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It wasn’t long before someone keyed in on an adorably squiqqly line snaking up the length of a tree. A frost crack! Long ago I learned that these cracks burst open with a noise like a rifle shot as a sunny day plunges into a frigid night. I couldn’t remember, though: was it the contraction of cooling wood, or the expansion of ice that caused the trunk to split? Both make sense. I pondered this as we hiked along, and also tried to spot more cracks throughout the forest. 

You know it’s chilly when even Lake Superior can see their own breath. During a recent period of bitter cold, there was sea smoke drifting across the shining gray wavelets near Grand Marais, MN. Lake water had also formed ice on the rocks near shore, and we circumnavigated Artist’s Point to admire Nature’s sculptures. All the while, a small flock of mallard ducks bobbed on the waves in East Bay, behind the protective curve of Artist’s Point in Lake Superior. Then, driving home, something large swooped across the highway in front of us and several feet above the car. The blunt face and tapered silhouette were unmistakable characteristics of a Great Gray Owl—my first one in the wild! This day may have been bitter cold, but that made the beauty in it all the more sweet.

Murmurs of interest rippled through the classroom as I spread a rectangle of green felt on the floor at the front of the room. The murmurs became questions as I placed two lines of life-sized animal tracks, printed and cut out of white paper, onto the felt. When I finally invited the second graders to come up and gather around the felt, I was amazed by the almost instantaneous formation of a perimeter of kneeling children, totally focused on the scene.

On Christmas Day, I found myself driving from Lutsen, Minn., to Duluth with a very unusual package next to my skis and duffle bag.

To reassure ourselves that the owl was still alive, Christine opened one of the flaps on the box. Staring up at us were two giant yellow eyes nestled into satellite dishes of gray-patterned feathers that funnel sound into the owl’s hidden ears. 

Gathered around a bonfire on the Winter Solstice, the hostess asked us each to share one moment from the past year that made us go, “Wow!” Despite the fact that my year had included rafting the Colorado River through the Grand Canyon, my favorite “wow” moment happened on a river much closer to home. One lovely afternoon last May, I set out with a friend to paddle an upper section of the Namekagon River. Approaching a bridge, a burst of twittering, movement, and flashes of yellow in the alder shrubs drew my attention. Squinting, I thought I spotted a black cap on one of the tiny heads, and quickly pulled into an eddy.

Sure enough, our binoculars revealed a flock of half-a-dozen or more little birds, “yellow as a lemon, with a smooth, black cap…” as Mary Oliver described them. Laughing in delight, we felt like we’d just conjured these Wilson’s Warblers with her poem.

Chickadees cache as many as one hundred thousand food items per year. Not only do chickadees remember their seed cache sites, but they also remember details like which food items were the most favored and which seeds have already been eaten by them or by a thief. To support such an incredible memory, chickadees grow 30 percent more neurons in the fall when caching behavior peaks. Last April, researchers at Columbia University added to our understanding of chickadee memory. They discovered that chickadees create “neural barcodes” and essentially create their own system for inventory and checkout—just like at a grocery store!

While digesting one of the many rounds of holiday feasts and leftovers, with plates of cookies in between, a headline caught my eye: “Big brains or big guts: Choose one.” As much as the post-holiday-dinner-brain-fog is real, I don’t love the implications of those options. Luckily, the article wasn’t about humans. It was examining birds in cold, highly variable habitats, and their struggle to survive. Essentially, birds have two options: spend energy maintaining a big brain that allows them to find high-quality food, or spend energy maintaining a large stomach that can make low-quality food sufficient in high quantities. According to the research, if you are a bird who needs to survive cold winters, you must choose one. There’s no middle ground. 

In a landscape of winter white, bits of color really pop. Recently I was on the North Shore of Minnesota when they received several inches of fluffy, wonderful snow. The forest seemed decked out for Christmas with clusters of bright red mountain-ash berries adding color in the woods along the ski trails, around town, and on the rocky shore of Lake Superior. Ruffed grouse appreciate them even more, I’m sure, as they perch in the dark purple twigs and nibble both berries and buds. And now the trees have given me a bit of a mystery to nibble on too...

The lack of leaves in this “see-through season” reveals aspects of the landscape otherwise obscured. For example, “Check out that nest!” I exclaimed to my friend, and we admired the small cup suspended between a Y in the sugar maple twigs. The placement of the nest, plus the few pale strips of paper from a bald-faced hornet nest woven among grass, bark, and pine needles, told me that it was likely built by a red-eyed vireo. 

On a recent hike in Virginia, a song burst out of a bush beside us. The white-throated sparrow riffed on their usual song, experimenting with a gravely “sweet can-a-NA-da can-a!” “Jazzy!” We laughed to each other. I don’t usually expect birds to sing in their winter habitat. Birds’ songs are typically used to attract mates and defend territories, and therefore are most useful in spring and summer. So, we figured we were hearing a young male practicing for the coming year. As it turns out, that was only part of the story.

Head down, I hurried toward the post office. Then, a spot of color made me stop and smile. A single yellow dandelion and its star of vibrant, toothy leaves nestled into the grass. I’ve always loved dandelions. And, the dandelion may be more useful than I ever imagined! The Kazakh dandelion, a relative of the one in your yard, is an excellent source of natural rubber.

Once upon a time, and by that, I mean 1.9 billion years ago, the atmosphere was filled with carbon dioxide and methane, and the first inklings of life had only just begun. Volcanic activity in the early oceans, and erosion off the few continents, enriched the water with iron and silica. Cyanobacteria bloomed in those mineral-rich seas, and they also produced at least one type of toxin: oxygen.

Light from the dining hall at Upham Woods Outdoor Learning Center spilled out, down the hill, under the pines, and onto the bank of the Wisconsin River, where a handful of environmental educators were waiting for a night hike to begin. 

I almost hadn’t joined the group. This was the final night of the Wisconsin Association of Environmental Education annual conference, and I had a long drive home the next day. Being sleepy for that wouldn’t be ideal. But it had been years since I’d been on a night hike, and I didn’t want to miss out. 

An odd series of hollow little clucks and rattles emanated from a patch of lichen-crusted rocks. Was there a friendly alien hiding nearby? Or maybe a Star Wars character that only Han Solo can understand? With short, jerking movements, the camouflaged chatterboxes revealed their identity: ptarmigans.

The wool of my favorite old rusty orange sweater felt warm and scratchy as I stuffed it into my backpack next to a jacket and camera. The low gray clouds hung onto their rain, but wind gusts flung water drops off the trees as I walked to my car. As soon as I turned onto the gravel road, though, I knew I’d made the right decision. The much-needed rain had washed dust off the autumn leaves and saturated their colors. This was a perfect day for a scenic drive through a rainbow forest.

Ever since I discovered how to read the glaciated landscape of Northern Minnesota and Wisconsin, I’ve been fascinated by these massive forces of nature. Admiring them from afar, seeing them up close, paddling among icebergs, touching their ice…glaciers are even more amazing than I’d expected. This week I’ve been busy leading field trips, but I’ve been dreaming of a time when I was a participant on two field trips that involved paddling near glaciers in Alaska.

By Elliot Witscher with Emily Stone
In the bright sunlight and heat of the afternoon, the cool, fresh, flowing water from a pipe in Prentice Park in Ashland, WI, was a welcome treat. I wasn’t expecting to find a unique geological feature in an unassuming city park. But walking down the hill from the parking lot, we found a plain metal pipe, surrounded by gravel, with water gushing from it. Standing in a circle with the 20 other people also taking the Wisconsin Master Naturalist Volunteer Training, I learned from Professor Tom Fitz that this was a flowing artesian well.

As our water taxi motored into the harbor, a gray-headed water bird floated around the corner of a barnacle-crusted rock. A Pacific Loon!
Having spotted one new species of loon, my interest in seeing the others grew. The afternoon that I arrived at the Toolik Field Station to prepare for doing caribou research, I took a short walk around the base to get a feel for the area. The tremolo of a loon flying overhead sent a thrill down my spine, and I watched the large bird land on the far side of Toolik Lake. Were they a Common Loon? They sounded similar. But the logo for Toolik features a Yellow-billed Loon, and I was sure the scientists would have chosen them deliberately. Now that I’d seen the most similar loon to the ones I’d left back home, my last goal was to see the most different loon.

A small group of first graders nearly vibrated with excitement as they gathered in a circle on the carpet at the front of their room. They remembered me from last school year, when I’d brought tubs full of nature stuff to their kindergarten classroom. For those first Museum Mobile visits, we focused on exploring nature using our five senses. Now, as first graders, I explained, we get to practice those skills again…by using our eyes to make observations about spiders! I was heartened by the wave of enthusiasm – not fear – that rippled through the group. 

Floating down the river, exploring the side canyons, relaxing around camp, I was always on the lookout for both the novel and the familiar. A giant insect I’d never seen before but knew immediately to be a Tarantula-hawk Wasp caught my attention just as easily as the glossy black feathers of a Common Raven. After a few days of pointing out something I’d noticed, or explaining the basics of a geological feature, I found more questions coming my way from the other participants. With each teachable moment, I felt more connected to both the canyon and my fellow rafters. I wasn’t surprised at the way this unfolded, and probably, neither are you.

Due to a stuffy nose, I’m not recording a new episode for you this week. I did pull forward this episode from 2023 about the elk herd near Clam Lake. 

Morning mist hung low in the sky as a dozen elk ran across a clearing. A similarly sized herd of Museum members held our breath and grinned at our good luck. It was luck 3 billion years in the making.

Curtains of vibrant lights were moving just above the horizon. The aurora! My jaw must have dropped as I stumbled backward to lean against the car, and tears welled up as I tilted my head back for a better view. The moon hung full and bright on my east. To my west, spruce trees were silhouetted against the faint, rosy afterglow of the setting sun. And all across my southern sky, northern lights danced in curtains of green and white and pink. The curtains were woven of many wispy streaks, as if I was seeing the individual particles of solar wind blazing through our atmosphere. Northern lights are not just an awesome benefit to living on Earth; they are an absolute necessity to our survival. Our Earth defends us. And the result is unspeakable beauty.

With the rough, rolling, cold, wet ferry ride behind us, we disembarked gratefully at the Windigo dock on the southwest corner of Isle Royale National Park. Isle Royale, a 45 mile long and 9 mile wide bedrock island, is teeming with life that somehow made the treacherous journey. We hoisted our packs and started off down the trail. Before long, we met several pairs of hikers just ending their trips. We asked about their route on the island, their hometown, and which ferry they took. In essence, we asked “How did you get here?” Mostly they used the water route, but one couple arrived by air in a float plane. Historically, making winter crossings by dogsled was also common. Isle Royale is not an easy place to get to, or to get around, and yet life surrounded us on all sides. Soon I started asking “How did you get here?” to everything we saw. 

Cliffs rose out of the lake ahead of us and soon towered a few dozen feet above our heads. Millenia of waves had worked their way into weaker layers of rock and then continued to enlarge them grain by grain. Some hollows were still tiny, but others formed deep alcoves. They spoke of the power of persistence. As we rounded one corner, a sea arch with one leg out in the lake framed our view. In another spot, multiple caves had coalesced into a maze we could paddle through.

After hours on the water, we returned to dry land to find food and shade. Taking our dessert to-go, we sat at a picnic table with a view of the lake and remarked about just how restful and healing the day had been. The combination of soaking in sunshine; gazing at and jumping in clean water; feeling awe at the ancient rocks; and admiring the beauty of life, had worked a special kind of magic on our moods. 

Sarah Montzka is about to start their senior year as a wildlife education major at UW Stevens Point. This summer, as a Summer Naturalist Intern at the Museum, they taught our Junior Naturalist programs, assisted with live animal care, and showed a real talent for finding and appreciating the oddest parts of nature. 

This week Sarah will tell you all about lampreys!

The main event of the moth workshop came after dark. Kyle hung a white sheet with a mercury vapor lamp across an old driveway. Then he painted fermented banana goo onto the trunks of trees along the drive. Until almost midnight, our little group walked from tree to tree to the sheet and back, with stops at patches of blooming milkweed in between.

From drab lichen mimics to shimmering green wings; micromoths smaller than a grain of rice to underwing moths the size of my palm; we were captivated by the multitudes of mysterious moths.

Butterwort, primrose, and eyebright are arctic disjuncts, or northern plants who have been separated from their main populations. “We're very interested in these species as the vanguard of climate change for the Arctic. Whatever is happening here is what we expect to see happening farther north, as the climate continues to warm,” said Dr. Briana Gross, an Associate Professor at UMN-Duluth.

I met a new friend this spring, and I’ve been heading up north to visit them every chance I get. We didn’t meet online exactly, but I did use an app to figure out their location. You see, I read about them over the winter, and just had to find out more about their life! They are a little odd – they supplement their diet with insects and make an unusual kind of yogurt – and they may not be hanging out this far south for very much longer. 

Being a botany nerd, I call this new friend of mine Pinguicula vulgaris, a plant also known as Common Butterwort.

Keir, who specializes in moss, passed around tuft after tuft of green Dr. Seussian inventions. The scientific names he gave with each sample slipped through my brain in a fog of unspellable syllables. I admired each one eagerly, though, in awe of the kaleidoscope of leaf shapes, textures, patterns, and colors.

I was crouched down, admiring the round, glistening leaves of a unique moss sprinkled in a thick jumble across a small bowl between cedar roots, when Keir finally spoke words I recognized. “And here’s some spilled penny moss…” I couldn’t even see the specimen he held up, but I knew he’d just named my lovely, shiny friend.

I pretty much stopped fishing after my dad stopped untangling my line and tying my hook. The few times I’ve tried as an adult, I’ve come up empty-handed. So I have the utmost respect for osprey, who catch at least one fish for every four dives. How do they do it? Osprey, eagles, kingfishers, and green herons have adaptations that make them excellent anglers.

With a quick push from shore, my old green canoe caught the current and we swept downstream on the Namekagon River. The recent rains have filled the river with more water than I’ve seen in a couple of summers, and warm days have filled the river with life.

I’m not sure that we’d been searching for anything in particular when we decided to paddle on the Namekagon, but what we found was a river, that, in the words of Mary Oliver, is “touching every life it meets.”

Coggin and I followed Karen’s memory through the dark swamps in search of this rare flower. The dirt path wound around spruce, fir, birch, and cedars. A hint of color caught my eye. There, almost crushed by the tip of a spruce tree blown off in some strong wind, the white and pink of the Ram’s Head orchid glowed through the gloom. 

Since the fungi, forest community, and pollination have to coalesce perfectly for an orchid to bloom, we felt lucky to be in the right place at the right time.

The old turtle scraped at the sand with her naily toes as the kids gathered in a wide circle around her. Sometimes I get questions about dinosaurs on field trips, but they don’t fit into the Museum’s focus on Northern Wisconsin species. Today, instead, the first- and second-graders got a close-up look at a creature whose species has existed on Earth for over 40 million years, with direct ancestors much older than dinosaurs.

The fleshy stem bore no leaves, just a sprig of beautiful little flowers on the upper half. Each blossom looked like a whimsical elf.

Coralroots exist underground for much of their lives, and their flowering stalk may not pop up every year, or in the same place. So, while widespread and not uncommon, coralroots can be hard to spot – or at least that’s my excuse for never having seen one before this year! 

As I climbed back into my car with a camera full of more lovely wildflower photos, I smiled at my good luck. Here in Wisconsin and Minnesota, we have quite a variety of habitats and soil types in a relatively small area. I can explore rich soils and maple forests filled with trilliums, wild oats, and large-flowered bellwort one day, then delight in the bedrock home of bird’s eye primrose (and a not-yet-booming mystery plant) the next. And now here I was enjoying prairie flowers in a barrens! 

What do we have to thank for these riches? Why the glaciers, of course!

This week I attend a festival of birds and nature.

Last week, with evening sunshine glinting off the riffled waters of Lake Superior’s North Shore, and a surprisingly warm breeze wafting over the spit of wave-washed bedrock, a flower caught my eye. Rock-hopping over, I discovered the pink petals and yellow centers I’d been looking for. Notches in each of the five petals gave them a lovely heart shape. At the base of the flower’s wiry stem was a little rosette of bright green leaves with wavy edges. This flower was one of dozens all sprouting from the cushion of moss in a little bedrock nook. Besides the Bird's-eye Primrose, quite a diversity of plants crowded together in this island of habitat surrounded by a sea of bedrock. 

Even though I wish my beloved spring ephemerals could last longer, each spring I also cheer them on in their race against leaf-out. In many ways, the speed of spring is what makes it such an amazing season!

The cool, damp air smelled delicious as I ambled up the gravel road. I’ve been up and down ladders and scaffolding for exhibit construction lately, and so I haven’t had the energy for big bike rides in the afternoon. That’s fine. I will still be able to bike once the mosquitoes hatch, but I won’t be able to walk slowly without a head net.

When the blossoms of a honeysuckle bush caught my eye, I was even happier for my slow pace. I stopped to admire the prismatic raindrops caught under each flower’s chin.

“During this activity,” I explained, “you will each become a professor of something in these woods.” 

Over the years, I’ve found that this Professor Hike activity is very effective at connecting students to nature. What’s been a surprise, especially as I lead it with adults instead of sixth graders, is how wonderful it is at connecting people to each other as they teach and learn. 

Professors indeed, these little plants have reminded me of the value in taking the time to look closely. I can’t wait to share more of their wisdom during the Professor Hike program on May 8! Register by May 6 at cablemuseum.org.

Read all about it in this week's Natural Connections, or listen to the podcast. Find links to both at https://www.cablemuseum.org/connect/

I heard it first, since I knew what to expect. I pointed eagerly toward a featureless place in the bushes. Peent. The brand-new birder with me strained to pick that one sound out of the thicket. Peent. We waited; breaths held. Peent.

Nature has invented some pretty interesting courtship behavior over the eons, and American woodcocks are a lovely example. Somewhere in the bushes, a female woodcock pretends not to watch the male’s strenuous antics. If he passes muster, she will let him approach her, bobbing with his wings raised, to seal the deal. That’s it, though. She goes off to build a nest and he keeps displaying.

I’m not sure what traits woodcocks are looking for in a partner, but I want to hang out with someone who goes looking for woodcocks!

What if we stopped calling trees, water, minerals, fruits, fish, soil, and everything else Natural Resources and started using the term Earthly Gifts? This was one of the first questions posed by Dr. Robin Wall Kimmerer at a talk last month in La Crosse, WI. Kimmerer is the author of Braiding Sweetgrass: Indigenous Wisdom, Scientific Knowledge and the Teachings of Plants.

I’ve been thinking about Robin’s words…and finding her ideas echoed elsewhere. Kathleen Dean Moore is another of my favorite authors, who, like Kimmerer, won the Sigurd Olson Nature Writing Award. They both encourage us to appreciate gifts from the Earth. Moore wrote, “to turn the gift in your hands, to say, this is wonderful and beautiful, this is a great gift—this honors the gift and the giver of it…” 

Here are a few of the Earthly Gifts I’ve received recently. Please admire them with me, and then reflect on a few of your own.

With soggy skies above and soggy snow below, my recent hike on the North Country Trail was not inspiring a love for spring. But with my head bent to watch my footing, I noticed a sprinkling of debris coated the surface of the softening snow. Suddenly one of the little specks vanished. Crouching down for a better look, I discovered that most of the sprinkles were tiny, leaping springtails known as snow fleas. I dug out my macro camera.

Birds can collide with windows in any season, but I’ve always noticed an increasing number of those sickening thuds in spring. As waves of migrating birds head north, we see both a huge increase in the number of individuals, and an increase in birds who are new to the neighborhood and more likely to be hoodwinked by windows.

Now that warm days are turning even window washing and yardwork into attractive tasks because they give us excuses to get outside, it’s a good time to think about making your windows better for birds.

Re-published from 2021

As a naturalist, I get the strangest emails. I try not to check them at home, but when my phone buzzed and the subject said “June bug on steroids?” it was worth interrupting my evening chores. “The past couple nights I’ve heard something hit our window at night when we have lights on and each time I’ve thought ‘that sounded like a June bug… but BIGGER.’” wrote a Museum member. 

Chuckling, I wrote her back, “Looks like a predaceous diving beetle! That’s their normal size!”

“To name and describe you must first see, and science polishes the gift of seeing,” wrote Robin Wall Kimmerer in Braiding Sweetgrass. In this week’s Natural Connections, we’ll explore some of the vocabulary of winter tree identification, and the beautiful ecology it helps us to see.

One consequence of this weird winter is that plants like mosses, ferns, and wintergreen who are usually protected by a blanket of snow are now exposed to drying winds. This can result in what is essentially freezer burn in nature.

“Who’s eating my trees?” asked a participant on a hike last week. I’d been wondering the same thing! A few weeks ago I noticed creamy colored exposed wood on several small maple trees along my driveway. 

“Why do animals even eat bark?” someone else asked. Good question.

As our world changes, I’m grieving my old friends cross-country skiing (on natural snow) and the subnivean zone, while still making a point to appreciate new delights. I can’t even count how many times I’ve looked at the frozen surface of a North Shore river and wanted to walk the whimsical ice formations up through bedrock canyons. But on past visits the snow was too deep, the wind chill too brutally cold, or the skiing too good to choose that adventure. 

This past weekend, conditions were finally perfect!