Words on Birds and Wildlife

ELY, MINN. – Those of us who are in the business of trying to attract birds to our backyards by filling feeders with an assortment of seeds are familiar with watching the contents of those differently-shaped tubes, cubes and trays disappear.

But when a feeder turns up empty of its contents in the first light of dawn after being full at sunset the night prior, one can deduce there’s a high probability that the pilferer of seeds was likely a furry rather than a feathered friend.

Such overnight guests in Mid-Iowa most likely would be raccoons or opossums, which are primarily nocturnal creatures. In the Superior National Forest of northeast Minnesota where our cabin is located, neither of those mammals has made much of an inroad, yet, so a most likely culprit could be a black bear.

One late-night seed-eating creature found in both locations, however, is as stealthy as a fox but as seemingly gentle as a fawn. I’m talking about the shy and reclusive flying squirrel.

Unlike their name indicates, however, flying squirrels don’t actually fly; rather, they glide.

“In part, this is due to a large flap of skin (patagium) attached to its front and hind legs and sides of its body,” writes naturalist Stan Tekiela. “To glide, a flying squirrel will climb to the top of a tree and launch itself, extending its four legs outward and stretching the patagium to make a flat, wing-like airfoil. Its flat tail adds some additional lift and acts like a rudder to help maneuver objects while gliding. … To create an air brake for a soft landing, the squirrel will quickly lift its head and tuck its tail between its hind legs.”

Larry Dau, a Boone County resident who also owns a cabin in northwest Wisconsin, has been observing and photographing flying squirrels for many years.

“I have seen them glide in from more than 100 feet and even pick up altitude at the end of their glide,” Dau said.

There are two species of flying squirrels – the northern and southern – and while the squirrels that are frequent visitors to our cabin and Dau’s are the northern species, those living in Iowa are the southern species, said Jim Pease, emeritus associate professor of Natural Resource Ecology and Management at Iowa State University. Their ranges do, however, ranges overlap in many areas of the country, Dau said.

“The northern is known for being in the boreal forest,” he said. “In Iowa, they would normally be in the oak-hickory woods.

The two species of flying squirrels vary in length and weight, with the northern being slightly bigger at around 9 to 10 inches in total length and weighing about 3 to 4 ounces while the southern tends to be around 7 to 8 inches long and weigh roughly 2 to 3 ounces. Both species are active year-round and will often build a nest in an abandoned woodpecker cavity to raise their young. Both species also are omnivores, feeding on insects, seeds, nuts, catkins, eggs, mice, birds, mushrooms and other fungi.

“At the cabin, we have a mixed conifer and deciduous forest,” Dau said. “So we have lots of acorns and pinecones for them to feed on. At my feeders they come in for peanuts and sunflower seeds.”

No matter where you live, the chances of seeing them are slim.

“Rarely do they come out in daylight,” Dau said.

The best chance to possibly see one is to go outside after dusk and to listen for the soft bird-like calls of the adults, the high-pitched squeaks of the young or the sound of something scrambling on the bark. Shining a flashlight in the direction of the sounds might reveal a small brown creature with bulging eyes and a long tail. Often, they will freeze at the presence of light and you can get a good look.

“They move very fast,” Dau said. “Guests at the cabin are fascinated by their flights, quick movements and antics. They will watch them for an hour or two.”

Once you’ve seen a flying squirrel, it’s easy to understand why.

Watch them fly … or glide

To see video clips of flying squirrels, visit Larry Dau’s website: https://larryd.smugmug.com/Nature/Northern-Flying-Squirrels-Fall/

Todd Burras can be reached at ou****************@gm***.com.

ELY, MINN. – Sunny fields of gold this time of year across the Midwest are the colorful result of uncommonly prolific common dandelions. In standing water of low-lying forests, potholes, bogs, swamps and ditches, however, the occasional “yellow brick road” through an often otherwise brown landscape is usually the result of spectacular masses of marsh marigold.

Neither a marigold nor a cowslip, marsh marigold is an annual wildflower that’s a member of the buttercup family. The name “marigold” comes from an old English world that means “marsh-gold.” As the name suggests, marsh marigold are water-loving wildflowers that like to “keep their feet wet.” They grow to a height of 1 to 2 feet, produce yellow upturned petal-like sepals that form a shallow cup and have thick leaves that are dark green.

Sig Olson, one of the country’s most renowned naturalists, conservationists and authors of the mid-20th century, called marsh marigold the “flower of the spring floods.”

In this region of the country in which Olson lived, where there is a seemingly never-ending labyrinth of lakes, rivers, streams and wetlands, marsh marigold abound during May.

“The earth was trying its best to cover its soggy desolation while waiting for the green of early summer,” Olson wrote in his classic “The Singing Wilderness.” “The butter-yellow mats that had come so swiftly would hold sway until other flowers began to bloom, adding a not of color and aliveness. But by the time the creeks were back to summer levels, the marigold would be forgotten, remembered only by trout fishermen as bedding in their creels.”

Closer to home in central Iowa, marsh marigold, though not so prolific as in some regions of the Midwest, can be found earlier in the spring with a little effort.

“They were in full bloom on April 23,” said Tom Rosberg, a prairie expert who lives near Colo and teaches at Drake University. “I cannot think of a population in Story County, but there could be. The closest one I know of is at Turtlehead Fen in Polk County.”

Steve Lekwa, a lifelong resident of Story County, said, “There used to be a little of it just north of the Prairie View pull-off on Interstate 35 south of Story City near the bottom of a wet draw. I haven’t been there in many years, though.”

Jimmie Thompson, an Ames resident who has conducted plant inventories throughout Mid-Iowa, said small populations of marsh marigold exist in the area, but others have been lost.

“Years ago there was a very small population on the west-facing slope overlooking Squaw Creek at the Northridge subdivision within the Ames city limits,” said Thompson. “But I think that population has been extirpated.”

Thompson said during his four-year plant inventories of Boone and Hamilton counties, he found a small population of marsh marigold at Bjorkboda Marsh in Hamilton County as well as a few places in Boone County. He said he has also seen a population of it at the south end of Brushy Creek State Park in Webster County.

Carl Kurtz, another prairie expert who lives near Zearing, said there is a little in the wet areas of his prairie, but it isn’t very prevalent around the area.

“I was hoping to collect some seed this year,” Kurtz said, “but am behind on that endeavor.”

At least there’s always next year.

Marsh marigold is past the blooming stage in central Iowa for the season, but make a note to look for it next spring. As Glenda the Good Witch of the North told Dorothy in “The Wizard of Oz,” just “follow the yellow brick road.”

Todd Burras can be reached at ou****************@gm***.com.

As darkness gave way to light Tuesday morning, the sky revealed an ancient luminary that I had begun to wonder whether I would ever see again.

Ahhhhhh, the sun.

It has returned.

At last.

At long last.

A couple hours later as I sat in a chair looking into the backyard I noticed something I couldn’t take my eyes off: bees. More precisely, Steph’s two new colonies of honey bees. They seemed as exuberant as I felt when I awoke a little earlier in the morning. In the dappled sunlight streaming through the giant pin oak the bees were flying and working and singing.

My heart danced.

The bees arrived in their cages on April 22, a bright sunny day in its own right. Into the hives each colony and their queen went, and for the next four days, the weather cooperated and we watched them come and go. We wondered, with great interest, if inside the each hive the bees had eaten through the candy plug and released their queen from the small cage that holds her until they get acclimated to her pheromones and hopefully accept her. If they didn’t she might be dead; if they did, she could also have met her demise. Colonies usually accept their queen. Usually but not always.

We were a day away from opening the hives to check on each colony’s queen, when the spring-time weather turned, well, to spring-time weather. For the next six days it rained and blew and the temperature dipped and dropped and dipped some more — miserable weather for people, even worse for newly released bees in need of acclimating themselves to their surroundings and building a vibrant colony.

When you’re a worker bee, it’s tough to do your job of collecting pollen and nectar when it’s cold, wet and windy out. When you’re a human, at least you can turn up the furnace or put on a raincoat.

So when the inclement weather finally relented and Steph could finally get in and check the hives, we were relieved to see evidence that both queens are alive and seemingly doing well. It’s too early in the process to see if the queens are hard working and if they expect as much from their colonies of thousands of worker bees. But at least the sun is out, the queens are on their thrones and, for now, all is right in the backyard.

May the flying, working, singing and dancing continue throughout the spring and summer.

Todd Burras can be reached at ou****************@gm***.com.

WAYLAND, MASS. – While I wandered the trail through the woods with my eyes scanning the canopy above for the sound and flutter of songbirds, other members of our small party were bent forward at their waists, their attentions drawn to the ground below where a different sort of winged creature moved about.

This was a little more than a week ago during a picnic and birding outing with some of Stephanie’s extended family at Great Meadows Wildlife Refuge west of Boston. Having been welcomed to the woods by a large flock of migrating palm warblers and numerous tufted titmice, I was preoccupied at the time, scouring the surrounding trees for blue-gray gnatcatchers, which a local birder at the trailhead had told us to keep an eye out for.

As I caught up with the others, however, I, too, soon found myself focused on what was happening on the ground near the trail. It was there that I noticed scores of little holes in the ground, many of which had mounds around them similar to small anthills, only larger, and coming and going — by ground and by air — were dozens of well-camouflaged bees.

I was instantly captivated.

Soon the group of relatives moved on and I reached for my phone with the hope of getting a photo or two to use for identification purposes later on, since not anyone in the small party knew what kind of bees these were that we had enjoyed watching. The photos, as you can see from the one accompanying the story, didn’t turn out well as the bees had seemingly more important things to do than to pause and have their pictures taken.

I’m not entirely unfamiliar with bees – Stephanie has tended honey bee colonies in our backyard and elsewhere for the past five years; bumble bees always gain my attention whenever they’re in the garden; and we’ve attracted mason bees to some manmade bee hotels we’ve made and added to our landscape – but for the most part I’ve have had little experience with them, save for the aforementioned species.

Unless you’re really into bees and other insects, that’s probably not unusual. Most of the some 3,600 native bee species in the United States, including about 300 species in Iowa, are small and solitary creatures that fly under most of our radars. While non-native honey bees live in large colonies of tens of thousands of bees, bumble bees and some sweat bees are a few of the only other bee species that form social colonies. To see and learn about most bees, you have to work at it.

That said, here’s what I discovered about the bees in question. It turns out they were a species of mining bees, also commonly known as andrenid bees or digger bees, which build burrows and nest in the ground. Mining bees, which are found in Iowa, range in size from that of a honey bee to much smaller and are known to be docile and rarely sting people. They are typically darker in color than honey bees, can have stripes and a few are even a metallic green color.

Female mining bees dig their own individual burrows that typically contain a vertical tunnel with smaller side tunnels that end in a single cell. Each female then works to gather pollen and nectar for the offspring. If soil conditions are suitable, many bees may nest near one another.

Like many solitary bees, mining bees are often oligolectic, which means they collect pollen from just a few select types of plants. Some are even monolectic, gathering pollen from just one species of plant. As such, solitary bee populations, including mining bees, fluctuate significantly on the basis of the availability of their preferred plants of choice.

If you keep your eyes on the ground this spring and summer, you might cross paths with a few mining bees. You might just come to dig them, too.

Todd Burras can be reached at ou****************@gm***.com.

Entry Point No. 19 Stuart River — For all those who have been privileged to set foot in the Boundary Waters Canoe Area Wilderness, nearly all have memories of not just placid campsites and pristine waters, but also something less inviting: portage trails. These ancient paths cut through the forest and serve as primitive escape routes for eager paddlers seeking temporary emancipation from civilization and its seemingly frenetic treadmill of endless running, playing, working and worrying. All portages are not created equal, though. Some can be short, flat and relatively free of rocks, tree roots and wet spots. In many cases, however, portages can be long — a quarter-mile is normal; a half-mile or more common — and arduous, requiring paddlers to pack their gear and canoes over and through rugged terrain that includes steep inclines, rocks and boulders, downed trees, water, mud and frequent clouds of insects. No matter the fear, frustration or even hardship these well-worn thoroughfares have produced, paddlers know that they are just a temporary means to a usually glorious end: fish fries and shore lunches, warm campfires and laughing loons, distant wolf howls under an aurora night sky, and most of all: happy, serene memories. Have you added your footprints to the stone, soil, tree roots and mosses that make up these hallowed portage trails? This summer will you add your name and write your own chapter in this unending wilderness story? The trails, rivers and lakes within the BWCAW await your arrival.

WAYLAND, MASS. — It’s tempting on this day before Earth Day to climb into the high pulpit of conservation and environmentalism and to preach, as I frequently have tried through the years, about the need to teach our children well. To encourage them to be good fellow citizens on this blue and green marble we all share and call home. To exhort them to care for Earth. To care for nature. To care for one another regardless of creed or color or class.

It would be particularly easy to feel justified in pontificating against the irresponsible slobs who don’t pick up after themselves a day after hiking with extended family — both children and adults — around a beautiful national wildlife refuge in eastern Massachusetts where the arrival of spring was evidenced in swollen tree buds and pulsating bird life, but where, in the same place, in every direction, there could be seen paper and plastic and broken glass and wads of old fishing line and even a sign warning anglers not to eat any fish they might catch. (The sign didn’t explain why, which leads the mind to imagine all sorts of dire possibilities, such as high levels of mercury.)

Of course it would be easy to bemoan how others are despoiling the planet — for us, our children and our children’s children — not just by throwing their garbage everywhere but all the more seriously by not doing a better job of regulating the massive amounts of fossil fuels they are emitting into the air we breathe or the tons of deadly chemicals they are dumping onto the soil and into the water that inevitably contaminate the life-giving natural resources we all need to survive.

It would be just as easy to point an accusatory finger at others, especially corporate heads, lobbyists and the politicians both aforementioned groups often appear to own and control, and who seem — all too increasingly — only to value an economy based on the insatiable appetite of its citizenry to consume physical and material goods — an unsustainable approach to life that ends up trashing the Earth and the atmosphere while ignoring and enslaving the lives of so many in a tyranny that lines the coffers of a greedy few.

It would be easy, as one among those who try to respect and care for the good world around us, to play the blaming game.

To attack the adversary. To be angry and to grumble and to rage against the annihilating machine.

To say to others that they are either for us or against us. With us or without us. Good or bad. Left or right. Pro or con. Black or white.

Because of our humanness, however, it’s not so easy for some of us — whether we’re liberal tree huggers on the left, radical conservatives on the right or most likely somewhere in between — to acknowledge that we all, in some way, share the blame and shame for the degradation.

We are all in this boat together. As such, we all are part of the problems, and we all can be part of the solutions.

In these turbulent days our children desperately need to see all of us demonstrate honesty, civility, respect, nonpartisanship and statesmanship.

Not to mention grace, forgiveness and stewardship of this one and only beautiful home we call Earth.

Happy Earth Day 2017.

^

Todd Burras can be reached at ou****************@gm***.com.

ELY, MINN. — Look on any number of maps of this part of northeastern Minnesota and you’ll see dozens of circled red numbers or black asterisks and numbers often next to a red line of varying lengths.

Paddlers who are familiar to the area know what those symbols mean. The numbers represent entry points — read “parking areas” — and the red lines indicate portages — manmade trails that link paddlers and their canoes from their vehicles to water entries — creeks, rivers and lakes.

These entry points serve as jumping off points to a few days or even weeks of adventure into North America’s largest wilderness area east of the Mississippi River. It’s here where tens of thousands of people come to escape the grind and rat race of daily life and to rest and recuperate, relax and recreate, revive and refocus.

A few entry points allow a paddler to disembark right next to the water, but most require some foot travel over a portage. All portages, however, are not created equal. Some can be short, flat and relatively free of obstacles. In many cases, though, portages can be long — a quarter-mile is normal; a half-mile or more common — and arduous, requiring paddlers to pack their gear and canoes over and through rugged terrain that includes steep inclines, rocks and roots, downed trees, water, mud and frequent clouds of insects.

In short, the red portage lines mean the paddler is going to have to go to some effort and inconvenience to get onto the water and into the wilderness where they can find the lake, campsite, fishing spot or vista he or she seeks.

The question now arises: Do you have any special entry points into the wilderness — read “nature and outdoors” — in your life? If not, could you identify one and visit it sometime soon?

An entry point doesn’t have to be 1 million acres of wilderness. It doesn’t need to be 1,000 or 100 or 10 or even 1. Maybe you already have an entry point that’s as simple as walking out the door and into the backyard where you have a flower or vegetable garden, or both. Or maybe you manage some birdfeeders and birdhouses or raise bees back there. Maybe the entry point is a walk around the block or a trip to a small park where you like to watch, listen, smell and possibly taste the natural world around you.

But maybe the backyard or a neighborhood green space doesn’t do it for you. Maybe you don’t even have a backyard or maybe you need a destination entry point that allows you to unplug and reconnect with the outdoors. Remember the red lines representing the portages? Maybe, in your case, you need to walk or drive or even fly to an entry point to gain access to a setting that brings you the benefits that only nature and the outdoors can provide.

Through more than two decades of living in central Iowa, several areas have served me as entry points into the outdoors and nature. They include Ada Hayden Heritage Park in Ames; McFarland Park, east of Gilbert; Inis Grove and Emma McCarthy Lee parks in Ames; Ledges State Park near Boone; Colo Bog in eastern Story County; and the Skunk River Greenbelt south of Story City. There are, in fact, many others; too many to mention.

What about you? Is there an entry point nearby? Here’s guessing there is, and here’s hoping you’ll use it.

Todd Burras can be reached at ou****************@gm***.com.

Entry Point No. 16 Moose River North — A windfall balsam may block the progress of a vehicle, but it cannot impede a spirit called into the wilderness. A raven croaks. A robin sings. A time-worn portage trail is covered by snow, ice, water, leaves, mud, tracks. Whitetail. Wolf. Moose River North droning in the distance … always, hypnotic in its invitation. That is until the thunder of ruffed grouse wings momentarily breaks the reverie. A new song. A new season. Nothing will hinder the desire of the water to rush on toward Hudson Bay. Nothing can halt the march of spring into the North Country.

“The early morning belongs to the Church of the risen Christ. At the break of light it remembers the morning on which death and sin lay prostrate in defeat and new life and salvation were given to mankind.”

–Dietrich Bonhoeffer