Nature Watch
January 18, 2008
By Susan Benson
Director of Education
Cable Natural History Museum
“Winter darkness shuts off the far view. The cold drives you deep into your clothing, muscles you back into your home. Even the mind retreats into itself.”
So writes Barry Lopez in Arctic Dreams, which is one of my favorite books, in part because it is a celebration of snow, ice, cold temperatures, and a far northern place. Re-reading Lopez, I began to think about some of my other favorite “winter books,” those set in winter and that delve into the joy of living in cold places. This is my Top 10 list, but in no particular order.
10. The Way Winter Comes by Sherry Simpson
Born and raised in Alaska, Simpson writes about what it means to live in a northern land where “heat always yields to cold.” She uses some of the north’s characteristic animals – moose, ravens, wolves, and bears – to explore various perspectives on wilderness and our place in the natural world.
9. Arctic Dreams by Barry Lopez
A classic piece of nature writing that explores the cultural and natural history of the Arctic and includes a generous mix of spirituality and adventure.
8. Winter Sign by Jim dale-Huot Vickery
A former Park Service ranger in the Apostle Islands, Vickery offers this meditation on life, death, change, and beauty during a winter in Ely, Minnesota, a season that “hunts us with its cold and haunts us with its beauty.” Over the course of this difficult season, he shows how signs, if we remain open to them, can help us to see and understand these great mysteries.
7. Winter: A Spiritual Biography of the Season by Gary Schmidt and Susan M. Felch
A collection of 30 essays and poems that help the reader to see winter not as “a time of postponed activity and of shoveling snow, navigating ice, and trying to keep warm,” but as “a time of shoring up, of purity, praise, delight, and play.”
6. The Snowflake: Winter's Secret Beauty by Kenneth Libbrecht and Patricia Rasmussen
This is the first in what has become a series of books by Libbrecht that showcases stunning photography of the graceful and delicate snowflake. This is a non-technical book that discusses the science behind the beauty, using hundreds of photos to illustrate structural characteristics of snow crystals.
5. Snowflake Bentley by Jacqueline Briggs Martin
This is a wonderful children’s book about real-life scientist and pioneering snowflake photographer, Wilson A. Bentley (1865-1931). Bentley took over 5,000 snowflake photographs in his lifetime and published two books on the subject. This book, illustrated with colorful woodcuts, tells a story of determination and beauty.
4. Wandering Through Winter by Edwin Way Teale
The final installment in Teale’s American Seasons Series, this book chronicles a 20,000-mile auto tour by the author and his wife, beginning on December 21st (the Winter Solstice) on the Silver Strand of San Diego Bay, California, and ending in March at their Hampton, Connecticut, home, just as spring is beginning.
3. Sigurd F. Olson’s Wilderness Days by Sigurd F. Olson
Though this whole book is not about winter, it is a collection of Olson’s essays arranged by the seasons and illustrated with color photographs from Olson’s beloved Quetico-Superior region. The essay titles alone (“Coming of the Snow,” “Northern Lights,” “Dark House”) conjure beautiful images of winter in our northern region
2. Shadow of the Hunter: Stories of Eskimo Life by Richard K. Nelson
This glimpse into the life of Eskimos living in Wainwright, Alaska, is told in a series of monthly stories that revolve around hunting walrus, polar bear, and seals. My favorite is the chapter about November (“Nippivik Tatqiq: Moon of the Setting Sun”), a tense story about survival by a group of Eskimos who become stranded on pack ice that has drifted free of the mainland.
1. Owl Moon by Jane Yolen
This is my most favorite children’s book. It is a beautiful story about a little girl who goes into the winter woods with her father in search of owls. The little girl’s father teaches her to imitate the call of a Great Horned Owl, and together they experience the excitement of “talking” with an owl and having it come to them in the darkness.
It seems necessary to read or re-read some of these books in this age of global climate change. Even today, as I sit down to write, there is news about an increase in melting ice in the Antarctic. These times may leave some of us yearning for those winters of our childhood when snow fell from October through April, gathered into mountainous drifts, and left us with warm memories of skiing, sledding, snowshoeing, and ice skating. But winter is also a time for reading, so maybe you will find some new adventures in these books.
Nature Watch is brought to you by the Cable Natural History Museum. For 40 years, the Museum has served as a guide and mentor to generations of visitors and residents interested in learning to better appreciate and care for the extraordinary natural resources of the region. The Museum invites you to visit its facility in Cable at 43570 Kavanaugh Street or on the web at www.cablemuseum.org to learn more about exhibits and programs.
Friday, January 18, 2008
Friday, January 11, 2008
Red Squirrels
Nature Watch
January 11, 2008
By Susan Benson
Director of Education
Cable Natural History Museum
There is a red squirrel that I see every day in my yard. He sneaks out from the cover of the wood pile and makes his way toward the bird feeder. Now that there is snow, he is especially interesting to watch because he has created a series of tunnels that he uses to get from place to place. He will appear near the trees, disappear and then pop up near the bird feeder, disappear again and pop up at intervals between the bird feeder and the house where he feeds on the sunflower seeds that have fallen from the window feeders. He does all of this while keeping a wary eye out for the dog, who will chase him every chance she gets.
The red squirrel is not only the smallest North American squirrel, but it is the only one to display any seasonal change in its pelage, or fur. In summer, the red squirrel is a grayish color above and white below. A prominent black line along each side separates the gray from the white. In winter, the red squirrel takes on a broad rusty red stripe down its back, from head to tail, and the black lines along the sides disappear. It also grows tufts of hair on the top of each ear, which then disappear when the warmer months return.
Unlike many squirrels that hibernate for the winter, red squirrels are active all year long. They mate in February and March and 3-7 young are born in April and May. Young squirrels stay with the adult female until they are 6-7 weeks old, and they reach breeding age in their second year (about 10-12 months old). The average squirrel life span is 2-3 years. They are preyed upon by coyotes, owls, martens, fisher, bobcat, and large hawks, and they are often the unfortunate victims of failed attempts to cross roads.
Red squirrels are remarkable dispersal agents for many trees and fungi because they cache their food. Red squirrels feed on seeds found in jack pine and white spruce cones, as well as acorns and many types of mushrooms, including species that are poisonous to humans. During the late summer and fall, I have watched red squirrels throw pine cones from the tops of the trees, each one clunking onto the driveway. The squirrel then comes down and makes small piles of cones at the base of the tree, while others are taken and buried elsewhere, preferably in a moist location. Moist soil keeps the green, unopened cones from drying out, opening up, and spilling their seeds. Mushrooms are cut off at the base of the stem and put up in the crotch of a tree to dry.
How do they find their buried treasures? Research has shown that red squirrels use both memory and smell to relocate their food stores. In fact, red squirrels have demonstrated the ability to smell a cache of cones under 12 inches of snow! You can tell where they have been eating by the presence of middens. These are piles of cone scales and the cone “stalks” that are formed when the squirrel returns to eat seeds from the cones and discards the inedible parts in the process.
Another interesting food source for red squirrels is the sap of paper birch and sugar maple. The squirrels acquire this food in the spring when Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers have returned and are drilling new holes in paper birch trees. The squirrels themselves gnaw gashes in sapling sugar maples to get the sap running. They return later to lap up the sweet liquid, which, by virtue of being exposed to the air that evaporates the water content of sap, has increased its sugar content from a mere 2% to a energy-rich 55%. These gashes heal themselves by July, causing no permanent damage to the trees.
Of course, red squirrels can be troublesome if they get into your attic or other buildings. They will chew on wood and cardboard and anything else they can eat or use to build a nest, and they can be very defensive when cornered. Red squirrels are feisty creatures. The one that eats at my bird feeders often climbs up on to the bottom edge of the window and looks into the dining room. This causes the dog to jump up and run her nails down the glass and across the inside sill, a secondary form of squirrel damage, I suppose. Never the less, the red squirrel is a joy to watch in all seasons of the year, and I suspect the dog enjoys having this little bundle of energy around as much as I do.
Nature Watch is brought to you by the Cable Natural History Museum. For 40 years, the Museum has served as a guide and mentor to generations of visitors and residents interested in learning to better appreciate and care for the extraordinary natural resources of the region. The Museum invites you to visit its facility in Cable at 43570 Kavanaugh Street or on the web at www.cablemuseum.org to learn more about exhibits and programs.
January 11, 2008
By Susan Benson
Director of Education
Cable Natural History Museum
There is a red squirrel that I see every day in my yard. He sneaks out from the cover of the wood pile and makes his way toward the bird feeder. Now that there is snow, he is especially interesting to watch because he has created a series of tunnels that he uses to get from place to place. He will appear near the trees, disappear and then pop up near the bird feeder, disappear again and pop up at intervals between the bird feeder and the house where he feeds on the sunflower seeds that have fallen from the window feeders. He does all of this while keeping a wary eye out for the dog, who will chase him every chance she gets.
The red squirrel is not only the smallest North American squirrel, but it is the only one to display any seasonal change in its pelage, or fur. In summer, the red squirrel is a grayish color above and white below. A prominent black line along each side separates the gray from the white. In winter, the red squirrel takes on a broad rusty red stripe down its back, from head to tail, and the black lines along the sides disappear. It also grows tufts of hair on the top of each ear, which then disappear when the warmer months return.
Unlike many squirrels that hibernate for the winter, red squirrels are active all year long. They mate in February and March and 3-7 young are born in April and May. Young squirrels stay with the adult female until they are 6-7 weeks old, and they reach breeding age in their second year (about 10-12 months old). The average squirrel life span is 2-3 years. They are preyed upon by coyotes, owls, martens, fisher, bobcat, and large hawks, and they are often the unfortunate victims of failed attempts to cross roads.
Red squirrels are remarkable dispersal agents for many trees and fungi because they cache their food. Red squirrels feed on seeds found in jack pine and white spruce cones, as well as acorns and many types of mushrooms, including species that are poisonous to humans. During the late summer and fall, I have watched red squirrels throw pine cones from the tops of the trees, each one clunking onto the driveway. The squirrel then comes down and makes small piles of cones at the base of the tree, while others are taken and buried elsewhere, preferably in a moist location. Moist soil keeps the green, unopened cones from drying out, opening up, and spilling their seeds. Mushrooms are cut off at the base of the stem and put up in the crotch of a tree to dry.
How do they find their buried treasures? Research has shown that red squirrels use both memory and smell to relocate their food stores. In fact, red squirrels have demonstrated the ability to smell a cache of cones under 12 inches of snow! You can tell where they have been eating by the presence of middens. These are piles of cone scales and the cone “stalks” that are formed when the squirrel returns to eat seeds from the cones and discards the inedible parts in the process.
Another interesting food source for red squirrels is the sap of paper birch and sugar maple. The squirrels acquire this food in the spring when Yellow-bellied Sapsuckers have returned and are drilling new holes in paper birch trees. The squirrels themselves gnaw gashes in sapling sugar maples to get the sap running. They return later to lap up the sweet liquid, which, by virtue of being exposed to the air that evaporates the water content of sap, has increased its sugar content from a mere 2% to a energy-rich 55%. These gashes heal themselves by July, causing no permanent damage to the trees.
Of course, red squirrels can be troublesome if they get into your attic or other buildings. They will chew on wood and cardboard and anything else they can eat or use to build a nest, and they can be very defensive when cornered. Red squirrels are feisty creatures. The one that eats at my bird feeders often climbs up on to the bottom edge of the window and looks into the dining room. This causes the dog to jump up and run her nails down the glass and across the inside sill, a secondary form of squirrel damage, I suppose. Never the less, the red squirrel is a joy to watch in all seasons of the year, and I suspect the dog enjoys having this little bundle of energy around as much as I do.
Nature Watch is brought to you by the Cable Natural History Museum. For 40 years, the Museum has served as a guide and mentor to generations of visitors and residents interested in learning to better appreciate and care for the extraordinary natural resources of the region. The Museum invites you to visit its facility in Cable at 43570 Kavanaugh Street or on the web at www.cablemuseum.org to learn more about exhibits and programs.
Friday, January 4, 2008
Who's Awake
Nature Watch
January 4, 2008
By Susan Benson
Director of Education
Cable Natural History Museum
I returned home late one evening last week and was walking up to the house when I heard it. Actually, I felt it more than I heard it. There was a deep resonant sound that beat in my chest. I stopped. It was about 25-degrees, and my breath formed small clouds as I stood in the driveway listening. Then, from out of the forest came a deep voice: Who’s awake? Me too. A quieter, single-note response followed from a second bird and then the silence returned. The male owl repeated his question and answer: Who’s awake? Me too, and the female bird responded again with a single note. After listening for a few minutes, I went into the house. It was clear that this conversation between a pair of Great Horned Owls would continue for a while.
There are eight species of owls that nest in Wisconsin, but only about half of them can be found in Bayfield County. The Great Horned Owl is perhaps the best known of these because it is found in every Wisconsin county, and because it is the most “owl-looking” owl. Even if people don’t know this common species by name, they likely think of it whenever someone says the word “owl.”
Great Horned Owls are large birds, nearly two-feet tall, with yellow eyes and feather tufts that stick up on each side of the head like ears. In our area, only the Barred Owl comes closest in height, standing 21-inches high. But Great Horned Owls can be distinguished from Barred Owls by their eyes. Barred Owls are one of only four species that have dark brown eyes rather than the piercing, bright yellow eyes found on the Great Horned and 14 other owl species in North America.
I heard the Great Horned Owls calling that evening because these dark nights and cold days of winter are the beginning of the mating season for them and most other owls. Adults are calling back and forth to each other, looking for mates and cementing relationships. They will soon be building nests and settling down to lay eggs and raise young. In Wisconsin, eggs are laid as early as February 6, and the first young are hatching a little over one month later.
Habitat for the Great Horned Owl varies from the deciduous woodlands between open grass- and croplands, to gaps within the heavily wooded northern forest. They feed on a wide variety of small birds, mammals, and snakes, but their favorite foods are mice and cottontail rabbits. Nests are typically made of large sticks, but the owls do not build a nest themselves. Instead, they will take one over that has been built by some other bird, usually Red-tailed Hawks, but sometimes ravens or the occasional squirrel. The Red-tailed Hawk nests are particularly favored because the hawks migrate and do not return before owl nesting begins. Great Horned Owls also nest in tree cavities and stumps, and even occasionally (but rarely) on the ground.
Great Horned Owls, like most of their other relatives, are most active at night. With a bit of searching, you might find one roosting high in a tree during the day, often sitting right next to the trunk. I once found one in Ashland’s Prentice Park, perched among the bare branches of an aspen tree. I could see its yellow eyes clearly burning right into me even from the great distance that separated us.
If you are fascinated by these birds like I am, you might want to join me on one of the “Owl Prowls” sponsored by the Cable Natural History Museum. One evening a month from June through October, I take people out into the woods to call for owls. Usually we only see Barred Owls, but we are sometimes lucky enough to find a Great Horned Owl or perhaps one of the more uncommon species such as the tiny Northern Saw-whet Owl. Incidentally, if you would like to hear an exchange between a male and female Great Horned Owl like the one I heard a few nights ago, you can find a recording from California on online at www.owling.com/Great_Horned.htm#recordings. Click on the recording labeled “Silverado Canyon, California, October 2000” on the far right. You can also hear the Great Horned Owl and the other species found in Wisconsin at the Museum’s Owl Booth, which is part of our “Birds in Focus” exhibit. Stop in and listen to “who’s awake?” and “who cooks for you all?”!
Nature Watch is brought to you by the Cable Natural History Museum. For 40 years, the Museum has served as a guide and mentor to generations of visitors and residents interested in learning to better appreciate and care for the extraordinary natural resources of the region. The Museum invites you to visit its facility in Cable at 43570 Kavanaugh Street or on the web at www.cablemuseum.org to learn more about exhibits and programs.
January 4, 2008
By Susan Benson
Director of Education
Cable Natural History Museum
I returned home late one evening last week and was walking up to the house when I heard it. Actually, I felt it more than I heard it. There was a deep resonant sound that beat in my chest. I stopped. It was about 25-degrees, and my breath formed small clouds as I stood in the driveway listening. Then, from out of the forest came a deep voice: Who’s awake? Me too. A quieter, single-note response followed from a second bird and then the silence returned. The male owl repeated his question and answer: Who’s awake? Me too, and the female bird responded again with a single note. After listening for a few minutes, I went into the house. It was clear that this conversation between a pair of Great Horned Owls would continue for a while.
There are eight species of owls that nest in Wisconsin, but only about half of them can be found in Bayfield County. The Great Horned Owl is perhaps the best known of these because it is found in every Wisconsin county, and because it is the most “owl-looking” owl. Even if people don’t know this common species by name, they likely think of it whenever someone says the word “owl.”
Great Horned Owls are large birds, nearly two-feet tall, with yellow eyes and feather tufts that stick up on each side of the head like ears. In our area, only the Barred Owl comes closest in height, standing 21-inches high. But Great Horned Owls can be distinguished from Barred Owls by their eyes. Barred Owls are one of only four species that have dark brown eyes rather than the piercing, bright yellow eyes found on the Great Horned and 14 other owl species in North America.
I heard the Great Horned Owls calling that evening because these dark nights and cold days of winter are the beginning of the mating season for them and most other owls. Adults are calling back and forth to each other, looking for mates and cementing relationships. They will soon be building nests and settling down to lay eggs and raise young. In Wisconsin, eggs are laid as early as February 6, and the first young are hatching a little over one month later.
Habitat for the Great Horned Owl varies from the deciduous woodlands between open grass- and croplands, to gaps within the heavily wooded northern forest. They feed on a wide variety of small birds, mammals, and snakes, but their favorite foods are mice and cottontail rabbits. Nests are typically made of large sticks, but the owls do not build a nest themselves. Instead, they will take one over that has been built by some other bird, usually Red-tailed Hawks, but sometimes ravens or the occasional squirrel. The Red-tailed Hawk nests are particularly favored because the hawks migrate and do not return before owl nesting begins. Great Horned Owls also nest in tree cavities and stumps, and even occasionally (but rarely) on the ground.
Great Horned Owls, like most of their other relatives, are most active at night. With a bit of searching, you might find one roosting high in a tree during the day, often sitting right next to the trunk. I once found one in Ashland’s Prentice Park, perched among the bare branches of an aspen tree. I could see its yellow eyes clearly burning right into me even from the great distance that separated us.
If you are fascinated by these birds like I am, you might want to join me on one of the “Owl Prowls” sponsored by the Cable Natural History Museum. One evening a month from June through October, I take people out into the woods to call for owls. Usually we only see Barred Owls, but we are sometimes lucky enough to find a Great Horned Owl or perhaps one of the more uncommon species such as the tiny Northern Saw-whet Owl. Incidentally, if you would like to hear an exchange between a male and female Great Horned Owl like the one I heard a few nights ago, you can find a recording from California on online at www.owling.com/Great_Horned.htm#recordings. Click on the recording labeled “Silverado Canyon, California, October 2000” on the far right. You can also hear the Great Horned Owl and the other species found in Wisconsin at the Museum’s Owl Booth, which is part of our “Birds in Focus” exhibit. Stop in and listen to “who’s awake?” and “who cooks for you all?”!
Nature Watch is brought to you by the Cable Natural History Museum. For 40 years, the Museum has served as a guide and mentor to generations of visitors and residents interested in learning to better appreciate and care for the extraordinary natural resources of the region. The Museum invites you to visit its facility in Cable at 43570 Kavanaugh Street or on the web at www.cablemuseum.org to learn more about exhibits and programs.
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