Natural Connections

While staying in Boulder Junction, Wis. to take a Wilderness First Responder course last week, I made time for a bike ride on the Heart of Vilas County Bike Trail. This wonderfully curvy, scenic, paved trail is a favorite of mine. At this junction between spring and summer, I delighted in the profusion of flowers. Lois Nestel, the Museum's first naturalist and director, might not have joined me on a bike ride, but I know I would have loved to walk attentively through the woods with her. This week, I'd like to share her description of the residents of woods and fields as summer begins to bloom. Slow down a minute with me, we'll smell the roses, and I think you'll find it rewarding.

I sat on the tan, dusty ground of the quarry in north central Iowa, fingers grasping at the shell that lay halfway buried in the chalky clay and limestone. Wiggling it back and forth, I gently pulled it up from the ground that it had been resting in for millions of years. The ridged shell was almost perfectly intact, painting me a detailed picture of what the animal looked like. I had found a brachiopod fossil, a marine invertebrate who used to live in the warm, shallow sea of the Devonian Period, roughly 380 million years ago. As I sat examining my find, I couldn't help but think about how special it is to find something so ancient, to hold the remnants of their life in my hand, and glimpse what life on Earth was like millions of years ago.

In just the last week or two, new life has exploded in the Northwoods. To my brain, it feels like a burst of fireworks. Instead of embers sparkling in the darkness, there's been a surge of colorful blossoms, an eruption of vibrant baby leaves, a cacophony of birdsong, and a buzz of movement everywhere I look. 

The shiny resin on balsam poplar buds turns to airborne molecules during spring leaf-out. Those molecules contain a myriad of chemicals that are useful to the tree -- and beneficial to us! Thriving in the far north -- farther than any other broadleaf tree in North America -- balsam poplar is poised to make drastic changes to the tundra as summer temperatures warm. Read more about this amazing tree in this week's Natural Connections, or listen to the podcast. 

426 - A Prairie-Dweller Moves North A lump of gray fur in the middle of the trail pulled us up short. The small mammal was about the size of a gray squirrel, but with cute, round ears tucked below their silhouette. I'd never seen a Franklin's ground squirrel before! On various websites I read that these are a species of tallgrass prairies, although they've declined as the prairies have declined. In the southeastern part of their range the squirrels are barely hanging on in grassy roadsides and railroad right-of-ways—the same places where a few native plants have escaped the plow. Several sources suggested that they belong only in the southern and western portions of Minnesota. So what was this little prairie dweller doing in Northeastern Minnesota?

My companion gasped in the middle of a sentence as a pine warbler darted over my head and landed on rough spruce bark a few feet way. Then he swooped to a rock wall and paused mid-hop to belt out a trill. We watched his stout beak open and his white wing bars vibrate with the effort. Pine warblers are aptly named, as they are rarely spotted anywhere but in pine trees.

First, we squinted, then we peered through binoculars, and finally I zoomed in with my camera to make sense of the dark shapes. The ducks had a funny conehead and a gracefully swooped patch of gray on their side. The pale ring around their dark beak was the most distinctive character. I'm not good at waterfowl, so I wracked my brain for a likely ID…were they ring-billed ducks? That would be logical. But no, a quick peek through the Merlin app's helpful photos confirmed that these were ring-necked ducks. Huh?