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.

The Bohemian Bird

Dawn was disappointingly gray over Lake Superior. Having been given a rare chance to wake up with a lake view, I’d hoped for something a little more spectacular. But a touch of color warmed the far horizon, and if I looked closely enough, a bit of sea smoke danced across the rippled surface.

Then movement closer up caught my eye. In the bare tree just outside the window, a flock of birds bustled. Their main activities seemed to be stretching up to pluck a mountain ash berry from its stem and then fluttering to another part of the tree in search of the next fruit. Their behavior, plus their dapper crests and rakish black masks, immediately identified them as waxwings.

Cedar waxwings are quite common in the Northwoods year-round. They nest near rivers throughout the northern half of North America, and I often spot them flycatching out over the water as I paddle by. Winter finds them eating berries across this country and into Central America.

Cedar waxwings have the same jaunty crests and rakish black eye masks as Bohemian waxwings, but they also have a yellow belly and white under their tails. Adults at least three years old also have a bright red spot on each of their wings. Photo by Emily Stone.

But cedar waxwings have yellow bellies, white under their tails, and just a dab of red on their wingtips. These birds’ bellies matched the gray of the low clouds, and under their tails was an orange that reflected the fading sunrise. The red on their wingtips was set off by jaunty splashes of white and yellow, with the yellow also banded across the tips of their tails. There was no doubt that these were Bohemian waxwings!

Bohemian waxwings have jaunty crests, rakish black eye masks, orange under their tails, a yellow tip on their tails, and three colors of markings on their wings. They are winter visitors to the Northwoods. Photo by Emily Stone.

Bohemian waxwings are less common visitors to the Northwoods. They breed in northwest Canada and Alaska as well as across northern Scandinavia and Russia, overlapping with their cousins, the Japanese waxwings. In the winter, they spread south into the western U.S., southern Canada, and northern Europe and Asia. In fact, it may have been a Swiss physician who first bestowed upon these widespread birds the name Bohemian. He based their original scientific name on a folk belief that the birds originated from Czech lands also known as Bohemia. Today we know that this region is just a small part of their winter habitat.

Who knew that there are Japanese waxwings? Not me, until researching this article!
Photo by  sunjiao - www.inaturalist.orgphotos398986107, CC BY 4.0.

Eventually, the term Bohemian, through an association with the roving Roma people, also came to mean wanderers, vagabonds, and free-spirited people who pay little attention to society’s conventional norms and expectations. It is this meaning that seems best applied to these unusual birds.

Unlike most songbirds, waxwings are happy to live in close association with their kin throughout the year and don’t bother to defend a breeding territory around their nest. Many of the beautiful and complicated songs we hear birds belting out during the dawns of spring and summer are meant to claim a territory and ward off competitors, but waxwings have no need for this. They don’t have a true song, but use high-pitched calls to communicate with their flockmates.

Bohemian waxwings are particularly mobile. While many other birds can be observed at the same nest site year after year, Bohemians don’t usually return to the same area to breed. Instead, they follow the abundance of fruit in both summer and winter.

Bohemian waxwing eating a berry. Photo by Lisa Hupp USFWS - Public Domain. 

Fruits are full of sugar, but not many other nutrients, so waxwings may eat double their own weight in berries in a single day in order to get what they need. Their short, wide intestines have enzymes to help break down the sugar, their large liver converts the sugar to energy, and they poop frequently to expel the seeds. When eating fruits that have dehydrated over the winter, waxwings must drink water or eat snow to avoid becoming dehydrated themselves.

Bohemian waxwings are known for their ability to find a tree full of berries in the middle of nowhere, descend on it en masse, strip every edible fruit from the twigs, and then disappear to their next meal. That’s exactly what they did as I watched.

This flock of Bohemian waxwings quickly stripped the tree of all fruit. Photo by Emily Stone. 

Waxwings hopped from twig to twig, sizing up each red mountain ash berry before stretching or fluttering up to nab it. Often the bird would mash the berry a bit in their beak before swallowing it whole. During brief pauses in feeding, the birds seemed to clean their beaks on a twig by wiping them from side to side. Some of the flock gleaned more berries off the red-stained snow beneath the tree.

Mountain ash berries provide food for many bird throughout the fall and winter. 

Photo by Emily Stone.

A few members of the flock shifted next door to another mountain ash tree with a few berries left. But that tree was soon stripped of all fruits, too. Eventually I got distracted with my own breakfast, and by the time I looked out again, not a bird remained. Happily the clouds had departed, too, and my day continued on much brighter than it had begun.

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.

Wintertime Porcupine

It was an early morning at the Cable Natural History Museum as I loaded up the van with our MuseumMobile totes, gearing up for a full day teaching about animal adaptations in the schools. Every Being has a fascinating set of adaptations that help them to survive in their habitat, and it is one of my favorite topics to teach about.

Heading north on Highway 63, the beautiful scenery never fails to keep me entertained as I drive through the picturesque nature of the Northwoods. While my thoughts wandered, a large dark spot high in a distant tree caught my eye. At first, I thought it might be a squirrel drey–a large nest of twigs and leaves built high in a tree. But as I got closer, I realized that it was a porcupine! Once my excitement calmed down, curiosity began to take its place. I began to wonder why exactly this porcupine was high up in the tree on this late fall morning. The answer may lie within the feeding strategies of the North American porcupine.

Once the vegetation has begun to go dormant for the fall and winter, porcupines change how they forage for food. They shift from their spring and summer strategy of feeding on ground vegetation and leaves to heavily relying on trees and shrubs in the fall/winter, often spending large amounts of time in a single tree. They target the cambium and phloem layers, the living, growing area between the bark and the water-carrying sapwood, responsible for transporting sugars. This transition from a wide variety of foods available in the summer to nibbling trees in the winter is a drastic drop in nutritionally valuable food for porcupines.

A porcupine high up in an Aspen tree. Photo by Emily Stone. 

Porcupines, like many animals, eat a large amount of food in the summer to put on weight for the coming winter. On average, porcupines will begin winter with around 50% body fat–similar to a polar bear or seal. However, porcupines have thrown the typical winter survival strategies to the wind. They don’t hibernate to avoid poor food availability, spend time in burrows to conserve heat and energy, or cache food to not spend energy foraging. Instead, they hang out in treetops, exposed to the elements, as they spend energy feeding on food with the nutritional content of cardboard. But recent studies show they still manage to only lose an average of 35% body fat over the winter! This lack of fat loss shows they have adapted to survive on a poor diet in harsh winter conditions. But how?

Studies show that a porcupine's metabolic rate slows in the winter, lowering their energy intake requirements. These low energy requirements, partnered with a high tolerance for dietary imbalances, moving very little while foraging, and their large fat stores at the beginning of winter allows them to mitigate body mass loss and survive winter.

The porcupine's impressive adaptations don’t stop there. Once more nutritionally valuable food is available, they are able to immediately put those nutrients to work and gain weight back. This is not a typical ability of many herbivores. Even when good food becomes available, other herbivore species are unable to quickly change how their bodies are being regulated and processing food, making them incapable of properly using those nutrients, and unable to gain weight immediately. Once again, the porcupine is proving to be an extremely adaptable species.

One of the best known adaptations of porcupines are their quills. These walking pincushions sport roughly 30,000 quills–specialized, hollow hairs that cover the porcupine's body. Quills are a porcupine's main defense against predators, and are a particularly mean one. As if getting stabbed by pointed quills isn’t enough, each quill is equipped with microscopic, downward pointing barbs. Once embedded into flesh, the barbs catch on tissue like many tiny fishhooks, making removal viciously painful and dangerous if the quill breaks off inside the tissue. But the brutality of a porcupine's quills doesn’t end there. Those tiny barbs hook farther into flesh the more the victim moves, and body heat makes them expand–making them even more painful and difficult to remove the longer they are embedded.

Close up with a porcupine. Check out those quills! Photo by Emily Stone. 

Between their unusual adaptations to survive winter, and their intricately hazardous quills, porcupines are a natural wonder. I could be entertained for days by the complex adaptations they have developed to survive in their habitat. Much to my surprise, while driving back along Highway 63 after teaching all day, the porcupine I saw earlier that morning was still there. No doubt they were putting those winter adaptations to use as they foraged for twigs and bark high in the tree.

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.

The Subnivean Zone Returns

Lake Superior was astonishingly calm as we walked out to a rocky point in the last rays of the setting Sun. With no wind and temperatures well above normal for late November, my fiancé and I only needed light sweaters and jackets to stay warm. It was a truly lovely day to be outside.

Lake Superior on a calm November, day. Photo by Emily Stone.

Lake Superior on a calm November, day. Photo by Emily Stone.

“Grandfather Alden would have called this a ‘weather breeder,’” I told Kevin. He didn’t read The Boxcar Children books by Gertrude Chandler Warner, but they were a staple of my childhood. In this early reader series, four brave siblings solve quaint mysteries with the help of their wise grandpa. In Snowbound Mystery they spend a glorious, bluebird day hiking around a mountain cabin before a blizzard socks them in. Their Grandfather called the bluebird day a “weather breeder.”

On The Weather Channel’s website, I found this explanation to confirm Grandfather Alden’s usage: “According to a late 19th century definition, a weather breeder is a beautiful day of ‘unusual fineness’… However, such a day is usually followed by bad weather.” A 1996 article about weather adages in The New York Times explains that the only science behind that saying is the law of averages. Good weather doesn’t cause bad weather, but since the weather is always changing, your good weather will soon turn to bad. Checking my weather app, I was thrilled to see the amount of snow in the forecast going up yet again. This day was certainly the calm before the storm!

Cold rain splattered my windshield the next day as I headed back to the shores of a smaller lake in Northern Wisconsin. Before cozying up indoors, I wrapped my digital thermometer in plastic wrap and tucked it under the bright green frond of an evergreen wood fern in the yard. This has become an annual ritual. On the weather station screen indoors, I could see that the newly placed sensor matched the air temperature in the mid-30s.

Can you see the white corner of the temperature sensor hidden under the fern?
Photo by Emily Stone.

Overnight, the wind howled and rain turned to snow.

As winter’s first snowflakes drifted through the dark, some landed on top of dead plants, fallen leaves, twigs, and other detritus of the forest floor. In many places, snow never fully reached the ground. That was surely true for the protected hideaway of my thermometer. By dawn, it was buried under six inches and counting.

Despite falling temperatures, the relative warmth of the cold rain and the residual heat of summer were still radiating from the soil. At sunrise, when I checked the weather station, the air temp had dropped to 24 degrees Fahrenheit, but the sensor cozied up to the earth under a fresh blanket of snow read 33 degrees. After two winters of thin snow, the Subnivean Zone has returned!

All winter long I will monitor the air temperature and the temperature of a thermometer I recently buried in the Subnivean Zone under the snow. In it’s first day of existence this winter, the Subnivean Zone did not drop below 33 degrees! Photo by Emily Stone.

In this magical space, with a blanket of snow to trap the earth’s warmth and provide a solid break against the windchill, temperatures hover around freezing even as the world above drops below zero. Deeper snow provides even more insulation, and all manner of Beings—from mice to martens, bacteria, fungi, spiders, hibernating insects, frozen wood frogs, and more—rely on the moderated microclimate.

In 2022-23—the winter of record-breaking snow—deep drifts accumulated on still-thawed ground, and the temperature in my front yard’s subnivium didn’t drop below 32 degrees for the entire season. The last two winters haven’t been so lucky. With thin, icy snowpacks, plant roots and mosses felt the sting of dry, bitter cold, ruffed grouse couldn’t dive into a snow cave to spend the night, and small mammals had to face the choice of staying safe and warm in a burrow, or risking being eaten or dangerously chilled while they foraged for food. Wood frogs in the leaf litter suffered without snow to buffer them from energetically costly freeze-thaw cycles.

Happily, at least for this week, those Beings are safe from the challenges of a snowless winter. Those Beings include me. Cold weather without groomed ski trails makes me sad. This week, my social media feed is full of good news about trails opening.

A weather breeder might be a day of “unusual fineness”, but I personally wouldn’t call what came after it “bad weather.” For many Northwoods Beings (the ones who don’t have to drive on bad roads or clear downed trees) snow and The Subnivean Zone are truly something to be thankful for!

Fluffy snow is a wonderful insulator to help retain warmth from the earth. Fluffy snow is also great for skiing up a gravel road! Photo by Emily Stone.

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.

https://www.cablemuseum.org/books/ 

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.