Fishers Looking For Love

My skis chattered over rough snow on the Valhalla Ski Trails that are perched on the spine of the Bayfield Peninsula. Several loops zoom from dark stands of pines through the lacy twigs of hardwood forests. The groomer had been out earlier that day, but in places where the previous day’s warmth had turned icy overnight, the surface had crumbled.

Still, the snow had enough give that when my ski buddy shouted “Check out these tracks!” I could snowplow to a stop and go back to look. Around the office, we’ve been asking each other the question, “If you could instantly be great at any Olympic sport, which would you choose?” Several people have mentioned skiing, but that doesn’t appeal to me. I prefer to ski slow enough that I can stop and look at tracks.

Male fishers travel widely in search of females in late winter and early spring. This one left a 1-2-1 loping pattern in soft snow at the Valhalla Ski Trails. Photo by Emily Stone.

These tracks went loping off through the forest in a winding trail. Unlike a wolf or a lynx, who usually walk or run in an even pattern of left, right, left, right, this Being had made groups of three or four big tracks separated by longer intervals. Each track showed five toes with pointy claws. This is the classic 1-2-1 lope pattern of a fisher. One front paw landed first, by itself in the back of the group (1). Then the other front paw and one hind paw landed side-by-side in the middle (2). Finally, the last hind paw left a single track at the front of the group (1).

From the depth that the toes had clawed into the snow, and also the smooth surface on the bottom of the tracks, we determined that this big weasel had been wandering around yesterday afternoon or evening, when the snow was still soft. Those long claws, when used in combination with rear ankle joints that can rotate 180 degrees, allow fishers to climb down trees headfirst!

Female fishers may be climbing trees this time of year as they look for a good place to have their young. Hollow trees are common den sites, as are rock crevices, slash piles, abandoned beaver lodges in dry ponds, and old porcupine dens. Inside the female, eggs fertilized last spring have only just begun to develop. A few kits will be born—blind and helpless—in late March to early April. Just a week or two later she will come into estrus and leave the den briefly to mate, but the new embryos won’t develop further until next February. Meanwhile, she will spend four months caring for the kits.

We continued skiing through the mature forest, admiring big trees and snags that the Forest Service has left for wildlife habitat. Fishers prefer closed canopy forests with lots of fallen logs. The cutover era, when most of Wisconsin’s forests were logged and then burned, had a devastating impact on fishers. Not only did these events remove their habitat, the influx of people led to overharvesting fishers for their fur. Fishers were absent from Wisconsin by the early 1900s.

I’ve heard a story that it was foresters who lobbied for the reintroduction of fishers because the number of porcupines had increased so much that they were nibbling the bark off too many trees. Porcupines are well-defended against predators, but the low, slinky posture of fishers allows them to dart in and attack a porcupine’s face repeatedly. Once the porky is incapacitated, a fisher will flip them over and access their unprotected belly. Fishers also eat squirrels, and compete with lynx for snowshoe hares. When fishers eat mice and voles, spores from truffles and other fungi in the preys’ stomachs also pass through the fisher’s digestive tract and may be dispersed far and wide.

Despite their name, fishers don’t really eat fish. The word seems to come from a European term “fitch,” which refers to a similar animal on that continent. The ancestors of fishers likely migrated to North America from eastern Asia between 2.5 and 5 million years ago. Sometimes called fisher-cats, they are not felines, nor have the rumors that they commonly eat cats stood up to scientific inquiry.

On the far side of the ski trail loop, we coasted past another loping line of fisher tracks, almost certainly made by the same animal. Early spring is when male fishers travel widely in search of mating opportunities. I often see their tracks in the softening snow as they tour their 9-15 square mile home ranges that overlap the smaller territories of several females.

Whether the Wisconsin DNR decided to reintroduce fishers for porcupine control, or just because they belong on the landscape, the recovery effort that began in the 1950s was successful. By the 1980s there were enough fishers to allow trapping again, and today their population in the state is estimated at over 10,000. Even so, I rarely see these dark brown weasels, except on my trail camera, or in my imagination as I watch their tracks lope off into the snowy woods.

While there are an estimated 10,000 fishers in Wisconsin, I rarely see them in the wild. Trail cameras are a much easier way to catch a glimpse of one. Photo by Emily Stone.

Emily’s award-winning second book, Natural Connections: Dreaming of an Elfin Skimmer, is now available to purchase at www.cablemuseum.org/books and at your local independent bookstore, too.

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. The Museum is now open with our exciting Growing Up WILD exhibit. Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

The Elusive Lynx

I stared open-mouthed in disbelief at the cat crossing the neighborhood street in front of my new house in Silver Bay, MN (I’ll be moving up full time in 2027). Trotting purposefully on long legs, with a body almost three feet long, this was no housecat. “Bobcat!” I exclaimed, eyeing the black tip on their short tail and dark blotches on gray-brown fur. Bobcats are common in Northern Wisconsin where I’ve been living for the past 15 years, and are often spotted around homes and roads, so that was the most likely identification my startled brain could find.

You can view the video on my Facebook or Instagram.

But as the cat climbed up the pile of dirty snow on the curb and into my neighbor’s yard, the size of their huge, furry feet came into full view. That, along with long black ear tufts visible against the white, confirmed their identity: Canada lynx.

In this still frame from a cell phone video, you can see the short, black-tipped tail, huge foot and striking black ear tufts characteristic of a Canada lynx. Photo by Emily Stone.

I’ve been lucky enough to see lynx before—once crossing the highway on a road trip across Canada, and again in Alaska when I helped a crew of biologists recover the body of a collared lynx who had died. But lynx are known to be elusive, solitary creatures who travel mostly by night in the tangled spruce-fir forests and conifer swamps of the far north.

While a small number of lynx once called Northern Wisconsin home, they’ve never been common, and declined rapidly as logging changed the forests, the winter snowpack thinned, and more aggressive bobcats took over. The last confirmed sighting in the state was in 1992, and was likely a visitor from Canada.

Minnesota is a different story. With an estimated 100-300 individual lynx in the state at any given time, Minnesota has the third largest lynx population in the U.S., after Alaska and Maine. And most of the lynx sightings occur in Cook and Lake County, where Silver Bay is located. In fact, a couple of different population maps from the DNR seem to indicate that the Superior National Forest just uphill from Silver Bay has relatively high numbers of lynx. It’s not hard to understand why—the ski trails I’ve visited up there are all crisscrossed by abundant snowshoe hare tracks. Hares make up 90% of a lynx’s diet, so good hare habitat equals good lynx habitat.

Figure 13. Lynx winter-specific occupancy probabilities (medians). Grid cells are 5×5 km and encompass Superior National Forest and designated lynx critical habitat in Minnesota, USA From:  Summary of the Superior National Forest’s Canada lynx (Lynx canadensis) DNA database and population monitoring 2024. LINK 

You can see the large hind feet of a snowshoe hare in these tracks as they cross a ski trail. Lynx also use large feet to carry them across deep snow—in pursuit of hares to eat! Photo by Emily Stone.

This is what a snowshoe hare's foot looks like from the bottom! Big and hairy! Photo by Emily Stone, taken while assisting researchers in Alaska. 

When hare populations go up, lynx numbers go up, too. When the bunnies crash headlong into a population low, lynx follow. Hungry humans all across the North have been aware of this cycle for hundreds of years, since hares were a staple in their stew pots. The lynx-hare cycle has been highlighted in ecology textbooks since 1942, when British ecologists Elton and Nicholson did a quantitative analysis of lynx numbers in the fur trapping records of the Hudson Bay Company. (Read about some theories explaining why this happens here.)

But the lynx population in Minnesota stopped following the hare cycle closely in the 1980’s. Now there’s just a small bump in the lynx population a year or two after hare numbers peak. Ironically, it may be the recovery of other mid-sized predators, like bobcats, fishers, coyotes, and foxes that has made it tougher for lynx. These other carnivores also love to eat snowshoe hares, but are able to pursue a much more varied diet when the hare numbers are low. Lynx aren’t nearly as flexible. They really shine when super deep snow slows their competition down.

Lynx feet can be 4” round, and heavily furred, which helps them stay on top of deep snow. This foot belonged to the lynx in Alaska who we recovered after their radio collar put out a mortality signal. Photo by Emily Stone.

Scientists with the Minnesota DNR, the University of Minnesota Duluth’s Natural Resources Research Institute, and the U.S. Forest Service are all working to figure out how many lynx there are each year, how well they are surviving, and how forest management can help them thrive. They are gathering hair and scat samples to identify individual lynx by their DNA.

My fiancé and I watched the lanky cat lope toward a forest that slopes down toward Lake Superior. It’s breeding season for lynx—could this be a male out searching for a mate? We crossed the street to look for tracks. Their furred feet float so well that not even a scuff could be seen on the crusty snow. I didn’t think to look for hair, but later I reported the sighting through a Minnesota DNR portal. What a thrill for my new neighborhood to be a dot on their map!

Source: https://www.dnr.state.mn.us/nhnrp/lynx_sightings.html 

Emily’s third book, Natural Connections3: A Web Endlessly Woven, 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 Winter 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.

Is the Sun Setting on Evening Grosbeaks?

The last leg of my morning commute takes me from the Museum’s parking lot to the front doors. Though short, this walk is often filled with birdsongs. Chickadees can always be counted on, blue jays shout their alarm, and house finches twitter from the neighbor’s cedar trees in the spring. One morning last week there was a chorus of sweet, arrhythmic calls coming from the hedge of boxelder trees by the street.

It was a gray morning, with just enough sun to silhouette the trees. When I stopped moving, their fluttering revealed a dozen or so robin-sized birds. As I watched, they plucked at the maple-like boxelder seeds in their large, pale bills. Discarded seed wings littered the snow beneath the tree. Squinting from a new angle, I could just make out the bright yellow bellies, black-and-white wings, and yellow foreheads of the male evening grosbeaks in the group. The females would have blended perfectly with the gray sky if it weren’t for black-and-white on their wings.

Male evening grosbeaks are bright yellow! Photo by Emily Stone.

Despite the poor light, I was thrilled! It’s so nice to see their sunny yellows when our local goldfinches have gone drab. In 2023, flocks of a hundred or more evening grosbeaks were spotted at many feeders in the Northwoods—but not mine. This winter, I’ve been watching jealously as my neighbors proudly post photos of small groups of grosbeaks visiting their feeders every few days. My feeders are too small for these big birds, but this tangled mess of boxelder fits their bills.

Evening grosbeaks are colorful members of the finch family. They got their name not because they are the color of the setting sun, but because English settlers thought the birds only came out of the woods to sing at sundown. French settlers reportedly gave them the more accurate name of le gros-bec errant, the wandering grosbeak. These bright birds travel widely toward the best food sources in movements known as “irruptions.”

In winter, evening grosbeaks are attracted to the large seeds of deciduous trees like maples, ashes, and boxelders. In the summer, they seek spruce budworms—the destructive caterpillars of a little brown moth—to feed their chicks. Grosbeaks are so good at detecting spruce budworms (which also feed on balsam fir trees) that an influx of the birds is often humans’ first clue to the start of an outbreak.

But cycles of natural budworm outbreaks and shifts in how much humans try to control outbreaks through aerial spraying, now impact how much baby food grosbeaks have access to from year to year, and decade to decade. It’s not good. According to the Finch Research Network, evening grosbeaks have declined by 92% since 1970. The causes of this decline are not fully understood, but likely stem from changes in both their summer and their winter food sources.

Back in the 1800s, evening grosbeaks were mostly a western species. In the early 1900s they started to move east, mostly in winter, probably due to the marked increase in the popularity of boxelder as an ornamental tree. Then the 1970s saw extensive spruce budworm outbreaks. The dramatic increase in both their summer and winter food at this time may have meant that evening grosbeak populations were unusually high at the start of the period of decline.

Logging, too little or too much management of budworm, and diseases like West Nile likely ended the grosbeaks’ period of abundance. It doesn’t help that evening grosbeaks are the species most commonly killed in window collisions, and they are also hit by cars in high numbers when flocks descend to the roads for salt. They may even be a victim of their own success as the budworms that grosbeaks love to eat sometimes end up destroying the birds’ breeding habitat.

In the 2016 Landbird Conservation Plan produced by Partners in Flight, the evening grosbeak was cited as the steepest declining landbird in the continental United States and Canada. They aren’t listed as endangered yet but have been designated a “species of special concern.” Scientists have come together in an Evening Grosbeak Working Group to fill the knowledge gaps across priority areas like diet, causes of death, migratory and population dynamics, habitat, and climate change.

Among other things, scientists are outfitting grosbeaks with satellite and radio transmitters and colored leg bands to help track their movements. The same MOTUS towers that I wrote about for tracking saw-whet owls in Bayfield Country are also recording radio-tagged grosbeaks! Up in Sax-Zim Bog in northern Minnesota, 75% of grosbeaks who scientists outfitted with solar-powered satellite tags stuck around the spruce-fir forests of this Important Bird Area, while the rest of them journeyed off in all directions.

How can you help? If you see grosbeaks, post your photos to iNaturalist or eBird where scientists can use them as data to determine where the birds are and what they are eating. Or if you’re lucky enough to see one with a colored band, report it to the USGS Bird Banding Laboratory. Learn about ways to prevent birds from colliding with your windows from the American Bird Conservancy. Keep cats inside. Keep your bird feeders clean and take them down if you notice sick birds. Support the Finch Research Network and other conservation organizations with your donations.

Together, networks of scientists and legions of bird-lovers are working to make sure that the Sun isn’t setting on evening grosbeaks.

Emily’s third book, Natural Connections3: A Web Endlessly Woven, 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 Winter 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.

How Do We Know the Moon?

“‘I know the moon,’ said the fox”

My colleague read this title line aloud from a children’s book recently, as part of a staff training. At first, I was just as enchanted with the story as she was. The fox goes on to describe how the Moon is like a rabbit that he can chase across the night. I nodded at this description. Long ago I encountered a lovely retelling of an Ojibwe story called Rabbit and the Moon. In an act of friendship and generosity, Crane carries Rabbit to the Moon, since Rabbit cannot jump that high. Whenever I see a full Moon, I try to pick out the shadows that hint at Rabbit’s long ears. I also see a rabbit in the Moon.

Can you see a rabbit in the moon? I see him looking up to the left, with long ears at the top right. Photo by Emily Stone. 

The moth disagrees with the fox, though. They see the Moon as a great cocoon. The owl knows the Moon as light shining out of a window. The bullfrog sees a lily pad floating on the surface of a pond. The language is poetic and the descriptions are whimsical, but in a children’s book there must be a lesson. The animals start bickering about who’s right. They decide to visit A Man of Science, and each Being hopes that he will confirm their perspective.

Bullfrog knows the moon as a lily pad... and here it floats on Lake Namakagon!
Photo by Emily Stone. 

I was enjoying the story immensely up to that point, and even related to the idea that everyone wants science to support their favorite theory. Then the Man of Science spoke from his high tower. He declared that the Moon was nothing more than cold, dusty, crusty sand, plus a slew of facts and figures. As you can imagine, the animals weren’t happy with that answer. But, united against the scientist’s perspective, they went home with a greater appreciation of the many ways their group of friends knows the Moon.

The moon comes in many shapes and sizes! Photo by Emily Stone.

I felt ashamed. I think of myself as a very science-minded person, and I sensed that the author was trying to make some point about how the facts and figures of science are out to squash wonder in the world. How horrible that would be!

But as I thought about the depiction of the stuffy old man in a tower spouting information from books and declaring “To be sure, the moon is that and nothing more,” I realized that the author had constructed a strawman argument by setting up a simplistic imagined opponent that’s easy to knock down.

In real life, I don’t know any scientists who even remotely resemble the Man of Science in this story. The scientists I know are full of wonder and excitement about whatever it is they study, and pretty much everything else as well. As scientists, they are open to new information that might change their current understandings, and are well aware that we don’t know even a fraction of everything there is to know.

For example, the Man of Science declares that the Moon is made of sand, as if that’s boring. But sand here on Earth is fascinating! In one of my early geology classes, Professor Tom Fitz jumped on a desk because he was so excited by a rock. Each sand-sized clast in the stone was perfectly polished quartz with a billion years of history. They had paused their journey in an environment of deposition so unique that each clast was almost exactly the same size as every other one. Later that year I walked on a beach—the tombolo at Stockton Island in the Apostle Islands—made from similar sand grains and they sang beneath my shoes.

The well-sorted (all the same size) sand grains on Stockton Island's tombolo squeak when you walk on them! Photo by Emily Stone. 

I wonder if the piping plover I saw on Stockton Island had squeaky footsteps, too? Photo by Emily Stone. 

When I taught kids in California, we looked closely at handfuls of sand born in the uber productive waters of the Pacific Ocean. Not only did a rainbow of minerals shine like jewels, but fragments of every type of seashell and tidepool detritus taunted us with mysterious patterns as we tried to guess their origins.

Of course, sand on the Moon is neither rounded and sorted nor full of seashells. From a Radio Lab podcast I learned that Moon sand is razor sharp! With no wind or water to bang pieces of rock against each other, there’s no mechanism to round off the corners of rock fragments created by impacts from tiny micrometeorites or impressive asteroids.

Impacts to the moon don't just create craters, they also make razor sharp sand! Photo by Emily Stone. 

As for the Moon being what that strawman knows and nothing more, scientists haven’t even agreed on exactly how the Moon was formed, and we’re continually learning about how it impacts life on Earth. Midwesterners don’t often encounter the Moon’s tug on ocean tides, but the pull of the Moon on the core of the Earth likely contributes to the maintenance of the Earth’s magnetic field, as well as shifts in the magnetic field’s strength that influences plants, snowshoe hares, lynx, and more.

Photo by Emily Stone. 

New discoveries about the Moon abound, and the scientists are excited. In my view, it’s lucky that this book by Stephen Anderson is out of print. Scientists deserve a place in our worldview right alongside those animals to look up at the Moon and think about all the possibilities it contains. Teaching kids—and everyone—to practice empathy and open-mindedness is great, but giving children an incorrect view of science and scientists isn’t going to help them navigate our changing world. It isn’t going to help them to know the Moon.

How do we know the Moon? Everyone has their own relationship with the Earth’s beautiful satellite. Photo by Emily Stone. (The Super Moon on November 16, 2016.)

Emily’s third book, Natural Connections3: A Web Endlessly Woven, 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 Winter 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.


Here's a few fun links to info about the Moon: 

https://radiolab.org/podcast/the-moon-itself/transcript

https://cablemuseumnaturalconnections.blogspot.com/2021/06/whip-poor-will.html

https://cablemuseumnaturalconnections.blogspot.com/2018/09/stranger-than-we-can-imagine.html

https://www.sciencealert.com/our-moon-is-curiously-lopsided-and-a-massive-impact-could-be-to-blame

https://www.amnh.org/exhibitions/permanent/meteorites/meteorite-impacts/on-the-moon

https://science.nasa.gov/moon/tidal-locking/

https://science.nasa.gov/moon/weather-on-the-moon/

https://science.nasa.gov/moon/formation/

https://science.nasa.gov/moon/composition/

https://www.universetoday.com/articles/moons-insides-still-hot-hot-hot-after-billions-of-years-of-formation-study

Why Woodpeckers Don’t Get Concussions

Years ago, Lois Nestel, the Museum’s founding director, wrote:

“I was stalking a pileated woodpecker whose calls and rapid fire hammerings seemed to come consistently from one area of trees not far from the house. These big, wary birds are not easy to pursue, so reasonable caution was necessary.

“Silence ahead seemed to indicate that the big bird had flown, but the apprehension was dispelled as, from a pine stub ahead, there came a staccato burst and bits of flying wood. A stealthy approach, timed with the pecking, ended abruptly when a large black beak topped by bright eyes and a flame red cockade was suddenly thrust around the side of the stub. With much scuffling of feet the crow-sized black body came into view. Unaware of being watched, the big bird seemed to talk to himself with soft knocking notes as if trying to decide where to drill the next hole.

Pileated woodpeckers have been increasing in numbers as we allow trees to get big and old. Photo by Emily Stone.

“Some unwary movement or sound on my part suddenly alerted him. There was a brief eye-to-eye confrontation; then the broad wings spread and with a few swooping beats bore the great woodpecker into the safety and seclusion of the forest.

“The pine stub bore evidence of much work. Large openings had been chopped through the shell and into the honeycombed interior. Breaking open a piece of this riddled wood revealed the dormant bodies of large black ants. This was what had attracted the woodpecker and would undoubtedly bring him back again. I might not be around to see, but the sound of drumming would bring to mind a clear picture of a great black bird with a flaming topknot—a memory to treasure.”

Lois’s experience with the woodpecker in the forest is timeless. How many of us have had the thrill of seeing or hearing these large birds swoop across the road, tear apart a backyard stump, or disappear into the forest? Actually, far more of us than in Lois’s day. Unlike many birds, populations of pileated woodpeckers have been increasing since 1966 due to the regrowth of large trees and the conversion of some large trees into food-rich snags. I’m sure Lois would be thrilled!

These days, during my own frequent encounters with pileated woodpeckers, I can think about the science behind the question I asked in the first chapter of my second book: “How can that little bird bang his head against trees all day and not develop debilitating headaches?”

Some of the initial research into this question, starting in the 1970s, proposed that areas of sponge-like bones in a woodpecker’s skull act as shock absorbers to protect the brain. Subsequent research, and logic, has disproved that. Pounding with a squishy hammer means that you have to pound harder to get the work done! Instead, newer research shows that a woodpecker’s muscles engage in a way that stiffens their body and transfers energy more efficiently. This seems to include exhaling with every bill strike—just the way I grunt to stabilize my core while picking up something heavy.

This female hairy woodpecker can pound away all day and not get a concussion. Several simple adaptations make that possible. Photo by Emily Stone.

When I wrote about pileated woodpeckers in February 2022, I was excited that some scientists had celebrated the woodpecker’s tongue as a brain-protector. Woodpeckers have a long tongue that wraps around the back of their skull. A Y-shaped bone called a hyoid apparatus supports the tongue and helps it extend into tree holes and extract insects for lunch. The researchers hypothesized that it also acts like a seatbelt for the brain. This was a fun “fact” to share with people!

After a neighbor suggested recently that I write about pileated woodpeckers again, I decided to see if there was any new research. Indeed! In 2024, James M. Smoliga of Tufts University School of Medicine summarized and critiqued the research on woodpecker brain protection. He criticized the hyoid seatbelt hypothesis for making conclusions based on preserved tissues with altered characteristics and the biomechanical properties of a human tendon. I will have to stop telling people that a woodpecker’s tongue cushions their brain.

Downy woodpecker with a sharp, stiff beak.  Photo by Emily Stone.

Smoliga concluded that, as far as current research shows, woodpeckers survive banging their heads against trees because they have less fluid in their brains than we do, which limits the “sloshing” of their brains within their skulls. And, in contrast to the impacts that cause concussions in humans or concussion-like symptoms in birds who have hit windows, woodpecker’s strikes are short, intentional, and involve coordinated muscle movement from back to front in a linear vs rotational way. The newest calculations, made with the most accurate modern technology, predict that a woodpecker would have to strike a tree twice as hard as usual to give themself a concussion.

Of course, any of these conclusions might be proven wrong or incomplete as scientists discover new information in the future. The beauty of science is that it requires us to be able to change our minds in light of new evidence. One thing that doesn’t need to change is the magic we feel, as Lois did, when we watch a great black bird with a flaming topknot spread their broad wings and with a few swooping beats disappear into the forest.

Emily’s brand-new third book, Natural Connections3: A Web Endlessly Woven, 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 Winter 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.

Cute Bits of Camouflage

The wide brown trunk of an ash tree in front of my house makes a good backdrop for assessing the density of falling snowflakes, their potential impact on the ski trails, and the unique beauty of a particular storm. While gazing at it last week, a bit of the bark began to move. The optical illusion lasted only a second before I recognized the small oval of brown-and-white patterning as a bird.

Brown creepers are cute little bits of camouflage with white bellies. This one moved upward in staccato motions, a bit to the side, around to the back, back to the front, and up some more. Pausing, the bird used their thin, downward-curving bill to explore a bark furrow. Perhaps they had spotted an overwintering insect larvae or antifreeze-protected spider for their lunch. Near the limit of my view out the window, the creeper suddenly launched off the tree and fluttered downward toward another tree trunk, out of sight.

Chickadees taking turns grabbing sunflower seeds at my feeder distracted me for a second, until movement at the base of the same tree again caught my eye. The brown creeper (or their mate?) was spiraling upward again. Apparently, there are enough crevices in a big tree like this that it pays to make many trips around the trunk.

Can you see the long claws and curved beak on this brown creeper? Photo by Emily Stone. 

The creeper hopped with both feet at once, and I knew that their curved claws were gripping tight. Their long, stiff tail braced against the bark. Just above a knothole, the creeper paused again and probed excitedly in a crevice until a flurry of motion brought a red-breasted nuthatch to that spot and the creeper flew off. The nuthatch circled, probing in the bark with their long, straight beak. Thief!

Having cleaned out that crevice, the nuthatch continued foraging downward on the trunk. Nuthatches are also known for their agility in navigating tree trunks, but whereas creepers go up, nuthatches specialize in going down. They are assisted by one backward pointing toe with a long claw on each foot. Nuthatches can hop in every direction, though, and even dangle on the twig tips with acrobatic chickadees. Their very short tail stays out of the way.

Nuthatches are known for climbing head-down, but are pretty versatile. Photo by Emily Stone. 

The first lesson in my first ornithology class back in college used these two birds as an example of how to identify a species by their behavior. Brown creepers hop up a tree, then fly down to the next one. Nuthatches walk down and then fly back up.

Classic nuthatch behavior! Photo by Emily Stone. 

Although both nuthatch and creeper populations are thought to be stable, I see and hear many more nuthatches while I’m out in the woods. This is partly due to their brighter colors and louder calls. Nuthatches shout their distinctive yank! yank! yank! pretty consistently as they feed in mixed flocks with chickadees and woodpeckers. Brown creepers, on the other hand, have thin, high voices that are easily lost among the contact calls of other birds. I’m not the only one who tunes out their songs. A study published in The Canadian Field-Naturalist journal in 2020, discovered that brown creepers do sing in the dawn chorus, but it took an automated recording to notice them consistently.

It's not just that nuthatches are easier to see and hear. They are also far more numerous. There are almost three times as many red- and white-breasted nuthatches in the world as brown creepers! Perhaps this is because brown creepers have some unique habitat requirements.

Brown creepers need forests with large trees for both foraging and nesting. They build their nests behind pieces of loose bark, which are more common on large trees that are dead or dying. Big trees also have deeper furrows for hiding the tasty insects and spiders that creepers prefer. Creepers occasionally eat seeds or suet, but rarely visit feeders. One study found that the gnarly bark of large yellow birch trees make good habitat in the East, while they are found in conifer forests in the West. These populations of creepers may actually be different subspecies, but physically they blend in with each other as much as they do the trees. It’s only through DNA studies that scientists are learning to separate them.

Nuthatches seem to thrive in a wider range of habitats and ages of forests. Nuthatches reuse old woodpecker cavities for nests, and sometimes excavate a hole themselves, but these can be in smallish trees. Both red-breasted and white-breasted nuthatches are much more likely to eat seeds than creepers, which expands their options to include bird feeders.

Happily, the greedy nuthatch didn’t scare away the brown creeper for long. As the snowflakes drifted down, the cute little bit of camouflage returned to the tree for another expedition up, lifting my spirits as they went.

Emily’s brand-new third book, Natural Connections3: A Web Endlessly Woven, 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 Winter 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.

Mulling over Mullein

This is the season for lists highlighting our most-listened-to or best-of-whatevers at the end of the year, so I decided to dig into the stats on my Natural Connections blog. To my surprise, the most-read article in 2025 was one I wrote in February of 2016 about a plant called mullein. In August 2025 it spiked in popularity, far above my normal readership. I have no idea why. I recently told someone the story of finding the chickadee-cached seed in the mullein stalk, but I’d forgotten about the rest of the article. It’s fun! And appropriate to this season. So, I hope you enjoy it as much as the 1.24K other readers did, too! Happy New Year! –Emily

Something in the quality of the pre-dawn light told me that the world had been made new with a fresh blanket of snow. I love waking up to a clean slate. What furry or feathered stories will lay their tracks on it today? Artists, with their warmer, drier canvases, must have the same feelings of anticipation and eagerness to see a new creation emerge. As a child, I felt that way on the first day of school, too, with my stack of blank notebooks, ready for a new adventure.

Even as the Sun rose, there was already one mark in the snowy expanse of my front “yard.” Sticking out of the snow like a proud sentinel was the dried stalk from a common mullein plant. I’ve been watching it since last summer, when its yellow-flowered stem was just a dab of color among daylilies, black-eyed Susans, and daisies. Today it was the center of attention while all of its companions lay resting under the weight of the drifts.

Although this mullein stalk is far more dead than its dormant neighbors, the sturdy, dry stem gives it a second life. This plant began during the summer before last, when a tiny seed found enough sunlight and bare soil to sprout. Mullein likes disturbed areas. Soon, a low circle of leaves, called a basal rosette, spread out on the earth. This biennial overwintered that way, with its leaves and roots hidden beneath the snow. A period of cold and dormancy is required to break down starch in the roots and trigger its next life stage.

In the spring, a thick stalk began to grow out of the basal rosette’s center. Once the spire was chest-high, the lowest flowers, starting about half-way up the stalk, began to blossom in clusters. Small and yellow, with five symmetrical petals, each flower only bloomed for a single day. It opened before dawn and closed in the afternoon. If a bee didn’t pollinate the flower during that short window, the flower did the job itself. With such measured restraint, a single stalk of mullein can bloom for an entire summer.

Over the summer, mullein flowers open in succession up a tall stalk. Photo by Emily Stone.

Once that summer is over, though, the mullein is done. Each plant only lives through two growing seasons, while the durable, dried stalk persists much longer.

Chickadees scattered from the bird feeder as I tromped outside to take a closer look at my sentinel in the snow. Up close, I could see tiny, roundish seed capsules split open down a center seam and clustered among the few dried flower petals still clinging to the top of the spike. Each of the hundreds of capsules can hold more than 700 seeds, each less than a millimeter long.

The flower stalk’s usefulness doesn’t end after it goes to seed, though. Mullein is a notoriously useful plant among survivalists and other wildcrafters. For one, it provides everything you need to start a fire. The lower portion of the stalk becomes a spindle for a hand drill or bow drill. The thick base of big stalks can be split and used for the fireboard that rests on the ground and holds the spindle and eventual ember. The tough root can be fashioned into a hand socket for pressing down on the top of the spindle when using a bow drill.

Once you get a hot coal, mullein leaves make excellent tinder. Held vertically on the stalk all winter, they are often dry when everything else is wet. Plus, their fuzzy texture provides ample surface area to ignite. Once you’ve coaxed a little flame, the uppermost club of seed capsules is useful as kindling. The fuzzy leaves are also a skin irritant and can either be rubbed on your cheeks for “Quaker rouge” or give you contact dermatitis. Beware of the wide basal leaves’ purported use as “cowboy toilet paper.”

The leaves of common mullein are covered in tiny hairs that protect them from grazing animals and bright sun. Photo by Emily Stone.

While mullein isn’t native here (Europe, northern Africa, and Asia are its home range), it has spread quickly since the 1700s, and is considered naturalized in most places. Native species as well as other newcomers find it useful, and it only threatens to take over where other plants are sparse.

As I stooped near the flower stalk for a photo, another use caught my eye. Hidden among the seed capsules was a single, hulled sunflower seed: the food cache of a chickadee. Leaning even closer, I bumped the stalk and sent a shower of tiny black seeds onto the snow. They are too small for the chickadees to bother with, but goldfinches have been known to eat them.

Can you spot the sunflower seed that a chickadee stashed in this dried stalk from a mullein plant? I still think about how fun it was to actually find one of the chickadee's cached seeds! Photo by Emily Stone.

Most of the seeds will likely settle into the soil when the snow melts. With characteristic restraint, the seeds can persist for up to a hundred years. They wait for just the right conditions to sprout a new basal rosette and begin again. Their requirements? Bare soil, full sun: a clean slate on which to begin something new.

Emily’s brand-new third book, Natural Connections3: A Web Endlessly Woven, 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 Winter 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.