Category Archives: Long Lake creatures

Put up your dukes!

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This is an American Red Squirrel, a/k/a pine squirrel, a/k/a chickaree, a/k/a Rocky Balboa. Really, this is one of the feistiest little critters in our neck of the woods. If he were even a quarter of our size he’d eat us for lunch. He is tamiasciurus hudsonicus. His Wiki entry says he’s “a diurnal mammal that defends a year-round exclusive territory.”

Technically, Rocky’s year-round exclusive territory is a red pine near the water’s edge. Woe unto the bigger Eastern Gray Squirrel who ventures into that pine. Rocky (or possibly Rockette) will chase that squirrel away and pursue for a good distance. He’s apparently decided to extend his territory.

He’s hungry and getting ready for winter. The hull-strewn area directly under our feeders include plenty of intact black-oiled sunflower seeds, including because pesky goldfinches like to sit at the seed feeders and toss seeds down to the ground for the rest of the flock. Rocky is feasting and he isn’t kind to the other squirrels.

We have recently seen him sometimes call a truce. After all, it’s hard to stuff your face while you’re in attack mode all the time. But it’s not really his nature.

His nature is to speak loud and carry a big stick in his effort to go far.

Did you ever wonder about the expression “put up your dukes?” It’s a vestige of British rhyming slang. Rhyming slang is where a word or phrase that rhymes with another comes to substitute for what the word or phrase means. And then the rhyming slang loses its context (or is shortened) so that the original word disappears. “Fork” was British slang for “fist.”  So, “Put up your forks” was an invite to a fight, as in “Put up your fists.” And then the fork phrase was played with and rhymed so that one pugilist might say to another “Put up your Dukes of York.” And, eventually, that was shorted to “Put up your dukes.”

There’s been no fisticuffs out on the lawn. Just Rocky being feisty chasing around the bigger brown and black Eastern Grays. Oh. And he’s eating and stashing a ton of sunflower seeds.

Passing the buck

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This buck was headed to the water’s edge in Ghost Bay last week as we paddled in our kayaks. We don’t see bucks often, so he was quite a treat.

White-tailed deer are named for that large patch of white fur on the underside of the tail that you see as the deer beats a retreat. Odocoileus virginianus to you scientific types. There are many subspecies of deer in North America and those subspecies are very difficult to tell apart.

These are the Hillman Long Lake subspecies. This is the subspecies that especially likes to eat Japanese Maples in people’s gardens. They wait until the leaves fill out nicely, the rain washes away the Deer-B-Gone stinky spray, and then they enjoy a nice red-leafed salad. They are the subspecies of deer that eat hostas before the slugs can. And they eat every day-lily bloom just before the flower opens. That subspecies.

Oh well. We don’t really begrudge them feasting on what passes for our garden. We are completely undedicated to gardening. We do sort of wish they’d leave us something for our trouble though.

White-tail herds are a matriarchal society. But we’ve been surprised this year to see that the herd browsing in the morning and evening on our property still has a young male moving with it. We don’t think he’s the same buck we saw in Ghost Bay, though. The one with the herd is small, with just two dinky spikes. The Ghost Bay buck had four points.

Here’s a look at one of the females, drinking in the narrows.

Some of the deer in Montmorency County have chronic wasting disease. That’s why bait piles and other unnatural ways of drawing deer in to feed are banned here. When deer gather snout-to-snout the disease spreads more easily.

On our lawn, the deer gather this time of year to eat the acorns falling from the large oak tree near our deck. At the water’s edge, they will stand on their hind legs with their front legs resting on the cedar tree trunks to browse. And we even see deer jumping on two legs to reach some tasty bits of cedar.

Kingbirds in the Cupholder

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Once again this year, as in the last two, an Eastern Kingbird couple decided that the cupholder in one arm of our dock bench would make a nifty home for their brood. Out in the baking sun. No shade. In a black plastic cupholder about 5 inches deep and 4 inches across. Good idea. Eventually, there were 4 eggs in the nest.

Eastern Kingbirds’ scientific name is “tyrannus tyrannus.” That tells you all you really need to know about what happens when the birds hatch. The parents both become fierce tyrants. We let the growing family have the dock and dock bench all to themselves except when we wanted to come and go from our pontoon boat moored about 8 feet away from the nest.

There was hell to pay for our passage to and fro. This first photo shows the kingbirds’ otherwise hidden red patch flared, about to bounce off Steve’s behatted head.

We’ve both had our heads and torsos bumped and wingslapped. They even took to flying under the pontoon canopy to go after us once we were underway.  Here’s sort of the gestalt of the experience.

I tried not to think about the Alfred Hitchcock film The Birds.

The parents had four growing babies to feed and they did not look kindly on intrusions. (These photos, of course, were taken at considerable distance.) And their definition of intrusion is born of a tyrannus tyrannus approach to the world around them. An osprey flying overhead? One parent, sometimes two, would mob it. They bounced off the osprey with the same abandon as they bounced off our hats. Their aggression bears no relationship to the threat, since osprey only eat fish and we don’t eat baby birds. Cornell reports that Kingbirds will defend their nest by attacking crows, hawks, squirrels and “have been known to knock unsuspecting Blue Jays out of trees.”

We let the tyrants rule the dock and only ran the gauntlet to get our pontoon boat out into the lake.

This next photo shows the scene on a nearly 100 degree afternoon. The parent, beak agape, seemed a bit stressed. The two parents rotated responsibilities. One would stand guard while perched on the back of the bench while the other hunted for dragonflies and other tasty morsels to feed the hungry babies.

The babies unstuffed themselves from the cupholder the day before they fledged. We think they fledged early. We’re imagining it was just way too hot out there to do otherwise. Anyway, we wish them lots of Long Lake buggy meals. We especially hope they are fond of mosquitos and deer flies. You can navigate here to find more about the best services of mosquito repellents available around your neighborhood.

April 16th? Snow Central (Ave)

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This Dark-Eyed Junco looks as if he’s dipped in snow. That’s actually the color of his belly feathers. He’s sitting atop a snow mound on our deck table.

We’d just started to see some grass, once the 10-12 inches of snow that fell a week earlier melted away. Then, this. It’s hard to tell, because the drifts are so high, but we estimate we’ve got about 15 inches of new snow. And the drifts, the drifts are thigh-high on my 5 foot three inch self.

Here’s a look at the deck table without the Junco.

And I’m jumping the gun a bit on this post because predictions are for another 3-5 inches today. It’s been snowing all morning.

This has to go down as one-to-remember. “Up north” Michigan is thinking more about wrestling with snow than tax forms today. Snowmobiles are reporting they’re getting stuck. Some of this snow is the gooey, water-laden kind that sticks to shovels, snowblowers, and snowmobiles.

That’s Steve with a big two-stage snowblower, trying to tame the first wave. We ended up hauling out the little guy for me to work on the cement pad during the third effort to get this under control.

You might be wondering how our snow-fencing effort fared. Good news!  This year it didn’t fall over. It stood there all winter, deep into this difficult early spring. But it hasn’t really done anything to significantly keep the snow off the parking pad. It does add a nice splash of orange though, don’t you think?

We aren’t even thinking about ice-out yet. Last year the last bits of ice were sent packing on April 25th into the 26th. So we have about ten days to go. I don’t think we’ll make it. At this rate we’ll still have snow on Memorial Day!

That’s the lake on the morning of April 16th. It’s been windy enough that the sunflower seeds that are whipping the finch flock into a feeding frenzy at our feeders have scattered around. Those finches who can’t command a perch at the feeders are picking at the snow crust searching for food. Every once in awhile the flock spooks and vanishes for half a minute or so, giving the chickadees, nuthatches, juncos, woodpeckers, and tufted titmice time to feed.

We’re worried about the trees on the property. We’ve been losing branches from some of the tall pines. So far, nothing has landed on the house. And nothing so major has fallen that we think the trees won’t pull through. But spring cleanup is going to be a major event. That’s assuming spring is eventually going to put in an appearance.

Here’s me, in my snow-covered Central Ave hat by Aimee Alexander. “Cheese.” We’d gone out for a second time to knock snow off the low-lying pine branches. Such a great hat. Knit in Swans Island Merino Worsted in the bittersweet colorway, it even matches the snow fence. I strive to be color-coordinated at all times.

White-tailed deer

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Deer have been visiting us nearly every evening. They aren’t as scrawny as is typical for March. That must be because, except for two spells of frigid weather, we’ve had fairly moderate temperatures. Repeatedly this winter, there’s been snows, and then thaws. The deer must have been able to find more food than during a usual winter. And they’ve been in larger herds than we recall from other years.

Soon after Steve shot this video with his iPhone, more snow arrived.

The deer keep coming. A few are habituated to our bird feeder. They are eating what must mostly be oiled sunflower seed husks. Well, the finches have been coming in large flocks and one of their pastimes is picking a seed out of the feeder and dropping it on the ground. So there must be at least some sunflower seeds down there too.

This deer hung around and ate under the feeders long after the rest of the herd left the property. In fact, she wandered off a few times and then came back for more. She knows we’re watching and is hyper-alert. But still she eats her fill.

Chowing down under the feeder isn’t anything new. Almost exactly one year ago, check out what we caught on our game camera one night.

Even if their habits along our county roads suggest that deer aren’t the sharpest crayon in nature’s box, they are beautiful and interesting creatures.