The Rhinelander Daily News - Online news and information for the Rhinelander, Wisconsin region

Ced Vig - wisconsin woodsmoke

“By all these lovely tokens, September days are here, with summer’s best of cheer and autumn’s best of cheer.”

– Helen Hunt Jackson

September is a beautiful month in northern Wisconsin. Already the red maples and sumacs are displaying their flamboyant colors.

The bracken is turning brown. It is one of the few ferns that are found all over the world. Since the plants do not fall when their tops dry in the fall, they form excellent winter shelter for ruffed grouse.

Amazing! Amazing!

Plant nectar (20 percent sugar) can be an amazing fuel for some forms of animal life. According to the National Geographic Society, a gallon of plant nectar would serve as fuel for a bee to travel four million miles at a speed of 7 mph. And it wouldn’t pollute the air. Hal Borland, one of my favorite writers, suggests, “Perhaps we should find a way to make a car operate on honey instead of gasoline.”

Smarter than cats

Raccoons visit our bird feeders during these September evenings. They’re smarter than cats; more intelligent than monkeys. Not only can they see, hear and smell better than most animals, but the soles and toes of their forefeet have a highly developed sense of touch which they use to find much of their food, probing under stream banks and logs on the water’s edge. Because of this type of food getting, raccoon dens are generally located in hollow trees close to water.

Look for black and orange caterpillars

You’ll see these colorful caterpillars crossing the roads and sidewalks. They’re woolly bears searching for a spot to spend the winter. Folklore says that these little “woollies” can predict the length of the winter. If the black band is longer than the orange one, winter will be a long one. These caterpillars are a life stage of the moths.

Long distant migrants

Toward the end of September you’ll see geese flying over the countryside. These Canadian geese are the earliest migrants both in the fall and spring. The geese nest on the south shores of Hudson Bay. It’s an 850-mile flight to their first stopping place at Horicon Marsh. The non-stop trip is made in one day. The geese will be at the marsh for about two weeks. Most of the geese will winter in southern Illinois, 450 miles south of Horicon.

“The wild geese were passing over. ... There was an infinite cold passion in their flight, like the passion of the universe, a proud mystery never to be solved.”

Martha Ostenso, Wild Geese

Dates to remember

Sept. 1: Happy Labor Day. Welcome to September! Early goose and mourning dove seasons open.

Sept. 3: Bear season opens.

Sept. 6: Sturgeon hook-and-line season opens.

Sept. 7: First quarter moon.

Sept. 13: Archery deer, small game, and fall turkey opens.

Sept. 15: Full moon.

Sept. 22: Equinox

Sept. 24: New moon.

How do blue jays get so many peanuts in their mouths?

Blue jays and other members of the crow family are unique. They have throat pouches into which they can pack whole or unshelled seeds for later cashing or eating.

The crow family is one of the most intelligent bird families. Once the jays hide their food, they can remember exactly where they put it for a remarkable length of time. They even have squirrels beat!

So when you see the jays collecting the peanuts in their throats, you know they’ll probably be eating it ... sooner or later.

Feeding the hummers

In a few weeks it will be time for the hummingbirds to fly south. “Should I stop feeding my hummers so their departure won’t be delayed?” a woman asks.

I don’t think so! Most of our birds leave the Northwoods because of the shortening of the daylight hours. They return in the spring because of the lengthening daylight.

The hummingbirds usually leave during the first two weeks in September. At that time there is still an abundance of food and the daily temperatures are warm. There really is no need for them to leave. But some type of biological alarm clock sends the hummers on their way. Artificial feeding doesn’t seem to deter their going.

For the hummers, sugar water is a supplementary food. Their principal diet is comprised of small spiders, insects and plant nectar. To my knowledge few hummingbirds, if any, stay in the Northwoods after they are programmed to leave. Keep feeding your hummers.

Woody Widdles

Q: What do you call 100 rabbits jumping backward?

A: A receding hare line.

Q: What happened to the two bedbugs who fell in love?

A: They got married in the spring.

Q: What does a worm do in a cornfield?

A: He goes in one ear and out the other.

Q: What did the ocean say to the beach?

A: Nothing, it just waved.

Q: What’s faster, heat or cold?

A: Heat—you can catch a cold.

Robins get tipsy

The mountain ash berries are ripe. The robins love them! In some parts of the country, if the mountain ash berry crop is large, the robins may hang around until December.

It is not unusual to have the robins eat so many berries that when they fly from the trees they act as though they are slightly intoxicated—flying into windows and killing themselves. Do they get tipsy from eating the fermenting berries? Is it the alcohol or another chemical that gets them tipsy? Maybe it’s a case of indigestion or overeating.

Northwoods notes

The most common shrub in the Northwoods may be the beak hazel bush. The female flowers produce nuts usually in pairs with the husks are elongated into flared tubes or beaks.

The spaghnum moss in our spruce swamps may hold 20 times its own weight in water, slowly releasing it into our brook trout streams.

Don’t know why, but there are few hemlock trees in Minnesota. Perhaps the finest hemlock stand in the Rhinelander area is in the forestland across from the old brewery site on the Pelican River.

Deer will eat balsam fir only when they are starving; moose will browse it nearly to extinction.

When the young ruffed grouse were hatched, 75 percent of their diet was insects, principally ants. Currently the major portion of the insect diet is replaced with berries and white clover leaves.

Those speckled alder bushes that grow along the streams are important—not only preventing erosion of the banks and providing a place for the fish to hide—but for adding fertility to the soil they’re rooted in. Bacteria in their roots turn atmospheric nitrogen into a mineral form that is accessible to plants—adding as much as five grams of nitrogen to a square meter of topsoil every year.

More notes

This is the time when you may see large numbers of baby toads hopping around the countryside—sometimes these small hoppers are baby spring peepers. A toad lays thousands of eggs—if all the hatchlings survived, we would be inundated with toads. Toads survive the winter by digging a burrow about 12” deep or in a tunnel made by some other animal.

In June fox snakes, or pine snakes, laid 8-29 eggs in old stumps or under old logs. Now those eggs are hatching and producing snakelets that are about 12 inches long. The female eastern garter snakes are giving birth to little six inch snakelets in numbers that may vary from 6-73.

The herring gulls that you are now seeing on our northern lakes nested on the rocky edges of the Apostle Islands, especially on Eagle and Gull Islands. Herring gulls have been known to live for as long as 27 years. From a distance herring gulls appear like a white duck on the water. The young gulls are dusky brown.

Today’s chuckle

Mosquitoes are like small children—the minute they stop making noise—that’s when you know they’re up to something.

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