Arriving in Ketchikan, Alaska (a bonus post)

After my beautiful walk in Bellingham, WA, where I saw the barred owl eating crayfish, my adventure truly began. I boarded the MV Columbia ferry and entered the Alaska Marine Highway System. After duct taping my tent to the bridge deck, I explored all four decks passengers are allowed on while the boat is in motion, and then settled in for a two-night cruise.

Thickly forested hills spooled by on either side. Porpoises leaped from the water, and a few pairs of orcas swam by. Meanwhile, I made myself comfortable on the green fake-grass carpet under the heated greenhouse roof of the solarium, and made friends with four other young women traveling alone. I had my tarot read by Rachel—a journalism major going to do a radio internship in Sitka. I chatted with a bright-eyed girl on her way to do an internship with the bears. And I listened sympathetically to a broken-hearted doctor heading to start a new practice in Juneau.

I used the hot water spigot on the cafeteria’s coffee maker to make oatmeal in the morning, and did the same with ramen for dinner. I also rolled out my yoga mat under the solarium in order to work out the kinks of travel.

When the ferry docked in Ketchikan, Alaska, at 7:00 a.m. in the rain, I was sad to depart. But, when my feet hit the ground, Hawaii became the only state I have not visited!

It had taken me several hours of the ferry ride to realize that the changing colors of the shoreline were caused by the tides going out and coming back in. A thin line of black rocks near the trees expanded into a rich gold band of seaweed, and lush, green saltmarshes appeared in low areas. Now, fully aware of my proximity to an ocean (it took a while for that to sink in!), I was excited to see that my arrival in Ketchikan coincided with a low tide.

Driving north on Tongass Highway, I spotted a rocky beach through the trees, and pulled in to the Refuge Cove State Recreation Area. Clambering around on the rocks, I soon spotted purple and orange ochre stars, slimy red-orange sea cucumbers, and spouting butter clams. I recognized the green-striped tentacles of burrowing anemones from the education tables in the ferry’s cafeteria. I also found an odd creature that Tim later helped me identify as a hydroid.

Twisted trees created a magical world just inland, and the starry white flowers of False Lilies-of-the-valley (related to the one in the Northwoods) created a beautiful border between beach and forest. A break in the clouds and lifting of the persistent drizzle urged me on toward the campground so I could dry out my tent.

Barred Owls Eating Crayfish

A small stream tumbled and crashed through edge of Bellingham, WA. The rocky ravine it had carved over time now provides refuge for big trees, a fish hatchery, a cacophony of birds, and humans, too. Well-worn dirt paths gave testament to the popularity of this waterfall-filled neighborhood greenspace.

I was out for one last walk before packing my bags and boarding the ferry to Alaska. A great blue heron hunting above the first cascade allowed me to stalk it with my camera. Pacific wrens and towhees chattered from the bushes and wild roses bloomed along the trail.

A great blue heron allowed me to stalk it with my camera while it was hunting above a waterfall.

At one point I peeked down a side path leading toward a bridge. An older couple and their golden retriever were standing there chatting, and while I wanted to see the view, I didn’t want to disturb them. Catching my eye, though, they waved me over.

“There’s a barred owl hunting crayfish in the creek,” exclaimed one in a stage whisper. “We’ve seen him here almost every day,” added the other. As if to confirm this fact, the brown and white checkered owl swooped off its perch on the lower branch of an alder tree. After dragging its talons through the water, the owl landed among the ferns and mosses on a low rock in the edge of the creek. From this new perch it turned its back on us and stared intently into the water. For a forest bird, it was extremely well camouflaged against the dappled light of the riffle.

Then whoosh again, the owl flapped and skipped across a few feet of shallow water and came to rest on a bigger rock just downstream. Immediately it started picking at something in its talons. By zooming in on its beak with my camera, and then zooming in on the photo on my LCD screen, we were able to positively identify its meal as a crayfish.

Barred owls have a very adaptable diet that sometimes include crayfish nabbed out of a stream or lake. 

Although barred owls’ stereotypical diet of focuses on mice, they are actually very adaptable opportunists. Small mammals (including mice, but also shrews, voles, and flying squirrels) make up the bulk of their winter fare, but in summer they expand their buffet to include birds, insects and spiders, amphibians, reptiles, earthworms, fish, snails, and crayfish.

Not every individual makes all of those options are part of its diet. Like flamingos, some barred owls eat so many crayfish that their belly feathers take on a pinkish hue. (I never thought I’d compare owls to flamingos!) Barred owls in the Eastern Cascades seem (based on surveys of their pellets) to subsist mostly on beetles, with frogs and flying squirrels for dessert. One owl was observed feeding almost entirely on aquatic snails. What they eat is largely dependent on what’s available at the time in their habitat. These birds don’t migrate, so they have to muster a year-round food supply from their local territory.

Needing big, old trees to nest in, barred owls were once confined to relatively undisturbed forests in the east. The advent of fire suppression in the northwest, along with tree planting across the Great Plains during the last century, gave the owls a path for hopscotching their way into a much bigger range. Their map now encompasses the southern provinces of Canada, southeastern Alaska, British Columbia, Washington, Oregon, and northern California.

Throughout their expansion, having an adaptable palate has worked to barred owls’ advantage. By eating oddities like crayfish they can scrape by even in small fragments of forests—like this creek ravine surrounded by neighborhoods.

All of this is wonderful for the barred owl, but not for their cousins the spotted owls who are native residents of the barred owls expanded range. Spotted owls were protected under the Endangered Species Act in 1990 because habitat fragmentation due to logging had reduced their nesting habitat. Spotted owls are smaller, less aggressive, and more set on eating flying squirrels, wood rats, and mice. With the influx of barred owls, their plight is only getting worse. Not only do barred owls outcompete them for food and nesting habitat, they also hybridize with spotted owls and dilute their gene pool. The best hope for rarer owls’ continued survival is the protection and expansion of old growth forests to provide enough habitat for the two species to coexist.

I’d learned about this conflict back when I worked in the redwoods of Northern California, so my excitement at watching a barred owl hunt in broad daylight was tempered by unease over the situation. The behavior we witnessed from that bridge is exactly why barred owls are a problem for spotted owls. We could declare this a normal consequence of species expansion and competition. Surely this scenario has played out millions of times over the eons. Natural selection is all about picking winners. This feels more dubious to me, though, because humans were definitely involved in changing the parameters.

Change is constant no matter how much we humans are involved. There’s value in working to protect things as they were, but finding beauty and wonder in a changed world isn’t wrong either.

The owl caught three more crayfish while we watched. Then, in a silent flash, it swooped out of the ravine through a gap in the sun-drenched leaves.

The creek flowing through Whatcom Falls Park tumbled and crashed over several waterfalls. 

Emily is on her way to Alaska for the summer! Follow the journey in this column, and at her blog: http://cablemuseum.org/connect/.

For 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Come visit us in Cable, WI! Our new exhibit: “Bee Amazed!” is open.

A great blue heron allowed me to stalk it with my camera while it was hunting above a waterfall. Photo by Emily Stone.

Tide Pools!

I took the scenic route along the coast from Anacortes, Washington, up to my friends’ house in Bellingham. Even though I’d just returned to the mainland from a couple days on Orcas Island, every glimpse of ocean through the trees was thrilling. With so many deep green islands dotting the sparkling blue, the view felt strangely similar to my beloved Boundary Waters—on a much larger scale. I’d enjoyed being out on the ferry, too, weaving among the San Juan Islands in a grander version of navigating the granite knobs of Saganaga Lake.

So much of this landscape feels familiar—but with a twist. Western species of hemlocks, firs, and cedars are much bigger than their Midwestern cousins. The towhees who call among those trees have prominent white wing spots, and the Pacific wrens—only recently recognized as a separate species from winter wrens—sing such a rapid-fire steam of notes that I couldn’t pretend to tell the two apart. The Pacific starflowers who glow in the understory are rounder and pinker than their cousins who are probably blooming along my Wisconsin driveway without me.

My excitement at seeing all of these sort-of-familiar species may seem odd, but their friendly faces provide stabilizing anchors as I navigate new trails and recover from driving new freeways. Plus, when viewed from a certain angle, they are thrilling testaments to the steady march of evolution, adaptation, and the connectedness of life. It’s no accident that they look alike, and there are probably good reasons for them to be slightly different.

One scenic pullout along the Chuckanut Drive seemed especially promising, with dirt paths disappearing over the steep bank. A young man with a dog on a leash bounded up out of the woods, exuberant about the beautiful, sunny weather. “Where does this trail go?” I asked. “To the beach!” he responded, so I set out through the forest in the direction he’d come from.

Waves push an odd collection of things up on shore as the tide goes in and out. In the wrack line, scavengers of all kinds can find crabs, algae, shells, and more. 

The trail soon became a bit of a bushwhack among lush thickets of sword fern and the holly-like leaves of Oregon grape. Finally, through the cedar boughs, I spotted the ocean. From deep shade I entered bright sun on a stretch of beach intersected by toes of bedrock and strewn with giant boulders. After taking in the view of misty islands and blue waves, a sliver of bright purple shell in the wrack line caught my eye. The little ridge of debris pushed up by waves is an important resource for scavengers, and I scanned it for interesting bits, too. The bright reddish-purple shell of a shore crab contrasted brilliantly with a heap of vivid green seaweed. It wasn’t food for my belly, but nourishment for my eyes.

Waves push an odd collection of things up on shore as the tide goes in and out. In the wrack line, scavengers of all kinds can find crabs, algae, shells, and more.

Soon I saw an odd pattern of sunken circles in the sand. Puzzling for a second, a half-formed thought nudged me to look around. Anemones! Of course!  A flood of memories from teaching at an outdoor school in California washed over me. I’d stumbled on tidepools. This zone of constant flux is no day at the beach for the critters who must adapt to the see-saw of wet-dry, dark-light, warm-cold, and more or less saline conditions. Those who have adapted to this environment are amazing.

Aggregating anemones host green algae on their bodies. Pink tentacles are a threat to small critters swimming or scuttling by. 

 Aggregating anemones, for instance, grow in colonies of genetically identical clones. They can reproduce asexually through binary fission, and over time one anemone can generate a carpet of replicas. The light green skin on the soft plop of their bodies is tinted by symbiotic algae who provide sugars and oxygen in return for carbon dioxide and a safe place in the sun. The algae also create sunscreen to protect them both from excess rays. Pink tentacles waving in the center of a submerged anemone shoot deadly, harpoon-like nematocyst cells at small fish, snails or crabs.

The exposed anemones had pulled their tentacles in and covered themselves with sand and shells to help prevent desiccation. Higher up, in a bowl in one of the rocks, I found a true tidepool bustling with waving anemones and other life.

From my perch above, I watched as an entire colony of fingertip-sized acorn barnacles licked the water in unison. Not tongues, but feathery legs ducked in and out of shells to sweep the mini currents for plankton and detritus.

These acorn barnacles and snail are closed up tight against the drying sun. When the tide returns, the barnacles sweep feathery feet through the current to gather bits and pieces of food. 

In the aquatic jungle, bushes of algae rustled with the action of crabs. Small snails crept over every surface. . . but not all of them were truly snails. After watching for several minutes I couldn’t resist. Scooping gently, I captured one of the dark, twisted shells in the palm of my hand. After just a second of hesitation, the cream and tan-striped legs and black-tipped eyestalks of a tiny hermit crab emerged. He righted himself, scuttled sideways, rolled again, and got back up. With soft, twisted bodies, hermit crabs need the protection of a borrowed shell to survive.

Hermit crabs have soft, twisted bodies that require the protection of a borrowed shell. 

The tide was returning by then, creeping up over the beds of anemones and pushing the wrack line higher. I giggled at the clown in my hand before putting him back and scrambling up to the forest. This juxtaposition of semi-familiar and completely peculiar is what makes travel so fun. Next stop: ALASKA!

Emily is on her way to Alaska for the summer! Follow the journey in this column, and at her blog: http://cablemuseum.org/connect/.

For 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Come visit us in Cable, WI! Our new exhibit: “Bee Amazed!” is open.

Brown Headed Cow Birds and Bison

My hike on the Centennial Trail in Wind Cave National Park in western South Dakota had been wonderful. I felt like Laura Ingalls Wilder as I strolled over the rolling prairie hills, dodged buffalo chips on the trail, and photographed wildflowers taking advantage of spring. Thankfully, the hot sun was offset by a cooling breeze.

Twice the trail ran right through the center of prairie dog towns. Their alarm calls were incessant and pushed before me in a wave, with the closest little rodents chattering from out of sight inside the entrance to their burrow. The bell-like tones of meadowlark calls rang out across the prairie, and repeatedly I searched for the vocalists who sounded much closer than their actual perch. The volume of their songs was impressive.

Prairie dogs shouted their alarm calls at me across the windswept prairie.

The prairie’s wide open horizon seems to encourage restlessness. Back at my car, I quickly settled in for an afternoon of driving west. Pa Ingalls would have understood the feeling.

I didn’t get very far, though. Where the park road met the highway, a pair of bison grazed on the shoulder. If it was just those two great, shaggy beasts, I might not have stopped, but around their heads fluttered personal flocks of brown-headed cowbirds. The shiny black birds with namesake brown heads pecked at the ground right in front of the bisons’ giant heads, played leapfrog over their humped backs, and generally acted just like brown-headed cowbirds are supposed to act. Glad that no one was with me to roll their eyes at my excitement, I swung onto the shoulder, rolled down a window, and picked up my camera from the passenger seat.

Now, brown-headed cowbirds are not my favorite animals. My parents and naturalist friends have always given them the evil eye. Arthur Cleveland Bent (an acclaimed ornithologist of the early 1900s) called the cowbird a “shiftless vagabond and imposter.” Its scientific name, Moluthrus ater, means “dark greedy beggar.” While they are native to the Great Plains, they have a bad reputation as lazy villains who parasitize the nests of more praise-worthy songbirds.

Female brown-headed cowbirds lay their eggs in the nests of smaller birds and let other parents do the hard work of feeding their hungry chicks. Cowbird eggs hatch first, and their chicks grow faster than the others. By virtue of being the tallest mouth in the nest, the cowbird babies get more food. Their gain is another’s loss, and their success comes at the expense of one or more of the host mother’s own young.

While most birds don’t seem to recognize the cowbird eggs or chicks as alien invaders, some do. House wrens puncture cowbird eggs. Yellow warblers build a new nest right on top of the invaded one—smothering their own eggs as well. Robins, catbirds, and a few other birds with big beaks toss out the strange eggs. I feel like giving them all a high-five for not being duped.

But on a birding walk last spring with Laura Erickson—a wonderful Duluth-based birder, author, educator and scientist—I gained a whole new perspective on the cowbirds’ predicament.

These maligned birds once depended on the bison’s feeding to flush tasty insects and their heavy hooves to break up tough prairie sod, which made seeds available despite the birds’ scrawny feet. The problem was that bison herds moved regularly, and the birds had to follow. That transient lifestyle wasn’t conducive to settling down and raising a family. The cowbirds’ only option was to deposit their eggs in the nests of birds who could find food even without the bison, and hope for the best.

Brown-headed cowbirds feed on insects that bison stir up as they graze, as well as seeds turned up by the bisons' heavy hooves.

Hope isn’t their only strategy. A female cowbird lays about one thick-shelled egg each morning, and can lay forty or even sixty eggs in a season. Using radio-tagged birds, scientists discovered that females will spend the morning in nest-rich habitats like forests and edges. They may silently observe potential hosts in preparation for a “mission impossible”-style egg laying operation; walk around in dense ground cover looking for nests; or fly noisily through the shrubs hoping to flush a mother and home in on a target. They spend their afternoons foraging in more open habitats. Sometimes they’ll even return to a parasitized nest to check on and feed their own young. Once fledged, the young cowbirds instinctively seek flocks of their own kind.

This worked out pretty well when there were still plenty of bison moving freely across the plains. Nomadic cowbirds rarely parasitized the same nest repeatedly, so their songbird hosts recovered easily from the reproductive setback. The problems came when pioneers settled the plains and replaced nomadic bison with fenced cattle, tilled farmland, and backyard feeders. The birds adapted well to the new scheme, which allowed them to spread east into new territory, where songbirds weren’t used to their skullduggery—which could now be concentrated instead of scattered. Their success came at the expense of their reputation, though, and cowbirds are now an unwelcome visitor in backyards from California to Maine.

Is it really their fault? Like so many animals, they evolved to live in a world that we have changed almost beyond recognition. But there, on the side of the road surrounded by vast prairies and restored herds, they were behaving exactly like they should. They still aren’t my favorite birds, but for just a moment I could really appreciate the cowbirds’ place in the world.

Then—restless as ever—the two bison moved on. I put down my camera, rolled up the window, and continued west.

Emily is on her way to Alaska for the summer! Follow the journey in this column, and at her blog: http://cablemuseum.org/connect/.

For 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Come visit us in Cable, WI! Our new exhibit: “Bee Amazed!” is open.

Jack-in-the-pulpit

The sun was hot as I sat on a bench outside the Effigy Mounds National Monument Visitor Center to put on my hiking boots. Entering the woods, though, the cool shade enveloped me. The air was sweet and buzzing with life. After a few deep breaths to enjoy the welcome change in the microclimate, I began by striding up the trail with purpose.

I didn’t get very far. Rosy columbine flowers glowed in the sunflecks. Neon orange orioles chased each other through the canopy. Both purple and yellow violets lined the trail, while may apples, wood anemone, false rue anemone, sweet William, and large flowering bellwort carpeted the forest floor. A big, fuzzy bumble bee queen investigated hollows in the leaves, perhaps still searching for the perfect spot for her nest.

Many spring flowers contain both male and female parts on the same flower. 

They also use bright colors and sweet smells to lure in a certain set of pollinators. 

Jack-in-the-pulpit goes on a different route. 

Calcium-rich limestone bedrock poked through black soil on this river bluff, and the canopy of maple, basswood, and hickory, attested to the richness of this woods. The calls of warblers, vireos, and a jumble of other birds floated out over the Mississippi River, which shone like a beacon on the migratory highway. The place was brilliantly, vibrantly, alive.

A patch of large jack-in-the-pulpit leaves caught my attention, and I stopped to capture a photo. These unusual flowers don’t have colorful, silky petals and a sweet smell like the others I’d examined that day. They aren’t crafted to attract bees (the pollinators at the forefront of my mind lately); they summon less flashy insects to do their pollen transport.

The outer part of the flower looks like a narrow pouch with a graceful rain awning, or an old fashioned church pulpit. Often the pulpits—known to botanists as the spathe—are green with purplish-brown stripes. This combination of colors, along with a mushroom-like odor, attracts fungus gnats. I wrote about these tiny cousins of mosquitoes a couple years ago when they swarmed my window screens in the fall. There are many species, and some must like to climb down inside the stinky, striped, spathe of an odd flower.

Inside the spathe lives the preacher Jack. His part is played by the spadix—the spike that pokes up out of the pulpit structure. At the base of the spadix are tiny flowers, protected from rain by the curving hood of the spathe. Jack-in-the-pulpits must be at least three years old before they have enough energy to produce anything except leaves. In poorer soils it may take longer. After mustering enough resources and storing them in an underground corm, the plant begins to create male (staminate) flowers.

Similar to the slippery trap of a pitcher plant leaf, gnats tend to be lured down inside the jack-in-the-pulpit flower and then struggle to climb back out on the slick sides. Scurrying around the bottom in a panic, they pick up pollen from the flowers at the base of the spadix, and finally exit through a tiny escape hatch, carrying the pollen with them.

Jack-in-the-pulpits require cross pollination for seeds to form, so the plant hopes that the little fungus gnat will fall into a pulpit with female flowers next. Scurrying around in panic once again, the gnat transfers the pollen to the stigmas on the female flowers. There isn’t an escape hatch in these jack-in-the-pulpits, though, and the gnats generally meet their demise in this beautiful, stained glass tomb. If they’ve done their job (in the plant’s view, at least), a cluster of green berries will be ripen to red by late summer.

The unusual flowers of jack-in-the-pulpit develop over 

time from having all male parts to all female parts.

What fascinates me about Jack is his transition over time. Young jack-in-the-pulpits with few stored resources are male, with staminate flowers. They only have enough energy to produce pollen. Over time, with ample nutrition, the plant increases in size both above and below ground. Female (carpellate) flowers start to appear on the spadix below the staminate flowers. Over the course of several years, as long as it continues to accumulate enough resources, more and more carpellate flowers appear until the plant is entirely female. If soil is poor or the habitat otherwise unfavorable, then the plant may control its resources output by continuing to produce only staminate flowers, and thus avoid the expense of growing berries.

Another bumble bee buzzed by as I finished taking my photos of this curious plant. Lately I’ve been focused on bees and the flashy flowers they pollinate. Jack-in-the-pulpits are a good reminder that everyone’s journey is different. They choose fungus over fragrance. They don’t need bees or bright colors. Their pollinators aren’t charismatic, but they do the trick. Their gender can change over time. These differences are a good thing. Even though they are neither sweet nor buzzing, jack-in-the-pulpits are a fascinating citizen of these woods.

Special Note: Emily’s book, Natural Connections: Exploring Northwoods Nature through Science and Your Senses is here! Order your copy at http://cablemuseum.org/natural-connections-book/.

For 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Come visit us in Cable, WI! Our new exhibit: “Bee Amazed!” is open.

Nature: Better Than Fiction

Bliss. It was warm enough to wear shorts, but the mosquitoes hadn’t hatched yet, and the spring ephemerals were blooming. Days like that are rare in the Northwoods. So I kidnapped Mollie, the Cable Natural History Museum’s new curator, to show her Juniper Rock overlook on the North Country Trail.

In the parking area, two shining clusters of bloodroot flowers spread their white petals to the sun. We took that as a good sign. After hiking past numerous small patches of bloodroot we came to a patch of rich woods. Wild leeks created an emerald carpet on one side of the trail, and a rock outcrop glittered with blossoms on the other. I scurried from one patch of flowers to the next with my camera, like following a trail of breadcrumbs. Hepatica! Spring beauty! Bloodroot! Oh my!

Patches of bloodroot dotted the forest.

While I found both the purple and the white color morphs of hepatica, all the spring beauties had bright pink pinstripes. I’d just read a post about pure white spring beauty flowers on the “In Defense of Plants” blog, and was hoping to see one. Pigments are chemicals, and most pigments do more than just add color. The white pigments in spring beauty flowers protect them from herbivory and pathogens. On the other hand, if spring beauties with the pink stripes can manage to avoid being eaten, they will attract more insects, which is necessary for cross-pollination and producing viable seeds.

In areas where there are lots of white flowers of other species, the white spring beauties have even more trouble attracting pollinators and become even rarer than usual. With all the gleaming white bloodroot plants nearby, plus white hepaticas, the pink spring beauties had a monopoly on this patch.

Hepatica blossoms can be white or lavender.

I bent down to photograph one pin-striped blossom, and noticed a pale green spider clinging to the underside of the flower cup. “A crab spider,” I exclaimed to Mollie, “it’s lying in wait for an early spring bee!” Then as I leaned in closer for a second photo, I laughed out loud. The spider already had a little bee clasped in its jaws. I love when Nature does what you predict. And equally, I love when it surprises you. This was a little of both.

The bee sported a halo of short, white hairs around its thorax, along each skinny leg, and ringing each segment of its black abdomen. It must have been a female with all of those hairs ready to collect pollen to provision her larvae. The fuzz can also hold in heat produced by its wing muscles and help these early season insects fly even on chilly days.

Crab spiders wait on flowers to ambush pollinators.

This little lady looked similar to the hairy-banded mining bee we’ve highlighted in our new museum exhibit, but our Bee Buddy doesn’t emerge from its ground nest until late July when the asters bloom. Most of its cousins are early spring emergers, though. I used the WI Wild Bee Guide (https://energy.wisc.edu/bee-guide/) to try and key out the bee from my photo. I narrowed it down to a group of black and black-striped bees that includes mining, sweat, and cellophane bees, which the website noted “is a large group of bees from 4 different genera that are often difficult to distinguish from each other.” 

The crab spider was equally wonderful. As with bees, female crab spiders are bigger than the males. She can change colors to match her flower, too—from white to yellow to green—although the change takes several days. Crab spiders don’t build webs; they ambush unsuspecting pollinators with their crab-like front legs. Once prey is caught and subdued with venom, the spider holds its lunch with just her jaw while she slurps up the insect smoothie her enzymes have blended up.

I left the woods in an even deeper state of bliss than I’d entered it. Not only was it a beautiful day, but I’d observed some exciting natural drama.

The rest of my evening was spent getting ready for my summer sabbatical. As I packed natural history books about Alaska into a tub, I chuckled at how much my reading habits have changed since I was a kid. You couldn’t have bribed me to read nonfiction science books back then. I thought they were boring. I wanted stories with adventure, resourcefulness, mysteries, and magic. Laura Ingalls Wilder, The Boxcar Children, Anne of Green Gables, American Girls, The Bobbsey Twins, and Trixie Belden were my staples. I wrote fiction, too, either set in the pioneer days or magical kingdoms. I loved nature, and my heroines did too. They used medicinal herbs to cure people or conjured up the powers of nature to defeat evil. But today I write only nonfiction and mostly read it, too.

So what changed?

Somewhere along the way I realized that the stories in nature are as good as or better than anything we can invent. Spring beauty uses magic potions to defend itself and to attract suitors. Harried mothers are caught in the traps of a color-shifting villain (who turns out not to be evil). Don’t even get me started on the stories of parasites and symbiotic partners.

But none of those stories are apparent without careful observation, which is often carried out by dedicated naturalists, or by scientists conducting experiments. Adventure. . .resourcefulness. . .mysteries. . .magic. . .I still want to read and write about those themes; I’ve just discovered that I don’t need to invent anything. Nature has already done it for me. Scientists are busy translating, and I’m off to write those stories!

Special Note: Emily’s book, Natural Connections: Exploring Northwoods Nature through Science and Your Senses is here! Order your copy at http://cablemuseum.org/natural-connections-book/.

For 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Come visit us in Cable, WI! Our new exhibit: “Bee Amazed!” opened on May 1, 2018.

To Measure the Earth

Warm days in early spring are just delicious. In the Northwoods, it is a rare delight to walk slowly through the warm woods. Fall and winter require a certain amount of movement to keep fingers and toes warm and summer hikes are often chased by mosquitoes. There is one brief period, though—after the sun has strengthened, the wind has mellowed, and chilly nighttime temps are keeping the bugs at bay—when you can saunter comfortably.  

I was doing just that—and enjoying very much the warm rays on my bare arms—when a little orange and brown flutter caught my eye. Butterfly! I tracked its erratic flight path in the hopes that it would land and let me see it more clearly. Last year in mid-April I spotted a red admiral butterfly with those same shades of ripe tomato and fresh dirt, and I hoped this might be that old friend.

When the blur landed in the middle of the soggy gravel road, though, I could tell it was different. For one, its wingspan was just over an inch. Red admiral wings fan twice that wide. For another, the bright splotches of orange were not displayed boldly across its shoulders like an admiral’s stripes; they were coyly hidden on the hindwings. Then there was the halo of fuzz around its head, and the delicate fringe on all of its trailing edges. Could this bright little day-flier be a moth, I wondered?

Creeping forward as it sat resting on the gravel, I kept my shadow out of its space and readied my hands for the catch, while also preparing myself to be disappointed if it got away. I’m not sure which one of us was more surprised by my successful pounce, but I did end up in the possession a delicate sprite.

Luckily I’d been on my way home, and had less than a quarter mile of sauntering to go. It was relatively easy to scoot my new friend into the bug bottle sitting on my front windowsill (I’d been meaning to put the jar away for months, but as it turns out, it was in the perfect location), and get a better look. Each forewing was mottled brown with two white bars. The hindwings were mostly orange with black bars and a dark fringe along the edge. After readying my camera, I set the moth loose to climb up the window. The sun shone through its paper-thin wings. It was luminous. Each tiny scale on its wings sparkled in the warm spring light. After a series of glamour shots I released the moth back outside and worked on discovering its name.

Archiearis infans: that is its scientific name; but one entomologist called it “First-born Geometer,” and it’s also known as The Infant. Both names refer to its phenology as one of the first non-hibernating day-flying moths to emerge in the spring. It overwintered as a pupa, and must have finished metamorphosing in the recent warmth. Its adult life will last just a matter of weeks and be very focused on mating and laying eggs. It life cycle starts so early in spring that sometimes the caterpillars emerge before their food plants—birch, alder, poplar and willow—have leafed out. In that case they feed on the flower catkins of those trees instead.

While the adult of this moth is a shimmering beauty, its slender, green caterpillars have their own charm. They are inchworms!

Caterpillars—being insects—have six true legs. Most caterpillars also have additional pairs of prolegs down their length. Prolegs are fleshy stubs with gripping hooks that function as additional feet. Inchworms, though, only have two or three pairs of prolegs at their far end. To move, the caterpillar clasps with its front legs and draws up the hind end, then clasps with the hind end (prolegs) and reaches out for a new front attachment. This gives the impression that the little wiggler is using its characteristic looping gait to quantify every step of its journey. Its family name, Geometridae, means “earth measurer.”

They measure quite a lot of the earth, too. This family of moths contains more than 23,000 different species worldwide. The First-born Geometer ranges from Newfoundland south to New York, and all the way to Alaska.

All the way to Alaska. May 15 is my departure day, when I’ll begin my own journey to measure the earth in words and photos. The logistics of my four-month sabbatical become more daunting each week, so I’ve been drawing inspiration and courage from reading the words of other adventurous women: Chery Strayed’s Brave, Mary Oliver poetry, and An Unspoken Hunger, by Terry Tempest Williams have been on my nightstand.

In one chapter, Williams offers words of wisdom given to her for her college graduation: “Don’t worry about what you will do next. If you take one step with all the knowledge you have, there is usually just enough light shining to show you the next step.” That advice came from Mardy Murie—herself an amazing adventurer of the Alaskan frontier.

So, as I pack my bags, I’m thinking of both Mardy and the caterpillar. My first step will be home to visit my parents. From there, I’ll gather what light I can find, clasp tight with my hind legs, and reach out. . .

Special Note: Emily’s book, Natural Connections: Exploring Northwoods Nature through Science and Your Senses is here! Order your copy at http://cablemuseum.org/natural-connections-book/.

For 50 years, the Cable Natural History Museum has served to connect you to the Northwoods. Come visit us in Cable, WI. Our new exhibit: “Bee Amazed!” is open!