The Sweetness of Bitter Cold

You know it’s chilly when even Lake Superior can see their own breath. During a recent period of bitter cold, the sea smoke drifting across the shining gray wavelets near Grand Marais, Minn., looked like a giant version of the hot springs in Japan—the ones where the snow monkeys sit in steaming pools to get warm.

Lake Superior is not a hot spring, of course, but with air temperatures dropping to -17 degrees Fahrenheit overnight, and warming up to -8 when we were walking along the shore in mid-afternoon, even water at 37 degrees was warm enough to steam.

Sea smoke forms from humid air just above the lake surface. I think of evaporation as something that happens in summer, but winter is when the lake experiences the greatest rates of evaporation, due to the stark contrast in the temperature of the air and the water. When the humid air comes in contact with an icy breeze, the air cools, loses its ability to hold all the water vapor, and the water vapor condenses into a fog of ice crystals.

Lake water had also formed ice on the rocks near shore, and we circumnavigated Artist’s Point to admire Nature’s sculptures. Thick mittens kept my hands from freezing, while my face was protected by both a scarf and the hood of my fluffy down jacket. I’d pulled on a thick skirt over my ski pants for an extra layer of wind protection. And still, whenever the breeze wiggled its way inside a layer and brushed my skin, I felt the bite of cold.

All the while, a small flock of mallard ducks bobbed on the waves in East Bay, behind the protective curve of Artist’s Point in Lake Superior. Shouldn’t they be somewhere warm? As we watched, the flock paddled toward the shore and settled in among the ice-draped rocks along the shoreline. Some dipped their bills into the shallow water, likely finding some remnants of aquatic plants to eat. Others stood on submerged rocks and preened their feathers. Both the oils they secrete and the structure of their feathers keep the cold lake out of their warm down insultation. They probably have less trouble maintaining their 100-degree body temperature than I do my 98 degrees.

Sea smoke rises of the relatively warm water of Lake Superior while a flock of mallard ducks preens among ice-covered shoreline of Artist’s Point in Grand Marais, Minn.
Photo by Kevin Friedman.

My friend and I had lasted longer than I’d expected out there, but as the north wind found us, my resolve wore out. “Race to the car?” I grinned with stiff cheeks. We were just south of the Grand Marais city limits by the time the car warmed up.

At the crest of a hill, something large swooped across the highway in front of us and several feet above the car. The blunt face and tapered silhouette were unmistakable characteristics of a Great Gray Owl—my first one in the wild! It seems strange to say, but the owl looked like they were flying silently. Of all the owls, Great Grays have the longest fringes on the leading edges of their wings and the thickest layer of fuzz on their flight feathers. Together, these adaptations reduce wing noise to almost nothing.

Great Gray owl in flight. Photo by By Arne List - https://www.flickr.com/photos/arne-list/2363789109/, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=16987237

 

We tracked the path of the large bird as they maneuvered through a grove of trees on the far side of the road but lost them behind some spruce boughs. Beyond slender aspen trunks, we could see a strip of open ground and the metal sheds of a storage facility. Owls and other raptors often prefer to perch at the edge of an open area to hunt.

The road was clear and wide, so we “flipped a Louie” and parked on the opposite shoulder. This move, and my family’s term for it, always reminds me of my photographer father, who flipped many Louies to photograph hawks on fence posts during my childhood in Iowa. I knew he’d be jealous of this sighting! With just a slight change in perspective, we could see the shape of the owl on the far side of the trees, their posture hunched forward in hunting mode.

Great Gray Owls have come south from Canada to eat a share of our mice and voles. Since they live at latitudes where days and nights take turns being long, they don’t have the strong preference for night that our Barred and Great Horned Owls do. Great Grays’ excellent hearing can pinpoint mice in the dark, or the day, and even under the snow. This year, however, the snow in many places is too hard for them to punch through, even with strong talons. Plus they don't like to cross open water. The owls have congregated along the shore of Lake Superior where the warmth of the water has kept the snow cover more sparse.

Just a few miles down the road, a truck on the shoulder with a camera lens sticking out the window made us suspicious. Sure enough, a second Great Gray flew directly toward us, but high over the road. When I’d helped rescue an injured Great Gray on Christmas Day, I’d only seen their yellow eyes inside the protective box. Now, big yellow eyes stared right at me from above.

The big yellow eyes of a Great Gray Owl. Photo by Lisa Hupp/USFWS - https://www.facebook.com/photo?fbid=255653503348234&set=a.221378263442425, Public Domain, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=114622821

This day may have been bitter cold, but that made the beauty in it all the more sweet.



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. The Museum is open with our brand-new exhibit: “Anaamaagon: Under the Snow.” Our Winter Calendar is open for registration! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Second Grade Tracking Stories

Murmurs of interest rippled through the classroom as I spread a rectangle of green felt on the floor at the front of the room. The murmurs became questions as I placed two lines of life-sized animal tracks, printed and cut out of white paper, onto the felt. When I finally invited the second graders to come up and gather around the felt, I was amazed by the almost instantaneous formation of a perimeter of kneeling children, totally focused on the scene.

Three times a year I get to spend a few days at the elementary school in Drummond, Wisconsin, teaching kids my favorite nature facts using my favorite nature props. Once each season, in Fall, Winter, and Spring, I load seven plastic tubs filled with skulls, furs, graduated cylinders, strips of birch bark, and other oddities into the Museum’s minivan for a visit to each classroom in grades pre-k through six.

“Can you figure out what happened here?” I asked the class. They began sharing their observations, and building a story together. “There’s a rabbit.” “And a wolf!” “The wolf carried off the rabbit!”

I asked them to explain themselves. “How do you know those are rabbit tracks?” I prompted. A girl pointed out the very large hind feet, and the smaller front feet, but she indicated that the rabbit was going the wrong direction. Rabbit, hare, and squirrel tracks are all a bit tricky, because of the way these beings hop.

Rabbits leap forward and land with their front feet I explained to the kids, and awkwardly tried to demonstrate. Then their hind legs swing around and land in front of the front feet, where they push off into another leap. This creates groups of tracks where the hind feet are in front of the front feet—not what we’d typically expect,

With rabbits and hares, the big hind feet are usually paired, with the two front feet placed on a slight diagonal just behind and between them. Squirrels, deer mice, and other hoppers who spend a lot of time in trees, move in basically the same way, but their front feet land right next to each other instead of on a diagonal. As a class, we reassessed the direction the rabbit tracks were going.

Next, we moved on to the guess about the wolf tracks. The tracks I’d set out were only a couple of inches long—much too small for a wolf. “What makes you think they are wolf tracks?” I asked. “They look like my dog’s tracks, and dog and wolf tracks look the same,” offered the boy. Pretty good reasoning, I’d say! I love teaching in the rural communities of the Northwoods, where students have a broad range of outdoor experiences and observations to draw from in their learning.

I commended the boy on recognizing the symmetrical, four-toed tracks with visible claw marks as being related to dogs, but I challenged the class to think about the size. “Would wolf tracks be that small?” I asked. Some students shook their heads no, but looked a little unsure. I had everyone hold up their hand, fingers together. “A wolf track will be about the size of my palm, and as big as your whole hand!” I informed them. I love how small I feel when I find a wolf track in the snow and place my handprint beside it.

Again, I asked for guesses about the owners of the tracks. Immediately, students offered fox and coyote as alternatives. Either could have been correct for the simple tracks we’d printed for the activity. On average, foxes are quite a bit smaller than coyotes, but big fox tracks can overlap in size with small coyote tracks. In the snow, red fox tracks often look less distinct, because dense hair protects the bottom of their feet from the cold. Coyotes have bare toes that leave crisp track outlines. If you have a very clear track, it’s also possible to see that foxes have wide, chevron-shaped heel pads, and the hind feet of coyotes register with narrow little heel pads.

“So we have a rabbit or hare, and a coyote,” I summarized. “And what did they do?” Together, the kids explained that the coyote killed the rabbit and carried them off, and they knew this because the tracks came from different corners. After the tracks intersected, the rabbit tracks disappeared, and the coyote tracks continued to the edge of the green felt.

And then class was over. After work, I headed out to the ski trail, absentmindedly cataloging the animal tracks at the edge of the groomed snow. I saw the hopping tracks of squirrels leading to and from trees, the heart-shaped tracks of deer stepping right in the middle of the ski tracks, and even the daisy-chain of grouse tracks winding through the underbrush. I didn’t see a single live animal, but these tracks recorded the unseen activity for anyone to read.

Did any of the second graders do the same thing? Did they pause while climbing up the sledding hill to see what furry friend had run across it? Did they follow a being’s trail to find out what happened to them? My hope is that our classroom exercise will help them learn to read the stories of the forest.

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. The Museum is open with our brand-new exhibit: “Anaamaagon: Under the Snow.” Our Winter Calendar is open for registration! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Operation Owl Rescue

On Christmas Day, I found myself driving from Lutsen, Minn., to Duluth with a very unusual package next to my skis and duffle bag. On my way home from a short trip near Thunder Bay, Ontario, a Facebook post caught my eye. “…large grey owl on the side of the road. They stopped to investigate, and noticed that its wing appears to be broken. Given our location (Lutsen) and the date (Christmas Eve), what should we do?”

Minutes later, I passed a group of three people trudging up a snowy road ditch with a blanket and a cardboard box. As it turns out, that crew included Christine Salomon and her two teens, Ezra and Macy. When I met Christine and Macy the next morning in Lutsen to help transport the owl, they filled me in on the rest of the story.

This Great Gray Owl was injured by a car on Highway 61 near Lutsen, MN. The rescuers took this photo to help wildlife rehabilitators assess the owl’s identification and injuries and then quickly backed off. Photo by Christine Salomon.

Christine had called the hotline for Wildwoods wildlife rehab facility in Duluth and received instructions on how to rescue the owl. That explained the blanket for protection from the raptor’s sharp talons, and the box to carry the owl without further injuring them. “It was not that different than picking up one of my chickens,” explained Macy nonchalantly. “The owl was all puffy until I picked them up, and then they just deflated.”

Great Gray Owls, one of the tallest owls in the U.S., are mostly made of feathers. Living in the taiga of Canada, Scandinavia, Siberia, Mongolia, and Minnesota, they need lots of insultation. They also need lots of food, and this year more owls than usual have come south in search of tasty voles.

Macy and Ezra placed the owl, still inside the sturdy box with lots of ventilation, in an unheated sauna for the night. Being in quiet darkness is the least stressful environment for an injured bird. The owl’s need for transport to Duluth on Christmas Day fit with my own travel plans back to Cable, which is how I ended up in the empty parking lot of a liquor store in Lutsen making the handoff.

Macy and Christine Salomon with the Great Gray Owl in the box.
We made a quick and quiet hand-off.

To reassure ourselves that the owl was still alive, Christine opened one of the flaps on the box. Staring up at us were two giant yellow eyes nestled into satellite dishes of gray-patterned feathers that funnel sound into the owl’s hidden ears. Just like the more common Great Horned and Barred Owls, Great Grays use their excellent hearing to locate mice and voles beneath the snow and plunge in talon-first to grab them.

This owl probably had swooped down toward a mammal snack in the road ditch, and didn’t see an oncoming car. Both natural weed seeds and food scraps thrown out of car windows can attract small mammals to the road ditch and put wildlife in danger.

I was mindful of my precious cargo on the long drive as I reduced my speed on corners, eased into stoplights, and kept the radio off. Jessica LaBumbard, executive director of Wildwoods, met me outside the door of their little facility in Duluth. With another owl already in their care, the possibility of spreading avian influenza was a risk she didn’t want to take. Plus, she would have needed the help of another staff member to handle the owl safely.

Instead, a third car pulled into their lot, and two of Wildwoods’ long-time volunteers whisked the owl away to The Raptor Center in St. Paul for advanced care. I asked if they were already heading in that direction. “Nope,” they said with big smiles. They were just happy to help.

Jessica and the small staff at Wildwoods have been busy lately. They helped rescue five owls in the matter of just a few days around Christmas. All were injured by cars, and not all of them survived.

One owl in particular, a Snowy Owl found in the grill of a car in the parking lot at the Bentleyville Tour of Lights in Duluth, made the national news. I asked Jessica what she thought those stories overlooked. “I cringe at all the photos of the owls with lights and people,” she told me. “Owls are terrified of us, and the best thing we can do is get them somewhere quiet and dark, away from human voices, as soon as possible. Our roads are not designed for wildlife, which makes these injuries unavoidable. But if people can slow down a bit, that helps,” she added.

Even after I’d delivered my unusual package, I found myself driving in silence. My thoughts were with all the rescued owls, wishing that their injuries could be healed. I’d just seen my first Great Gray Owl, and even that tiny glimpse had been unforgettable. With any luck, and with the hard work of all the rehabilitators and their rescue volunteers, and conservationists, the next Great Gray I’ll see will be healthy and in the wild.

If you find an injured raptor, never try to help them until you have spoken with a licensed wildlife rehabilitator. Only move them if they are in immediate danger and you aren’t putting yourself in danger. It is illegal to possess a raptor unless you are transporting them directly to a licensed rehabilitator.

Here are a few places you can call about injured raptors in Minnesota and Wisconsin:

• Wildwoods, Duluth, MN, 218-491-3604
• The Raptor Center, St. Paul, MN, 612-624-4745
• The Raptor Center has an excellent guide to handling on their website.
• Winged Freedom Raptor Hospital, Spooner, WI, 715 781-2595
• Raptor Education Group, Inc., Antigo, WI, 715-623-4015
• Hoo’s Woods Raptor Center, Milton, WI, 608-883-2795
• WI DNR Wildlife Hotline 608-267-0866
• Wisconsin DNR Wildlife Rehab Directory

All these facilities have websites where you can find out more, sign up to volunteer, and donate to support their important work!



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. The Museum is open with our brand-new exhibit: “Anaamaagon: Under the Snow.” Our Winter Calendar is open for registration! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

Wilson’s Warbler WOW

Gathered around a bonfire on the Winter Solstice, the hostess asked us each to share one moment from the past year that made us go, “Wow!” Being residents of the Northwoods, we had each experienced many such moments, she acknowledged, but in the interest of time, we must choose just one. “Wow” moments flickered through my memory with the same warmth and brightness of the campfire’s flames. Despite the fact that my year had included rafting the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, my favorite “wow” moment happened on a river much closer to home.

The Winter Solstice Fire

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.

Our goal was to experience the evening chorus of birds as they fueled up on insects before taking off on another night of migration, or defended their newly claimed nesting territory against intruders. Common Yellowthroat Warblers, with their rakish black eye masks, shouted witchety-witchety-witchety from deep within the alders. Dark gray Eastern Kingbirds darted off their perches to catch recently hatched insects. And Gray Catbirds announced their locations with loud mews.

As we reveled in the vibrant life coursing through the spring evening, while also gaining satisfaction from being able to identify so many birds, a Mary Oliver poem came to mind.

“Don't mind my inexplicable delight / in knowing your name, / little Wilson's Warbler” 

she wrote.

I quoted this poem to my friend, and then focused back on my steering, since we were coming up to a corner and then a potentially tricky slide down an old, submerged dam under a bridge. As I swung us wide into the corner to make it a straight shot, a burst of twittering, movement, and flashes of yellow in the alder shrubs drew my attention. Squinting, I thought I spotted a black cap on one of the tiny heads, and quickly pulled into an eddy.

Sure enough, our binoculars revealed a flock of half-a-dozen or more little birds, “yellow as a lemon, with a smooth, black cap…” as Mary Oliver described them. Laughing in delight, we felt like we’d just conjured these Wilson’s Warblers with her poem.

Wilson’s Warblers are bright yellow with a little black cap.
Photo by Rhododendrites - Own work, CC BY-SA 4.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=105248001

That poem, titled Bird in a Pepper Tree, must have been written on a trip to Mexico or Central America, where both the range of the pepper tree and the winter habitat of Wilson’s Warblers overlap. Each spring, the birds leave this narrow refuge and fan out across the continent toward breeding grounds in the far north. Males tend to migrate faster and earlier, rushing north to claim breeding territories ahead of the females’ arrival. Indeed, the little flock, each with a very distinct black cap, all appeared to be males.

As they bounced like fresh popcorn through the willow and alder thickets near the river’s edge, the Wilson’s Warblers perfectly matched the descriptions of their behavior in the bird guides. They tend to stick to the understory, unlike other warblers who will pause on a high perch to belt out a song. Surrounded by leaves, the Wilson’s Warblers pluck caterpillars and aphids off the bushes, and if a flying insect catches their eye, they’ll take to the wing to nab it, returning to nearly the same perch.

It was their greenish-yellow wings, black feathers on their crown, and darting behavior that earned these little birds their first English name: “Green Black-capt Flycatchers” in 1811. Alexander Wilson, an American ornithologist, called them this, following his preference for descriptive names. Ironically, after his death, other ornithologists changed the bird’s name to honor him.

The reason we can call this warbler by such a simple, alliterative name, instead of the harder-to-remember Cardellina pusilla, is that The American Ornithological Society (AOS) has standardized common names. Those standards may soon be modified. In 2023, the AOS committed to “changing all English-language names of birds within its geographic jurisdiction that are named directly after people (eponyms)…”

This decision is not without controversy, but I’m in favor of the change for the simple reason that it feels quite arrogant to call any wild being a possession of someone. Despite the name’s implication, Alexander Wilson doesn’t have any ownership over the Wilson’s Warbler, and never believed he did. Although Mary Oliver died several years before the AOS’s decision, I think she would have agreed. The last line in her poem, after delighting in observing the bird’s behavior and being able to identify them, was “a name is not a leash.”

And yet, by some magic, Mary’s poem and these handsome little warblers were tied together in a moment that made us say, “wow!”

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. The Museum is open with our brand-new exhibit: “Anaamaagon: Under the Snow.” Our Winter Calendar is open for registration! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.

A Black-capped Brain

Washing the dishes after a family dinner is a big job, especially because my mom’s kitchen doesn’t have a dishwasher. But the window over the kitchen sink looks out on several bird feeders, and my dad makes sure they are always full of seed and ready to entertain.

Black-capped chickadees are the most fun. They dart in, grab a single seed, and swoop off to eat it in a spot that’s less exposed than the feeder on a second-floor deck railing. This is similar to the feeding strategy of a ruffed grouse, but on a much smaller scale. As I wrote last week, grouse will stuff their crop full of buds and catkins for about twenty minutes, and then fly off to a protected place to digest all night. Grouse increase the size of their gut to accommodate this practice, but chickadees have kept their stomachs small and increased their brain size instead.

Inside a black-capped chickadees big, adorable head is a big, effective brain.
Photo by Emily Stone

Chickadees gain up to ten percent of their body weight in fat each day, and burn it off each night to stay warm. Even though they wedge themselves into a tiny tree cavity, puff up their feathers, and drop their body temperature by 18 degrees, they still need to shiver all night to generate heat. They don’t have energy to waste by maintaining both a large digestive system and a large brain. Getting too bulky would leave chickadees less agile and more vulnerable to predation, anyway.

One way that they find a balance is by hiding seeds—essentially storing fat outside of their body. Often, when a chickadee nabs a seed from your feeder, they don’t eat it; they stash it away for later in the bark of a tree or under a leafy lichen. This allows them to dole out their calories more efficiently and prepare for a “rainy day.” Eating just a few nutrient-rich seeds at a time also means that their stomach can stay small.

Chickadees cache as many as one hundred thousand food items per year. Unlike squirrels, chickadees don’t go sniffing out their hidden seeds. In lab experiments, scientists have determined that chickadees use visual cues—especially big ones like the location of nearby trees—to re-locate their cache sites. Not only do chickadees remember their seed cache sites, but they also remember details like which food items were the most favored and which seeds have already been eaten by them or by a thief.

To support such an incredible memory, chickadees grow 30 percent more neurons in the fall when caching behavior peaks. Then, as they empty out their cache locations, the neurons encoding that information wither away, and their brain shrinks toward spring. The title of a 2014 article by Kozlovsky, et. al. says it all: “Chickadees with bigger brains have smaller digestive tracts.” Chickadees, especially ones who live in the coldest and most variable habitats, have figured out how to eat smarter, not bigger. That could easily be my New Year’s resolution.

Last April, researchers at Columbia University added to our understanding of chickadee memory. Selmaan Chettih, and Emily Mackevicius, with the help of principal investigator Dmitriy Aronov, placed chickadees in what they call an arena—which sounds to me like an avian version of the Hunger Games! The arenas were built to look like a chickadee’s usual habitat, with plenty of nooks and crannies for hiding seeds.

As the chickadees conducted their typical caching behavior, the scientists recorded their movements with cameras, while also monitoring activity in their brains. Each time a chickadee hid a seed, their neurons fired in a unique pattern. When the chickadee retrieved that same seed, the pattern was repeated. Each cache got its own pattern. The scientists dubbed these “neural barcodes.” The birds are essentially creating their own system for inventory and checkout—just like at a grocery store!

Even though chickadees and grouse have evolved strategies that are on opposite ends of the brain-stomach spectrum, they are both good at surviving when we leave their habitat and natural food sources intact. Even when chickadees have easy access to your feeder, only about 21 percent of their daily energy comes from your generosity. The rest they gather from the wild.

As a result, the scientific consensus is that birds don’t become dependent on feeders like the ones in view of my mom’s kitchen sink, and will find other food sources if you go on vacation. That said, your gifts are appreciated. Years ago, Margaret Brittingham and Stanely Temple at the University of Wisconsin—Madison, observed that when cold temperatures lasted for more than five days, chickadees with access to bird feeders had higher survival rates.

Since I love watching chickadees while I wash dishes, I’m quite happy to continue feeding their big, black-capped brains.

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. The Museum is open with our brand-new exhibit: “Anaamaagon: Under the Snow.” Our Winter Calendar is open for registration! Follow us on Facebook, Instagram, YouTube, and cablemuseum.org to see what we are up to.