeing every caribou along the road. That 132-mile journey takes more than 6 hours.

Tessa and I saw varying numbers of caribou on each of our five sampling days, and they were mostly solo or in small groups. “Herd” is a relative term. The animals gather in full force only on their calving grounds, and drift off to other feeding areas for summer, fall, and winter. The population decline that this herd has experienced is pretty normal. Just like with snowshoe hares, when numbers get high their forage quality declines, birth rate slows, and predators increase. What’s unique about this herd is that ever since the Dalton Highway was built to access the oil resources at Prudhoe Bay, these roadside caribou have become an increasingly important resource to both resident and non-resident hunters.

Bumpy roads and tired eyes notwithstanding, it was a fine gig for a volunteer. In addition to caribou, we spotted red fox, short-eared owls, golden eagles, and muskoxen along the road. I exclaimed every few minutes about the stunning beauty of the fall colors, and, on the one sunny day, snowcapped mountains rimmed our view.

Visiting the Toolik Field Station had been on my bucket list since I first started planning my trip to Alaska. Run by the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska Fairbanks with support from the National Science Foundation, it is a hub for scientists (my superheroes) who are studying the Arctic. In addition to long-term datasets, labs, and equipment, the field station also provides researchers with gourmet food, rustic housing, a beautiful sauna, and high-speed WiFi.

Plus, it’s nestled along the shore of beautiful Toolik Lake, among the prettiest fall colors I’ve ever seen. Possessed? Sure I’m possessed—by an overwhelming sense of wonder at and gratitude for the experiences I’ve had.

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