Skydancing the Night Away

Excitement and nerves were at an all-time high as my car crept down the gravel road, the sun having just slipped below the horizon. I was on the hunt, following clues to lead me to my prize. My treasure was the somewhat elusive American woodcock, and I was hoping to catch a glimpse of their infamous skydance. Each spring, the males put on a dramatic display to attract a mate. They prefer a wet, forested area to hide out in, with a clearing nearby to perform their dance. The spring peepers and chorus frog songs that filled the air clued me in on being in the right place.

An American woodcock. Photo by Keith Ramos, USFWS.

The wind whipped through the trees, and time ticked by as robins, chickadees, and other songbirds sang their evening delights, but I had yet to pick up on the distinctive call of the American woodcock. Doubt began to creep in with each minute that went by. I began to wonder if I had found the right place, and was on my way to accepting that I may not find what I was searching for tonight. That's when I heard it–the American woodcock's opening line to start his show.

Peent.

My head snapped to the direction of the sound, with my ears tuned in and excitement taking hold once more. There it was again, peent. The soft, almost nasally call was off in the distance. I started my car and continued creeping down the gravel road. A small, shadowed shape flashed before my car, and disappeared into the thicket on the other side of the road. A woodcock!

The woodcock landed on the gravel road, not 20 feet behind my car, and began to call out again. Peent. I watched his silhouette, barely letting a breath escape my lungs, not wanting to risk scaring him away. He continued his serenade for a few more minutes before rocketing into the air. The remaining light was dwindling fast, but I watched as he flew past and began his spiral upwards.

As he flew, I mainly tracked him with my ears–only catching an occasional glimpse with my eyes. The twittering noise of his wings gave him away, his physically modified flight feathers singing as air rushed through them. It was like being immersed in a natural surround sound theatre as he circled around, higher and higher, the whistling sound of his wings looping through my ears.

Suddenly the sound of his ascent stopped, and a new sound took its place. In the final act of his mating display, the woodcock fell from the sky, spinning acrobatically as he plummeted. I found it reminiscent of scenes in old cartoons with the twittering piano tunes escalating as the character falls through the air. But rather than crashing into the ground, he righted himself at the last moment, and landed near the same spot he took off from. He was hoping that a female had taken notice of his superior showmanship, and would be waiting in the spot he took off from. He was not so lucky this time around.

But rather than that being the end of the show, it's simply the first act of many. As he stood on the gravel road that was his stage, the Woodcock began to call again. Peent. His determination to impress the ladies will keep his show going into the night.

While I was not his intended audience, I was enthralled by his skydance. There is something to be said about being privy to the intricate lives of wildlife. It feels intimate, getting a small glance into their private lives. As I watched the woodcock’s dance, a few cars drove down the gravel road, but turned before reaching us. I couldn’t help but think they were so close to a show of a lifetime, and had no idea. The woodcock paid them no mind, continuing to call out before taking to the skies again.

Night had completely fallen by the time I headed home. As I left, I was grateful I witnessed the woodcocks skydance. It is amazing how the smallest moments leave lasting impressions, and the impactful memories that wildlife can impart. I wish I could thank him for letting me witness his display, and the lasting memories he unknowingly imparted. Instead, I left him still singing on the gravel road and wished him luck in his nighttime endeavors.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Our Summer Calendar is open for registration! Visit our new exhibit, “Becoming the Northwoods: Akiing (A Special Place). Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Baby Food

The wetland just east of Lake Namakagon was still brown with last year’s dried leaves and swollen with this year’s melted snow as we drove home from a chilly hike in late April. Movement caught our eye, and we peered intently into the late afternoon sunshine. Two sandhill cranes, perfectly camouflaged in the warm browns of the marsh, stood on a spit of sedges and leatherleaf. Their red caps didn’t stand out, but when their eyes caught the sun just right, they glowed orange.

As we watched, one crane and then the other dipped their head down into the thicket of plants, then tossed a twig or long leaf over their shoulder. Over and over they repeated this behavior while we snapped photos. At one point, one of the cranes folded up their stilt-like legs and nestled their belly into the vegetation, their long black beak, red cap, and orange eyes just visible over a small channel of open water. Clearly, they were building a nest. Likely, the sitting bird was the female, helping to mold the pile of weeds into a cozy home.

Although the female shapes the nest and incubates the eggs overnight, the male helps to build the structure and splits incubation duties with her 50/50 during the day. Both parents lose belly feathers to form a brood patch where blood vessels just under bare skin share body heat with the eggs.

Although I often hear their rattling bugle calls echoing across the lake and through my open windows, having cranes nest where I could see them was a new treat. For a few weeks, every warm afternoon found me biking along that stretch of road with my camera at the ready. Each time, the evening sunlight spotlighted the face of a crane on the nest.

Then, I left for a conference in California. When the weather and my schedule finally cooperated again, it had been exactly a month since the nest building. Although I scanned the wetland with high hopes, no cranes were visible. The typical incubation period for cranes is 28-30 days, so it was conceivable that the 1-3 eggs might have hatched. But although the chicks emerge with eyes open and can soon walk and run, there’s little chance they could have already had the strength to travel to another wetland. And although they would have been too small for me to spot among the shrubs, their parents would surely have been visible.

The possible culprits are numerous. Many Beings will eat an egg or a baby bird. Crows, ravens, raptors, foxes, coyotes, raccoons, mink, and great horned owls are all potential predators if they can avoid the kicks and stabs of a defensive parent.

A few days after biking past the empty wetland, I switched vehicles. Paddling through a wide, marshy section of the Namekagon River, we again spotted a pair of sandhill cranes. This time their rusty feathers stood out against the fresh green spikes of horsetail. One stalked through shallow water with eyes focused downward, even dipping their head into the muck for something tasty.

The harsh cries of a red-winged blackbird brought our attention back to the other crane in the taller grass. The red and yellow epaulets on the blackbird’s wings flashed brightly as he dive-bombed the crane and even landed on their broad brown back. The wading crane returned, but there was little they could do except hunker down and point their beaks against the attacks of the smaller bird.

And could you blame him? This one male blackbird may have attracted as many as 15 females to build nests in his territory. While he doesn’t help incubate the eggs like the male crane, he does spend more than a quarter of his daylight hours in territorial defense against his peers and potential predators. And the cranes were potential predators. Although they eat plenty of waste grain from farm fields during migration, throughout the breeding season they seek the protein of small mammals, frogs, and baby birds. The blackbird was right to be leery.

These crane encounters drove home an ecological reality: One Being’s baby is often another’s baby food. The abundance of summer is driven by this necessity. Tender young leaves become caterpillar food. Six thousand caterpillars—who are baby butterflies and moths—become a half-dozen chickadee chicks. Some of those chicks become red squirrel kittens. The squirrels become red fox kits, and so on. How does anything survive?

Red-winged blackbirds can have multiple broods with several eggs over the course of a summer. Even after feeding a few cranes, they are one of the most abundant native birds in North America. At best, a pair of cranes raise no more than one chick per summer, but may have 30 years or more together to produce two successful heirs and replace themselves. Even with some predation, their population is increasing slowly due to habitat protection. There is space enough for all of us.

In the end, we can’t escape the fact that a bit (or a lot) of death goes into every life.

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 Summer Calendar is open for registration! Visit our new exhibit, “Becoming the Northwoods: Akiing (A Special Place). Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

The Teachings of Ghost Pipe

Last Sunday I was asked to give the message for the Chequamegon Unitarian Universalist Flower Ceremony. Everyone brought a flower, they were admired in a bouquet, and each person left with a different flower. This symbolized the unique value of each person and the way we came together to create a beautiful bouquet. To illustrate this idea, I chose to talk about ghost pipe (previously named Indian pipe), a plant whom I’ve been puzzling over for a while. In preparing the talk, I realized that I’d learned a lot from ghost pipe.

At a glance, we can tell that ghost pipes are unusual because they are pure white. Unlike green plants, they don’t have chlorophyll and can’t do photosynthesis to transform water, carbon dioxide, and energy from the Sun into sugars. Instead, ghost pipes are classified as parasites because they take sugar from Russula mushrooms. Sometimes, when I tell people about this relationship, they are indignant. Our culture loathes a mooch.

But let’s consider this from another perspective. Russula fungi produce beautiful mushrooms with crisp white flesh and caps in shades of pastel red. They can’t make their own food either. Many mushrooms decompose dead wood to gain energy, but Russulas have another system. The white threads of their fungal hyphae weave through the soil and connect to the roots of pines, oaks, and also to ghost pipe. The fungal hyphae are much better at collecting water and nutrients from the soil than relatively large tree roots, and these resources are shared with the trees. In return, the trees give up to 30% of the sugars they produce through photosynthesis to the mushrooms.

The trees themselves are big and healthy, waving crowns of green leaves in the sunshine. But big trees can’t thrive on their own. Water and other nutrients like nitrogen and phosphorus are often limiting for trees, especially because pines and oaks tend to grow on dry, sandy soil. The mycorrhizal relationships they have with fungi connected to their roots are essential for their supply chain. Even if they must pay for the water and nutrients, they can’t be resentful of a trade deficit. Resources gained through mycorrhizal relationships are what allow the trees to thrive, and include many side benefits.

The network of fungal hyphae (collectively called mycelium) woven throughout the soil and connecting many species of trees and fungi, can act as an internet of the forest, a way for chemical and electrical communication about drought, stress, pests, and pathogens to flow among the trees. The fungi may have some capacity to share the sugars from a thriving tree with another one who is struggling. In this way, the mushrooms can ensure that their preferred habitat—a deep, dark, shady forest—is maintained. A healthy forest is key to their survival. Some tree sugars travel through the Russulas into the ghost pipe. Is this a choice, or a trick? Scientists aren’t quite sure.

So, what is the value of ghost pipe in this system? The purpose of any living thing—at least from their own perspective—is to make more of themself. That’s what the trees and the mushrooms are doing. They haven’t forgotten that the health of the whole is essential to their own survival, even when parts of the forest ecosystem may compete at times. All flourishing is mutual.

As for the ghost plant, they have no leaves or trunk. They are just a flower—a reproductive structure. The beautiful, bell-like blossom curves over to protect a deep well of nectar. That nectar attracts and feeds bees and other insects, who move pollen from flower to flower and fertilize their seeds. The seeds disperse, and if they connect with the hyphae of Russula fungi, will grow. This focus on reproduction could be seen as self-serving.

But it's in this process that we begin to see ghost pipe’s unique contribution. The flower has given up their independence. They now rely on the mycorrhizal network for survival. Through this sacrifice they have gained the ability to bring a supply of sweet nectar into the darkest corners of the mid-summer forest floor, where few other flowers can survive. The trees, the mushrooms, and the flower are all part of the endlessly woven web of life on Earth.

Did you see yourself in any part of this story? Are you a healthy tree with resources to spare? Are you a networking fungi making sure your community is healthy? Are you a ghost pipe flower bringing beauty into the dark corners—even if that requires some support from others? Do you take sap from trees, concentrate it, and share it with others? I happen to have a little jar of maple syrup on my desk from someone who fits this last description. Maybe you're all of those. Maybe you're something else entirely.

Just like a mushroom is a visible outgrowth of the mycorrhizal network, each flower, each person, and each Being is a part of the web of life on Earth. If ghost pipe provides benefits that we struggle to notice, what does this teach us about other Beings in the web? Could it be that a “useless” Being is one whose value we just don’t understand? Could it be that a “mooch” is actually doing important work? Just like the bouquet of flowers on the altar, the web of life is more than just the sum of its parts.

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 Summer Calendar is open for registration! Visit our new exhibit, “Becoming the Northwoods: Akiing (A Special Place). Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Wilson’s Warblers on Their Way Home

One lovely afternoon last May, I set out with a friend to paddle an upper section of the Namekagon River. Flights of “mackerel sky” clouds patterned the sky, but plenty of blue shone through. The white blossoms of highbush cranberries and wild cherry trees accented the bright greens of brand-new leaves. As we rounded a corner, we spotted a flock of half-a-dozen or more little birds with lemon yellow bodies and smart black caps.

These beautiful Wilson’s Warblers are neotropical migrants who spends their winters along the south coast of Texas, or in Mexico, or Central America, and their summers in Canada and the Pacific Northwest. The bug-filled bushes of the Namekagon River are just a rest stop for them.

This May, I found myself in a very different habitat. As you might have read last week, I made my own migration to southern California for a museum conference. And then I rented a car and bopped over to Joshua Tree National Park to see what my friends had been raving about.

The temperature was pushing 100 degrees when I finally arrived just after noon. Stressed from L.A. traffic and drained from a week spent in the city, I pulled off at the very first trailhead and was surprised to find it empty. A faint trail led off through a desert of sparse and prickly plants. Chugging some water and grabbing my camera, I followed it.

This Zebra-tailed Lizard was the first animal life I spotted in Joshua Tree National Park.
Photo by Emily Stone.

At first all I saw were unfamiliar leaves. Then I recognized a clump of funny green twigs. To survive the desert, Mormon tea gave up on leaves and just photosynthesizes through their bitter green stems. Years ago, when I lived in Southeast Utah for a season, this plant was a familiar friend. A few steps later, a hit of fresh scent, vaporized like a potpourri pot by the blazing sun, led me to the shiny, tiny, leaves of a creosote bush.

Then the surface of the sand shifted, and a perfectly camouflaged lizard scurried away. As I began to feel the presence of wild life around me, my shoulders relaxed. The Sun blazed on my skin, but also warmed my heart.

Scientist E.O. Wilson’s book Biophilia hypothesized that humans possess an innate tendency to seek connections with nature and other forms of life. He wrote, “To an extent still undervalued in philosophy and religion, our existence depends on this propensity, our spirit is woven from it, hope rises on its currents."

I don’t know how people can survive for long in a city. “There are some who can live without wild things, and some who cannot,” wrote Aldo Leopold. I am one who cannot.

Soon, a lilting, three-note birdsong lured me toward a dry creek bed and an outcrop of rounded rocks. My Merlin bird ID app identified them as a Verdin, a pretty gray bird with a yellow face who only lives in northern Mexico and a bordering band of the U.S. I squinted through the intense Sun in the hopes of spotting the singer.

Flight! Out of the corner of my eye I caught the dart of a bird and followed their glint of yellow into a bush. Training my camera on the thicket, I snapped away, then zoomed in to check my results: yellow body, smart black cap. Instead of a new-to-me Verdin, I’d found an old friend!

A Wilson’s Warbler gleans bugs off of a desert-willow tree in Joshua Tree National Park. 

Photo by Emily Stone.

I watched as the Wilson’s Warbler bounced like popcorn through the narrow, willow-ish leaves of an unknown desert shrub. While this bird was named for a different Wilson, he certainly satisfied E.O. Wilson’s Biophilia. I wonder if the caterpillars and aphids he was eating here taste different than the ones along the Namekagon River? I wonder if he, too, was a bit fatigued and dehydrated by the intense heat?

I wound my way through the park, stopping at several short nature trails to explore. Several more times, movement among the leaves revealed the black-and-yellow garb of Wilson’s warblers.

I flew home early the next morning, wishing that I could listen to the soft rustle of wind through feathers instead of the roar of jet engines. One of my first days back at work was spent leading a birding field trip in the Bibon Swamp just north of Cable. Golden-winged warblers buzzed, catbirds warbled, and rose-breasted grosbeaks sang sweetly. I absorbed their vibrant life into my soul and the midwestern humidity into my skin.

Two years ago on this same field trip, we’d spotted a flock of little black-headed, lemon-yellow Wilson’s warblers bouncing through the willows. This year, we didn’t spot a single one. A part of me is worried that the population who migrates through here met some untimely end in their wintering habitat or during migration. With headlines like “75 percent of North America’s bird species are in decline” in the news, it’s not unlikely. Wilson’s warblers have declined by 60 percent between 1966 and 2019, mostly due to habitat loss throughout their range.

But a part of me is optimistic that they are taking a more leisurely trip north from Joshua Tree (as I would have preferred to do, too!), and will arrive in the Northwoods next week. In E.O. Wilson’s words, “hope rises on [this] current.”

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 Summer Calendar is open for registration! Visit our new exhibit, “Becoming the Northwoods: Akiing (A Special Place). Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Networking: Reflections on the American Alliance of Museums Conference in LA

From the air, Los Angeles looks nothing like the Northwoods. There’s the grid of roads, the glint of glass, and too little water. But with 841 museums and art galleries in Los Angeles County, it was an ideal location for the American Alliance of Museums (AAM) Annual Meeting. Our tiny little Cable Natural History Museum (CNHM) is accredited by AAM, which means that we achieved and now maintain core standards and best practices for the museum field. That’s a big deal, but still I felt like pretty small potatoes walking into the conference center with CEOs and curators from the most well-known museums in North America and around the world.

And yet, as the CEO of a local cultural center and I helped each other find our way through the maze of registration, our conversation somehow drifted to the mycorrhizal relationships between trees and fungi and how they allow for the sharing of resources and information throughout the forest. We headed in opposite directions after that, but we each felt that the conference was off to a good start.

During a lull in the presentations and networking events, I caught a rideshare to the La Brea Tar Pits and Museum with Rich Jaworski, CNHM director. Here, in southern California, the Ice Age looked different than it did in northern Wisconsin. While the Northwoods were buried under a mile of ice and even the earthworms were wiped out, the La Brea Tar Pits were a hub of big, furry, life.

The La Brea Tar Pits are an odd natural phenomenon that formed after a 6-mile-thick deposit of ocean floor sediment was buried and the algae within it turned into oil. Now pressure forces that crude oil up through bedrock cracks, and it turns into asphalt as kerosene evaporates. Throughout the grassy park surrounding the museum, Rich and I spotted small areas of blackened soil surrounded by fencing where asphalt continues to ooze up.

The much larger Lake Pit caught our attention next. This small pond is surrounded by bulrushes and cattails—and a serious fence—and its dark water churned ominously. Methane gas forms as the algae and other marine organisms continue to break down, and it bubbles to the surface.

Three sculptures of mammoths posed around the Lake Pit at the La Brea Tar Pits depict outdated ideas. The artist mired the female in the muck, with her baby and a male standing on the shore. Scientists now know that females lived in herds, and males lived apart. Males were more likely to get stuck in the tar because they didn’t have a herd to rescue them. Networks are valuable for many reasons! Photo by Emily Stone.

The Lake Pit is deep because it was excavated during asphalt mining operations in the late 1800s. Rainwater collects on top of the goo. And three sculptures depict the heartbreaking scene of a family of mammoths becoming trapped in the sticky mire.

Historically, the natural asphalt pools probably weren’t as deep and watery as Lake Pit. Scientists think it would only take a few inches of tar to spell an animal’s doom. The surface might have become camouflaged by dust and leaves, tricking animals into stepping right in. Once a large herbivore like a mammoth was stuck, their plight would have attracted scores of carnivores who also became trapped. Dire wolves are the most common large mammal found in the pits. One entire wall of the museum is covered in dire wolf skulls.

It’s dangerous to compare yourself to others, of course, but I couldn’t help thinking about the Cable Natural History Museum’s thousands of specimens in contrast to La Brea’s millions of bones.

Then, as we continued through the exhibit hall, I noticed a sign that explained how scientists use the teeth of these preserved remains to determine what their owner ate. Flat, grinding molars indicate that they were chewing plants; sharp canines were made to grip meat; and a combination of the two indicate an omnivorous diet. This is exactly what our four naturalists teach second graders in our MuseumMobile programs in schools!

The plant-grinding teeth of a mammoth.

The carnivorous teeth of a saber-toothed cat.

The omnivorous teeth of a Giant Ice Age Bear.

The hooked beaks of several extinct eagles excavated from the pits all looked very similar to the owl skulls we show fourth graders, and are a sure sign of a raptor. Yet another display explained how scientists can use the teeth of saber-toothed cats to determine how old they were. In fifth grade classrooms, we used to do the same thing with the jaw bones of white-tailed deer.

The Cable Natural History Museum may not encompass one of the world's most important paleontological sites, but the science we teach our students could still put them on a path to studying these fossils someday.

And here’s the thing about La Brea—the big animals represented there all went extinct. Meanwhile, descendants of all the plants and many of the small animals found in the pits are still alive today. I’ll take that bit of wisdom home with me.

As the conference continued, I interacted with people from museums of all sizes. Whether in a presentation or just waiting for a session to start, we shared our challenges and talked over solutions. In the furrowing of foreheads and scribbling of notes, I could see resources being shared, ideas taking shape, and relationships being forged.

Whether a network is made of fungi linking trees or shared goals uniting people, connections allow us each to grow just a little bit more than we could have on our own.

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 Summer Calendar is open for registration! Visit our new exhibit, “Becoming the Northwoods: Akiing (A Special Place). Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Adventures in Porcupine Lake Wilderness

“We all have enough reality, right?” My head whipped to the gas pump’s screen, catching the end of an advertisement for a virtual reality headset. Personally, I thought it was an odd thing to say. But I didn’t spend much time ruminating about it–I was on an adventure.

Snow was still on the ground, but the sunny 40 degree day felt like a cure to my cabin fever. Picking a spot on the map, I decided to take myself to Porcupine Lake Wilderness northeast of Cable. I was out the door to go explore in a flash.

My adventure started along the winding forested back roads that led to the trailhead. I have inhabited the Northwoods for a few months now, but I still cannot get over the wealth of trees that grow here. I find immense beauty in the way the forests surround the roads, encapturing me with every twist and turn, leaving almost nothing else in sight except for the wilderness around me, begging to be explored.

At the trailhead, the woods were set alight by the sunshine reflecting off the melting snow. While my boots crunched down the trail, my eyes wandered to the trees where life was starting to awaken. Lichens, mosses, and mushrooms decorated the bark in a burst of bright greens, yellows and oranges–a welcome sight against the backdrop of the forest.

One fallen tree appeared to have tiny orange scales sprouting up along the bark. Upon closer inspection, they were turkey tail mushrooms! Named for their shape and colorful bands of growth, these fungi have a similar appearance to a turkey's fanned out tail. They are a common sight in forested areas, and serve an important role within the ecosystem. Turkey tails are a saprobic fungus, decomposers who break down organic matter and cycle the nutrients back into the soil. This helps create healthy soil, and provides nutrients to microbes, insects, and plants.

Turkey tail fungus grew along the bark of the tree, feeding off the decaying plant matter.
Photo by Heaven Walker.

A bright yellow-green color spattered the bark of many trees, looking like someone with a paintball gun had run rampant through the forest. But it wasn’t paint that dotted the trees, it was common greenshield lichen. They are categorized as a foliose lichen because of their flat and leafy appearance. Lichens are another great example of how parts of an ecosystem are connected. They are a symbiotic relationship between a fungus and an algae, where both beings benefit from the relationship. The fungus provides them a “house” with its fungal body and the algae provides food for them both by photosynthesis. Common greenshield has other symbiotic relationships within their ecosystem. The tree provides the lichen with a growing substrate, while the lichen neither benefits or harms the tree. Ruby-throated hummingbirds will camouflage the outside of their nest using bits of the lichen, and northern flying squirrels feed on lichens.

Nestled among lichens and mosses was a small, bright-yellow jelly fungus. This tiny wonder of nature had a fruiting body shaped like a brain, with no stem or cap. When jelly fungi dry out, they can become stiff and rigid, but bounce right back to a squishy consistency when hydrated again. Unable to resist my childlike nature, I gave them a poke and delighted in their jello-like consistency. But unlike turkey tail mushrooms who feed on organic matter, this jelly fungus is in the Tremella genus, and is a mycoparasite. Instead of feeding on decomposing plants, this cute little fungus was feeding on another fungus who inhabited the same fallen tree.

Nestled by lichens and mosses, this jelly fungus stood out with it’s bright-yellow coloring. Photo by Heaven Walker.

Leaving the lichens and mushrooms behind, I wandered farther down the snowy trail. Stopping to inspect the base of a tree, I noticed that the dirt speckling the trail was not dirt. Kneeling in the snow, I watched as the “dirt” sprung atop the melting snow. Snow fleas!

Snow fleas are tiny arthropods who live in the soil and leaf litter where they feed on fungi and decaying organic matter–a similar diet to the turkey tail and jelly fungus. As the temperatures begin to warm, they move up through the melting snow and become noticeable. I happened upon a large gathering of snow fleas as they occupied a depression in the snow, making a dark, moving puddle. Watching them closely, it made me wonder what it might be like to be a tiny snow flea, making my way through giant melting snow crystals and up to the surface.

These snow fleas transformed the white snow into a dark, moving puddle.
Photo by Heaven Walker.

As my toes began to freeze in my boots, I decided to turn around and begin my slow trek back to my car. I found my thoughts back on the commercial at the gas pump, and hearing “We all have enough reality, right?” I thought about the lichens, fungi, and snow fleas I just spent an afternoon getting to know, and the connection I felt to the world around me while I wandered through the forest. That is my reality, and I never want less of it.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Our Summer Calendar is open for registration! Visit our new exhibit, “Becoming the Northwoods: Akiing (A Special Place). Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Lois Nestel’s Sweet Ode to Spring

“What sweet ode shall we write to spring? Soft and tremulous one minute, tempestuous the next, she proffers her gifts with one fair hand and with the other snatches them away.”

–Lois Nestel, Wayside Wanderings II

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 arriving birds, muddy driveways, and late snow flurries. Lois Nestel, the Museum’s founding naturalist and director, captured the contrasts of spring in her Wayside Wanderings newspaper column, which was compiled into two little chapbooks. The Spring section of Wayside Wanderings II begins like poetry:

“So, shall the ode be to her gentle side with greening grass, with birds and flowers and breezes moist and sweet as baby’s breath? Shall it be of earth reborn, of seed and root awakened and of bursting life in every swale and stream and creatures bringing forth their young? Shall it be of mingled scents, of mouldering duff, unfolding leaves and earth itself spewing forth the life it held intact throughout the months of cold? And must we not include the hues of spring; the tender blue of skies with puffy clouds, the yellow, pinks, and copper tones of bursting leaves; all the lovely tones of autumn only softened, modified?

“Mayhap it should be of slim-legged girls on bikes and running boys preparing for the race, of women planting flowers, and men in fields.

“Or should the ode be to the harsher side with snow and sleet, with slashing rain and wind, the lightning's flash and thunder roll or sudden frost that wounds the tender things?

“But would the ode not better be to hope, to promise and to the expectation of fulfilment of a dream that might have seemed for naught in winter's cold? Is there one heart so sick, so sad and worn that it stirs not with hope at spring's sweet touch? There is a magic, a restorative in spring that speaks of better things to come, of life worthwhile.

“Yes, it is all these things. The bitter makes us savor ever more the sweet and gentle days. No verse, no hymn, no song to spring but must include the teardrop with the smile. A bright new season, bright new dream, a time of growth; that's spring.”

I’ve been riding my bike around Lake Namakagon on warm afternoons, and while I’m checking the spots where hepatica and trailing arbutus usually bloom first, the buds have been tightly furled. That’s ok, because I know where to look for the even earlier flowers, and so did Lois. Her Spring section continues with odes to the flowers of trees!

“It is spring; there is no doubt about it. A pervading aroma emanates from last year's leaves, dampened by rain and warmed by sun, from expanding leaf buds, and from the earth itself. There is also the bitter sweet hint of another fragrance, fresh and elusive, coming from the prodigious blossoming which often remains unnoticed if one only looks at the ground. But look up at the trees, the willows, aspens, and maples. The flowers are there, small, not especially colorful or spectacular in casual observation. Close at hand, however, they are amazing. I find a special fascination in these minute blossoms, losing sight of my own gross imperfections in their purity of form.

“Willows and aspens produce their flowers in catkins which, at first, are furry, gray, brown shielded ovals best represented to us in pussy willows. As willow catkins develop, four-parted yellow clubs emerge from the gray fur, clothing them in gold and offering a welcome feast to early insects.

Pussy willows produce their flowers in catkins. As they develop, four-parted yellow clubs emerge from the gray fur, clothing them in gold and offering a welcome feast to early insects like this orange-belted bumble bee. Photo by Emily Stone.

“The common old poplar, more formally known as aspen, is so familiar that we scarcely see the tree, much less its bloom. Aspen catkins quickly expand into chenille-like tassels that may not impress one as being extraordinary, but a look through a magnifying glass reveals details that are as fair as the most precious garden flower. Here is a carefully arranged structure of delicate, fringed scales protecting creamy flowers with dark stamens. Their life is short. A little warmth, a little drying, and suddenly the flowers spill quantities of pale pollen to be carried on the wind. Empty, their task fulfilled, the catkins fall away.

“Showier are the maple flowers. The silvery twigs of soft maple are tipped by clustered scarlet blooms with golden stamens. At the height of their blossoming, the trees are a haze of red which quickly fades and is gone by the time the leaves appear. The sugar maples glow green-gold with dangling chartreuse bells bearing rust-colored stamens or two-pronged reddish pistils.

Red maple flowers are scarlet with golden stamens. From afar, they lend a pretty color to the forest canopy. Up close, they are exquisite works of art. Photo by Emily Stone.

“Flowers by the millions, yet so rarely seen,” Lois concludes. “One violet on the ground gets more attention. Each tree blooms in its own time, its own fashion, and each merits greater appreciation.”

May this inspire you to look more closely at the flower of a tree in this bright new season!

Our new exhibit "Becoming the Northwoods" opened May 1st! 

Come in and see the lovely display about the seasons of the Northwoods! 

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 Summer Calendar is open for registration! Our new exhibit, “Becoming the Northwoods: Akiing (A Special Place) opens on May 1! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

The Sparrow’s Songs

A faint string of birdsong filtered through closed windows on a recent morning. It was well after dawn, but thick gray clouds made it feel like the Sun had yet to rise. “Song sparrow!” I exclaimed. “They must have arrived overnight!”

My friend, who started birding last summer, looked skeptical. “That doesn’t sound like what I remember.” He pulled out his phone and opened the Merlin Bird ID app from the Cornell Lab of Ornithology to play an example of a song sparrow’s song. The recording started with a pair of notes and then a couple more, and then devolved into a messy, buzzy trill. Outside, the bird sang with the same quality, but not exactly the same pattern.

Listen Here: https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Song_Sparrow/sounds

Back in my college field ornithology class, we’d been taught the mnemonic “Maids! Maids! Maids! Put on your teakettle-ettle-ettle.” The maids representing the first notes, and the tea kettle mimicking the trill. It helped if we sounded a little like a spoiled heiress when we said it, to match the loud, brassy tone of the sparrow.

While the funny mnemonics I learned in that class were helpful, they were useless without also noticing variations in tone quality of the birdsongs. Repetition was also key. Before quiz days, we’d all sit around a tape player and listen intently to the mixtape our teaching assistant had made for us.

With song sparrows, the repetition came naturally. They are one of the first birds to return in spring. They are quite common around lakeshores, marshes, road edges, fencerows, yards, and pretty much anywhere there are some bushes and some grass. And they live up to their name, Melospiza melodia, which means “melodious singing sparrow.” One male was observed singing for 10 hours in a single day, which meant completing 2,305 songs.

With brown, white, and gray stripes on their head and breast, song sparrows resemble many sparrows who are brown and stripey, and somewhat hard to tell apart. The pattern I look for is a particularly dark spot under their chin where their chest stripes meet up. My TA taught me to remember this like the bow tie on an opera singer.

Photo by Emily Stone.

I was quite familiar with song sparrows by the time I moved from the Midwest to California in 2007, but I remember the experience of confusion the first time I heard one there. The song that emanated from a shrub in the coastal grassland of Salt Point State Park wasn’t the pattern I remembered, but the tone was the same, and my binoculars revealed the black bow tie.

California coast. Photo by Tom Fitz

As it turns out, song sparrows are widespread, and well-known to have regional accents. The variation is likely a result of picky females, who prefer to mate with males who demonstrate an ability to learn new song components from other males.

I guessed that the odd-sounding song sparrow outside the window on that gray morning was on migration to somewhere else, somewhere his accent would fit in. I also guessed that he’d been part of a larger wave of migrating birds who’d sailed in on a south wind overnight. Hoping that the rain would hold off, we headed out to Artist’s Point in Grand Marais, MN, where Lake Superior concentrates birds who’d rather not cross the open water.

Song sparrows were the first thing we heard from the parking lot, and we followed their melodies to a thicket of willows and red-osier dogwood. One sparrow swooped away with a characteristic tail-bobbing flight, landed in the top of a small tree, and belted out a few songs. Before long, though, he swooped back into the brush to join his buddies scavenging for seeds on the ground. With competing needs to refuel for the next leg of migration and to satisfy their raging hormones, the guys sang even from the middle of the thicket.

Cameras poised for the moment a sparrow posed for a clear photo, we spent several minutes there, just observing. That’s nothing compared to what Margaret Morse Nice did on May 11, 1935. On that day, she followed a single song sparrow from midnight to midnight, recording his behavior for 24 hours straight. She’s the one who observed him singing 2,305 complete songs for a total of 10 hours—which was more time than he spent roosting (9 hours) or feeding (5 hours).

That birdwatching marathon was part of an eight-year study in which Nice, both a trained zoologist and mother of five, trapped, marked, and observed 870 different song sparrows in her Ohio backyard. Before her groundbreaking work, many bird books contained “facts” conjured up by Aristotle, and the study of birds focused on “collecting” them—with shotguns.

Nice banded her birds with plastic from children’s toys and created a new standard for scientific research by observing hundreds of marked individuals over many years. In her studies, she learned to recognize individual males by their distinctive songs and pick out the phrases they’d learned from their neighbors. Her work inspired a new generation of ornithologists—and me—to be more observant.

Margaret Morse Nice lying flat in the grass to study a nest of baby field sparrows.
Photo taken by Al Fenn circa 1956

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 Summer Calendar is open for registration! The Museum is closed for construction until May 1. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

The Pulse of a Waking Forest

Our morning dawned crisp and blue. In the woods, we knew that the trails would be firmly frozen, the mosquitoes still far from flying, and perhaps the ticks would be hunkered down, too. This chilly spring weather is a perfect match for a hike on the North Country Trail.

As we entered the brushy, deciduous forest and strode down the leaf-littered path, I felt my heart quicken and thud in my chest. After a moment, the sensation reached my ears, too. It wasn’t my heart—it was the drumming of a ruffed grouse! I’m always amazed by how much I feel their sound instead of hearing it. In the thick of mating season, their incessant, accelerating beats have even caused a fleeting catch in my breath as they temporarily overpower my own body rhythms.

Ruffed Grouse displaying. 
Photo by USFWS midwest, Public domain, via Wikimedia Commons

The grouse drummed again; thumping slowly at first, and then crescendoing into a rapid-fire blur. As his last vibrations dissipated into the still air, another grouse answered from a neighboring territory. The low-frequency sounds are audible from up to a quarter mile away.

Over the years, we’ve employed several explanations of how ruffed grouse create this sound. Because male grouse often display from atop a hollow log, perhaps they created the sound by actually hitting the log with their wings. Or, since they also display on rocks, mounds of soil, or prominent roots, perhaps the sounds come from the wings striking together behind the birds’ back, like a spruce grouse. Those explanations were discredited in part due to some fuzzy photographs of captive Ruffed Grouse by Professor C.F. Hodge of Clark University in the early 1900s.

H.E. Tuttle spent many days in blinds observing drumming grouse from 1910 to 1918, and published his findings in the American Ornithologists' Union journal, The Auk. Tuttle examined Hodge’s photos and agreed that the sound did not come from wings beating together. He posed the possibility that rudimentary air sacs contribute to the sound (as in the displays of greater sage-grouse).

One theory he dismissed heartily was that the drumming sounds were produced the same way as a grouse’s noisy flight. He described it as “an unsatisfactory explanation of that far-away throbbing challenge which steals on the ear so subtly, like the half heard beating of one’s own heart.”

As in many realms of science, when technology improved, so did our explanations and accuracy. In the 1920s, Arthur Allen of Cornell University used a new-fangled contraption to shoot motion-picture footage of the grouse. By slowing down the movement, he ruled out every explanation except the one that we currently accept.

On the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s “All About Birds” website today, you can read the result of their founder’s research: “The male Ruffed Grouse’s signature drumming display doesn’t involve drumming on anything but air. As the bird quickly rotates its wings forward and backward, air rushes in beneath the wings creating a miniature vacuum that generates a deep, thumping sound wave...”

That miniature thunderclap sends “the blood sap pulsing quicker along the veins…” (Tuttle again) not only for humans, but also for the lady grouse. She can probably differentiate between different males, since the number and rate of pulses in each bout of drumming is unique to each individual.

Tuttle noted that if he rustled the leaves in his blind to sound like the dainty footsteps of an approaching female grouse, the male would drum instantly, and also flare his name-sake ruff of neck feathers. Once he’s able to attract a female with this huge output of energy, copulation lasts only a few seconds. The female then wanders off to build a ground nest and raise the chicks completely on her own.

Hiking down the trail, we found many clusters of sawdust-filled grouse droppings. Those piles marked where they had digested tree buds and catkins on sub-zero nights while buried snugly in a snowdrift. In one balsam thicket we heard—but did not see—the whirr of a grouse’s startled explosion into flight. We have to admire the tenacity of these year-round residents, even if we sometimes chuckle at their lack of grace.

Grouse scat in snow. Photo by Emily Stone. 

Now, as the days lengthen with the promise of spring, we can also appreciate how grouses’ drumming seems to jump-start the pulse of a waking forest.

Author’s Note: This article was originally published in 2015.

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 Summer Calendar is open for registration! The Museum is closed for construction until May 1. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Snowshoe Hares Eat Dirt

“Empty,” called Claire Montgomerie over her shoulder with a hint of relief in her voice. Matt Kynoch and I paused in our crashing through the brush, waited for Claire to make sure the live trap was still properly set, and then we all tromped back along the transect together. “Full,” announced Matt as we approached the next trap, a snowshoe hare cowering inside.

We used live traps baited with carrots and alfalfa cubes to catch hares in the Brooks Range. A piece of tarpaper over the cage provides protection from rain and sun, as well as making the hares feel more secure and hidden. Photo by Emily Stone.

Matt and Claire—both graduate students at the University of Alaska Fairbanks—sprang to action with practiced efficiency. Claire fit a long, white pillowcase around one end of the trap, grasped the door through the fabric, and opened it wide. Matt crouched at the far end and blew little puffs of air on the hare’s rear end to encourage them to run into the bag. Sometimes, cartoon-like, the hare would blast into the bag with such force that you could see the impression of their little face through the fabric.

Matt and Claire spooking a hare into a pillowcase. Photo by Emily Stone.

For three days in the summer of 2018 we worked on this mark-recapture survey along a pipeline access road in the Brooks Range of northern Alaska, gathering data that would help scientists at the nearby Gates of the Arctic National Park estimate hare population numbers for this year. Our opinion? The population was high. Almost every trap was full, which meant a delayed lunch, and that sense of relief to find an empty trap.

While the Dalton Highway is riddled with potholes and washboards for much of its length, but the scenery more than makes up for it. Photo by Emily Stone.

Along one rutted gravel road we set 14 live traps baited with alfalfa cubes and carrots. Claire pointed out exposed dirt on the road cuts where hares had been recorded coming to lick the soil. National Park Service scientist Donna DiFolco had asked us to help recapture hares who had been previously deployed with GPS collars to track their use of the mineral licks.

Later in the week we collected data for Claire’s master’s thesis. From each hare, they plucked fluffy tufts of hair, clipped a toenail, and drew blood from a vein in the hind leg. I also helped collect fresh bunny scat into little plastic bags. Once back in the lab, Claire would run tests on the materials to find signs of the hare’s stress levels and other measures of health. All of this was in the name of science, and Claire is not the first to try and tease out mechanisms behind a roughly 10-year cycle of snowshoe hare population highs and lows.

I was super impressed with Claire's blood drawing and hare handling skills. She trained with a veterinarian on campus. Photo by Emily Stone. 

Releasing the hare. Photo by Emily Stone. 

The classic, top-down, predator-driven theory posits that as hares increase, the number of lynx who feed on them go up, too. Hares get eaten. Lynx have more babies. Soon there are too many lynx and not enough hares to feed them all. The lynx population goes down, hare numbers recover. The cycle starts over. Most scientists now believe that this is oversimplified.

A giant, furry lynx paw. Photo by Emily Stone.

For example, predators don’t just kill hares by eating them. When lynx numbers are high, hares may spend more time being vigilant and less time feeding. Plus, DeAngelis et al, 2015, found that when numerous hares browse heavily on their favorite winter foods, those willow and birch shrubs increase the concentration of anti-herbivory chemicals in their tender new twigs.

Therefore, at the same point in the cycle when hares experience the most stress from high numbers of predators, they are left eating woodier and more toxic twigs. That leads to lower survival and reproduction—except for those hares who were coming to lick the soil.

The interconnected boom-and-bust lifecycles of lynx (bars) and snowshoe hare (line) populations in the central Brooks Range. Lynx data are from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game lynx sealing records, and snowshoe hare track counts are from this study.

NPS / Donna DiFolco   https://home.nps.gov/articles/000/brooks-range-snowshoe-hares.htm 

When I tell people about my 2018 sabbatical to Alaska, this snowshoe hare study is always a highlight. Which is why I was so excited to see a recent headline from the National Park Service during my lunch hour last week. After decades of research, Donna DiFolco, the NPS scientist who Claire was assisting with the mineral lick study, confirmed what locals had already observed: in areas with mineral licks, the hare population grows larger for longer. Instead of peaking equally every 10 years, the hares with access to natural mineral licks have a super peak every 20 years, and a smaller one in between.

By comparing the samples of hare scat—some of which I helped collect!—Donna was able to determine that mineral licks were providing critical nutrients like sodium, calcium, potassium, and magnesium that helped the hares to stay healthy even when the plants they ate became more toxic. Donna retired last year, but her colleagues will continue to investigate the importance of mineral licks for other mammals, too.

Hare scat. Photo by Emily Stone. 

The data I helped collect from hares in the summer of 2018 contributed to Claire’s master’s thesis and an article published in The Scientific Naturalist. Photo by Emily Stone.

All those years ago, while Clarie, Matt and I were staving off hanger to trap all the hares, I commented to them that 2018 was surely a peak year. Like good scientists, they equivocated. That could only be determined in hindsight. Well, according to Donna’s data, the super peak was still one year away—in 2019. If I’d have been part of the research team that year, I might have had to join the hares in eating dirt!

Author's Note: Portions of this article are republished from 2018. Check out the three original articles on the blog to find out more about how the moon may impact the hare's cycles, too!

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 Summer Calendar is open for registration! The Museum is closed for construction until May 1. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.