Graced by the Seasons: Fall and Winter in the Northwoods

By John Bates and Terry Daulton

Graced by the Seasons: Fall and Winter in the Northwoods offers a sequel to Bates' highly popular book, A Northwoods Companion: Fall and Winter. This "Volume 2" provides readers with more fascinating insights into the remarkable transitional season of autumn, and the many extraordinary adaptations animals and pla

• Language: English
• Publisher: Manitowish River Press
• Release date: Jul 14, 2023
• ISBN: 9780999815762

John Bates

John Bates is the author of ten books and a contributor to seven others, all of which focus on the natural history of the Northwoods. He's worked as a naturalist in Wisconsin's Northwoods for 33 years, leading an array of trips and giving talks all designed to help people further understand the remarkable diversity and beauty of nature, and our place within it. He has served on the Board of Trustees for the Wisconsin Nature Conservancy, River Alliance of Wisconsin, and the Wisconsin Humanities Council, and he currently serves on the Board of the Northwoods Land Trust. John has a MS in Environmental Sciences from UW Green Bay.John and his wife, fiber artist Mary Burns, live on the Manitowish River in Mary's grandparent's old home, where they raised two daughters.

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ALSO BY JOHN BATES:

Trailside Botany © 1995, University of Minnesota Press

Seasonal Guide to the Natural Year: Minnesota, Michigan, and Wisconsin

©1997, Fulcrum Publishing (Out of Print)

A Northwoods Companion: Spring and Summer

©1997, Manitowish River Press

A Northwoods Companion: Fall and Winter ©1997, Manitowish River Press

River Life: The Natural and Cultural History of a Northern River

©2001, Manitowish River Press

Graced by the Seasons: Spring and Summer in the Northwoods

©2006, Manitowish River Press

CONTRIBUTING AUTHOR TO:

Harvest Moon ©1993, Lost River Press

A Place to Which We Belong: Wisconsin Writers on Wisconsin Landscapes

©1999, 1000 Friends of Wisconsin

Seasons of the North ©2003, Jeff Richter, Nature’s Press

White Deer ©2007, Jeff Richter, Nature’s Press

PRAISE FOR Trailside Botany:

"I found it fascinating. . . Bates crafts his language to reflect the beauty he sees in each plant. . . Trailside Botany is as lively and diverse as a patch of woods."

—The Minnesota Conservation Volunteer

PRAISE FOR A Northwoods Companion:

It would be equally enjoyable to slip this book in your backpack with your sandwich and field guides, take it along when can sneak in ten minutes of reading between appointments, or keep it on your nightstand for a few minutes of quality reading at the end of the day.

—Wisconsin Natural Resources Magazine

PRAISE FOR River Life:

Bates leads the way with tantalizing stories and factoids as he presents the diverse ecological communities that can be experienced along the way . . . an excellent resource for presenting examples of natural history and ecology or for highlighting the biodiversity of northern temperate rivers.

—CHOICE

PRAISE FOR Graced by the Seasons:

Spring and Summer in the Northwoods:

Winner of the Ellis/ Henderson Award for Outdoor Writing,

Council for Wisconsin Writers

[Bates] has become arguably the state’s most prominent Northwoods naturalist . . . He’s the Pied Piper of informative outdoor excursions. In appetizing, informative bits and pieces, Bates drops intriguing scientific morsels on every page without being the least bit stuffy or confusing about it. Though not shy about offering an opinion on controversial issues, he typically delivers a classroom lecture while the reader is largely oblivious that school is in session. High school biology class was never so interesting or entertaining.

—Jim Lee, Appleton Post-Crescent

Graced by the Seasons: Fall and Winter in the Northwoods

© 2008 by John Bates. All rights reserved. Except for short excerpts for review purposes, no part of this book may be reproduced or transmitted in any form by any means, electronic or mechanical without permission in writing from the publisher.

Printed in the United States on 30% recycled paper.

Editors: Callie Bates, Greg Linder

Illustrations: Terry Daulton

Cover photography: Jeff Richter

Book and cover design: Pat Bickner, www.anewleaf-books.com

Publisher’s Cataloging in Publication Data

Bates, John, 1951-

Graced by the Seasons: Fall and Winter in the Northwoods

written by John Bates ; illustrated by Terry Daulton

Includes bibliographical references and index.

ISBN 978-0-9656763-6-6 (softcover)

ISBN 978-0-9998157-6-2 (e-book)

1. Natural History

2. Seasons

3. Nature Study

Library of Congress Control Number: 2008903435

0 9 8 7 6 5 4 3 2 1

I am indebted to all the people in the Northwoods who have shared their experiences and stories with me. Thank you, thank you, thank you.

My deepest thanks also go to the following people for making the production of this book possible: Callie Bates, Mary Burns, Terry Daulton, Pat Bickner, Stephany Freedman, and Greg Linder.

****

Dedications are usually reserved for honoring loved ones, but this book must be dedicated to a different sort of loved one—winter itself. I’m not sure we have a full sense of how important winter really is to us. My hope is that it may, at least, survive. But I pray that it may also truly flourish, so that come every mid-April we are again on our knees begging for spring to finally come—only then will the Northwoods have retained its true character.

Walking on the Earth is a miracle! We do not have to walk in space or on water to experience a miracle. The real miracle is to be awake in the present moment.

— THICH NHAT HANH

Present Moment Wonderful Moment

Contents

Introduction

September

October

November

December

January

February

Appendix

Index

Introduction

My wife Mary and I live on the Manitowish River in northern Wisconsin, so we pay attention to the life of this particular river and the woods around it. We paddle and play, botanize and bird, ski and snowshoe, exploring the landscape every way we can every moment we can. And the longer we live here, the richer the region grows in our hearts and minds.

We journal our experiences, my wife designs some of the life of the Northwoods into her weavings, and I use sightings of this and that as jumping-off points for my writing. We are mindful, as Jack Turner writes (The Abstract Wild), of "the dates of arrivals and departures, the births, the flourishings, the decays and deaths of wild things, their successions, synchronicities, dependencies, reciprocities, and cycles—the lived life of the earth."

I have to admit, however, that we’re guilty of not keeping complete records of all that we see, and are also guilty of not seeking the same flowers in the same places every year, or the same birds at the same sites, so that we can provide accurate, objective data on the phenological changes occurring here. As someone who writes and teaches about phenology, that’s a hard admission to make. But to be honest, recording observations is not why we spend our time on the river or in the woods.

We’re out there for the sheer joy of it, the pure pleasure, for how good the beauty makes us feel. It’s like the pleasure one gets from being around old friends who make you laugh, who help you find wisdom in tough times, who are fully themselves around you, and who grant you the space to be fully yourself. We’re connected to friends, as we are to the Northwoods, by a shared life. We sit on the bank of the Manitowish, listen, and converse, just as we sit on a couch (or in a canoe) with friends, listen, and converse. And we feel like we truly communicate, though we’re not always sure at the time what exactly was understood.

We’d do just about anything to help out our friends, and we’d do the same for the Northwoods. That’s one of the definitions of love—you care deeply for someone or something, and you act upon that love.

When I think about studying phenology, its practice certainly has a wealth of scientific, political, and educational value, but its ultimate worth comes down to the riches gained by learning to love a place and its inhabitants. As in most loving relationships, it is a life-long course, a slow accrual.

Most of us advance from seeing a charismatic swath of a place to seeing smaller and smaller things, which in turn widen our perspective. From a birding standpoint, many Northwoods residents begin by noticing eagles and loons, but over time start to notice kingfishers, then maybe kingbirds or cedar waxwings, and on to the sparrows and flycatchers. If they observe over enough years, they eventually learn to differentiate most of the sounds and the visual clues that indicate any one bird’s presence.

The same goes for plants—people start with white pines and graduate to the comparatively nondescript but equally interesting mosses or tiny wildflowers.

As our experience grows and we take more and more in, we expand our awareness of the diverse communities of life around us. In the process, we expand in equal measure our love of a place. Where before we had experienced only a sensory blur, we gradually learn the names of things. Over time we become acquainted with these other lives as one would with friends, and we begin to feel a part of the larger natural community. No longer a visitor or tourist, we become a card-carrying member, someone who belongs within the natural world in this time and place.

It’s a layering process of first learning to see, and then transforming formerly disconnected images into a personal vision so we are no longer lost in our own neighborhood. By making the landscape visible, then bringing it into focus, then bringing it to life, we make it part and parcel of our life. We’re no longer standing apart, but within. We gain the role of membership rather than dominance, and attempt to interact with the least harm and the greatest joy possible.

This is how, I believe, most of us come to love a place.

You may ask: Can a study of phenology really do all that?

Sure.

And no.

There’s no magic process for anything. George Thomson understood this when he wrote, "There is no answer. Seek it lovingly." Phenology is but one path to understanding the natural world. And like all paths, it’s one that can be taken to the top of a mountain, or just as easily, a path from which one can go in circles.

I believe, however, that the study of phenology offers one of the best paths into nature because it can be applied anywhere, anytime. The center of the world is always where you are right now. So, we don’t need to dream of the big trip to Glacier or Yellowstone or some other charismatic site—all of the world that we need is right here. While hiking a charismatic mountaintop helps knock the blinders off faster than looking at the robin on your lawn, major trips to astonishing landscapes can be a bit of an addiction. It’s a seeking of big highs, when most of our world is made of a vast assortment of little highs. As Emerson wrote, The invariable mark of wisdom is to see the miraculous in the common.

Phenology is all about seeing the common, and seeing it year after year with a growing sense of appreciation, not boredom. It is a soulful perspective. Once we get beyond the initial physical attraction to a place and look deeper, we begin to see the soul of the lake, the soul of the woodlands, the soul of everything.

Paying attention to this world leads to reverence. The study of phenology thus helps dissolve the perception that some species are worth saving more than others based solely on their beauty or usefulness. One of the most difficult political issues for environmentalists is society’s perceived inequality of species—we’re happy to save endangered eagles, but the snail darter or the kangaroo rat? Who needs them?

The backyard phenologist, though, is more likely to get the bigger concept of biodiversity because she has been spending time looking at common species all along. Over time, she has seen how the little species feed the big species, how just a little tweaking of habitat can make a big difference, and how small things can upend a local population. This reverence drives the endless passion needed to fight for obscure species like the Karner blue butterfly, Fassett’s locoweed, and the winged mapleleaf mussel.

Backyard phenologists call me regularly to talk about grackles and chipmunks and all manner of common critters and plants. They have built a relationship with these creatures, and have found, at a minimum, a deep curiosity for them, and, at a maximum, a reverence for them. These backyard observers, or citizen phenologists, are connected in a hundred small ways to their place and its inhabitants. E.O. Wilson wanted people to take "a Magellanic voyage around the trunk of a single tree." Backyard observers have the best chance to take such voyages as they witness the life around their home.

I have written a column called A Northwoods Almanac for a local paper over the last 18 years, and in it I relay many of the sightings people report to me. Alice in Woodruff saw a northern shrike; Bill in Springstead watched an eagle take a loon chick; Jean in Boulder Junction had a pair of cardinals nesting in her yard (a big deal because cardinals are rare in the Northwoods). I’m the natural world’s bulletin board for this area of northcentral Wisconsin, akin to the function of the local Laundromat’s bulletin board full of postings. The hope is that folks in Woodruff, upon hearing about the northern shrike, start looking out their window for this bird most of them have never heard of, and start talking about the fact it eats their goldfinches and chickadees, and it comes down from Canada, and . . .

Sometimes I act as a confirmer of things. Someone calls and says, I think I just saw a ——. Is that possible? I can then share the known range of such an animal, if it migrates through our area, if now and again rarities are sighted, and so on.

Sometimes I’m like a hardware store clerk trying to find the right nut to fit the bolt, except I’m sorting through information on the natural world in order to try to explain how something could have happened in a particular way.

And sometimes people just need someone with whom they can share the wonder of it all: Did you see the northern lights last night? My God, they were beautiful.

I’m convinced every local newspaper should have an almanac column where people can share their sightings, their questions, their excitements, their distresses, and their hopes for their place on this planet.

I think phenology also helps people talk across their fences. I’ve been envious for a long time of my 92-year-old father-in-law’s youthful connection to the land where he was raised and to his neighbors. Farming communities back in the 1920s were deeply connected through the sharing of tools, labor, and information. Neighbors needed one another. Crops wouldn’t get in without help. Not everyone could afford a thresher, so one machine rotated around through everyone’s fields. If you got sick, your neighbor would milk the cows, just like you’d milk their cows in a similar emergency.

If I ask Dad about something, he has a hard time giving me just the bare details. He talks about things always by referencing them to a bunch of other things. Say I ask him directions: Well, that’s over on County J just down from the Hardy farm; you know, they’re the folks that had draft horses that they used to loan to us if we needed some extra power in plowing a rocky field. They were related to . . . And on he goes, seeing in his mind all the relationships between people and the land and their work. Dad has lived a life where the stories of the plants, animals, and the land blend with those of the people. There’s no such thing for him as just directions.

He has a blessing that I don’t have. Mary and I have raised two daughters over the last 24 years in a tiny town, and we still don’t know many of the people. Why? Because unlike my father-in-law’s farm community, we don’t need to know one another in order to get by. Like most people in the 21st century, we’ve gained physical independence, but as the price, we’ve lost our sense of community.

Our surprising isolation from our neighbors is seldom breached, except for those moments when we exchange our sightings of something going on in the natural world. Then we have shared experiences around which to talk—reasons to lean over the fence.

Thus, while the scientific data that we citizen phenologists generate have significant value, I see our individual connectedness gained through our observations as the most important result. Efforts of naturalists and environmental writers to create connections are usually three-pronged, aimed at the head, hands, and heart. But of all the prongs, I would choose the heart as the most important to try to reach. "The conservation of rivers is not about rivers, but about the human heart," said Tanaka Shozo, a Japanese conservationist. We need all the phenological data, all the work of the hands, but without the heart’s convictions, it’s just data and work.

I dream of a time when people buy their home and receive not only the title to the property but also an album of the phenology of the property. This house album would point the way for every new owner—what to look for, where to look, when to look, and why to look. The writings, the photographs, the data would hit every new owner square in the head, hands, and heart. This is what this place has been all about for a century or more. Here are the people and the plants and animals that have called it home. The scale and scope of the album would provide the framework for an ethical, if not spiritual, connection.

In her poem Spring, Mary Oliver writes, "There is only one question; how to love this world. Phenology is basic to that love. But love of the natural world isn’t just a one-way street. It’s also the path to understanding yourself. If you don’t know where you are, you don’t know who you are," says Wendell Berry. I buy that. We need to know our backyards, our communities, our landscapes, if we wish to honor the life we’ve been given and honor the lives of all others on this earth.

NOTE:

This book is a follow-up, a volume 2, to my book A Northwoods Companion: Fall and Winter that was published in 1997. The material is largely drawn from columns I have written since then for a local paper. Combined with all the new material in my Graced by the Seasons: Spring and Summer book, I hope visitors and residents alike will come to more deeply love the North-woods, and to return that love in the form of true conservation.

All errors in the book are mine alone, and I’m happy to be corrected or to learn more—feel free to contact me at any time. I realized a long time ago that the more I learn, the more the world expands.

September

All the woods are pathless now—footway, cart track, mill road, alike knee-deep in leaves. The highway, even, broad and beaten though it be, shrinks to a ghostly trail through a fluttering world of color . . . Is there magic abroad? Have genii or gnomes caught you suddenly into a golden world? There is gold all about you—overhead, underfoot. It must be these lithe, gray-stemmed woodland giants stored all the sunshine in their hearts, and now exhale it through their leaves.

— M. MCCULLOCH WILLIAMS, 1892

THE HARVEST MOON

The harvest moon is the full moon that occurs nearest the autumn equinox. For those of us in the Northern Hemisphere, the harvest moon seems to remain in the sky longer than during other times—a phenomenon well-known and long appreciated by farmers who receive an unexpected amount of lunar light beneath which to reap their harvests.

How does this work? For most of the year, the moon rises in the east an average of 50 minutes later every night. But in the northern U.S. around the equinox, the moon rises only about 25 minutes later each night, thus providing more light in the early evening hours when harvesters may need it.

SEPTEMBER 1-15

FIRST FROST

The first frost rings the opening bell for autumn’s arrival. Leaf change progresses more rapidly now, the air will have more of a bite to it, seeds and birds will be flying on the wind, and morning fogs will now commonly obscure the lakes and rivers. While frost may not seem like a profoundly important event to most humans, to plants and animals in the North Country, this conversion of water into ice presents great danger. If ice forms within living cells, the result is almost always fatal. So, the first commandment of fall is: Thou shall avoid freezing.

For farmers, the first frost has dramatic consequences, triggering the end of the growing season for most crops. But for most insects and susceptible plants, frost translates as a cataclysm, an annual holocaust.

I’ve often wondered if insects have evolved behavioral adaptations to frost. The temperatures along lakeshores are typically warmer than those inland, demonstrating the very local atmospheric warming capabilities of lake water. Do some insects know that they should move to lakeshores to avoid frost? Some insects do survive the first frost, but most die, setting off a chain reaction in the bird world and increasing the pace of migration.

Note that the effect of the same freezing temperature varies according to the time of year. Thus, a 30°F night in July is a very different beast than a 30°F night in November. Many plants harden gradually in the late summer and early fall, acclimating to the cold by increasing the permeability of their cell walls. This permits water to pass through the cell walls into spaces between the cells where the water can freeze without harm.

COATS OF MANY COLORS

Autumn causes the shedding of many coats, whether in the form of plant leaves or animal fur. In September, deciduous plants shut down their metabolic engines, shuttling nutrients into storage, ending production of chlorophyll, getting their buds ready for dormancy, and beginning the process of the abscission of their leaves—an amputation of all that they strived for throughout the spring and summer.

Evergreens drop their needles in the fall, too, but only the older needles that have given service for several years. Come early winter, evergreens will enter several months of photosynthetic dormancy. However, by retaining a good proportion of their needles, they can begin photosynthesis in late winter, giving them a leg up on the leafless hardwoods.

Many animals and birds also drop their coats and grow new ones in the fall. Most waterfowl already molted back in mid-summer, but songbirds typically undergo a fall molt, replacing their colorful summer plumage with more, but less colorful, feathers.

So the molt is on, from summer leaves to summer pelages. We humans have little to molt, but perhaps what we alter is our emotional state, losing the languidness of summer and gaining the heightened energy of fall.

Whatever may be occurring, change is in the air. How beautifully the leaves grow old, wrote John Burroughs. They fairly become luminous, as if they glowed with an inner light . . . a maple tree before your window lights up your room like a great lamp.

WILD RICE AND SORA RAILS

The wild rice harvest typically takes place in early September. While today we harvest relatively little of the available rice—a testament to how the supermarket rules our eating habits—no food was more important to the Native Americans of our area.

The quantity and quality of the harvest varies every year. In 2003, the wild rice crop peaked—a friend of ours gathered 1,500 pounds by mid-September! On average though, only one in every four years is a boom year.

That same September, Mary and I were walking alongside a large stand of rice when we heard numerous sora rails making an assortment of calls from within the tall rice stalks. Soras love rice, and concentrations of this otherwise hard-to-see bird are common in September rice stands. The soras were mostly singing their very distinctive descending whinny. But they were also crying out a sort of plaintive ascending call that sounds like ker-wee, ker-wee, as well as uttering their high-pitched keek, keek alarm call.

As we were walking, we also inadvertently kicked up several dozen wood ducks from within the rice. Woodies love wild rice, too, so it was no surprise to hear the male’s thin crying call (jeeee-ib) as they jumped out of the rice and into the air.

A week later, Mary and I took a group of people new to ricing to Aurora Lake, a Wisconsin State Natural Area in Vilas County that supports an exceptional rice crop. And though the rice was abundant, we were most impressed by the amazing number of sora rails that we kicked up as we paddled. At least a dozen individuals jumped out of the rice, flew a short distance, then dropped back into the rice. In my experience, soras are very secretive birds, and if Mary and I see a couple of them a season, we think we’re doing pretty well. A dozen or more within a couple of hours is a veritable swarm. Family groups are said to congregate in large numbers in the fall wherever wild rice grows, but we had never seen actual evidence of this.

Soras are just eight to 10 inches long, with short stubby wings that spread only 12 to 14 inches. You sure wouldn’t think these plump little birds would be good flyers, but they migrate nearly 3,000 miles one way, crossing the Caribbean to winter throughout the West Indies.

While they’re chicken-like in appearance, rails have the uncanny ability to narrow their bodies while they’re running through marsh grasses; hence, say some sources, the saying skinny as a rail. They’ve also been observed running nimbly along the bottom of a stream a foot deep, clinging to aquatic plants along the way. All rails also have flexible wings with a claw-like appendage at the tip of the wing where it bends, which helps them climb through dense vegetation.

Rice provides an exceptional food source for nearly all waterfowl, while also providing excellent cover in the fall. The rice straw also makes a first-rate building material, so it’s not just birds that appreciate wild rice. We saw our first muskrat house of the fall being constructed, with rice stalks as the primary component.

THE SOUND OF SILENCE

Autumn brings an end to bird songs, one of the few times I really am disheartened by silence. But the wind appears to have more to say, maybe because the natural background noise is gone. Sounds sharpen in the colder air, seeming to resonate in contrast to the prevailing silence.

We’re in transition from the noisy breeding and family rearing of summer to the business of preparing for winter—and for some, of departing altogether. Time seems shorter, less languid now.

I seldom long for anything from a prior season, because I’m so engaged in the current time. But I miss bird song, its seemingly sudden absence quickening my nerves and broadcasting loss and change.

Still, many songbirds remain. On days of significant migrations, birds may be present in greater numbers than in summer. Songbirds migrate at night and can sometimes be heard issuing their call notes as they fly overhead through the darkness. Expert birders can identify many of these species by their call notes, and thus can determine that a certain species went through an area during a given time.

The birds fly all night and land before dawn. You can still experience good visual birding in the mornings when these famished migrants feed quietly on berries, seeds, and insects. They are building up their fat stores for another long push southward in the evening.

Eighty to 90 percent of migrant yearling songbirds won’t return next year, so their silence may be a harbinger of their own destinies.

The true silence of winter is yet to come, but it’s in the wind.

A GREEN FALL

In early September 2003, I was asked to forecast what the fall colors might be like. After considerable hemming and hawing, I said that I believed the stress of our late summer drought that year would contribute to poor colors and to an early leaf fall. Well, I was right about the color, but dead wrong about the timing of the leaf fall—green leaves still clung to most hardwood trees in our area well into October.

My failure as a leaf forecaster forced me to more deeply investigate what forces impact leaf change. I found a citation from Charles Abbott, a naturalist in the late 1800s, who observed: In 1886, there occurred a protracted summer drought, yet the leaves remained upon the trees longer than usual—a fact not to be ascribed to absence of frost, but to the vigor they received from a superabundance of rain in April and early May.

Thus, according to Abbott, conditions in spring have more impact on autumn leaf change than conditions throughout the summer. Taking this one step even further, Peter Marchand, in his book Autumn (2000), wrote: We are aware now that any growth processes dependent upon accumulated sugars or starch reserves can be affected by environmental conditions in some cases extending back into the previous growing season, and this complicates our attempts to explain (and certainly to forecast) year-to-year differences in autumn color considerably.

So, conditions in the previous year factor in as well, which makes me think that forecasting