North Woods Naturalist
Contributor(s):
Chel Anderson
Chel Anderson is a botanist and plant ecologist. She lives in the Hovland area and keeps close tabs on daily changes happening in the great outdoors. She shares her insights with WTIP listeners every Tuesday during North Shore Morning.
Arts, cultural and history features on WTIP are made possible in part by funding from the Minnesota Arts and Cultural Heritage Fund. Check out other programs and features funded in part with support from the Heritage Fund.
Featured On:
What's On:
Tracks: what’s walking in the woods?
-| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| AnimalTracks.mp3 | 12.85 MB |
Lots of snow means lots of interesting animal tracks in the woods. WTIPs Jay Andersen talks with local phenologist Chel Anderson about snow prints.
Program:
Birds have winter survival skills
-| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| WinterBirdSurvival.mp3 | 9.94 MB |
As winter settles in, so do many birds. Those that don’t migrate must have adaptations to the cold. WTIPs Jay Andersen talks with local phenologist Chel Anderson about winter bird survival.
Program:
Sky streaks continue through mid-month
-| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| Meteor_120610.mp3 | 6.21 MB |
Look up in the sky! It’s a bird! It’s a plane! No, it a meteor shower and it’s going on right now. WTIPs Jay Andersen talks with local phenologist Chel Anderson about the meteor shower from Gemini.
Program:
All things snowflake
-| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| Snowflakes_112210.mp3 | 13.43 MB |
Chel Anderson is a botanist and plant ecologist. She lives here in Cook County and joins us periodically to talk about phenology or what’s going on in the woods right now. Welcome back, Chel.
Anderson: Hi, Jay.
Well, now that winter is officially here—that is, with snow on the ground—let’s talk about all things snow.
Anderson: Snow is one of those miracles of water, right? We are the water planet and we have all these miracles related to water, and one of them, in my opinion, anyway, is snow. You can toss it around, you can pack it into things, you can roll around in it, you can cover up with it—I mean, it’s really, when you stop and think about it as you’re grinding your teeth over having to scrape off the snow on your car again, it’s good to reflect on all the amazing things about snow.
You can throw it at your friends.
Anderson: Yeah, right, games, everything. So many things are possible on snow and with snow, so I thought this is definitely a good topic to try to cover. So, first, let’s start with a couple of basic facts, which I’m sure everyone knows, but bear repeating in this context and that is that snow is a form of water, ice (ice forms at 32 degrees, the magical temperature when it comes to water), and that clouds are water vapor. So, when clouds, or water vapor, encounter temperatures in the air that are at that magical number 32 or lower, snowflakes can form. Something has to happen, because water cannot be a liquid 32 degrees or less. So, in the clouds, often times the response of water vapor to temperatures below freezing is to form snowflakes. The formation of snowflakes is an amazingly dynamic process. If you think about clouds, and maybe what you’ve read about clouds in the atmosphere, it’s not generally a very stable place. Clouds have a lot of air currents swirling around in and through and around them. They have updrafts, downdrafts. They have different temperatures; they are not a uniform temperature. So, the formation of snowflakes is dynamic and depends on all of those environmental conditions. So, a snowflake can begin to form somewhere in a cloud, but then it might encounter a wide range of conditions that are different for the next several hours, and those conditions might cause it to grow into yet a bigger crystal, or they might cause it to melt down completely and become a water droplet again, or to melt down partially and then regrow. So, the story of any individual snowflake could be very long and arduous. We don’t really know. But, what we see is what manages to emerge. Depending on what might happen to be mixed up with the water vapor—dust, dirt—those things can be incorporated into snowflakes as well, and they have an influence on the shape, on the durability of a snowflake, on how quickly it melts once it’s on the ground. All of those environmental conditions described, as well as these kind of foreign particles that might be within the water can have an influence on the formation and the overall life of the snowflake. Where you’re formed as a snowflake will have an influence on your shape. Generally speaking, if you’re a snowflake that is formed high up in the clouds, you’re going to have six-sided hexagonal shape. If you form in the middle, you’re more likely to be needle-shaped. If you’re formed low down, you’re more apt to have a, you know, more smooth, less intricate shape than snowflakes formed higher up in the clouds. Temperature will affect your shape, and temperature might well be associated with where you are in the vertical column of the cloud, but not necessarily, because temperatures can vary quite a bit through the clouds. So, between 32 degrees and 35 degrees you’d look like a beautiful, thin, hexagonal plate. If you formed at 21 to 14 degrees, you could be a hollow column. Again, hexagonal in shape because snowflakes are hexagonal, but you could be a hollow column instead of a plate. At another range of temperatures, you’d form a solid needle, but hexagonal in cross-section. If you form at those temperatures that are really cold, down to two degrees or, you know, the coldest temperatures, then that’s where you’re going to have the most intricate shapes. So, those are going to be those snowflakes that we all go, “wow, how could that be with all those arms and all those smaller arms and branches.” Those dendritic crystals form at the coldest temperatures, so that’s how we get this amazing array of different shapes that we can see over the course of the winter in all of our different snowfalls. Snowfalls can consist of many different shapes; it isn’t necessarily going to be uniform. But, then we’ll have other snowfalls where, boy, pretty much every snowflake is of the same general type. They don’t always look exactly alike. In fact, that’s one of those kind of myths about snowflakes is that no snowflake is exactly the same shape and, chances are, you wouldn’t necessarily be able to find two that are exactly alike, because there so many bazillions and trillions of them. But, there probably is a match somewhere out there. But, from our standpoint, they all do have amazing, different shapes.
I often wondered about that. That would be pushing infinity, I think.
Anderson: Yeah, because the conditions, especially at this time of year, are so unstable, you know, temperatures are hovering just above and below freezing. You’re going to have much more of a chance for there to be all this variability in whether it is snow versus rain or mist. It’s just amazing.
Are snowflakes fairly durable, or do they get buffeted and busted up?
Anderson: Yeah, great question. Snowflakes, really, from the point at which they begin to form until they turn back into water, are constantly being changed. And so, you see one of those incredibly intricate and delicate snowflakes and if it’s January and it’s really cold and it comes down and isn’t being blown around, you can watch them on your jacket for awhile and you can watch them on the surface of the snow for awhile staying just perfect. But, before long, they’re being changed. The sun comes out—boom—it’s just, even in the cold January temperatures, the sun will start to have an impact, especially if there’s a little trace of dust or dirt in there that can absorb a little bit more light than the ice reflects, so that’s going to start to create a little more of a heat source there and start to change. And the wind blows and it wears those arms off and all those physical properties that the snowflake arrives with on the ground are almost immediately beginning to be changed by its environment.
Chel Anderson, botanist and plant ecologist. Thanks for helping us understand what’s going on around us with snow.
Anderson: You’re very welcome.
Program:
Prehistoric plants grow under our winter snow
-| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| ClubMoss_110810.mp3 | 6.64 MB |
Chel Anderson is a botanist and plant ecologist. She lives here in Cook County and joins us periodically to talk about phenology or what’s going on in the woods right now. Welcome, Chel.
Anderson: Hi, Jay.
Well, now we associated cold weather with a brown landscape, unless there is snow on it, of course. But, I understand there is still greenery out there even though things look brown. Where is it?
Anderson: Right. Well, this is one of the best times of year to find things, because they stand out so much because they’re still green when, as you say, everything else is grey or brown other than coniferous trees until the snow falls. These plants that are still green out there, some of them will stay green right under the snow and some will actually feed little animals that live under the snow. But, I thought one thing for people that is worth paying attention to, until the snow comes and covers everything up, is a group of plants called the club mosses. They’re related to ferns, with which people might be a little bit more familiar, and there are ferns, too, that stay green under the snow and are still green. Those ferns that are still green now, once spring comes, those fronds of the ferns that are green under the snow and are still there in the spring, will eventually dry up and go away as the new fronds come out. The club mosses, on the other hand, they actually stay green right on through. They don’t ever die back in the annual sense of the word. They’re an interesting group of plants in that, like the ferns that they’re related to, they’re part of the most ancient lineage of plants that we can observe today.
Now, these are the guys that kind of look like fuzzy caterpillars, only they’re green?
Anderson: Yes, and some of their common names like Ground Cedar or Ground Pine or Running Pine or Princess Pine or Christmas Tree Pine, those are common names for the different species of club mosses that are one clue to what some of them look like. They look like miniature trees with spreading branches of different shapes and sizes, but they’re all within the three- to six-inch high range, and then some of them are more spikes with just a few small branches. Others have much more spreading, rounded branches.
These club mosses, as you said, are really ancient. I mean, are we talking, like, prehistoric?
Anderson: Oh, yes. We’re talking about hundreds of millions of years ago. So, the carboniferous period.
Wow, that is a long time ago.
Anderson: Yeah, which is part of when the dinosaurs were on the land. At that point in time, the club mosses and the ferns were the canopy species at that time.
They were big.
Anderson: So, they were enormous. Bigger than, in some cases, the trees we have here today. This is a very ancient lineage of plants, and, of course, the world has changed around them, but they’ve managed to hang on—keep a grip, so to speak—on earth, despite all the big changes. And here, in our landscape, they present themselves as usually small to very large colonies of green. They may look like small trees, you know, miniature trees, as I described before. Some look like mosses on steroids. They don’t have branches, but they look big and robust like huge, pumped-up moss and they grow in colonies, which most of our mosses do as well. So, they’re easy to see right now or identify. Sometime they’re hard to find when they’re amongst all the other ground-layer plants in the summertime that are green, but now is a good time to look for them and see if you can pick them out. Some of them actually create their reproductive parts at the top of their stems. That’s where the “club” part of the term “club moss” comes from, because it’s often shaped like a baseball bat is shaped, and that’s where the spores ripen and dry. And once they dry, they can be wind-dispersed, so if you walk along and happen to kick those on a nice, dry day, you’ll send up a swirl of this very fine yellow dust which is the spores of the club moss. And if you notice that or you find some and you see that they have these clubs, you can flick it with your finger even and you’ll create a little dust cloud of these spores, and those are going to be dispersed by the wind and settle somewhere, and if things go well, they can start another plant and eventually a colony. But, these plants can also spread vegetatively, because all those stems that you see above the ground are connected by rhizome. So, the rhizome travels along just under the leaflet or just under the soil, and the individual, upright stems come from the rhizome. So, you could have a colony that covers a huge area and it’s possible that it’s all one plant, or just a few plants versus many, many individuals represented by all these stems. Those individual vertical stems can all be part of very few or even just one plant.
If I’m out in the woods and I see Princess Pine and I uncover it to look at it, am I doing it any damage, or should I cover it back up?
Anderson: Yeah, cover the rhizomes back up. They grow where they do because that’s where they’re nicely settled and are protected from some of the elements. Yeah, cover them back up, and it’s probably worth reminding people that the Princess Pine that you’re familiar with is a very attractive species that people utilize for making wreaths and other kinds of decorative things during the holidays, and they’re valuable because they have this long-lasting green capacity to hold their color for a long time. So, if you are collecting any kind of decorative material like that, be sure to collect the stems individually. Don’t get ahold of a few stems and pull up that rhizome and pull it out and take it all as a big bunch.
So, that would be the end of that.
Anderson: If you’re going to harvest them on public land, then you need to get a permit for that and do it that way. I’ll just mention one more thing that’s very interesting about these species, and that is that these tiny, little spores that come off the club moss, in past times, this was a very important product. The spores were a product and they were used for everything from cosmetics, because it’s a very fine talc, kind of as fine as talcum powder, and as an explosive agent for things like fireworks, photographers’ flashes. So, you picture the old photographers working with their big, heavy cameras and plates and the flashes that they used often made to flash like they did using these club moss spores. So, it was a substitute for gunpowder. Something one would never really realize looking at it in the woods or think, “Oh, wow, big potential here for explosives.”
I wonder who connected those dots.
Anderson: Yeah, I don’t know if that was the Chinese, perhaps—
They invented gunpowder.
Anderson: Yeah, I think magicians also used this in the past to make some of their flame-related magic tricks.
Chel Anderson is a botanist and plant ecologist, and thank you for helping us understand about club moss. It’s an explosive topic.
Anderson: You’re very welcome.
Program:
Frogs face the freeze in different ways
-| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| FrogsToadsTurtles_110810.mp3 | 4.52 MB |
Chel Anderson is a botanist and plant ecologist . She lives here in Cook County and joins us periodically to talk about phenology or what’s going on in the woods right now. Welcome back, Chel.
Anderson: Hello, Jay.
Well, with winter upon us we have talked about how some animals protect themselves from the cold. What about frogs, toads and turtles? They seem a little vulnerable.
Anderson: Amen. That’s what I’d be feeling right now if I was a toad or a turtle or a frog. So, let’s start with frogs that are in something we would call the terrestrial group of frogs. So, these are frogs that we’ve talked about before in our conversations that really spend most of their lives living in the woods or in marshes. But, they really don’t spend a lot of time in the water, except for the breeding season. So, these would include Spring Peepers, Chorus frogs, Wood frogs, frogs that spend a lot of time in the water during the early spring when they’re mating, because that’s when they’re going to meet their mates and lay the eggs. But, once that’s over, they move back into the forest. So, those frogs, they’re among the amphibians that are capable of actually experiencing freezing temperatures. We’ve talked about amphibians like salamanders that aren’t capable of that, so they use a different strategy. But, for these terrestrial frogs that I’ve mentioned and toads—American toads, Eastern Grey Tree frogs—they don’t need to avoid freezing temperatures, because they’ve developed physiological strategies to allow their body temperatures to drop well below the freezing point of water. And, to be very simplistic about it, what they are able to do is let water move out of their cells and freeze outside their cells, so that it doesn’t damage the cells. Those frogs and toads are taking refuge, though, both from potential predators who are still on the lookout for them. So, this would be weasels and foxes and even birds of prey that are still around. They are taking refuge in that wonderful leafy litter that has just come down out of the trees, or under the coarse, woody debris that has come down in the last big storm. So, they’re looking for places to get underneath the leaf litter or some kind of nice, hidden place where they get some protection from direct exposure to wind and things like that and where they’ll get also the benefit of a nice snow blanket eventually that will reduce their exposure to extremely low temperatures, you know, down to 40 below or the deepest cold. So, that’s what they’re doing, or they’ve already done, hopefully, because we’ve had enough cold weather that they should be there by now. So, they’re hopefully resting comfortably. In the case of aquatic frogs, which would include things like mink frogs and green frogs, leopard frogs, that really spend most or all of their time in the water, they have to use a whole different strategy. Because, they too, they cannot freeze. They are not adapted to freezing. So, they are going down to the bottom of the permanent ponds or lakes or streams that they’re living in and they are just kind of barely burying themselves in the fine silt at the bottom, or they might be wedging into the root mass of something in a marsh. But, it has to be a place where it’s not going to freeze to the bottom, so you need to have significant water above you or some water moving through, you know, in maybe a spring-fed situation where there would be water moving through that would keep that area from freezing. The reason that they don’t go deep into the mud or silt is that they need to be breathing oxygen from the surrounding water while they’re in their kind of torpid state. They are not moving around very much, but, if the need arises, for instance, if where they are the oxygen becomes depleted, they move around to a place that is more suitable. Aquatic frogs need to be able to have oxygen during the winter, and they can get it through their skin as long as the water stays open and the oxygen doesn’t become depleted, but they need to find just the right kind of spot. In the case of turtles, this would be another species of reptile that also can’t freeze, so our Snapping and Painted turtles are not capable of surviving freezing temperatures. But, turtles are different in that their oxygen requirements, because they can reduce their metabolism so dramatically, their oxygen requirements are much smaller than these aquatic frogs that we were just talking about. So, they will bury themselves up to three feet deep. If the sediments are that deep, they’ll bury themselves very, very deep and spend the winter hanging out in that deep muck resting the winter away.
Chel Anderson, botanist and plant ecologist. Thanks again for helping us understand what’s going on around us this late fall.
Anderson: You’re welcome.
Program:
October storm: the pluses and minuses
-| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| BigBlow.mp3 | 6.43 MB |
Chel Anderson is a botanist and plant ecologist for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. She lives here in Cook County and joins us periodically to talk about phenology or what’s going on in the woods right now. Welcome, Chel.
Anderson: Hi!
Well, Chel, we had one big storm. Let’s talk about storm damage.
Anderson: Yeah, that’s a great topic, I think, very immediate, shall we say, since we’re right in the aftermath and getting a better sense of just what all of the impacts are that are easy to say. And, of course, one of the most obvious, besides damage to your home or your yard or local buildings, is all the trees down. And, there are a lot of trees down.
Oh, I’ve talked to so many people that basically had to carve their way out of their driveways. And, I know I did in a number of cases run into that and a number of people, particularly away from the shore, there were a lot of trees down along the shore, but this was back inland where you might not expect quite so much.
Anderson: Right, true, and I think it’s a great remind of how while things like the big blowdown in 1999 really loom large and for good reason in our minds. This kind of damage to the canopy trees in particular in the forest and woodlands is happening all the time and these smaller events, in terms of the area and mass that they affect, may be smaller and not as easy to visualize. There is still a tremendous—there’s probably literally millions of trees that in this storm were impacted whether or not they came down altogether or were damaged somehow would vary quite a bit, but there is a tremendous effect on the canopy trees in particular. And, to some degree, this is a very important process within forest and woodland ecosystems, because it brings larger woody material down to the forest floor which is utilized by many things and is very important to various functions within any forest ecosystem. But, of course, it can also have negative effects in that it can open up areas of light on the forest floor, which can make for significant changes to plant life that normally grows in the shade. And, in terms of long-term impacts of something like climate change, this is one of the effects that we anticipate we will see as a result of climate change here and that is something that is generally referred to as the thinning of the forest canopy. This will not necessarily happen in huge events like ’99 blowdown, but will happen as a result of more frequent, larger, more impactful storms, like the one we’ve just had, and take out canopy trees and bring more light to the forest floor.
I’m assuming those would be the leafy trees?
Anderson: Yeah, well, any tree that is growing at the top of the structure of the vegetation.
So, some of the white pines?
Anderson: It could be conifers; it could be deciduous species like aspen and birch. A storm at this time of year has a relatively smaller effect on our leafy trees, our deciduous leafy trees, because they’ve lost their leaves, so they present less of an obstruction to the wind. So, the wind is exerting less force on them than if this had happened two months ago when they still had their leaves.
Yeah, they wouldn’t have that kind of wind-sail thing.
Anderson: Exactly. So, the conifers—as a proportion of the total forest canopy out there—they’ve probably taken a larger hit than the aspen or birch, for instance.
A lot of spruce and balsam seem to come down. Does that have anything to do with their root structure?
Anderson: Well, in part. They do have very broad root systems, but so do many of our deciduous species. But, it mostly has to do with the fact that they present a lot of surface to the wind, compared to the other trees, and they’re less protected by the other trees, because the wind can sail through those bare canopies of the other trees. And, of course, the biggest effects on any species of tree out there are going to be the trees that are on the edge of something, because they’re going to take the brunt of the wind first and they’re going to be totally exposed to the force of the wind. If you’re a tree growing within the forest, then you’re sheltered by your fellow trees around you. And trees that grow on the edge, if they’ve started from the beginning growing on the edge, they develop extra special strength qualities of strength both in their roots and in their trunks and branches that help them, you know, resist and be more firm to the wind. So, that doesn’t mean they can’t be toppled, they can, but they definitely adapt to that as they grow, just like your tomato plants. If you grow your tomato plants inside before you put them out, and you never put them until they’ve got to be tall, ready, looking good, you put them out, they fall right over, because the plant has not been exposed to any jostling by the wind. So, the cells have not responded to that particular condition and they aren’t ready for it and they need time. Again, as I said, bring coarse, woody debris down to the forest floor is a very important thing and that’s not a bad thing, and having it there is a good thing. So, if you have stuff that’s come down in the forest around that isn’t in your way, other than if you have a huge area blown down around your home or something, don’t feel the immediate need or that there’s some ecological need to go out and tidy it up, because the decaying of that material on the forest floor is essential to a healthy ecosystem, and it helps prevent the big rains that we had, which is another component of this storm, from going like a bullet to the nearest stream or lake, and slowing down the water is something that this kind of coarse, woody debris as it decays becomes like sponges and it soaks things up and slows water from moving across the surface of the land when it falls so heavily like it did this time at times. Big storms like we had are the kinds that really can contribute huge amounts of sediment—if a watershed isn’t in good shape in the forest around it—it can contribute tremendous sediment loads that can really spoil spawning options for fish. And, a lot of that sediment, in a big storm like this, ends up in Lake Superior, which has a lot of near-shore spawning for species that, again, require areas of boulders and gravel and cobbles that are not covered with sediment and where all the spaces in between them aren’t filled in with finer sediments of clay.
So, in other words, with a storm like that, there was good news and bad news.
Anderson: Yeah, as with most things.
Chel Anderson, DNR botanist and plant ecologist. Thanks again for helping us understand what’s going on around us and putting the big October blow into perspective.
Anderson: You’re welcome.
Program:
Late migrating birds are in the fall skies
-| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| LateBirds_102510.mp3 | 5.29 MB |
Chel Anderson is a botanist and plant ecologist for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. She lives here in Cook County and joins us periodically to talk about phenology or what’s going on in the woods right now. Welcome back, Chel.
Anderson: Hello, Jay.
It seems like we should be getting close to the end of the bird migration, so who’s coming through now?
Anderson: Yeah, we are winding down. It’s been a great season as always to be watching birds and most of our songbirds have gone by. We have bid farewell; the woods will be very, very silent compared to the summertime.
Except for the nuthatches and chickadees.
Anderson: Yes, right. It won’t be absent, it won’t be totally silent, but this is the time of year when we’re entering what I think of as the “deep quiet” of our year. It’s not, like, without sound, but it’s pretty different and something to be enjoyed and appreciated. Not everywhere can one enjoy quiet. So, most of the songbirds have departed and you might still see some flocks of juncos, dark-eyed juncos flapping around here and there, maybe a few Lapland long-spurs, flocks of those still showing up. They’ve been pretty abundant in town and down along the shore and open spaces. They are birds of wide open spaces, so that’s where we tend to see them. And coming on now, and continuing especially for awhile if we don’t have snow are the snow buntings, which are always a real joy to see, aren’t they?
Oh, yeah, especially when you’re driving down the road and they fly up in flocks all around you. I think we’ve all had that experience.
Anderson: Yeah, I hope so. Well, I suppose it can be annoying if you’re trying to get somewhere in a hurry, but they are just beautiful. They’re a beautiful, warm brown and white with bright, white wing flashes when they fly, and they go around in small flocks usually, and yeah, just go ahead down the road and lead the way. It’s very, very beautiful to watch.
Now, birds like chickadees and nuthatches and blue jays, for example, they stick around.
Anderson: Yeah, they do stick around. There are movements and more localized migrations of birds moving around and setting up for the winter. Birds don’t stay necessarily right in the same place at every season of the year. And, of course, some birds that stay in more social groups, they’re sorting things out amongst each other and figuring out how they’re going to work their terrain over the course of the winter. So, there are movements going on even with the birds that stay here.
What about the big birds like geese and loons?
Anderson: Geese and loons, you know, there could still be the odd flock of geese that will be flying over. Loons should be gone by now, there may be the odd young bird that was maybe late in being born this summer and is taking longer to kind of get ready and be physically able and capable of taking off, but they want to get out, of course, before the lakes start to freeze. Most adult loons would be gone by now. There might still be the occasional group of swans going by, but probably most common now and what’s peaking right now in terms of migration are the large raptors. So, the red-tailed hawks, the rough-legged hawks, the northern goshawks, the occasional golden eagle and eagles, bald eagles. These are the raptors that, their numbers, in terms of the fall migration, peak at this time in the migration. So, these are still great times to be out at those places where thermals are generated on a sunny day to be looking for the big raptors. So, that’s definitely worth doing. The other thing related to the fall migration that I don’t think I’ve mentioned earlier is that fall, like any migration time, is when we sometimes see very uncommon things. And, I haven’t made the time to stay really in touch with the details of that this year, but I did hear a couple local reports on a black-billed magpie in the county this year, so that’s a fun thing to think about. That’s normally a much more western bird that, I don’t know, somehow got off on a tangent and was here for awhile. The other thing is to look at this time of year for waterfowl, especially sea ducks, out on Lake Superior. So, things like oldsquaws and scoters; these are things that we might see anytime now and in to different parts of the winter. So, these are birds that are from the far north and who come down and end up on Lake Superior, and they’re always fun to see. So, it’s a good time of year to be looking for the odd thing that might show up.
But, bald eagles and some owls, they stay around?
Anderson: Yes, and some birds, like bald eagles are a good example, will only go as far as they need to go. So, even snow buntings; they won’t stay right here, but they’re going to go only as far as they need to go to have a reliable food supply.
So, that would apply to these odd or infrequently seen seabirds, too?
Anderson: Right, yeah, as long as they can keep themselves going, they’re going to be OK, because they can handle the colder temperatures. But, it’s that food supply that’s really governing where and how far they go. So, yeah, we’re going to see eagles around here and maybe they’ll move, depending on our winter, down closer to Duluth and a little further south initially, and then show up again in February. Or maybe they’ll just be here right along, depending on how it goes.
Well, with some of those ducks you were talking about, I don’t think I’ll have a problem finding anything in Lake Superior.
Anderson: I bet you’re right.
Chel Anderson, DNR botanist and plant ecologist. Thanks again for helping us understand what’s going on around us and particularly with the end of the bird migration.
Anderson: Sure.
Program:
Wildlife buttons up for winter
-| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| ColdWeather_101810.mp3 | 12.15 MB |
Chel Anderson is a botanist and plant ecologist for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. She lives here in Cook County and joins us periodically to talk about phenology or what’s going on in the woods right now. Welcome, Chel.
Anderson: Hi!
Well, OK, as much as I hesitate to bring it up, winter is bearing down on us. Some of us are buttoning up our homes and preparing for cold and snow, but what about shelter if you live in the wild?
Anderson: Great question. Let’s talk about that. There’s so many things that we could talk about on this topic that I think we’ll try to limit it. First, let’s make the distinction between critters, like us, who are endotherms, who regulate our heat from the inside out and ectotherms, all these other living things whose temperature is regulated by the outside temperature. They don’t have any control over their own body temperature, so they’re really at the mercy of the outdoors. In that group, we have, first of all, snakes, garter snakes, and we have red-bellied snakes for the most part here. This time of year, in much of the county, you won’t see a garter snake or a red-bellied snake anymore, because they’ve already headed to the places that they’re going to spend the winter. Usually after the first couple hard frosts, they start making their way towards wherever they’re going to spend the winter in something called a hibernacula. And, more often than not, because in this part of the world we don’t have a lot of options of places to get below the frost line, these critters are going to spend the winter together. And so sometimes they’re in places that are traditional over many, many generations of snakes that snakes are moving to to spend the winter at. We don’t know about very many of these here in northeastern Minnesota, but there are some great locations that are known, say, in Manitoba, so even further north than here, where literally tens of thousands of snakes spend the winter together in what are, up there, sinkholes. So, at this time of year, the snakes here are moving sometimes along very traditional routes even to go to these places where they know they can safely spend the winter. They’re heading down into, it might be, under rock piles, talus slopes, fissures in cliffs, places that we can’t tell go down deep, but do go down deep into the ground, deep enough so that they get below the frost line. Once they get down there, they’re just going to get colder and colder and colder, but they’re not going to freeze. They can’t tolerate freezing, snakes can’t, so they have to find someplace that’s going to be reliably above freezing for the winter. They’re going to stay alert, but sluggish, so if their hibernacula would allow them to go deeper, should it get colder than it normally does or maybe there’s less snow cover and that’s affecting their particular spot, then they can move lower if they need to. But, if things get bad and they can’t go any lower, and it gets too cold, then there’s obviously a lot of mortality. It’s not about giving off any heat; it’s about the fact that there are limited numbers of places where this is possible.
No, I wouldn’t think so.
Anderson: So, think about it, if we only had a few shelters for humans through the winter here, we’d all be there, and we’d pile in pretty deep, I bet.
That sounds like a bad horror movie to me, Chel.
Anderson: Well, I know especially for people who are a little bit leery or phobic about snakes anyway, it’s not a happy thought. But, it is an amazing thing to see. I’ve only had the good fortune of stumbling upon one of these hibernacula one time, but it’s just incredible to peek down into some depth and see all these snakes together. So, that’s what snakes are doing. An amphibian that’s common to our area here, salamanders, so that would be the red-backed salamander and the blue-spotted salamander, they are also not tolerant of freezing. So, they have to find places to go and very little is known about where our salamanders are going in the winter, very secretive all throughout the year and we don’t really know a lot about it, but it’s suspected that they’re using the tunnels of the other critters that are doing the same thing. So, it might be chipmunk tunnels or woodchuck tunnels; who knows what all kinds of entrances. We might be able to go down some little space around roots of a tree that go deep from the surface. And, of course, they’re also going to be very dependent on having good snow cover, because snow cover makes a huge difference in how deep that frost goes in the ground, as most of us know. Let’s talk about insects, so butterflies. This is the time of year when people may have been seeing on the warmer days that we’ve had a lot of the small butterflies of a variety of different kinds; morning cloaks, commas, tortoiseshells, there are a number of species in those latter two groups. And, they’re going around looking for a sheltered, unheated space to spend the winter to kind of get tucked in. So, before we were inhabiting the landscape, they would have used under the big flakes of tree bark or in the fissures of tree trunks or under some kind of bark, you know, that was maybe propped up against something. So, they’re looking to mostly hide themselves. They can tolerate freezing, they’re adult butterflies, and they’re going to go through the winter frozen, basically. But, they need to hide from things that might want to eat them. So, there are going to be birds and mammals out there looking for things to consume over the winter, and they want to be out of sight, out of mind, out of harm’s way, that way. On the mammal side, in a similar way, we have snowshoe hares that are changing color rapidly to their winter white. They, of course, are an endotherm, like we are, they’re regulating their own body heat, but they are using, similar to the butterflies, a camouflage strategy: “OK, I’m going to change my color here, because that keeps me safer.” So, that’s a form of shelter, a different kind of shelter than we maybe normally think about, but it’s a form of shelter, and it can backfire in some years where you change color before the snow shows up, so I’m sure they’re hoping that the snow comes sooner rather than later.
Chel Anderson, DNR botanist and plant ecologist. Thanks for helping us understand what’s going on around us this fall.
Anderson: My pleasure.
Program:
Brook trout spawn is on in cold streams
-| Attachment | Size |
|---|---|
| BrookTrout_100610.mp3 | 6.03 MB |
Chel Anderson is a botanist and plant ecologist for the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources. She lives here in Cook County and joins us periodically to talk about phenology or what’s going on in the woods right now. Welcome, Chel.
Anderson: Hi, Jay.
Well, I understand brook trout are spawning. So, let’s talk about brookies and the spawn.
Anderson: Yeah, well those who have been taking advantage of fishing the streams and inland headwaters of streams here in Cook County over the summer are no longer doing that for brook trout, because the season is closed, and a key reason for that is because this is the time of year when brook trout are spawning, and we wouldn’t want to get in the way of the spawn, now would we?
No, no, because then you don’t get little brook trout.
Anderson: That’s right, because then your fishing the next year and years after would not be nearly so promising. So, yeah, brook trout are one of the two native trout species to Minnesota, the other of course being lake trout. Here in our part of the northeast, we have both a coaster lake trout which lives most of its life in Lake Superior, and we also have a stream brook trout that live in the headwaters and upper reaches of streams.
Do they get into lakes, too?
Anderson: Yeah. They are in lakes and ponds. I’m going to focus on the spawning of the brook trout that don’t spend any time in Lake Superior, because they’re really pretty different. But the brook trout that live in the headwaters of our streams here are cold-water loving species. So, this is where these fish are going to be focused on spending their time and doing their spawning. Brook trout, if one hasn’t ever seen one, is kind of a medium-sized fish, dark back, lighter sides and belly. The belly often has some red; the lower fins have some red on them. They have beautiful modeling on the dark part of their back and upper sides, and then they also have beautiful spots which are red and trimmed with blue. So this is, at least in my opinion, one of the most spectacular fish that one can ever see. They rival any fish I’ve ever seen on a coral reef and have this very close association with what are really rare environments even in Minnesota. Their close association with cold water environments make them a good indicator species for water quality in streams and rivers here in the north. At this time of year, the females are looking for places where the springs are actually coming up through a gravel, sandy, gravelly kind of substrate. They’re interested in finding those particular places for two reasons. One, because that water that’s coming up is cool, so it stays cool all the time and because that constant flow helps maintain the substrate there free of silt and it’s also a place where they can easily make what’s called a “redd” which their nest that they are going to put their eggs in. So, they’re looking for these spots and they’re swimming hard into the bottom and they’re vibrating their bodies and swishing their tails, and over the span of a few days they are doing that in that spot and creating this shallow nest or “redd.” During that time, there may be a male that is defending that against other males while the female is working on creating the redd. Once the redd is ready, the female is satisfied with it, then she’s going to kind of lie still in the redd, just kind of maintaining her position there, and the male will come over and might do a little bit of courting. Then, he’s just going to arch his body over hers and she’s going to release the eggs and he’s going to release the sperm at the same time and they’re going to be vigorously vibrating their bodies and churning the water, so there’s a lot of mixing that’s going to go on when that release is happening. Of course, that’s essential to make sure the eggs get fertilized. Then the eggs will settle down in that depression. The female, then, with swipes of her tail, will move some gravel from the edges of the redd out over the eggs and cover them with a light layer of gravel. So, now they’re kind of stuck there in that nice place where there’s this constant flow of oxygenated, cool water. They’re looking for water temperatures between 40 and 49 degrees, is when they really want to be working on their spawning activities. The eggs are going to develop there. Depending on how cold the water is, it may take anywhere from 50 to 150 days for the eggs to develop and hatch out as tiny fish. They’re going to spend that time right there in the redd, and maintaining that open, oxygenated condition of water moving through is essential to the survival of the egg. So, that’s where the linking of the high-quality conditions of the watershed are so important to the success of the spawning, and the success of the eggs.
And they’re developing under the ice?
Anderson: Yes, they’re developing under the ice. But, of course, because there’s a spring flow, those aren’t going to be places where the ice is going to form right stuck to the gravel, right? And so the fish are very careful about the spots that they choose. The importance of watershed quality is that we don’t want silt coming in and settling over these places. Of course, a small spring flow can only keep off a small amount of sediments coming through in the stream or in a pond. It’s an out-of-sight kind of activity that’s going on, but so important to something that people enjoy so much about coming and living here and visiting here fishing here. You know, I don’t know how many people I’ve talked to over the years who there’s no greater delight for them than spending a day touring through the woods trying to get to their favorite brook trout fishing area. I mean, these are such important aspects of many peoples’ time here, and it’s important to remember that it persists because of some things that go on outside of our easy-to-see or easy-to-hear kinds of experiences, but they’re really important none the less. Brook trout don’t die after they spawn, they live, you know, three to four, maybe up to six years and they spawn every year of their adult lives. They are usually ready to spawn at just a year old.
Yeah. That’s my next question. How fast does it take these little guys to grow?
Anderson: Yeah, they grow pretty fast, and usually within a year or so, they can be ready to spawn the very next one.
Chel Anderson, DNR botanist and plant ecologist. Thanks, Chel, for helping us understand brook trout this fall.
Anderson: You’re welcome.
Program: