Red Wing Nature Notes

During the past two or three weeks, I have observed no less than a dozen road killed skunks along the highway. This is most unusual given the fact that the skunk population has been very low in recent years. I’m wondering what causes such fluctuations in numbers? Possibly disease?

Turkey vultures appear to have left the area for warmer wintering grounds. I haven’t seen any since October 25th.

Tuesday morning I received a phone call from our neighbor Jack Woods letting me know that a big flock of white pelicans had landed on Wacouta bay just below his house. By the time I grabbed my camera and walked across the road, the pelicans were positioning themselves into a line for feeding. They swim in formation and gradually head for shallow water chasing fish ahead of them. Near shore , they tighten ranks and begin to feed by scooping up 3 gallons of water in their large bill. After closing their bill, they tip their head sideways to let the water drain out leaving the fish behind. It is quite a sight to watch.

Later in the morning, my daughter Ena from Bergen, Norway and I went on a nice long hike at Frontenac State Park. This beautiful morning presented us with many interesting observations of which I will mention three:

1. Fresh buck scrape from a whitetail deer. Weeks before the rut begins, bucks make scrapes by pawing the ground creating bare patches. The scrape is then marked by their own scent leaving a calling card for does, and reinforcing his social order.

2. Bright red oak leaves against the steel blue sky. These oaks provide most of the remaining color in the park. Many of these trees will retain their leaves throughout the winter season.

3. We observed numerous wild coffee plants that are sometimes called Feverwort (Triosteum perfoliatum). These plants have yellow/orange berries with 3 seeds inside each berry. Years ago, people would roast the seeds and use as a substitute for coffee. The roots have also been used by Native Americans to treat fevers.

Friday morning around 8:30 a.m. I had an eerie experience. In the past two years I have seen coyotes two or three times. Any time I have visually encountered a coyote it has been brief, a few seconds at most. I think however, on any given night, anyone trying to hear coyotes around here has a very good chance of success. Most commonly a lone coyote passing by in the dark stops and howls or barks as if to say to others ranging around in the dark, ” I’m over here, see you in a few minutes”. Other times members of a pack will bark and yip setting up a racket that sounds like uncontrolled conversation before a meeting. More rarely, on a beautful night, a large gathering will bark, yip and howl sometimes making unimaginable noises, maybe just for the joy of making noise. I have always heard this in nice weather at dusk or in the night. They may be easy to hear, but for the most part these common animals are invisible.

The other morning as I mentioned, at about 8:30 I was outside on my driveway waiting to meet someone. It was crisp and clear with fall colors past their peak but still beautiful. Across a small valley from our house is a corn field and beyond that is highway 58 south of Red Wing. As I stood appreciating the morning I heard the sirens of several emergency vehicles in the distance growing louder as they approached on the highway. With the sound of the sirens the rest of the world seemed even more silent. I stood alone, the brown corn across the way quietly soaking up the sun.

As the sirens drew nearer a howl sudenly rose from the corn nearby. Then the first howl was joined by another howl and another and another. Then in the distance I heard more howls. Then as the sirens faded down the road the howls stopped one by one until the corn again stood quietly in the sun.

Suddenly I realized instead of standing alone with the corn I was standing with perhaps as many as a dozen coyotes near me. I wonder what they were doing, mid morning, out in the corn. I wonder if they are always there or in the woods near the house, smelling, hearing and watching us go about our business. We must be blind not to see them more often.

I have some short recordings of our invisible friends gathered in the last few weeks. I have yet to record one of the wild howling parties. I want to get some better recordings and some photos. When I figure out how to do this I will post them. Here is what I have so far. Any clunking or scraping you hear in the recordings is the opening of windows or doors or perhaps me walking through the grass to hear better. To really hear these you’ll probably have to turn the volume up on your computer. These recordings are all recent, but you might notice there’s only one with crickets. That was before the hard frost last week that must have ended the cricket season.

coyote_close_pack_and_cows_far I was wide awake as soon as this guy started right outside our bedroom window. You can hear the pack in the distance responding and you can hear what I imagine is an unhappy cow that sounds like he is near the pack. There are four close-up sets of barking and not much after that. There’s not much to hear in the second half of this recording.

coyote_packThis recording has crickets in the background. One coyote is yipping like he’s hurt, but they do that all of the time.

coyote_pack_closer A few desperate sounding howls and yipping in the background that gradually fades away.

lone_coyote This one sounds smaller and a little higher pitched and in more of a hurry to call than the other lone coyote.

I’ll also share a couple of leaf photos that seem common enough now, but I figure they’ll be nice to look back on in February.

Today it snowed for most of the afternoon, the first snow of the year. The snow is just in the sky, its too warm for it to collect on the ground. Our high tempereature of the day in the mid forties occurred in the morning. As a cold front moves in it is very windy, the crows flap hard and long to make headway up wind and shoot past flying downwind. Anything not tied down is taken by the wind. Our trash can blew over even though it was tucked behind the garage. I think of Piglet in Winnie the Pooh. “It’s a blustery day, a very blustery day.”

The recently planted grass in our yard is still green and a flock of Robins is searching for worms. The lady bugs that were thick in the air and on the sides of the garage and house are in hiding waiting for a warm day that could be as far away as next spring.

I wanted to mention this earlier, but forgot. If you have an older house or a loosely fitting door you can end up with lots and lots of lady bugs(asian beetles) in your house. It can be hard to catch them all with a vacum. Even in our new house we get quite a few when the door is opened or closed.

A couple of years ago I found a plan on the internet for a lady bug trap that uses a black light and milk jugs. I have made several. With some fussing around I have learned a few things.

About the trap:

White tagboard dusted with baby powder hangs in an “x” below a black light. The tag board is very bright white in the dark. Under the tagboard is a funnel made from a milk jug with with the bottom cut off. The jug is covered with with black duct tape so that it doesn’t glow in the dark. A second milk Jug hangs right side up below the first. The two jugs are connected at the neck. The second jug collects the bugs.

How it works:

Lady bugs see the bright light in the dark and flay towards it. When they hit the tagboard they can’t hang on to it because it is dusted with baby powder, You hear a satisfying “thunk” as they fall into the jug. You can catch many, many lady bugs in your house in a single night.

More:

Don’t bother to put the trap outside. You end up catching a bunch of moths and not so many lady bugs.

Make sure your trap is the only light source.

Black light works much, much better than a regular light.

Make sure the jugs are firmly together as it makes a mess if your trap falls apart spreading lady bugs and baby powder across the floor.

You can catch many more lady bugs if you hang the trap at night and then disturb groups of bugs with a broom. Once airborne they will go right to the light. Even if you leave them alone you’ll catch quite a few.

Last Friday a friend and I canoed the lower section of the Cannon river from Harlisstown (highway 61) to the confluence with the Vermillion river. This part of the river is travelled less than any other and rightly so. Along this section of the river, one encounters several areas where fallen trees and logjams make paddling quite challenging. I prefer to canoe this section only in low water and slower current. High water levels could make this trip very dangerous. Our recent paddle provided us with several interesting wildlife observations. These included:

1. Several large flocks of robins feeding on a variety of berries along the river’s edge. One of the more common foods available were the dark blue berries of the invasive buckthorn shrub.

2. Large flocks of common grackles were very noisy in the tree tops. They commonly spend the nights roosting in the trees in the bottomlands. By mid-morning, they leave these roosting sites and head for nearby fields and open areas to feed.
To attract more species of birds to our home feeding station, I scatter some seeds on our patio. In the last couple days, most of that seed has been cleaned up by the hungry grackles. I might have to curtail such feeding until these birds move out on their southerly migration.

3. Several mature and immature bald eagles sitting in trees along the river were also observed.

4. In the Red Wing area seeing ospreys is quite rare. We were fortunate to spot two this morning. One treated us to quite a display of areal acrobatics. As it was circling over our canoe at a height of no more than 50 feet above the tree tops, it all of a sudden performed four consecutive cart wheels.
In the spring, I have observed bald eagles doing this maneuver at much greater heights as a part of their courtship ritual. Why this osprey performed this routine at this time of year, I have no idea.

5. Another exciting observation was a small flock of six shorebirds known as Greater Yellowlegs. These slender elegant wading birds are found in a variety of shallow-water habitats. They feed actively, even running after small fish and bob the head and body emphatically when alarmed.

6. Our last two miles on the Cannon were through open marshland. We observed a female northern harrier soaring very low to the ground in search of any available prey. They are easily identified by a white rump and sometimes are referred to as the cottontail of the marsh.

7. We are getting to the time of the fall when beaver are beginning to store up food supplies for the long winter. These supplies are cached near the lodge and are known as feed piles. This food is comprised of live green willow branches that are available for the cutting along the riverbanks. We observed several well used trails leading from willow thickets to the edge of the river.
The final observation that I will share on this post is a fresh beaver scent mount marking its territory. These mounds are started by placing mud and leaves in a clump at a prominent spot along the riverbank. Then a yellowish substance known as castoreum is secreted from a scent gland near the tail and deposited on the mound. Fresh scent mounds are a sure sign beaver are in the area.

With the steady rain and strong wind today, it appears that this past weekend was probably the peak color for this fall. Rattlesnake bluff at the east end of Wacouta pond was about as colorful as I have seen it in several years.

My hike at Frontenac State Park on Saturday also exhibited a wide range of colors including the red of sumac, orange of maples and bright yellow of aspen. One colorful sight that caught my eye was looking into the morning sun as it shone through scarlet sumac leaves and goldenrod flowers that had gone to seed.

On my drive down to the park Saturday morning, I came across a fresh road kill deer along highway 61 that had already caught the attention of a hungry turkey vulture. It is about the time that turkey vultures leave this area for warmer climes. Later in the day, I observed numerous vultures circling high overhead as they caught the rising thermals.

One week ago, the farmer who rents the field adjacent to our house came in with a crew and combined his mature crop of soybeans. For the past 38 years that we have lived here, crops have been rotated every other year between soybeans and corn. This year we noticed that as soon as the beans had been harvested, another crew came in and began to work up the field. Soon after, a third crew appeared and began to plant winter wheat. As of today, the wheat had germinated and is starting to appear above ground.

Another interesting thing that we observed during the planting process were flocks of herring gulls feeding on worms that the plows had exposed. These large white birds are the largest of the gulls and are very opportunistic scavengers.

The final observation that I will report on this week was spotting numerous wooly bears moving across the hiking trails in the park. They are commonly observed moving on nice warm days during the fall. These are the larval stage of the Isabella tiger moth. According to superstitution, the amount of black in the caterpillars bristle coating forecasts the severity of the upcoming winter. Actually the coloration indicates how near the caterpillars is to full growth before autumn weather stimulates it to seek a warm shelter. It survives the long winter by producing its own anti-freeze with which their cells are infused.

Today I came upon all kinds of ?mushrooms and am posting photos. I hope that someone who knows might comment or post and share some knowledge. The one that I can name is the giant puff ball. I saw several today slightly smaller than a soccer ball, growing both in grassy fields and in the woods.

 ?

I also came upon bittersweet which has yellow berries that pop open to reveal orange insides. Â ?Just a few are showing orange now.

 ?

 ?

 ?

Some time in the last week the bug invasion started in earnest. We get both box elder bugs and asian lady beetles. When the nights turn chilly and the days are warm and sunny the air is filled both kinds of bugs. The asian lady beetles are most annoying. They cover our house and a dozen or so come in each time the door is opened. Once in the house they are attracted by lights or they clump together in in the corner where the wall meets the ceiling. If left alone they leave specks on the walls. If swatted they leave smears on the walls. They do bite, but its not even as bad as a mosquito and doesn’t leave a mark.

The asian lady beetles will work their way through any crack or into your house ?through bathroom exhaust vents. They seem attracted to cracks or bright light. Sometimes they will leave on their own accord if you crack your window open durring the day when its lighter outside than in.

You can also build a trap for them using a black light, milk jugs and baby powder. The traps work, but they are messy, unwieldly contraptions. The box elder bugs don’t get in our house and I’ve found evidence that mice eat them in the winter. One of our dogs likes to eat them as well.