Ripples 5/13/21

Posted on by May 13, 2021

What a joy to finally emerge from the cold, at least some days, and see nature’s green again.  Early morning’s in May, when not too cold and a calm wind are my favorite days of the year.  The haze of green new growth, reddish buds, and white flowers paint the forest canopy in gentle springtime hues, and the songs of returning birds are the perfect accompaniment.  

I had such an experience on Trillium Trail at Woodland Dunes the other day.  The sun shone brightly and there was no wind.  Skunk cabbages were still emerging from the mucky swales below the mature catkins of the pussy willows.  Speckled alders were budding out, and at least three northern waterthrushes sang from hidden perches.  A red-shouldered hawk soared and screeched above the swamp, and a pine warbler sang his feeble song from the top of a white pine on a ridge.  There were no photo of juneberries mosquitoes to be had, and a few spring peepers still called from the flooded areas.

The morning made me think about how this wooded swamp, disregarded as wasteland by some, is filled with life, and how restorative it can be to just be in such places.  Wetlands and their margins are some of the most favorable areas for wildlife, and are especially beneficial in the world of nature.  They are wonderful places to observe species and their interactions, and being immersed in such a setting is beneficial to our well-being.  

I could appreciate that as I walked along the trail, eventually coming to a short boardwalk over one of the larger swales in the preserve.  A wood duck jumped out of the water into flight, and spiky sedges emerged in clumps from the dark water.  On either side of the swale were ancient beach ridges covered with red maples, white pines, black cherries, and others.  Juneberries, one of the first flowering trees to bloom, whitewashed part of the forest with their blossoms.  In a while, dark blue berries will follow, but birds will consume them all before my feeble senses tell me that they are ready.  That’s fine- we should be content with some things being just “for the birds”.

On the boardwalk, seated on a bench, a visitor sat quietly reading amid the peaceful surroundings.  It was such a perfect setting- the last thing I wanted to do was intrude on her solitude.  So I turned around and went back the way I came, still enjoying the perfect morning.

Photo- juneberries in blossom in the forest along Trillium Trail at Woodland Dunes.

Ripples 5/6/21

Posted on by May 6, 2021

 by Jessica Johnsrud, Education Coordinator

Recently I was weeding outside and noticed a couple of fuzzy black and yellow insects flying low to the ground. I initially thought they were bumblebees, but upon further inspection, I realized they were mining bees. I observed as one popped out of the sandy soil, then flew to a nearby dandelion. 

Mining bees are native to Wisconsin and are one of the earliest bees seen in the spring. They are one of over 1200 solitary bees

photo of mining bee

mining bee

in North America and are often mistaken for bumblebees because of their stout build and furry body. However, they are much smaller than a bumblebee, sizing up to a quarter to a half inch in length. They are non-aggressive insects and rarely sting.  

Mining bees get their name because they tunnel into the ground to make their nests. They prefer to dig into well-drained soils and will also burrow in areas between stones in old buildings or between logs in cabins or barns.

Once a nesting location is chosen, the female will excavate a vertical tunnel a few inches deep with an entrance that is about the diameter of a number two pencil. A sure sign of a mining bee nest is a pile of dirt left near the entrance. Mining bees may nest in the same location for several years. Mining bees tolerate each other and if many nests are clustered together, females only provide for their own.

Each tunnel has several side branches with chambers for the eggs. The female waterproofs the cells using a waxy substance she creates from a gland in her abdomen. To provide for her future offspring, the female will also leave rolled up balls of nectar and pollen in each chamber. Once she’s mated with a male, she will lay a single egg on top of the food provisions and then seal the chamber off.

Once the eggs hatch, the larvae stay in the chamber and eat the food that was provided for them. Then they overwinter in a prepupae state and will not emerge until spring. They live for about one month after emerging to reproduce.

Mining bees are buzz pollinators which means they vibrate their flight muscles and cause the flower to give up its pollen. The loose pollen then gets stuck in the mining bee’s hairy legs and body. Mining bees are important pollinators in the Midwest for wildflowers, apples, other fruit trees, blueberries, huckleberries and orchids.

Mining bees are just one of many interesting native pollinators in Wisconsin. There is so much variety in the insect world and even the smallest of these creatures is worthy of appreciation. 

Photo: mining bee by Jessica Johnsrud


Ripples 4/29/21

Posted on by April 29, 2021
When I was young, growing up on the west edge of Manitowoc, I always looked forward to this time of year and the sounds that came with it.  I remember meadowlarks singing in the field next to our house along with dozens of other birds each morning as I walked to the bus stop.  At night spring peepers and other frogs sang from little ponds in the old gravel pit nearby, and I would open my window so they could sing me to sleep.  Several decades later I’ve been fortunate to be able to return to the family place, no longer a farm, and settle back into the area.  But there have been some disturbing changes.  No meadowlarks inhabit the fields, and no frogs at all sing from the now filled-in ponds.  There are still other birds, and other wildlife, but the lack of frogs is disappointing.
 
photo of spring peeperWildlife is sensitive to what we humans do to the land.  Frogs are especially sensitive to chemicals in their environment- both those applied by people and those emitted by invasive plants like common buckthorn.  In the area around our place, buckthorn, Eurasian honeysuckle, and autumn olive have all taken over much of the landscape, and areas which were once fields now sport dozens of houses surrounded by lawns.  It appears that we are choosing an artificial landscape over our native species.
 
We use a lot of chemical substances to manage not only crops but urban grassscapes.  Like with many things in life, we need to be careful in doing so.  In the U.S., about 2.5 kilograms of pesticides are applied per acre for agriculture, over 1.1 billion pounds annually altogether.  While this helps feed us, these substances also affect wildlife such as amphibians, fish, pollinating insects- all animals that are not the target of the applications.  Beneficial plants are also impacted.  It is appropriate to ask if there are measurable effects on wildlife, are there also effects on people?  And, if combined with inadequate efforts to keep applied pesticides from being carried to surface or groundwater, the effects are so much the worse. For lawn management, pesticides are applied at a rate 10 times higher than for agriculture. Urban areas also experience runoff issues.
 

I think David Attenborough, the British naturalist, said it best- that the solution to many of our problems is to not waste.  In this case, I think it means being thoughtful about whether or not we really need to control weeds and insects around our homes, and if we do must we apply pesticides heavily?  Perhaps it is better for wildlife and ourselves to be very careful when using them and to consider them when nothing else will work.  The US EPA has guidelines referring to what’s called integrated pest management and talks about safe lawn care in general at:   

 
Putting a little more thought into how we interact with the world around us is never a bad thing. I hope that someday I will hear frogs singing in my neighborhood again.
 
photo- spring peeper, one of the smallest and loudest frogs in Wisconsin, from USGS

Ripples 4/22/21

Posted on by April 23, 2021

Written by Kennedy Zittel, Assistant Naturalist

I find that every time I put an item “somewhere that I won’t lose it” the item always ends up lost.  My memory isn’t bad necessarily, it’s just that if I try to not lose something, it definitely ends up lost.

I was replacing a fence around one of the gardens here at Woodland Dunes when I saw that haphazardly buried in the soil were a few acorns. They were in pretty rough shape – clearly they had been in that soil for awhile. I certainly sympathized with that squirrel or whatever animal lost those acorns, as I am sure it too felt that it was placing those nuts in a spot that it would remember. Doesn’t that make you wonder just how many of the food stashes placed by animals get completely forgotten about? Well, one animal in particular has adapted to avoid that very problem, and it happens to be one of my favorite little birds. 

Many animals will collect and store away food during the warmer months that they return to in the winter to eat when food photo of black-capped chickadee gets scarce. Chickadees are an adorable example of an animal that does just that. Oftentimes you will see chickadees go to a bird feeder and fly away with seeds and then return again and again. Chickadees will cache their seeds in bark, in pine needle clusters, on crevices of branches, in gutters, under shingles, and wherever else they find that can house some seeds. It has been estimated that chickadees store away as many as one hundred thousand food items, like seeds, per year. The question is, if I can’t even remember where I placed a book that I wanted to read the next day, how can these small birds remember where countless stashes of seeds are that they hid months ago? 

Scientists have shown that Black-capped Chickadees are able to increase their memory capacity during the fall by adding new brain cells to their hippocampus (which is the part of the brain that controls learning and memory). In the fall, the chickadee’s hippocampus expands in volume by roughly 30% and then come spring the hippocampus will shrink back to normal size. How cool! If they see that they are being watched, the chickadees will wait to store away their food, especially if another chickadee is watching. You wouldn’t want to hide food and use up good hippocampus space only to have your neighbor come snatch away your seeds, so I would be secretive about my food stashing too! Other research done has also shown that chickadees will discard cells that hold older memories and then replace them with new cells for storing fresh memories. I sure wish I could swap some memories of me tripping over my feet for being able to remember where I put my keys! 

As you can imagine, the ability to remember where the bird stored its seeds helps it survive winter far easier than if the birds couldn’t remember where they put all of those collected seeds. Research has been done on chickadees that live in the Sierra Nevada mountains as to how their memory correlates to their ability to survive, and they found that the individual bird’s memory has a direct impact on the individual’s survival. Given that, I would definitely be on the lower survival end in the chickadee world. Upon learning about the chickadee’s amazing memory capacity, each time I lose something now I will hopefully be encouraged to become better organized so that my chickadee survival rating increases a bit. Until that happens, I will just marvel at my favorite little birds that would definitely win at any memory games.

photo of black-capped chickadee by Kennedy Zittel

Ripples 4/15/21

Posted on by April 16, 2021

Spring is a time for repair and improvement, and the nature center has been a very busy place lately.  Volunteers have constructed about 500 feet of new boardwalk on Willow Trail to permit hikers to more easily pass a section of trail that has been flooded more and more in the past couple of years.  Fixing and improving things seems to be universal this time of year- birds building nests, bumblebees enhancing their burrows so that they can lay eggs, mammals tidying up their dens for their new young.

Another project at the nature center involves replacing part of a deck next to the building, removing rotted boards that were close to the ground.  As the boards were taken up, we discovered a maze of tunnels beneath, and got just a glimpse of the animals that made them- star-nosed moles.

photo of star-nosed-moleThe star-nosed mole (Condylura cristata) is one of two mole species found at Woodland Dunes, the other being the eastern mole.  Both have massive feet and claws with which to excavate tunnels and burrows and both are harmless to humans.  They are covered with the softest fur- dark gray in color.  The nose of the star-nosed mole is adorned with fleshy tentacle-looking structures which help them feel their way around underground and detect the earthworms and other small animals on which they feed.  They have 22 of these unique structures, in which they have something called Eimer’s organs, and they are incredibly sensitive although strange looking.  Their sensitive nose structures allow them to very quickly determine if something is edible or not, and one study found that it took them only 227 milliseconds between the time they encounter prey and consume it.  Also, they are able to smell underwater, exhaling bubbles of air and them inhaling them again.

Star-nosed moles, although I imagine them leading quiet lives underground, are very active animals.  They have very poorly developed sense of sight, probably because there is not much that can be seen underground in the dark.  They spend much of their time burrowing in moist soil, and are often found in wet areas.  Its often in these wet places that we find the proverbial “mole hills” that they construct.  Mole hills are lumpy small mounds of soil made when the mole pushes up clumps of dirt to the surface from below.  They are small, typically less than a foot in diameter and just a few inches high, so it would be difficult to make a mountain out of one!  They are also good swimmers and look for food in the water, where they in turn may be eaten by fish such as northern pike.

Moles raise one brood of 4-5 young each year, typically in late winter or spring.  They have probably benefited from the photo of mole tunnels introduction of European earthworms by people (there were no earthworms in Wisconsin before settlement by Europeans).

Moles are not dangerous, and I cringe when I encounter people talking about the “damage” that moles do to lawns and how they need to be controlled.  Lawns are not a natural ecosystem, and moles do nothing more than hunt for small animals in the soil – occasionally making their mole hills.  Mole hills are not permanent and the moles move on, so there really isn’t a need to kill them.  They are an important native animal and should be appreciated as such.  They and their kind are unique among the mammals and probably do much more good than harm.  We’ll be careful not to disturb them more than needed as we re-assemble our deck!

photos: star-nosed mole by the National Park Service, mole tunnels beneath the deck at Woodland Dunes