Today I finally made it out on the ski trails. (I’ve reached a point where if I have a relatively flat, groomed trail to ski on and I don’t have to go too fast, I can manage to avoid embarrassing myself too badly.) We got about four fresh inches of now last night and the woods were beautiful. It was also a lot warmer than it was last week, with an air temperature right around the freezing point.

While I was huffing and puffing along I spotted several wingless Chionea snow flies of the same type that I wrote about at length last winter, walking over the surface of the snow.

When I was almost back, though, a different insect caught my eye – another tiny fly in the snow, but with one crucial difference from the Chionea ones.

This one has wings! After doing a little digging, I think this critter is from a different branch of crane flies, family Trichoceridae. I couldn’t find a lot of information about them beyond the fact that they’re a type of crane fly that’s active in cold weather, but I’m still amazed by how many small insects and other arthropods are actually active in the middle of winter here if you keep your eyes open for them.

There are two spiritual dangers in not owning a farm. One is the danger of supposing that breakfast comes from the grocery, and the other that heat comes from the furnace.

-Aldo Leopold

Let’s talk about cheese.

If you’re wondering what a post about cheese is doing on a nature blog, I guess I don’t blame you, but in my head it makes perfect sense. When I started this blog I never intended for it to be just about natural history. In my head my interest in plants and animals is all mixed up with my broader interest in how people interact with the environment, which includes knowing where our food comes from. Hence posts about maple syruping, harvesting honey, and now making cheese. After all, I do live in Wisconsin. My license plate literally says “America’s Dairyland.”

Turns out making cheese – soft kinds, at least – is not actually all that hard.

Citric acid being stirred into a pot full of ordinary whole milk.

After you heat and stir it for a while, the curds start to separate from the whey. (Paging Miss Muffet…)

Curds, transferred to a cheesecloth and hanging over a sink to drain. Ta-da! Ricotta!

I had to leave before the ricotta was done draining, but someone else ended up with this beautiful chunk of mozzarella.

I meant to also take a photo of the cheesy bread we made for dinner, with its bubbling layer of fresh mozzarella, but it was so tasty that we ate it all before I remembered. Oops. I can’t imagine making all the cheese I ever eat myself, but trying it out to see the work that’s involved is a good reminder of all the effort and resources that go into things we casually toss into our grocery cart.

Have you ever made cheese from scratch? Do you agree with me that this is a perfectly relevant thing to be writing about on a nature blog? Or do you wish I’d get back to birds and bugs?

On Wednesday afternoon my boss stuck her head into the room where I was working. “There’s a crossbill at my feeder,” she said, and while there are plenty of White-winged Crossbills out in the bog, getting a close look at one is still a special event, so up we went to her office to check out the platform feeder outside her window.

Sure enough, we found ourselves looking at a big male crossbill. It seemed odd to see one all by itself near the building, instead of with the flocks in the bog. But – but – “Guys, look at him, he doesn’t have any white wing bars.”

“What? No, he just – wait – oh, wow.”

RED CROSSBILL AT THE FEEDER! OMG OMG OMG!!!!!!!! #birding

—
Rebecca Deatsman (@rdeatsman) January 30, 2013

Photo by Fran McReynolds (my boss).

I don’t know why, but Red Crossbills are by far the less common, harder-to-find of the two North American crossbill species, at least in the east. (Both species of crossbill have funky bills with crossed tips to help them pry open conifers’ cones and extract the seeds.) I wish I’d been able to get my own photo of ours, but it was gone by the time I got my camera, and I had to console myself as best I could photographing another bird with “red” in its name.

Great Christmas card photo, or BEST CHRISTMAS CARD PHOTO EVER?

Common Redpolls. They live up to the “common” part of their name in the winter here… but they’re just so pretty.

If you want to know what a nation values most about itself, look at its money.

Aside from the state quarters, America’s money is decorated primarily with portraits of dead white guys. Don’t get me wrong, a lot of those dead white guys accomplished really amazing things, and I’m not saying there’s anything wrong with having Lincoln and Washington and the rest of them on our bills and coins, but it’s interesting to look at other countries for comparison. I was going through the coin jar on my desk recently and came across remnants of my time in Canada and Australia. Most Americans are probably familiar with the beaver and caribou (at least I think that’s a caribou and not an elk) on the Canadian nickel and quarter.

Australian money is even cooler. They have coins featuring a swimming platypus…

An adorable curled-up echidna…

And best of all, a lyrebird. Look carefully – all those feathery plumes are its tail, and you can just see the head under the number 10, partially hidden behind curling tail feathers.

Wikimedia Commons photo by fir0002/Flagstaffotos.

If this bird looks familiar, it might be because the Superb Lyrebird is the subject of a well-known David Attenborough clip documenting its amazing vocal abilities. (I feel very lucky to have seen one of these in the wild when I was in Australia, although the one I saw was just walking around, not displaying and mimicking car alarms.)

If I were redesigning American money, I might replace some of the buildings and dead white guys and weird Masonic symbols with prairie chickens, or bison, or alligators, or redwoods, or pronghorns, or salamanders, or saguaros… well, you get the idea. What image would you put on your currency to honor your country’s wilderness and wildlife?

The woods this morning may have looked (and felt – more sub-zero temperatures) like the depths of winter…

Frost on fir needles.

Entrance to a squirrel’s cache under the snow.

Looking out across the snowy lake.

But they sounded like the very first stirrings of spring: for the first time this year, I heard chickadees practicing their whistle songs and woodpeckers drumming in the trees.

Listen to these sounds yourself at the Macaulay Library website by clicking on the links below:

• Black-capped Chickadee’s “hey, sweetie” song
• Downy Woodpecker drumming

Image from Google Maps

Click to see panorama full size

One of the lakes on our campus has the evocative name of Inkpot. Unlike the rest of them, which are clear, pristine, eutrophic kettle lakes, take a canoe out on Inkpot in the summer and you’ll discover that it’s surprisingly murky and full of aquatic vegetation. Part of the reason for this, according to one of the science teachers here, is that it’s at a slightly lower elevation than the other lakes; another reason is that a sluggish stream flows through it from a nearby spring, meaning it’s the only lake on campus with any current. There’s even an old beaver dam at the outflow, although it doesn’t appear to be actively maintained by beavers anymore.

The current means the ice is thinner on Inkpot than on the true kettle lakes, and I’d heard that last weekend someone saw otters there, coming and going through a small patch of open water. Today a friend and I skied out that way, and while we didn’t see otters or any open water, we did see otter tracks of varying ages criss-crossing the surface of the ice. At one point an older set of tracks appeared to vanish at the lake’s edge, and I managed to push my skis through a snowdrift to get a closer look.

So yeah, today I learned that otters make snow tunnels just like mice and squirrels do!

One other small point of interest: getting out to this lake, at the far western end of the property, required skiing a much longer, hillier trail than I’d done before, and actually getting to the edge of the lake required leaving the groomed trail and going down a slope through a couple feet of fluffy, unpacked snow. And then back up it when we were done. On skis. There was a lot of screaming and falling. Leanna, the friend who went with me (and the person in the panorama above), composed a haiku about the experience that she wanted me to share with you.

On an adventure
Otter tunnels in the snow
Sp-lat on my back

She is adamant that “sp-lat” should be pronounced as two syllables.

February is in full-swing now. February is generally my least favorite month of the year – it’s always a busy time in school or work, and it’s usually when I start to get tired of winter. I always feel like it’s harder to find interesting things to blog about in winter, when there’s just not much going on with plants or insects, only a few birds hanging around, etc. So both as a reminder to myself and as ideas for anyone else feeling the same way, here are four ways to pay attention to nature even in the cold and snow.

1. Learn to identify animal tracks. Seriously, it only takes a few minutes to teach yourself the basics of different track patterns (for example, how to tell squirrel tracks from weasel tracks), and it opens up a whole new world of observation in the snow. You can read my past posts about animal tracks here, and find a good primer to basic track patterns here.
2. Learn to identify trees without their leaves. Winter tree ID can be tricky but fun. Key things to look for include the branching pattern (alternate vs. opposite) and the size, shape, and color of the buds. I recently did a post with some photos of winter maple buds.
3. Pay attention to the night sky. Yes, it’s cold, but that cold air can also mean crisp, clear views of the stars at night. Last fall I compiled a list of some great online resources that will get you started with night sky observation without the need for a telescope.
4. Don’t take your winter birds for granted. Okay, yeah, a lot of the beautiful songbirds that breed here disappear in the winter, and it’s easy to not give a second look to the chickadees, nuthatches, and others that stick around. However, this is a great opportunity to get to know a few species in-depth without distractions. The Great Backyard Bird Count is coming up this week – why not get started with that?

Bundle up (I recommend wool socks and long underwear), brave the cold, and let me know what you find in your winter woods. I’m going on a winter birding adventure in Minnesota this coming weekend – can’t wait!

Tomorrow is Valentine’s Day, so here are some lovebirds. Get it? Lovebirds? Get it?

My dad took this with his point-and-shoot camera. Rosy-faced Lovebirds are native to an arid part of Africa, but there’s an established population in the eastern suburbs of Phoenix now, and they were recently added to the official ABA checklist (woo-hoo armchair tick!). I know we’re all supposed to frown disapprovingly at non-native species, but these are just so darn cute – look at those pink faces and blue butts!

This is a re-run of an old post from February 2011, when I lived in Georgia; the original is here. I’m not blogging today because I’m busy looking for sweet boreal birds at the Sax-Zim Bog Birding Festival. One of the species I’m hoping to add to my life list over the weekend is the Black-backed Woodpecker, so this post seemed an appropriate one to repeat, since it tells the story of another expedition to see a woodpecker.

I wasn’t working this morning so I decided to head to Moody Forest, a Nature Conservancy preserve a couple hours’ drive inland, for a hike. I’d heard it was an excellent place for seeing Red-cockaded Woodpeckers, one of a couple remaining birds I absolutely must add to my life list before I depart this area of the country. It did not disappoint.

Moody Forest is not a place one could stumble on accidentally; you have to want to go there. What I mean is, there are no signs for it along the way, and the last few miles are over narrow back roads of hard-packed red dirt. I suppose the isolation and obscurity help protect it. Moody Forest is one of the most important remaining fragments of longleaf pine woodland in Georgia.

Longleaf pine was once the dominant tree in much of the southeastern U.S., and it was (and is) important for threatened species such as the Red-cockaded Woodpecker and the Gopher Tortoise. Most of this ecosystem, however, is now gone, replaced by faster-growing pine species more valuable for timber, like slash and loblolly.

The trail first passed through an open, sandy area that was, according to the interpretive pamphlet I picked up at the trail head, a good place to see the tortoises. I didn’t spot any (it may still be too early for reptiles to be out and about, although with the streak of warm weather we’ve had lately you never know) but I did see what I strongly suspect was a tortoise burrow.

Finally I arrived in the fragment of longleaf pine/wiregrass woodland: prime habitat for the federally endangered Red-cockaded Woodpecker. It only took a few minutes of lurking around, peering up into the trees, before I managed to find them, identified by their rasping call and distinctive white cheeks. Score! The pines also held Hairy, Downy, Red-bellied, and Pileated Woodpeckers, as well as Brown-headed Nuthatches, which sound like squeaky toys. (I had forgotten temporarily about the existence of Brown-headed Nuthatches and had a surreal moment of SWEET LORD WHAT ARE PYGMY NUTHATCHES DOING IN GEORGIA before I recalled the Pygmy’s eastern cousin.)

Longleaf pines live up to their name – their needles, which come in bunches of three, are more than twice as long as my hand and form characteristic round tufts at the ends of branches. Their cones are also massive.

This coming weekend I’m going camping at Manatee Springs State Park in Florida with a coworker (and, yes, hoping to see manatees), and then that will only leave Okefenokee as far as places on my must-see-before-I-leave-the-Southeast list. Hope everyone has a great week, even if it isn’t as warm and sunny as mine…!

When I told one of the people I work with that I was taking a weekend off in February to go to a birding festival, he said, “Isn’t February an odd time of year for that?” Well, sure, normally. But not if you’re talking about Sax-Zim Bog. Then it’s the perfect time of year for it.

Sunrise over Sax-Zim.

I first heard about Sax-Zim Bog back when I was in college, when I started reading the blog of “Birdchick” Sharon Stiteler. It was also in college that I first read the book The Big Year, in which the area is mentioned prominently as one of the characters criss-crosses it again and again, searching in vain for his Great Gray Owl. (In the movie adaptation this nemesis bird is switched to the Snowy Owl, probably because the Snowy is more familiar to the non-birding public, but they still slipped a quick mention of Sax-Zim into the script.) This out-of-the way patch of rural northern Minnesota, named for two all-but-abandoned settlements on its edge called Sax and Zim, is known as one of the best places in the country to see boreal birds. This winter, with the bog only a four-hour drive away, I couldn’t resist signing up for their annual birding festival and going to explore it for myself.

Festival transportation.

So I spent this past weekend being driven around on a yellow school bus with a bunch of other birders from around the country and a couple guides familiar with the area, hunting for interesting birds in the bog and in nearby Duluth. The festival itself was fascinating – this was the sixth year they’ve been doing it, and it’s put together by locals who are mostly not birders themselves but who are clearly thrilled that people from all over the country believe this place is special and want to come see it for themselves. The buses were driven by regular school bus drivers, giving up their weekend to ferry us around and show off their home turf, and our Saturday driver told us how much he loves seeing how excited the festival attendees get when they see new birds. It was a fun dynamic.

And oh yeah, we did see some really good birds… more on that later.

Further reading – Birders add to life lists during Sax-Zim Bog Festival, from Sunday’s Duluth News Tribune. The reporter was on my bus, but I wasn’t interviewed and somehow didn’t end up in any of the photos he took, either. Which is fine with me.

By far the birds I was most excited to see at Sax-Zim Bog were the owls. Who doesn’t love owls??? However, by mid-day on Saturday I was beginning to feel a little pessimistic. The Friday evening search for Great Gray Owls at dusk had proved fruitless, and today our guide seemed to be doing his best to let us down gently. “Yeah, the Great Grays haven’t been nearly as reliable this year as they usually are. They’ve been a lot harder to find.” “There’s only been one hawk-owl reported in the bog all winter. We’ll look for one but it’s not too likely.” What if I went home at the end of the weekend without having seen a single nocturnal raptor? That would be so embarrassing.

Then this happened.

Do you see the owl? It’s there, I promise. When a couple of photographers told us what they’d found – in a tree right by the edge of the road, with orange flagging tape around its trunk, no less – we couldn’t believe it. (“You wouldn’t believe how long it took us to train that bird to sit in the tree with the flagging tape so we could find it,” quipped the guide.)

Yes, it’s a Boreal Owl! These awesome little denizens of the north country are about ten inches tall and usually spend the day well-concealed in the woods, but ours had ventured into the open. Our bus radioed the location to the other buses full of birders cruising the bog and soon the whole stretch of road was lined with owl paparazzi.

What’s good news for birders is unfortunately not good news for the bird. The fact that it was alert and out in the open in the middle of the day probably means that this bird was under stress and not finding enough food during its normal hunting times. This is often the case with the owl irruptions we birders love so much – last winter’s amazing influx of Snowy Owls in the U.S. was a sign that there wasn’t enough food for them in their regular range to the north.

Still, I cannot tell a lie, getting such a spectacular look at such an amazing and seldom-seen bird really made my day. And that was only the first owl of the weekend… to be continued!

*

Also, on an unrelated note: this marks my 500th post on Rebecca in the Woods. When I began blogging three years ago I was just doing it as a fun project for myself, because I enjoy taking pictures and writing. I had no idea where it would lead me – to becoming a published freelance writer, to doing a graduate project on social media and environmental education, and more. The community I’ve found online has genuinely enriched my life (I feel corny typing that, but it’s true), and I just want to say thank you to every single person who takes the time to read, like, comment, and share. You rock!

The unofficial mascot of Sax-Zim Bog, the bird everyone goes there to see, is the Great Gray Owl.

I did not see a Great Gray Owl on Friday evening. I did not see a Great Gray Owl on Saturday. Sunday, I was signed up to spend the day birding in the Duluth area rather than in the bog itself, and hope was fading. But was we headed up toward the lakeshore, we came across a couple cars stopped by the edge of the road. (You’ve heard of “bear jams” in Yellowstone? Duluth in winter apparently has “owl jams.”) There, sitting at the top of a small evergreen tree not one hundred feet from the road, was North America’s largest owl.

It was beautiful. It was so exciting. But while we were admiring this big beautiful bird, someone suddenly called out, “Hey guys, look! There’s another one right here across the road, and it’s even closer!” And then a minute later, “Here’s another one around the corner!”

Check out that white mustache! Like some other predators, Great Gray Owls hunt primarily based on sound, and can hear small rodents moving through tunnels under the snow. We actually witnessed one dive off its perch and into the snow, although I wasn’t quick enough to get a photo of this and we couldn’t see whether it caught anything. Also, while this is one of the world’s largest owls in terms of height, it is definitely not the heaviest – that volume is mostly feathers.

Image from Wikimedia Commons, by FunkMonk.

Later in the morning we spotted a fourth one. At that point we didn’t even bother to get off the bus. We just admired it through the windows for a moment and kept going, looking for new species to add to our list. And that is the story of how I saw four Great Gray Owls in one day.

To be continued…

Yes, one last post about the owls I saw on my Sax-Zim Bog trip. Like the Great Gray I posted about last Friday, I saw my third and final owl species not in the bog itself, but in the Duluth area.

This was Sunday afternoon, the same day that we saw four Great Gray Owls in one morning. We only saw one of these, but one was enough to bask in its awesomeness: the Northern Hawk Owl! (Or Northern Hawk-owl. I’ve seen it both ways.)

Hawk-owls get their name from the fact that they’re, well, a bit hawkish. See that long tail? In flight this bird looks almost more like an accipiter (like, say, a Cooper’s Hawk) than an owl. They’re active during the day, hunting prey from conspicuous perches at the very tops of trees, like a kestrel or a shrike. Like the Boreal and the Great Gray, this is primarily an owl of the great northern forests, both in North America and Eurasia.

Someone gave me directions to a field just a half a mile out of my way on my drive home that was supposed to be another hawk-owl hot spot. I didn’t see any owls, but I did find another car slowly cruising along the country road. I could resist pulling up next to him and saying “Hey, are you looking for hawk-owls too?”, which of course he was. Got to love birders. (At first when I pulled up next to him and rolled my window down, I don’t think he was sure what to expect. I am not a demographically typical birder. I think I may have been the only woman under thirty at the festival.)

This concludes the tale of my Sax-Zim Bog trip. That means it’s time to start planning my next birding adventure… anyone up for lekking prairie chickens in April?

You might be surprised if you knew how often I find myself sitting on my couch going, “Ugh, I really do not feel like going for a walk right now but I need to find something new to blog about.” Inevitably, though, once I’m actually outside my energy comes back and I end up enjoying myself thoroughly.

Temperatures are up this week, and yesterday was one of those sunny winter afternoons where the trees start shedding their accumulation of snow – periodically you’d hear a loud FLUMP! and the creaking of newly unburdened branches as clumps of snow rained down on the forest floor. I heard another sound as I walked, though. It was a woodpecker tapping, and not just any woodpecker. The loud, slow TAP, TAP, TAP suggested a woodpecker that was big. (Note that I am not referring here to drumming, the sustained rat-tat-tat-tat-tat that woodpeckers use to announce their territorial claims.)

This is (of course) a Pileated Woodpecker – a female, as you can tell from the black forehead. This is a really cropped photo, but I spent a few minutes walking closer to try to get a better one. I was able to walk right up to the tree she was in without disturbing her, but she’d moved around to an awkward spot between branches.

I’m guessing it’s too early for them to be nesting, but pairs stay on their territories all winter, ripping up dead trees like this one in search of insects to eat (they’re especially fond of ants). This one was leaving quite a bit of debris around the base of the tree she was working on.

Nothing to brighten your afternoon like a close encounter with North America’s largest woodpecker!

I admit it: I’m getting tired of winter. People who live further south are already posting photos of tulips and crocuses. Here we still have snow and ice. I’m ready for flowers and insects and migratory birds to come back.

But, I am still enjoying our feeder birds, and I like this photo of a Pine Siskin in the late afternoon sun that I took yesterday. The light brought out the yellow highlights in its wings.

Unlike the redpolls, these guys might stick around all year – we’re at the southern edge of their breeding range, and they like pine forests, which we have plenty of here.

On Monday afternoon, I impulsively decided to grab my camera and go check out Bond Falls, which is supposed to be one of the most spectacular waterfalls in Michigan’s Upper Peninsula  I’ve been living within a thirty minute drive of it for a year and a half now and had yet to go see it, so when someone happened to mention it at a meeting that morning, I decided it was time.

Unfortunately I wasn’t planning on the fact that to reach the overlook at the base of the main waterfall, I would have to descend a set of steep stairs, which at this time of year were covered in a layer of snow and ice. Really, you couldn’t even see the stairs, just a very steep slope with a thick glaze of ice and the slight suggestion of the outlines of stairs visible underneath. I think if I’d known my way around I could have found a way down, but I stared at this for a long moment and decided it wasn’t risking my neck and (worse) my expensive camera, so I turned around and took some photos of the smaller cascades upstream instead.

Not too shabby! This is on the middle branch of the Ontonagan River. The series of falls and rapids is natural, but there’s a dam a short ways upstream that keeps the flow of water fairly steady. (Fun fact: “flowage” is Yooper*-speak for what most of us would call a reservoir. The body of water behind the dam is the “Bond Falls Flowage.”)

Have you all seen those photos of waterfalls where the photographer uses a slower shutter speed to capture the movement of the water, so that it looks all soft and misty? I wanted to try that, but I didn’t have a tripod, so I wedged my camera into the forked trunk of the cedar tree that you can see on the left in the above photo. Here is the result.

It’s overexposed, of course (is there a trick for taking this kind of photo without it coming out looking overexposed?), but not bad for a first attempt. I like the effect.

For anyone who remembers my post on not seeing O Kun de Kun Falls last summer, I swear I’m not purposely writing a series of posts on failed attempts to see the Upper Peninsula’s waterfalls. I’m determined to actually lay eyes on both of them this spring, once hiking becomes possible again. Until then, this will have to do.

UPDATE: I’ve been informed that there is a much easier way to get to the base of the falls. Apparently I parked in the wrong place. Oh well, I’ll go back.

*Yooper: someone who lives in the Upper Peninsula, better known as “da U.P.” The people of the Lower Peninsula are called trolls. Why? Because they live under the bridge, of course.

Yucky wet rain/snow stuff falling outside right now, no way am I going out to take photos, so instead here are some nature and conservation links from the last week. Enjoy.

• Gunnison Sage-grouse (a very cool, very threatened bird) are being considered for protection under the Endangered Species Act, and the public comment period has been extended. The ABA has more information here, and you can submit your own comment here.
• Elizabeth of Woods Walks and Wildlife posted some cool (and slightly gross) photos of a mockingbird coughing up berry seeds. I didn’t know they did that! Scroll down for the mockingbird – the Red-shouldered Hawk in the snow is gorgeous, too.
• The colorful flowers in this post by Wanderin’ Weeta are the ideal treatment for spring fever.
• Chris Helzer at The Prairie Ecologist reminds us that even “experts” don’t know everything in his post on what he doesn’t know about prairies.
• Who knew cassowaries (giant terrifying birds that live in Australia’s rainforests) have brilliant emerald green eggs? This also led to a conversation on Twitter about what possibly evolutionary benefit there could be in eggs this brightly colored.
• Comparison shot of three yellow-eyed ducks on Rock Paper Lizard.
• Dissected pellet of a Barn Owl on Ohio Birds and Biodiversity.
• Julie Zickefoose tells the story of how she discovered that there are caterpillars that eat lichen. Cool!

Now, nap or job applications? Blargh…

You folks down south (by which I mean in Ohio) may be posting photos of your crocuses in bloom, but here it still looks like this.

I was looking for something to photograph, and the lichens on the tree trunks caught my eye, as they often do.

There are three main types of lichens: crustose (crusty), foliose (leafy), and fructicose (shrubby). The ones in these photos all fall into the middle, leafy category. An example of a fructicose one would be reindeer lichen.

Our view of the western sky from the top of the sledding hill last night. (No, you can’t see the comet in this photo. It would be just above that center group of trees.)

I have been interested in comets since I was a kid, going back to a series of comet-related events when I was in elementary school.

• When I was in second grade, Comet Shoemaker-Levy 9 broke into fragments and smashed into Jupiter. Second-grade me was deeply impressed.
• When I was in fourth grade, Comet Hyakutake buzzed path Earth, bright enough to be clearly visible with the naked eye at night.
• When I was fifth grade, Comet Hale-Bopp passed by, even brighter. I remember being able to see it through the kitchen windows while we ate dinner. Two years in a row of naked-eye comets was very unusual.
• Fifth grade was also the year I studied comets for my independent research project for gifted class.
• In sixth grade, I broke my arm. This is significant because that was the year I met Caroline Shoemaker of Shoemaker-Levy 9, and she signed my cast. (I had already met David Levy.)

What surprises me is when I mention Shoemaker-Levy 9 or Hale-Bopp to other people my age and they have no idea what I’m talking about. They were such a big deal in my family! What do you mean you weren’t watching comet fragments hitting Jupiter on CNN when you were in second grade? I have to remind myself that most people’s parents are not amateur astronomy enthusiasts and most second-graders do not watch CNN. (My parents also kept me home from school one day in second grade to watch an annular solar eclipse.)

I had been looking at the photos of Comet Pan-STARRS (named for the telescope array that discovered it) that people in the southern hemisphere had been taking for weeks. Finally this past week it arrived in the skies of the northern hemisphere, where it would only be visible for a short time before getting too close to the sun, but the weather wasn’t cooperating. Tuesday night was supposed to be the best night to see it and we had clouds and snow showers.

Wednesday morning, though, I woke up to clear sunny skies.

Sunset was at 7:00 pm. I was working until 7:30, which worked out perfectly, because the short window when it would be dark enough to see the comet before it set in the west was supposed to start about half an hour after sunset. At 7:30 I closed the building and booked it to the sledding hill, the best place to get a clear view of the horizon, carrying my binoculars and camera. My friend Leanna was already waiting for me, sliding down the hillside on a plastic disc sled to pass the time. I got a text from my roommate as I arrived on the hill – “It’s not dark yet. You sure this is the right time?” “Yep. Come now. Bring binoculars.”

Over and over I scanned the area of sky between the crescent moon and the horizon as the sky slowly darkened. No comet. No comet. Finally, around 7:45, I spotted it. “There it is! I see a dim fuzzy dot! Right above the trees!” Only astronomy people get so excited about dim fuzzy dots. Once we knew exactly where it was, though, we could spot it even without our binoculars. As it got a bit darker, with the binoculars we could make out the fuzzy tail streaking up and to the left.

Two comet facts: first, no matter whether the comet is coming or going, the tail always points away from the sun. It’s formed when the comet arrives in the inner solar system, as the sun vaporizes and blows away bits of it. Second, Halley’s Comet, which returns to the inner solar system every 76 years, is the exception rather than the rule. Most slingshot back out to the solar system’s outer reaches and don’t return for millennia, if ever.

We enjoyed the view for a few more minutes as Pan-STARRS slid into the band of haze above the horizon. A Great Horned Owl called in the distance. It was getting colder. Finally we trudged back down the snowy hill and went home.

For plenty of photos of Comet Pan-STARRS, check out Spaceweather.com’s photo gallery. Another one heading this way, Comet ISON, may put on an even bigger show this fall.

We started tapping maple trees on campus this week. I would guess that most of my readers are familiar with the general process of making maple syrup – you tap the trees to collect their sap and boil it down to get rid of the excess liquid and concentrate the sugar. The Ojibwa Indians in this area were already collecting sap to make syrup and sugar before the first European settlers arrived, and there’s even a town south of here called “Sugar Camp” because the site was known as a center of maple tapping activity. But why do we tap the trees at a specific time of year? What exactly is going on with the sap?

Well, first, what is sap? Duh, we all know it’s the sticky liquid in trees, but it has an important function. Sap flows through a tree’s xylem and phloem (remember your high school biology?), bringing moisture and nutrients from the roots up to the leaves and taking sugar and other carbohydrates produced in the leaves back down to the roots for storage. This is roughly (very roughly) analogous to an animal’s circulatory system.

The ideal time to tap a tree to collect sap is early in the spring when temperatures are above freezing during the day but below freezing at night – basically right now, if you live here in northern Wisconsin. The most commonly accepted theory for why sap flows at this particular time of year is that as temperatures rise and fall each day, carbon dioxide within the tree’s tissues expands and contracts, creating a cycle of pressure that causes sap to flow out of any wounds in the tree during the day and suction that causes water to be drawn up from the roots at night. This is a separate process from the water tension and cohesion that usually drives the movement of moisture up and down the tree.

Sugar maples and other closely related species have particularly high amounts of sugar in their sap, which makes them ideal for making syrup, but some sources I found suggested that another reason maples are particularly suited for tapping is that the structure of their internal tissues makes this pressure cycle more pronounced in maples than in other trees. Even with the relatively high amount of sugar in sugar maple sap, it takes about forty gallons of sap to make one gallon of syrup.

So, have you ever done your own maple syruping? One of the very first posts on this blog was actually about the syruping process, way back in March 2010. I can tell you this much, real maple syrup is way better than the cheap fake stuff in the grocery story.

Further reading:
Sap Flow
Biology of Maple Sap Flow