January 29 Goodbye to a Friend I Never Met

I got word that the "Presidential Oak," a burr oak tree of some size and history, was taken down recently because it was hollow and likely to fall on passersby. The tree, estimated at over 300 years old, stood on Bascom Hill near the School for Public Affairs building, which was once home to several UW presidents. Even the two feet of stump remaining is amazing to see. Rumor has it a preschool class sang the tune "Let it Go" to the tree to say goodbye. What if 300 years ago, this was the average size for oaks, white pines, hemlocks, and maples across the state. Would we cut them all down? Will any trees celebrating their first birthday this year make it to 300? Would this tree have lived this long had it started growing in the year 1400?

January 28 Red Osier Dogwood Blooms

If you need a shot of color to brighten up your midwinter, now is the time to start experimenting with cuttings of early flowering plants, like willow and dogwood, aspen, and even red maple. If you cleanly cut a few young shoots, you may be able to coax these species into flowering with warm indoor temperatures in a jar of water. These early bloomers, and all plant species, prepared buds and flowers back in late summer, before going dormant for winter. This way as soon as the combination of more sunlight and warm enough temperatures arrive, they can immediately start growing. Competition for resources is just as fierce in the plant world as in the animal world. So go ahead, find out which trees are ready for spring. 

January 27 All Quiet on the South Shore

Today was white and silent and offered time to think. Walking on the Lakeshore Path on campus I watched as students walked past over Lake Mendota ice. Breezes ruffled the remaining leaves on a few red oaks. I stopped to think about all of the sights and sounds these slow growing sentinels have seen and heard over the years. Oaks are a stubborn sort - hanging on to their leaves through the winter, acting as a bridge from one growing season to another. This tree knows what Picnic Point looks like in all lighting conditions, weather, and seasonal variety. I appreciate that wisdom, in a tree.

January 26 Overdose

This is not going to be an answer, but a question about human versus plant and aquatic life rights. Americans put over 15 million tons of sodium chloride on pavement every year. 1 teaspoon can pollute 5 gallons of lake water beyond legal concentrations. I read that the amount of salt needed for 1000 square feet of a surface is under 4 pounds. It is more than likely that whatever goes on streets will end up in sewers, and then the Yahara Watershed. Another key fact here is that rock salt only melts ice down to 15 degrees Fahrenheit (freezing point depression, woooo chemistry!). Beyond that, it no longer works. So use sand instead. And, if you want to prevent ice most effectively, shovel off your snow before anyone has time to walk through it. My sidewalk routinely gets covered in rock salt, per above, and I'm going to start sweeping it up once it's clear that the impending threat of ice has passed.

January 25 That Loveable Bird

If anyone needs a friend this winter, set up a bird feeder outside your window and wait a few hours. You are likely to see the black-capped chickadee (Poecile atricapillus) the same day. These feisty birds seem to enjoy themselves on a snowy morning while they go about surviving the northwoods winter. Weighing in at about 11 grams, chickadees may add as much as 10% of their body weight during daytime feeding, and then shiver it back off by the next day. They also may lower their core body temperature by as much as 20 degrees during the coldest nights to conserve precious body fat. I heard the chickadee's two note "cheeseburger," or, "hey sweetie" mating song for the first time back on December 28. It became more regular the second week of January, and is now in full chorus. While warblers vacation in the tropics and we humans spend most of our time indoors, chickadees are out there with fluffed feathers, singing songs, showing us winter is more fun than we think.

January 24 A Big Brown Bat

At an environmental education conference at Treehaven, UW Stevens Point's famed research station in Tomahawk, I participated in a workshop that was all about bats. I will relate some amazing facts, and some bad news, about Wisconsin's mosquito control animals. There are 8 species of bats in the state, with little brown and big brown bats being the most common. Bats have a 3:1 wingspan to body height ratio, meaning my batwings would be 18 feet wide! The wings are made of a skin membrane that connects the fingers, but the thumbs are free to hook into trees and walls for climbing. Bats also have huge ears, strong nighttime eyesight - they're far from blind - and a pouch of skin between their feet that they use to scoop up insects in flight. The only flying mammal in the world faces a big challenge right now as white-nose syndrome spreads west, north, and south. White-nose syndrome wakes up hibernating bats before winter ends, and they use up more energy and starve because they cannot find enough food. It has already claimed 5.7 million bats in North America. This week reports say that 2 eastern pipistrelle bats in Dane County were found to have the disease but were not showing symptoms. We need bats to keep insect populations balanced, so I hope we can contain the syndrome.

January 23 Feeding Frenzy

Warm temperatures this morning led to exciting bird activity at Aldo Leopold Nature Center. In the crabapple fields, dozens of robins, house sparrows, tree sparrows, juncos, and northern cardinals (Cardinalis cardinalis) were at work eating apples and prairie seeds, and robins were digging through leaves to find insects and invertebrates. Even more exciting were the mating songs coming from the beaks of robins, purple finches, and bright red male cardinals. I first heard cardinals songs two days ago, and today was the first robin song for me. I watched this female, busy looking for food but occasionally stopping to listen to the songs. Maybe she's interested?

January 22 Sumac Berries

On the path out to Picnic Point is a stand of staghorn sumac (Rhus typhina) that is typically a hangout for winter birds. This small shrubby tree can be identified by its big velvety twigs and buds (hence the staghorn title) and fuzzy red berries that hang on into winter. Sumacs are dynamite spreaders, shooting stems up out of their own roots to create clones that grow up in bunches. If left to do their thing, they can eventually dominate a prairie and shade out undergrowth. Some trees in this patch have no berries left at all while many appear to have almost all of them. Seems like the robins and chickadees and red-bellied woodpeckers know a ripe berry pod from an unripe one. Will there be any berries left by the spring equinox?

January 21 Smarter Lights

This is what it looks like outside my door at 10:00 PM on a winter's night. Very unfortunately, most of our streetlights and houselights are designed to emit light in all directions. This has the effect of sending light generally into the sky, and into people's eyes as they drive, bike, or walk down the street, actually reducing our ability to see. The brightness is stronger in winter, as snow reflects and spreads it even further. Studies of the ecological consequences of light pollution have been growing in number and show that our night lights create complications for a wide variety of insects, birds, reptiles, and mammals. A major first improvement is to replace fixtures with ones that point only down, illuminating just the street or sidewalks we travel on instead of yards, buildings, bedroom windows, and the night sky. More on this topic later.

January 20 Garlic Mustard Appears

My Winter Tracking students and I sighted a green, growing plant today at the Aldo Leopold Nature Center. Garlic mustard (Alliaria petiolata) is a fast moving invasive plant with this distinct basal rosette pattern. It grows in all but 4 Wisconsin counties, and prefers a little shade and will survive in most forested areas. It is super easy to pull out - roots and all - in the spring before the plants go to seed. Also, the young leaves make a tasty pesto, so I've heard.

January 19 Bagels for Breakfast

Our most common urban mammal, the gray squirrel (Sciuris carolinensis) is certainly pleased with the present January thaw. Next week we get to the start of mating season for several mammals, including red foxes, wolves, beavers, lynxes, and red and gray squirrels. I may have seen a few grays chasing each other yesterday, and wouldn't be surprised if the mating season is already underway given the nice weather. If so, maybe this is a male bringing a delicious present to woo potential mates. Or, more likely, I interrupted its feeding and it took to the trees to get rid of me.  

January 18 Meltdown

Temperatures rose into the 40s early today and street asphalt was mostly dry by 10:00 AM. I was on a run through Mt. Horeb and saw these three snow people. The presence of snowmen means it's warm enough for packing snow, which binds together because it's wetter as it melts. The "normal" annual snowfall for Madison over the past 30 years is 50.9 inches. Remember though that it's more likely that the total will not be 50 inches: over the past 15 winters, Madison has seen snowfall totals between 29 and 102 inches, and only 1/3 of those years saw totals close to "average." Right now we have 8 inches for our winter total. We will need a record February to get to 50.9.

January 17 Buck Wild

I have seen many grey squirrels and rabbits this winter, but today at Pheasant Branch we watched a white-tailed buck spring to life out of its hiding place and scamper out into the wetlands. With mating season long past, this deer is concerned with conserving energy and finding enough shrubbery and saplings to last the winter. In a about a month, look for many bucks to shed antlers, with most off by the end of February. We also saw or heard 18 bird species total, including hordes of cardinals and tree sparrows. Birds are still congregated around small open springs and today enjoyed the upper 30s.

January 16 Robins Here to Stay

During mild winters, some American robins (Turdus migratorius) may stay put in southern Wisconsin. It seems to me that with our current combo of very little snow cover, patches of open water, and many days with warmer than average temperatures, at least one small flock of robins is content to winter in the Lakeshore Nature Preserve. I have seen at least two of them there each week since mid-December, and there seem to be at least a dozen around. I do believe that most robins did migrate - I saw many flocking up in October and gorging themselves - and those return around March 10 on average. If winter continues petering out, I would expect them back sooner. But maybe winter is just toying with us?

January 15 Life on the Beech

Our January thaw began today and as I rode down the sloshy pavement on Arboretum Drive, I stopped to take in this big American Beech (Fagus grandifolia). You can identify this slow growing, long living tree by its smooth gray bark (some say it looks like an elephant ear) and pale yellow leaves that hang on in winter. Madison is on the edge of the edge of the beech's western range - it is common in Michigan, Ohio, and throughout the northeast. Beeches produce edible nuts that mammals and birds appreciate, but fare poorly in urban soils, which are fairly poor. Head to the Arboretum if you want to see the beech.

January 14 The Turkey Tree

The wild turkey (Meleagris gallopavo) is one of the more familiar residents of the UW Arboretum. The population has been counted at between 50 and 100 birds - difficult to pinpoint because animals don't respect property boundaries when they are counted. Wild turkeys were abundant during European land grabbing days, but had been completely extirpated from the whole state of Wisconsin by 1881. In fact, turkeys were only successfully reintroduced in 1976, and the state population has boomed since: hunters harvested 42,600 turkeys in spring of 2012. This means that for 100 years, there were no turkeys, and during the past 40 years, turkeys have proliferated into the hundreds of thousands. Getting back to the Arb, today the resident flock were gulping down crabapples while stumbling across tiny branches. They are the goofiest of birds. I do like having them around, though I wonder what other species they may have crowded out since being reintroduced.

January 13 The Stars of Winter

This morning big fluffy snowflakes fell lazily to the ground, laying a sparkling blanket on top of our few inches of sugar snow. At Hoyt Park, sunlight poked through the trees and pointed out the larger undamaged flakes. These are the most well known flakes, stellar dendrites, and the ones with more horizontal branching might be fernlike dendrites, which are the largest snowflakes with a diameter of 5 mm. Depending on humidity and temperature, snowflakes may form in an incredible variety of shapes, including prisms, plates, columns, needles, stars, dendrites, triangular crystals, irregular crystals, rosettes, or graupel, just to name the basics. Next time it snows, take a magnifying class outside and see if you can identify the snowflake species.

January 12 Red Bellied Sounds

A short trip to Hoyt Park this morning brought me past a new sound. It was a rising "churrr" coming from high up on the hillside. I searched for a while, before finally spotting this red-bellied woodpecker (Melanerpes carolinus). I watched as it stretched its neck up and down while making the sound at regular intervals. A second churrr started a little further away, and this bird stopped to listen once in a few churrs. My bird guide has since told me that this is the red-belly's mating call. The males have red from beak to the back of the neck, while females have gray foreheads. Expect red-bellies, and all woodpeckers, to stay active now through the winter, as mating season heats up!

January 11 Crows in Snows

I'll admit that I didn't travel far today - I may have watched a lot of sports - but on a walk I again saw crows doing curious things and stopped to watch. This one was on a roof, beaking into the gutters and definitely eating snow. Was it eating other things that it had cached in the gutter weeks or months ago? The Corvid family of birds (including ravens and blue jays) are experts are hiding away food and then finding it later on, as long as another corvid hasn't found it first. This crow flew down to the front lawn, still searching, and became vocal.  After a long while I finally looked across the street and saw three of its "friends," dangling from the gutters, pulling snow up into their beaks. Maybe it just wanted to introduce them to me.

January 10 Winter and Me

It's been wicked cold for two weeks now and it feels like winter has finally set in. As a historical-minded human, living in 2015, I often wonder how changes in our lifestyles affect our relationship to the season, and therefore our overall health. On the one hand, heated shelters, hot showers, safe stoves, and an abundance of food makes winter almost an afterthought my extremely privileged human psyche. I do not worry about freezing, starving, or finding shelter to make it through the night.  However, if my mind and body no longer need to adapt to 6 months of seasonal change, because I can live indoors in perpetual summer, am I missing part of the natural cycle of a year that makes me human? What about having artificial light to extend winter days until 10:00 or 11:00 at night?  It seems that our impact on the natural world has the greatest impact on our own lives, especially now, in winter.

January 9 An "Amazing Bunch" of Crows

Crows (Corvus brachychyncos), like other darkly colored animals, have a bad reputation. Poets once referred to a group of these incredible birds as a "Murder of Crows," noting an imagined propensity to do evil. On the contrary, crows are unbelievably intelligent, finding anything and everything that is edible in our cities. I watched this group - which totaled at least 30 - flying back and forth over downtown Madison during sunset. They typically roost in large groups of 100 or more (and up to 2 million!) at night, which they do for any of several reasons: strength against predators, because they all go to the "best spot," or because they can find food easier in large groups. I'm glad we have some crows to keep us company in winter.

January 8 Quick Frozen Critters

Short Tailed Shrew

Deer Mouse

After an inspiring documentary video about Jens Jensen, famous Chicago landscape artist, I tried to take a stroll around the Arboretum trails. Snow whipped through the trees and the wind made it hard to see much, but once again, house sparrows seemed to be unphased. On trails heading back through the Curtis Prairie, I saw a tiny foot poking out of the snow, which belonged to the short-tailed shrew (Blarina brevicauda) above. This "smammal" has a long nose, slate gray fur, and a tail that's maybe an inch long. A few steps further along, I noticed another dark spot under the fresh snow and it was this deer mouse (Peromyscus maniculatus), identifiable by it's large ears, large eyes, deer-colored fur, and 7-8 inch length, tail included. Examining animal bodies allows good practice in identification. In various books,  I've read that up to 50% of all newborn mammals (and birds) do not survive their first year of life. Winter has a strong say in this, for sure.

January 7 Winter Waves

Picnic Point has quickly become one of my favorite places to see, and today only one other brave soul went out to see it during the afternoon minutes I was there. I did scare up a few robins, goldfinches, and house sparrows on the way out to the point, but nothing looked very lively. The west winds were blowing snowy waves across Lake Mendota, which made the lake come alive as the sun lit it up while lowering onto the horizon. It was cold and beautiful.

January 6 First Good Tracks

Today was an intense day of winter. Bright blue sky, trees lit up with snow, and winds that blew right through mittens. I was excited to take an early walk around the nature center, to see fresh animal tracks all over the trails. Most common were eastern cottontail rabbits' (Sylivilagus floridanus) feet, using the trails like aisles at a grocery store as they sized up prairie plants that are still holding on to a few seeds or tasty stems. "Bunnies" stay active throughout the winter, eating a lot of food at dawn and dusk, but staying still most of the time to conserve energy. I know that there are several extensive networks of groundhog tunnels at the nature center, and I bet cottontails are squatting in some of these this week to escape the wicked winds.

January 5 Lake Mendota Frozen?

Another visit to the Lakeshore Nature Preserve today, and as I looked out over the lake I could see that the northern 1/3 was still moving water. I wondered how late this is in the winter for Mendota to still be wet, so I checked the UW's Climatology website to find out. They have compiled data on Madison's lake ice since 1852, and so the median freeze date over that stretch for Mendota is December 20th. Excitingly, to maintain consistent data, they try to use the same methods used by researchers in the 1800s to determine when Lake Mendota is considered "frozen." According to those methods, Mendota was frozen on January 2 this year (12 days later than the median), because that was the first full day that a boat could not be rowed from Picnic Point, seen above, to Maple Bluff across the lake, which is a route that the early Climate profs used to take a case of beer to their friends. I kid you not!

January 4 Snow, Finally!

Today we visited the Pheasant Branch Conservancy, interested in finding a lot of different bird species. A few steps down the trail, we spooked a great-horned owl off its perch and it flew away through the snowy aspens. We saw eighteen bird species in all, but I also noticed some plant life that "stuck out" in this all-white landscape. This is the winter look of the wild cucumber (Echinocystis lobata), a tall viny plant with star-shaped leaves and these spiky seed pods, which are said to look like little watermelons in the spring.

January 3 A Green Stranger

We went on a walk to Hoyt Park today as snow floated down between the oaks. We watched as a dozen woodpeckers got busy searching for food, and I saw the color green! Off trail a ways I found several plants with still-green leaves poking up out of the snow. The leaves were between 2 and 5 inches long, and some of the plants had up to ten leaves. I don't yet know this plant, but am intrigued as to why and how its leaves are still green on January 3rd. Has it been photosynthesizing recently? Or are its leaves green all winter although dormant? I will keep my eyes open for this plant in spring so I can identify it and answer these questions.

January 2 Oak Leaf Imprint on the Ice

During our Snow Science vacation day camp, the students and I spent a lot of time exploring the new ice on our pond. There were plenty of air bubble swirls and frosty sticks and even a minnow trapped in between layers! Maybe coolest of all were imprints left by leaves that students pulled off the surface. Almost like a crayon rubbing except raised up above off of the ice, this swamp white oak print caught my eye more than once. Even without snow, winter is still full of impressive secrets waiting to be uncovered.

January 1 New Ice for the New Year

I walked out on Lake Mendota on the isthmus side of the Lakeshore Nature Preserve to see how thick the new ice is and I couldn't stop looking at these amazing bouquets of bubbles, scattered and suspended in the ice. What we call "black ice" is just water that froze with very little air content and so is highly transparent. Usually, snow falls on frozen lakes throughout the winter, covering the ice with frozen air which gives it its usual white look and also insulates the ice. This part of the lake must have been a little choppy as it froze to produce these air pockets. It's ready again for ice skating, and nice to look at, too.

December 31 Winter Maker Commands the Sky

The Ojibwe call Orion the winter maker, rising into view on November nights and lording over the rest of the sky. By now, Orion is visible just after sunset until about 2:00 AM. Look for it in the southeast, with the three stars of its belt being an easy identifier. The star in Orion's right shoulder, Betelgeuse, is the 8th brightest star in the night sky, and appears red because its a supergiant set to supernova soon. That means it's likely to explode in the next million years. Rigel, the left foot, is the 6th brightest star in the night sky, and 40,000 times as bright as the sun!

December 30 The Hawk's Body

I see red-tailed hawks (Buteo jamaicensis) almost every time I ride along the Capital City Bike Path between Olin Park and the Beltline. This evening, I stopped riding when I saw a shadow off the trail and was shocked to find this hawk in the grass. Could it have died from a virus or some other illness? Did it not eat enough food over the last few weeks and found a comfortable place here to rest? Was it clipped by an automobile crossing John Nolen Drive? I was too cold to linger and give it a close examination, but I do notice that its eye has already been eaten by a scavenger. I assume that when I pass by it next, many of this hawk's nutrients will have been recycled into several different birds and mammals.