Red Wing Nature Notes

With the snow and extremely cold weather this past week, we have had an abundance of bird activity in our yard and and at our feeding station. The list of birds includes the downy, hairy, red bellied and pileated woodpeckers, cardinals, mourning doves, chickadees, house finches, slate colored juncos, goldfinches, blue jays, tree sparrows, starlings and crows.

This increase of activity has also attracted predatory birds like sharp-shinned(top photo) and cooper’s hawks. We have witnessed these hawks taking downy woodpeckers and juncos in their sharp talons. In some cases, the hawks cause the birds to fly into a window and become stunned. This makes the disabled bird easy prey.

Unfortunately the increase in bird activity has also attracted two different free roaming house cats to get in on the action. According to the Fish and Wildlife Service Bird Management Office, a recent study by Dr. Stanley Temple an ornithologist at the University of Wisconsin estimates that several million songbirds are killed each year by roaming house cats in Wisconsin alone. I wish cat owners would understand the damage caused to bird population by letting their cats run loose.

Thirteen thousand years ago large mammals, including the woolly mammoth and man, became extinct on the continent of North America. There is a new theory about this extinction.

It was a cold spell, they say. A cold spell brought on by a minor meteor shower. The theory says that meteors, or perhaps comets made it through the earth’s protective atmosphere without completely burning up and hit North America. The impacts raised dust and caused the weather to get really cold for a while.

The scientific details are interesting, but an average guy like me is more apt to wonder what that might have been like. A cold snap that endured through summer, maybe many summers. Cold that continued so long humans and animals could not survive. I wonder about trees and plants. Which ones were able to wake after the extended winter?

It’s cold this morning, but not a record. Twenty four below, on our thermometer, is still thirteen degrees warmer than the record for human memory set in the 1880’s.

How would we do today if winter decided to stay a few extra years? What if summer still came, but just wasn’t warm enough or long enough for the grasses to produce seed. What if all of the mice died? And the song birds? The larger animals would surely follow. And what of us in our warm houses? How would that play out?

The cold sun rises this morning and a little cloud of exhaust from our furnace blows by my window on a northwest breeze. The wind has hardened pristine drifts of snow which lay untouched outside. The patterns the wind has made are unbroken by any track. The sky is blue and wide open, unblinking.

The kids will stay home because school is closed for the cold. We will put out fresh seed this morning for the birds. After work today I will go out in it.

As I mentioned in an earlier post, I had observed seven trumpeter swans while cross country skiing in the backwaters at the Head of Lake Pepin on December 12th. Since that time, I have received several reports from other local birding enthusiasts of similar sightings of these large swans from the high bridge downstream to the head of the lake. This includes sightings near the Izaak Walton League on December 28th as a part of the Audubon Christmas Bird Count.

Yesterday, Kathy and I took Alice Tackaberry a long time birder from Frontenac up to Hudson, WI to see the many trumpeter swans that winter there at the confluence of the Willow and St. Croix Rivers. The photos included in this post came from yesterday’s adventure.

Interestingly enough the Minneapolis Tribune reported in today’s paper that several swans have suffered injuries and lead poisoning after the DNR halted feeding efforts at two wintering flocks of trumpeter swans. One flock of an estimated number of 2000 is near Monticello and the other is along the Ottertail River near Fergus Falls. The DNR and other wildlife officials have feared an outbreak of disease in the heavy concentration of birds. Unfortunately many birds did not leave and turned up with lead poisoning from eating decades-old lead shot from nearby wetlands. DNR Nongame Program Supervisor Carrol Henderson says that the state has resumed their feeding program.

A final observation for this post involves some very unusual behavior of a red-bellied woodpecker that frequents our home feeding station. While two red-bellied woodpeckers land and feed from our suet feeder, another one feeds exclusively off the ground. It spends a considerable amount of time attempting to crack open sunflower seeds and splitting whole kernels of corn to bite size. Does anyone have an explanation for this feeding activity?

Sorry, no photos, it’s dark out.

Click on these sound files to hear them:

footsteps_in_ice_covered_snow

coyotes_1-6-2009(The ones that didn’t get shot).

Around 8 pm on January the sixth. It’s about nineteen degrees. There is a big moon, not full yet. When I arrived home a little while ago I noticed a couple of coyotes barking and howling nearby as I went from my car to the house. Once I was in the house , I took my coat off and the dogs greeted me, then there was relative silence in the house. I could distinctly hear more coyotes outside again.

Sam and I stepped outside to better hear the concert. At first it was quiet and then one nearby let go a howl. My son said he could hear footsteps in the crusty snow as something went from the edge of the field into the woods. More silence, then the cracking sound of the ice armor on the snow as it contracted in the cold of evening.

As we stood more howling came from the south. It sounded like lots of animals. We stood on the front porch and smiled quietly at each other. Then from the north came a solitary string of howls. Then we were cold and went in.

I found my memo recorder, put on warmer clothes and headed outside. To me it’s a beautiful night. To the coyotes having just weathered multiple events of below zero, high winds and rain it must be extrordinary, a cause for celibration.

Instead of howls I hear volleys of gunshots, from the north. There is silence except for the ocassional sound of a car on highway 58. As I stand wondering if it took all of those shots to kill one coyote a horned owl begins to hoot. I walk east through the field in an attempt to get closer so that I might record them. I have heard this many times since the last week of December and I think it must always be the same pair.
There is a clear tenor hoo hoo, hoo hoo hoo eventually answered by a calmer baritone hooo hooo hooo. Its a little far away to record and since its early in the evening there is car traffic competing for my ear. The recorder doesn’t pick up either owl. I stand a while longer and hear a train miles away blow its whistle at a crossing in Red Wing. Without any recording success I head back towards the house and realize there is one thing I can record, my steps in the ice covered snow.footsteps_in_ice_covered_snow

As I type this the howling has startedagain. I open the window next to me and hold the memo recorder out the window. coyotes_1-6-2009(The ones that didn’t get shot).
It’s been an unremarkable evening which in itself is remarkable.

The weather has been alternating from cold to warm, snow to ice. I think its a hard time to be a wild animal.

January 4th at sunrise it was 4 below zero at our place. The house was making loud cracking noises all night. The night before it was 29 degrees and raining for the second time in a week.

The rain event before this one of last night, happened last week and melted a substantial part of our beautiful snow. It left the driveway slick and Ice covered, making me think of a bobsled run. My teen-aged driver learned that four wheel drive does nothing for stopping. First he used our mailbox as a break, then as he got better he used a snowbank.

I knew it was going to be clear at sunrise this morning, which put me in mind of the day after an ice storm a few years ago when I found myself in a sparkling cathedral of frozen branches. This morning I headed for the spot with camera in hand hoping to catch in photos what I found by accident last time.

Not only was it cold, but it was windy. It was also noisy, every step sounded like breaking pottery as shards of ice broke free from the surface of the snow sliding away. Tree branches scraped together in the wind making a heavy sound, foriegn becasue of the thick ice coating.

When I reached the spot there was no brilliant display of dazeling ice crystals. It was a different day, with different ice and different sun. My plans foiled, I continued on. On my way home though I passed bittersweet I hadn’t noticed before hanging low and glittering in the rising sun. The grasses were covered in ice and crackled in the wind.

I have been admiring the delicate geometry of skeletons of last summer’s wild parsnip(very top photo). Today they glittered in the sun as they swayed in the wind with a fresh coating of ice from last night. Something else I couldn’t duplicate.