Southward Migration

The shallow water in Northwoods marshes and bays began to crackle with a skim of ice recently, gently reminding everyone that winter is on the way. Ice-up is a firm deadline for many beings who migrate to travel at least a little bit farther south. I got caught up in the flurry of activity and soon found myself in the Mississippi River Flyway swooping around the hills and corners of the Great River Road.

The Mississippi Flyway is busy this time of year! Photo by Emily Stone.

Just south of Brownsville, Minnesota, my skyward scanning for the bald eagles, who are always plentiful here, caught the graceful, long-necked shapes of three sandhill cranes flying in formation. As they circled between the forested bluffs and weedy backwaters, I swung into the small parking lot at the Brownsville Wildlife Overlook. The rattling bugles of the cranes sent a thrill down my spine. Could these birds be some of the thousands who we saw at Crex Meadows Wildlife Area near Grantsburg, Wisconsin just a few weeks ago? The biologist there did say that the cranes start to move on when the marshes freeze.

Two cranes feeding at Crex Meadows in late October. Photo by Emily Stone. 

Evening light shimmered on the calm surface of the Mississippi River backwater below the overlook, and a big white shape caught my eye. We had watched a trumpeter swan family with one cygnet feeding in Crex Meadows before the evening of cranes, and I chuckled at such elegant birds sticking their heads in the muck to feed.

A swan and cygnet feeding in Crex Meadows. Photo by Emily Stone.

But as I watched this big white bird foraging by repeatedly dipping a long orange bill in the shallow water, waggling it around, then tipping the pouched bill up to swallow, I realized that my first glance had been wrong. Pelican! American white pelicans forage in shallow water similar to the swans, but while swans eat aquatic plants, pelicans scoop up small fish and crustaceans in their pouch, then let the water drain before swallowing everything whole. Pelicans are known for nesting, migrating, and fishing in big flocks, but this migrating bird was solo. Where were their friends and family?

A white pelican feeds alone in the backwaters of the Mississippi River. Photo by Emily Stone.

My family was waiting for me to arrive in Northeast Iowa, so I left the rest of the cacophony of waterfowl, unidentifiable in the fading light, and continued south.

After supper we stepped outside into a crystal-clear night and found the sky aglow with northern lights. Red and white curtains shifted slowly above the tops of trees on our North Ridge. When we are south of the Auroral Oval, we only see the sides of those faint curtains of light on the northern horizon. When the oval widens or shifts far enough south, the light curtains appear straight above us, and you can look up at the bottom of the curtains instead of at their side. Then, the corona appears. After a few games of Bananagrams, we looked again, and this time we found streaks of light swirling around the top of the sky. The Auroral Oval had migrated south, too.

Looking south over my parents' house at the Northern Lights, you can just barely make out the old basketball hoop on our garage in Northeast Iowa...Photo by Emily Stone.

Thanks to the early sunsets and late sunrises this time of year, I wasn’t even tired when dawn light streamed through my window the next morning. Movement in the prairie grass caught my eye, and I watched in amusement as a dark-eyed junco fluttered up to grab the middle of a grass stalk, bending it toward the ground. The little bird then slid down toward the seedhead and pecked at a few bites of breakfast before jumping off and disappearing into the thicket.

Dark-eyed juncos breed across Canada. The northern forests of Wisconsin and Minnesota are at the southern edge of their mid-continent breeding habitat, and the Northwoods sometimes see a few juncos through the summer. The real influx comes when the leaves begin to fall and juncos head south to their winter range. The big push seems to have come and gone in the Northwoods, but now I’ve followed them south.

Later, as Mom and I drove along a winding, treeless, Driftless Area ridge, we spotted a hawk hovering over the corn stubble, their face to the wind. Black patches on the bird’s wrists and belly gave away their identity as a rough-legged hawk. After spending the summer on the arctic tundra, these beautiful birds head south to hunt in open country.

Back at home, we tackled some of the projects I’d come home to help with. Organizing bookshelves, I found my parents’ well-loved set of books by Sigurd Olson, one of the best-known authors to ever capture the Northwoods in words. In a roundabout way, these books are the reason I now live Up North. I often wish it was easier for my parents to visit the lakes and forests that Olson wrote about and I’ve fallen in love with, but this trip was a good reminder that pieces of the Northwoods also come south to visit them.

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. Natural Connections 3is available for pre-order from Honest Dog Books!

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Our Fall 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.

Dowsing for Witch-hazel

Wet autumn leaves drifting among rugged chunks of hard gray quartzite on the trails at Rib Mountain State Park in Wausau, Wisconsin, forced my attention to my feet as I hiked. Even with trekking poles, this was no place to daydream. As I circled the top of the ridge of erosion-resistant, two-billion-year-old rock, an overlook beckoned as a place where I could pause and look up.

View from the Red Trail at Rib Mountain State Park in Wausau, WI.

The scarlet leaves of sumac shrubs framed the view, and beyond them was a spectacular sea of yellows, oranges, greens, and rich brown autumn trees in peak color. While the fluffy gray clouds had sprinkled on me a few times, the way they focused sunlight on the valley made me glad they were there.

Continuing on, with my hat brim pulled low against the sun showers, a shape on the path tripped my subconscious and, like a toddler’s toy, the shape fit perfectly into a matching spot in my botany brain. The unusual leaf was broadly oval with wavy margins and an asymmetrical base where it met the stem. I’d been admiring the vibrant reds and yellows of maple leaves, but the rich yellow surface of this leaf was already mottled with brown.

Before my conscious brain could even get involved and dig a name out from the files, I looked up. Sure enough, there beside the trail stood a spreading shrub with a few rays of sunlight illuminating tiny yellow flowers that looked just like sunbursts themselves. Witch-hazel! The flower-dappled shrub twinkled like a reminder of spring.

With flowers that begin blooming in October, and sometimes persist into December, this native shrub was a delightful find on my fall hike. As I leaned in to take photos, I also inhaled deeply. I’d read that witch-hazel has a strong smell to attract pollinators. Since scent molecules have a harder time traveling in cold air, the flowers may have to put forth extra effort to be noticed this time of year. All I detected was the distinctive aroma of wet leaves. Of course, I don’t have giant, feathery antenna like one of the flower’s pollinators.

Since many insects don’t survive the first frosts and aren’t able to fly in cold weather, it’s not obvious who might help this plant move pollen and fertilize seeds. In 1987, though, ecologist Bernd Heinrich observed owlet moths visiting the flowers. Bernd is a Professor Emeritus at the University of Vermont, and was still teaching a week-long Winter Ecology course when I was a graduate student there in 2009. We didn’t see any witch-hazel in bloom among the deep January drifts, but Bernd’s ability to notice small, odd, and interesting things in the woods is unmatched.

Owlet moths are active at night. They can shiver to raise the temperature of their thorax to 86 degrees above the air, even when the outside temperature is slightly below freezing. The thick fuzz that covers their body helps to hold in that heat just like your favorite sweater. Moth antennae are famous for detecting scents at low concentrations, so maybe they can smell the flowers even though I can’t.

A more recent study found that a few flies and small bees also visit witch-hazel flowers, and are pretty effective at moving around the sticky grains of pollen. Fungus gnats are out and about, too, but these mosquito-sized beings are probably too small to be useful pollinators. All of these visitors may be rewarded with tiny drops of nectar offered by the flower.

Once the four ribbon-like yellow petals fall, the four-lobed calyx remains on the twig all winter and looks itself like a tiny flower. The fruit doesn’t develop until the following year. I found a few of the small, round seed pods initiated by last year’s pollination nestled among this year’s flowers. They were still unripe, but I split one open with a fingernail to see the two brown seeds tucked inside. Once the seeds do ripen, the capsule will split explosively and send the seeds flying up to 30 feet away! Then the seeds spend another year in the duff before they germinate. This plant has patience!

Witch-hazel flowers from this year and fruits pollinated last year occur on the shrubs at the same time. Photo by Emily Stone. 

These two seeds would have exploded forcefully out of the seed pod and flown up to 30 feet if I'd left them on the plant to mature. Photo by Emily Stone. 

I’ve needed patience to find this plant, too. While they are common in the southern two-thirds of Wisconsin, that’s not where I spend most of my time. Up north here, they are much rarer. And where I first met witch-hazel near Sandstone, Minnesota, they are listed as a threatened species. We are simply on the western edge of their range.

While they do bloom near Halloween, witch-hazel’s name is probably a misspelling of old English words wicke or wych that meant “lively” and “to bend.” They refer to the use of a forked branch of witch-hazel as a dowsing rod, which purportedly would bend downward to point out a good location to dig a well. Hazel likely refers to this plant’s resemblance to American hazelnut or beaked hazel shrubs. Since they aren’t closely related, I prefer to hyphenate witch-hazel to indicate they are not a true hazel species. Witch-hazels are more related to gooseberries!

In a bit of reverse-dowsing, rain showers helped me see the leaf, and sun rays helped me see the witch-hazel. On that fall day, I found a deep well of beauty.

I'd never been to Rib Mountain before, but it was absolutely beautiful on this damp, fall day. Photo by Emily Stone. 

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. Natural Connections 3 is available for pre-order from Honest Dog Books!

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Our Fall 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.

Watching Cranes at Crex Meadows

“Turn here, they’re heading north!” I directed my fiancé as we navigated the gravel roads of Crex Meadows Wildlife Area near Grantsburg, WI. We’d spotted a line of sandhill cranes flying through the sunset sky, and were following them toward what we hoped would be a spectacular evening of birdwatching.

Thousands of sandhill cranes converge near this wetland complex each fall. They spend their days fueling up for migration by gleaning waste grain from recently harvested corn and soybean fields nearby. Then, at dusk they rise from the fields and stream into the wetlands. By roosting together in shallow water, the cranes make it harder for their numerous possible land predators, like coyotes, wolves, bobcats, and fishers to sneak up.

As we puttered along the grid of gravel roads trying to triangulate the most likely landing area for the flock, I felt like I was reliving my childhood of being on the chase crew for my grandpa’s hot air balloon in central Iowa. The difference was that Grandpa could communicate his plan to us through the radio in the old farm truck, and he was aiming for an accessible landing pad.

Balloons don't ALWAYS land in an accessible place...Photo by Larry Stone. 

These cranes had no concern for our viewing access. At the Crex Education and Visitors Center, we’d been warned that a recent influx of visitors had spooked the cranes away from some of their usual, easy-to-see roosts. Even when people are quiet, stay in their cars, and stay out of the wetlands, the birds may choose to go elsewhere. Luckily, this extensive wetland complex has plenty of space away from roads where the cranes could go to get some privacy.

That ability to hide makes it hard to keep track of their numbers. A few days after our visit, on October 29, the Wisconsin DNR conducted the annual survey of the crane population. Eleven staff spread out among known roost locations in Crex and the nearby Fish Lake Wildlife Area. Arriving before dawn, they prepared to witness the early morning commute of cranes from their bedrooms back to their breakfast fields.

Some cranes stay right in Crex Meadows and feed there throughout the day. This family to two adults and one juvenile crane were spotted earlier that afternoon. The second adult is feeding with their head down and is quite invisible in this photo. You can tell the adults by their red head, and the juvenile by the lack of it. 

“The total count with Crex and Fish Lake was 7,754 cranes,” reported DNR wildlife biologist Joe Dittrich when I called him up the day after the survey. In contrast, the average over the last three years was 13-14,000. That’s a sharp decline. Dittrich wasn’t too worried about the numbers, though. The morning of the count had been extremely foggy, especially at the Fish Lake unit, with visibility of only 100 yards. He suspects that they missed about half of the birds there. It’s also possible that some birds have already continued on south to their winter habitat in southern Georgia and Central Florida. No banding or telemetry efforts have established more specific migration routes or schedules for the birds who pass through here.

Even if some of the birds have left, Dittrich assured me that a good number of them will likely stick around until the wetlands begin to freeze up during the day. With the warm fall we’ve been having, that might mean we have several more weeks to witness this phenomenon. The Crex Visitor Center is happy to provide current information if you call 715-463-CREX.

“I really like their calls,” Dittrich told me when I asked what he liked best about the cranes. That’s no surprise. Many of us have heard one or two cranes give their thrilling, rattling, bugles during spring migration or nesting season. The cacophony of hundreds or thousands of these ancient voices echoing across the sunset is unforgettable.

Aldo Leopold wrote eloquently of the cranes in the “Marshland Elegy” chapter of A Sand County Almanac. “Our appreciation for the crane grows with the slow unraveling of earthly history…When we hear his call we hear no mere bird. We hear the trumpet in the orchestra of evolution. He is the symbol of our untamable past, of that incredible sweep of millennia…”

That isn’t mere hyperbole. Cranes are some of the oldest living birds. In Nebraska, a 15-million-year-old crane skeleton records their ancient stake on the territory. Over that time scale, the habitat has changed more than the bird. Several glaciers advanced and retreated. The last one here in Wisconsin sent a flood of sandy outwash southwest from the Bayfield Peninsula, creating the Northwest Sands Ecological Landscape. Then a rogue, northeast-flowing section of ice dammed up some of the meltwater, which created Glacial Lake Grantsburg. The lake’s calm water accumulated clay sediment. Together, the patchwork of sands and clays, along with science-based wildlife management, has turned this area into a destination for nature lovers of all kinds.

The Northwest Sands mostly failed at farming, and now host lots of important wildlife areas! Source

FIGURE 6. Advance of the Grantsburg Sublobe, an offshoot of the Des Moines Lobe, overriding the St. Croix Moraine blocking southward drainage of the Mississippi River, and forming glacial Lake Grantsburg.  Source

And yes, I was thinking about the glaciers as we stood at the edge of the wetland watching the flocks of cranes appear on the horizon, stream in over our heads, and descend with legs dangling into the water we knew was hiding behind grasses and shrubs. That old ice is the reason the cranes are here, and this winter’s ice is the reason they will leave. In between, their rattling cries send an awestruck shiver down my spine.

I took this video on October 14, when the cranes were still landing just north of Main Dike Road. Spectacular! Turn up your volume! 

 

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. Natural Connections 3 is almost here!

For more than 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Our Fall 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.