Even More Tree Munchers

The resident deer population hasn’t been shy about having their picture taken.

These were uploaded from the trail camera:

Mama and her twins...








And (possibly) a three year-old buck sporting his growing antlers...

Click on pictures to enlarge

There is a resident family of coyotes – I’ve heard them several times howling and yipping. It sounds like demented laughter. Sure would like to capture them on camera.

Rat's Chapel

There is this signage on one of my often-ridden bike routes.

I sure would like to know who this Rat person is and what his Chapel looks like.

It isn’t listed with all of the usual places of worship…

More Peninsula Geology

Door County’s rocky promontories are typical of the bay side of the peninsula. This rock formation is the Niagara Escarpment – that tough dolostone that even multiple glaciations failed to wear-down.

This formation was formed during the Silurian age by tropical seas when Wisconsin was located much closer to the equator.

Plate tectonics can move a continent a handful of centimeters each and every year. Year–in and year-out. Before too long (roughly 420 million years) you might find yourself not on the equator but on the 45th parallel – midway between the equator and the North Pole.

Anyway, the glaciers that once occupied this part of Wisconsin only a mere 10,000 years ago eventually receded. That’s not to imply that they turned around and went back to the polar ice cap. Rather they melted in-place leaving their melt water as a vast endowment that filled the Great Lakes.

Lake levels back in those days were considerably higher than they are today. As evidence of that if you are observant you will find beaches, beach cobbles and sea caves quite distant from the current shoreline and many feet higher in elevation.

In the second picture there is a sea cave just above the talus slope of this rocky cliff. It was formed by the pounding of wave action over many, many years.

It also happens to be roughly 50 feet above the current lake level.

Only about 1 percent of Lake Michigan’s water is recharged by precipitation each year.

Lake levels fluctuate.

They always have.

They always will.

Door County's Old Growth Forest

Door County is home to a curious sort of old growth forest.

The rocky promontories that are typical of the bay side of the peninsula are home to some very old cedars.

Like the ancient white cedar that you see to the left.

Without any soil you’ll find these guys growing out from the rocky cliff-face - their roots exposed but clinging tenaciously to the fissures in the dolostone.

This is hardly ideal habitat. Wind whipped exposure. Ice shoves in the winter. Drought brought on by fast drainage during the summer. Yet these cedars persist – sometimes putting on a growth ring only as wide as the width of a single cell in a year’s time.

The tree in the picture may possibly be many hundreds of years old. There is a very good chance it witnessed the arrival of Jean Nicolet in 1634.

Makes you wish the darn thing could talk, eh?

Stonehenge?

While out making some field observations abut the Niagara Escarpment I encountered this on the bay side of the northern peninsula.

Click on the picture to enlarge and you can see that these stone edifices extend the length of the beach.

I think someone has too much time on their hands.

Chewy Capitalist Charity

I first met these three young entrepreneurs a year ago while riding my bike.

They were at the same location – the middle of just about nowhere but a bunch of dairy farms.

On the exact same date – early Sunday morning.

Peddling their yummy wares for the same price – nothing.

What’s for sale today – I ask.

Young girl - Lemonade and cookies! Oatmeal, chocolate chip and chewy cherry cookies.

Did you make them yourself?

Young girl – I made the chocolate chip and the oatmeal and my mom helped me with the cherry.

I see they’re free again this year. What’s that all about?

Young girl (obviously the threesome’s official spokesperson) – They’re free because you are riding your bikes to raise money to fight cancer we thought it would be a good idea to show-up with cookies and lemonade to help out. We did it last year you know.

OK. OK. What cookie do you recommend?

All three chime-in – Chewy cherry!

Good. I’ll take one.

I have to tell you that the chewy cherry was a good pick. Oatmeal, cherry and chocolate chips – and very chewy. It was excellent. (I need to get a hold of the recipe).

I still cannot believe you’re giving away these cookies for free.

All three in unison – Hey mister. We take tips you know!

I hit the tip can with the last five bucks in my fanny pack. The cycling team behind me helps themselves to cookies and lemonade and stuffs a twenty in the can.

Want to know where all those tips ended-up?

Yep. The Leukemia and Lymphoma Society.

Kids, cookies, lemonade and a touch of hucksterism. What’s not to like about that?

Small town America.

That what keeps America great and a smile on my face.

The Escanaba Cleavage

The dog starts, gives a woof and a faint tremor is felt though the house.

At first blush you might think - earthquake?

Nope.

Actually this happens pretty regularly.

It is blasting from the mining operation up the road a piece.

If any of you have ever traveled the length and breadth of the Door Peninsula you've probably taken notice of the rock.

There is rock everywhere.

The spectacular cliffs. The promontories. The bluffs.

And the views from Cave Point County Park on the Lake Michigan shore.

If you ride your bicycle around the peninsula like I do you will also notice the thin topsoil.

Within the boundaries of the peninsula there are more than 94,000 acres of landmass with an average soil depth of eight inches.

There is bedrock everywhere.

The consequence of which is that if you wish to build a road, bury a utility cable, drill a well or install a sewer you might find yourself having to tunnel, trench or blast your way through dolostone.

You can even see the joints in the bedrock through the thin soil cover because moisture and better rooting conditions support slightly better plant growth.

This would be the Niagara Escarpment.
A very tenacious formation of dolomite limestone that extends all the way from Buffalo, New York through the Fox Valley.

Multiple glaciations were unsuccessful in wearing it down.

About 10,000 years ago when the last ice age visited Wisconsin my part of the world was buried beneath an ice sheet more than a mile thick.

The earth's crust is still rebounding from the weight of all of that ice.

Looking at that map you can see how the escarpment transects the peninsula. Visualize the lake Michigan lobe of the glacier extending south just to the right of the line and the Green Bay lobe of the glacier extending south immediately to the left of the line.

Geologic time is slow but relentless.

And that ice sheet melted and receded.

If you are observant of the coastlines of the peninsula you can actually locate where the ancestral high water mark and beaches are located - including the inland lakes that had previously been part of a much larger Lake Michigan and Green Bay.

I sometimes wonder about what man-made influence conspired to melt an ice sheet a mile thick only a mere 10,000 years ago.

A blink in geologic time.

Paleolithic campfires maybe?

I digress.

Anyway, about a mile or so from the farm is the demarcation line identifying the point where the two lobes of the glacier split and went their separate ways. There is a rocky outcrop of tough-old dolomite limestone that even all that ice could not carve down.

Here it is-

Now it is being mined by modern means.

Into gravel. Hence the blasting.

What nature could not finish - man will complete.

And fast - geologically-speaking.

Turning it into road-base and the raw materials for concrete.

We're pretty lucky having built upon what the Government Land Office Surveyors originally described as a swamp.

Oh sure, we have a seasonally high water table but we also have almost eighteen feet of soil.

To be fair - that would be where the well was drilled. About two hundred feet away is a rock shelf where a rock saw had to be used to cut a passage for the electric utility lines.

See what I mean about that funky average depth of eight inches?

It is complicated for sure.

So, Swamp, you are being long-winded again. What's your point? When are you going to get to the juicy part about the cleavage?

Many years ago I was fishing with my a couple of my deer hunting compadres - the Wench and the Dutchman - the original deer camp.

After a long day on the water - whilst I regaled these two gents of my new-found knowledge of geology and the natural world - we eventually sought landfall and the comfort of Joe and Nancy's Bar in Rosiere.

Joe and Nancy have long-since retired and the establishment is now Why-Lee's.

(Incidentally - I recommend that you go there for the blue gill sandwich on Fridays. Tell Lee that Swamp sent you.)

Somewhere along the line, and after more than a couple of beers, Joe might have asked how the fishing was.

Instead of simply answering the question with a direct answer the Wench went off on a tangent and launched into his own reiteration of what he had learned in his abbreviated geology lesson on the boat that day.

Considering the circumstances he got most of it correct.

Joe was thunderstruck. He was probably thinking - These guys aren't fishermen. Fisherman are liars. These guys sound like scientists.

The Wench was actually doing pretty good with his bar stool geology dissertation.

Everyone else at the bar was now paying attention.

When he got to the part about the formidable rock formation which marked the split between the Green Bay and Lake Michigan lobes of the last glaciation he reached deeply into his arsenal of knowledge.

He employed props.

Grabbing a napkin holder he placed it on the bar to illustrate the Escarpment.

Salt and pepper shakers followed to identify the location of the glacial lobes.

Tap beer glasses we used to show the movement of the glaciers.

Pausing to take a long pull from the western-most lobe of the glacier, he gathered his wits, summoned the reserves of his short-term reservoir of knowledge, slammed the beer glass upon the bar top, thrust his finger in the direction of the napkin holder and bursting forth with enthusiasm for his new-found scientific knowledge, exclaimed...

That is the Escanaba Cleavage!

Riding With the Devil

You are absolutely not going to believe who I rode my bike with today.

And for a good cause too.

What's the world coming to?

We all agreed that Mr. Beelzebub spends way too much time in the shower. About three times longer than anyone else.

High maintenance is the devil...

A Little Longer Ride

Been doing some training and I'm going to do a 150 miler.

If the weather is cooperative I figure if I leave Mequon before 7:30 AM I can get to Manitowoc by 1:30 PM or thereabouts. Same for Manitowoc to Sturgeon Bay.

I plan on carbo loading the night before each leg of the ride.

Sprecher product.

Migrants, POWs and Labor Markets

The Door County paper runs a column a couple of times a week that is titled: Traveling Back in the Advocate Times.

It's a time capsule of stories from their archives dating-back ten, twenty, fifty, one hundred and a hundred and twenty five years.

Published are all sorts of useful tidbits including stuff like tax assessments, who built a new shingle factory, the going price for a barrel of pickled fish a hundred years ago, who got kicked by their horse, shot-off their finger, or the random cow that was struck by lightening. Marriage, birth and death records are included.

What has always struck me is a glitch in the birth records a couple of generations ago.

Namely a disproportionate number of Hispanic-surnamed parents. Mostly clustered about the summer months and hardly ever during the winter.

This would make sense.

Migrant laborers arriving for the seasonal harvest of orchard crops.


Traveling about the peninsula you'll still find outposts of crumbling housing.

Poking around inside you'll find rusted bed springs and dilapidated furniture.

I wonder what kind of stories these dwellings would tell?

During the war there was a general shortage of labor.

Temporary housing was built in Sturgeon Bay to house the thousands of shipyard workers. With military recruitment for the war effort and the boom in manufacturing farm help was hard to come-by.

Solution?

Prisoners of war. Believe it or not - German POWs were placed with farm families and orchard growers to fill the gap.

By the way - unemployment on the peninsula is not anywhere near as high as many places around the state. It's actually shown some improvement lately.

More Breaking News From the Peninsula

Not this one - the Korean peninsula...

Whistling Past the Grave Yard

Germans are not the dominant ethnic group on the peninsula. They never were and never will be. Belgians settled the southern part of the peninsula and the Norwegians populated the northern portion.

Germans could be found east of the primary Belgian settlement near the town of Kolberg with scattered families around the rest of the county.

So - what's your point?

When I'm out riding about on my bicycle I am fond of visiting cemeteries.

Are you some sort of creepy ghoul?

No. I just like to visualize the lives lived and lost by the people that are buried there. Grave yards can be vast repositories of history if you don't mind taking the time to check them out. There's more on the subject over at the other blog.

Check out this grave marker-



It marks the resting spot of an early German settler.
What strikes me is the singular uniqueness of it.

It was crafted in Germany of porcelain in the form of a missal or bible and it lays flat on the ground. It is a bit faded and worn but hasn't been shattered by the grounds keeper's mower.

I cannot tell if it is the original marker or a modern-day or more recent marker.

Click on the photo to enlarge

Update On the Food Plot

OK. Remember that food plot I planted over a month ago?

The Indian corn, the sunflowers and whatever else I had?

Here it is.

It is pathetic.

A collection of sparsely germinated forage peas, what looks to be some oats, stunted oil sunflowers and a half-dozen wizened corn plants.

If you look at the photo you'll see a robust crop of milkweed with all sorts of thistle.

Blech.

Plenty of hot growing weather but a lack of rain. The bare earth is cracking-open with fissures.

Last weekend I spent the better part of Saturday picking seed heads and nuking reed canary grass that tenaciously clings to its beachhead around the big pond.

At the end of the day I had about a three gallons of 6% glyphosate (with brilliant blue turf dye) remaining in the sprayer on the Polaris.

So I nuked this plot and another one as well.

I'll replant in August or early September. Probably a frost-tolerant mix of brassicas for the deer.

The birds got short-shrift this year. Plots can be hit or miss.
_____________________________________________________________________
I am reminded that I owe you readers an update on my turkey fan mount.

It is still curing on the work bench. The second turkey fan is in the freezer.

So much to do.

So little time.

Karst Topography

Karst topography: A landscape shaped by the dissolution of a layer or layers of soluble bedrock, usually carbonate such as limestone or dolomite.

The peninsula is known for rock. Rocks here, rocks there, rocks everywhere. Rocks, rocks and more rocks.

And pretty thin soils too - which has created an altogether more complicated problem for everyone's drinking water.

Talk to a farmer and they'll wax eloquently about the farmers in Iowa County who will plow the same fields over a lifetime and hardly ever hit a rock.

I once told my brother-in-law how I could look forward to a new crop of rocks every spring.

With a serious expression he said - You mean you get more rocks every spring? Are the delivered?

Frost heaves - silly.

They are either crumbled chunks of the underlying bedrock or glacial boulders being forced to the surface by the freeze-thaw cycle every year.




Which is why Door county is known for its rock piles.












And its rock walls.

And this magnificent glacial boulder.

This is granite - and not part of the underlying rock formation.

This came from somewhere in Canada during the last glaciation about 10,000 years ago.

Imagine the power of water and ice that were marshaled to transport that stone all the way to here in an ice sheet a mile thick.

And all that ice melted without the impact of an SUV or a coal-fired power plant.

These rare rocks are called erratics.

They are a gift of the glacier.

All Roads Lead to the Swamp

So Swamp - how do we find you if we want to visit?

Simple.

Follow the sign...

Highbrow Artistic Composition

Lest you think I am completely without a taste for artistic expression - I bring you my own photographic, rural still life.

I call it: A Reflection In Poppies And Propane Superimposed Upon Septic Field.

A Strange Encounter

While this has happened a couple of times before it is too weird for words.

See that doe - just left-center of the picture?

I was out on the tractor clearing a trail with a brush mower. We're talking a clattering diesel tractor and a clanking and screeching mower. Altogether enough noise to wake the dead.

OK. I'm exaggerating. But I have to wear ear protection.

Anyway, this doe and a spotted fawn materialize from almost nowhere and approach me.

Yes. They approach me. The fawn leading the way.

I'm thinking - where did you put the camera you moron?

The fawn approached to within about fifty feet before the mom called it back. It was only by then that I had managed to fumble-about for the camera in the tool box.

Deer that would otherwise be scairt half to death about the approach of a human show no fear when there is loud machinery involved.

What the heck is that about?

This morning I asked my neighbor what he thought.

Tom, I can remember picking corn this one time and every time I made a pass this doe got-up and laid back down - always six rows over.

Go figure.

The American Goldfinch

My most favorite bird is the chickadee.

For any of you bow hunters that are reading - a really cool trick is to take a half a handful of bird seed with you when you go afield on your hunt. After you have set-up in your stand take some of that seed and place it on the top of your cap. Those chickadees will alight on your bow and fetch seed from your cap.

It is a great deal of fun and a good way to while-away your time hunting if you can stand getting bird seed down the back of your shirt.

Anyway, my second most favorite bird is the goldfinch.

We have vast flocks of them on our thistle feeders all summer.

One of my readers sent this picture of a male goldfinch-




And I took this picture of a goldfinch nest. These canary-like birds nest later than most birds. The female builds the small cup of a nest lining it carefully with wild thistle down.

Walking the Dog

With a break in the hot weather it was a great day to take the dog for a walk.

Some walks are better than others - if you are paying attention and taking it all in.

In my view you should never walk too fast.

It is better to stroll carefully - yet deliberately - and be exceedingly observant.

Sometimes it's nice to stop and smell the flowers.

Like these ox-eye daisies














Or this Canada anemone














Nature isn't always so pretty though. It can also be a cruel mother.

We discovered the remains of a newborrn fawn.














Yet, hope springs eternal.

Mama robin is working on a second hatch of youngsters.














We make the turn and head for home.

All of the snuffling and running-about has taken some of the snot out of the dog's attitude.

Girlfriend is less a leader and more a follower.

After a mile and a half we reach home and the dog's reward is a swim in the rain garden pond.














That's an altogether pretty good life - if you are a dog - or a person for that matter.

There's more over at the other blog.

MoreTree Munchers

I finally chased the balance of the ant colony out of the game camera by leaving it out in the hot sun to bake.

Fresh batteries and a clean memory card were added and the dog and I reinstalled it along a trail.

Over a half-dozen days we got forty deer pictures.

Here are a handful of them.

I have a suspicion that hunting this fall might be OK.

(Click-on picture to enlarge)

Garden Update

The garden is coming along nicely. If we could only get consistently warm temperatures and some regular rainfall

It's been cold (again) for the last four days and dry as a bone for the last three weeks.

Spinach and lettuce are coming on-line so there are fresh garden salads soon.

French breakfast radishes too.

More Green Stuff

The other day I posted the news that green earthworms could be had from the local mini-mart.

Yesterday Taco Bell announced their New Green Menu.

I cannot wait to check this out.

In-fact I'm thinking - I should drive to Sturgeon Bay for tacos tonight! Yum!

Day-Off

Last weekend afforded us the opportunity to kick back and relax.

The dog too.

Some neighbors who live on the bay side of the peninsula called -

You should come over and spend the day. The dogs can play in the water. We'll take the jet skis out. And we'll grill something afterwards.

Perfect day - threats of thunder storms passed and the wind calmed, the sun shone and the temperature rose.

Tennis ball after tennis ball was thrown from the pier and the dogs raced each other to fetch.

When it was hot enough the dogs lazed in the shade on the deck and the adults ran the Sea-Doos on the cooling waters of the bay.

Cold beers, some wine, local cheese and grilled fare followed.

Dessert was fresh-baked blueberry pie and this sunset-