Robins are back - I hope they survive this late winter storm

Three days ago I was listening to robins singing in my yard, watching a flock of juncos passing through on their way to Canada, and hearing flocks of geese overhead, honking their way back north.  Today we are getting buried in snow again -- at the same time Washington D.C. is having record breaking 90s -- in April!  Talk about global weirding.

Jet Stream, April 11, 2013
(Map courtesy of acuweather.com) 

The instability of the Jet Stream is a big contributor to all this strange weather.  I can remember when it pretty much stayed put up in there Canada, circling the arctic and dipping occasionally into Minnesota but no further south.  Now, as you can see from this map, it has gone crazy.  And with it comes all this weird  weather.  That huge dip is pulling cold air south, where it meets warm air from the Gulf and produces severe storms, including early tornadoes along the front.   It also traps warm air on the East Coast, resulting in those record-breaking 90s yesterday. (For more on how the Jet Stream is causing more severe weather lately, read this article on Climate Central.)

Last year's crab apples provide
food for spring birds

Meanwhile, birds on migration are getting caught in the storms.  The winds have been very strong today, so I suspect we will have a major bird drop around here (which is different from a bird dropping!)  A bird drop is when migrating birds come down to wait out the bad weather.  Sometimes you get to see some unusual species when the weather clears -- if the birds survive.

I find myself wondering what those robins on my land are eating today.  The Juncos can find seeds on tall grass stalks and the harrier hawk who returned a few days ago will no doubt find a rodent or two around the chicken coop.  But the ground is still too frozen for those robins to find any worms.  In the past I have seen them picking on frozen crab apples still on the trees.  So maybe that will help.

Minnesota drought map 4/11/2013
(Click pic to enlarge)

In spite of this snowstorm, we are still in the midst of a serious drought here.  Today's drought map shows my county, Pine, in the "severe" category.   (For more on the drought, click here.)

Last year it was so dry in late summer-fall that we headed into winter about 7 inches below normal in precipitation.  With the ground still frozen, all that this snow will do is run off -- which helps the wetlands downhill from my place, but won't do much for the garden.  In fact, it is so dry that, for the second year in a row, I decided not to tap my trees for maple syrup.  They grow along the edge of seasonal woodland wetlands that normally provides them with plenty of spring moisture during the melt-off, but this year it is bone dry.  I saw on the news that some syrup producers are getting a decent run -- guess it depends on where you are.  But for everybody it is very late, because of the abnormally cold spring.  In the past, syrup production would begin in mid-March and be over by now.

All of which goes to show that the climate is indeed changing.  Better get used to the new normal -- whatever that turns out to be...

Are eagles nesting too early this year?

This is a still shot from the Minnesota DNR EagleCam, which is focused on a nest in Minneapolis.  As you can see, there is already an eagle incubating eggs -- according to the website, there are 3 of them, laid around January 1st.  You can also see that the nest was full of snow, which the eagles have covered with straw.

Given that the incubation period for a Bald Eagle is about 35 days, these eggs are long overdue to hatch -- if they ever do.  January is awfully early for nesting here in Minnesota -- even now the lakes are still frozen, so it would be hard for eagles to catch fish (one of their favorite foods).  They do eat carrion -- I have seen them on deer carcasses -- but would the chicks do OK on that?  And what about getting chilled?  Since those eggs were laid, it has gone below zero several times.  I'll be watching this nest to see what happens.

Eagles are not the only birds who might be mixed up by the crazy weather this year.  There was a pair of mourning doves that apparently never migrated from here because of the long, snowless, unusually warm fall.  Then it went to 20 below zero (F) one night and stayed below zero for several days.   I have not seen the doves since.  Did they freeze to death?  And today I could swear I heard a robin -- no worms for it to eat yet.  Maybe it will survive on frozen crab apples still on the trees.

If climate change deniers would pay more attention to nature, it would become obvious that something is happening.   A friend of mine in Pennsylvania said she has had pigeons breeding all winter, when normally they stop until spring.   I read recently that birds in Europe are arriving 2-3 weeks early, long before the insects that they normally feed on have emerged.  This certainly messes up the breeding season, since those birds evolved to feed their young on insects.

Back here in Minnesota, we are getting a wildly fluctuating freeze-thaw-freeze-thaw, while most of our snow is going south.  In spite of the fact that there's about a foot of the stuff in my yard, we are still technically in a drought, because there was so little rain last fall that the ground under that snow is very dry.  And frozen, so when the snow does melt, it is just going to run off.  According to the weatherman, this leaves us with the strange possibility of having drought and flooding at the same time.

Where are the Monarch butterflies this year?

Over the years, I have purposely allowed Common Milkweed to naturalize on my land, because it is the food plant of the Monarch butterfly larva.  The area where I live is on the migration route and a breeding grounds for the larvae.  (In fact, the Monarch is the state butterfly of Minnesota.  I consider my place to be a butterfly sanctuary.)  The caterpillars will only eat plants in the Milkweed family -- which include not only the Common Milkweed, but also Butterfly Flower ( formerly known as Butterfly Weed, but renamed "flower" by retail greenhouses) and Aesclapia varieties.   So it's a good idea to have some of these plants in your  butterfly garden if you want to attract Monarchs.

In past years, I could go out into the field this time of year and, within minutes, find either larvae or eggs from Monarchs, as well as see the females fluttering from plant to plant laying more eggs. This year, zilch, zero, nada.  I wanted to find some eggs and/or caterpillars to raise so my little grandson could watch them grow and pupate.  A few years ago his older brother, at around age three, was amazed to see an adult Monarch emerge from the pupa. "Butterfly in there!" he exclaimed in delighted surprise. He also delighted in releasing the butterflies. Now his brother is about the same age and spending daycare time with us, so I wanted to do this project again. I went in search of larvae or eggs, but found not a single one. I must have looked under the leaves of a hundred plants or more, with no luck.  So what happened?

It's hard to say.  Did all those fires in the Southwest kill the Monarchs as they migrated from Mexico or the Gulf states?  Was the long cold spell here in Minnesota this spring too much for those who did arrive?  Are they being killed off by genetically-modified corn pollen from plants with BT (Bacillus thuringensis) built in to kill corn earworms -- and any other caterpillars it comes in contact with?  Is climate change upsetting the migration cycle?  Is it a combination of all these things?  We do know that their wintering habitat in Mexico is shrinking, due to illegal logging of the areas where they normally go.   In addition, there are fewer and fewer places for Monarchs to stop along the way.



Female Monarch
(Photo by Kenneth Dwain Harrelson
Courtesy of Wikimedia Commons)

 Monarch butterflies travel north at about 50-100 miles per day.  The butterflies don't make a single trip from Mexico to Minnesota.  Instead, they breed along the way, then their offspring continue the journey.  It take 3 or four generations for them to reach Minnesota from Mexico.  In other words, they travel in stages, as spring moves northward and flowers become available for nectaring and Milkweed plants for breeding.  You can read more about the migration and see a map at this site:  http://www.fs.fed.us/monarchbutterfly/migration/index.shtml.

Only once in my life have I seen a migrating flock passing through Minnesota.   It was many years ago, when I was still in college.  A fellow student and I were driving along a back country road when the call of nature came, so we pulled over and I  went into the woods to pee.  Suddenly I was surrounded by fluttering Monarchs.  There must have been three or four hundred of them.  It was a magical moment I will never forget.  I called to my buddy to come see, and he was amazed, too.   Of course, I didn't have a camera with me (I never seem to at these moments) so the only record of this event is in my memory - and I don't even remember exactly where it was.  But I'll never forget the wonder of it!

Even if I could remember the place, I'm not sure that patch of woods still exists.  The land is becoming more and more developed along the migration route, with fewer "way stations" for the butterflies to breed and feed.   So one way you can help the Monarchs is to plant milkweed for them.  Each fall, I harvest the milkweed seeds on my land and sell them in my eBay store, The Happy Rooster, for butterfly gardeners.   I have both the Common Milkweed and what I call Swamp Milkweed, the Aesclapia species with the narrower leaves that likes ditches and other damp areas.  I do a pretty good business with this, since commercial seed companies don't offer such "weeds" in their catalogs.  In this way, I am doing my little bit to help Monarchs survive.  You can do the same:  Be a good Monarch steward and plant some milkweed in your butterfly garden this fall -- help save our state butterfly.

On bird migration, modern science, and Jewish theology

The Canada geese are coming back now -- I've seen several flocks heading north.  With all the flooding going on here in Minnesota, there's plenty of open water for them to swim in.  (Luckily we are not in a flood zone, but my domestic geese are having a good time wading in puddles and honking at their migrating brothers.)

Speaking of migration, did you know that until the late 1700s, it was commonly thought that birds hibernated in the mud in rivers and lakes during the winter?  The British doctor Edward Jenner, who is best known for discovering the smallpox vaccine, was also interested in hibernation, and conducted extensive studies on hedgehogs and other hibernating mammals.  He was among the first to remark that birds were not dirty or muddy when they reappeared in the spring.  Nor were they thin and hungry like other hibernating animals when they emerge in spring.  So where did the birds go? 

Jenner dissected spring-returning birds and examined the contents of their stomachs, to see what, if anything they had been eating.  He found seeds of plants not native to Britain. He also noted that these species of birds had been seen flying far out across the oceans. So he hypothesized that the birds were leaving Britain to go someplace else in winter. Unfortunately, Jenner died before he was able to write up his studies on bird migration, but his family published them after his death. Modern research has confirmed his theory:  birds do not hibernate in mud, they migrate.

That such a basic scientific fact was not discovered until the late 18th century raises the question of various "scientific" statements made by the early Jewish sages.  When I was growing up in the 1950s and 60s, it was taken for granted among Jews that when it came to science and medicine, the modern discoveries take precedence over any folklore that might be in the Talmud or other earlier writings.   We went by the opinion of Maimonides, one of the greatest Jewish philosophers and a medical doctor, wrote in the 12th century: "Do not ask of me to reconcile everything that they (the Sages of old) stated from science with the actual reality, for the science of those days was deficient, and they did not speak out of traditions from the prophets regarding these matters... " (Guide for the Perplexed, 3:14)  In other words, when it comes to science, the Sages were not divinely-inspired prophets nor were they infallible.

Rabbi Samson Raphael Hirsch, a major 19th-century German Jewish theologian, later wrote: "...We find that the Sages themselves considered the wisdom of the gentile scholars equal to their own in the natural sciences. To determine who was right in areas where the gentile sages disagreed with their own knowledge, they did not rely on their tradition but on reason. Moreover they even respected the opinion of the gentile scholars, admitting when the opinion of the latter seemed more correct than their own." (From a letter written in 1876  to Rabbi Pinchas M.E. Wechsler.)

That was the attitude I grew up with: science was science, no matter who discovered it.  But more recently, with the rise of the Haredi (post-WWII fundamentalist Orthodox Jewish) movement, there are those among my Jewish brethren who expect us to take absolutely everything the Talmudic rabbis said as literal scientific fact, trumping anything the secular scientists might since have discovered.  I find this impossible to do without having to turn my brain off -- an option I doubt God would want.  After all, God gave us brains to learn with.  The rabbis of the Talmudic era were very wise, but when it came to science, they were limited to what was commonly known around them. 

Thus, you find  things like the curious statement that "lice come from sweat" and  it is therefore permissible to kill them on the Sabbath  (Shabbat 107b)  when we normally do not kill living things.  At the time of this ruling, "spontaneous generation" of insects and other creatures was taken for granted by the whole known world, not just the rabbis.  Aristotle wrote that certain lower animals “are not produced from animals at all, but arise spontaneously: some are produced out of the dew which falls on foliage... others are produced in putrefying mud and dung, others in wood, green or dry, others in residues, whether voided residues or residues still within the living animal.”   Eels and fishes were commonly believed to come from the foam of the sea and flies from rotten meat. 

But today we know that lice come from the eggs of other lice, and are indeed living things.  The same goes for the Talmudic mice that are "half dirt and half flesh" (Chullin 9:10, Sanhedrin 91a), another biological impossibility.   For that matter, DNA wasn't even discovered until 1962 -- when I was still in high school.   Yet look how much  -- in my own lifetime! --  that discovery has fundamentally changed our entire perspective on the natural world!  All the "ancient wisdom" about passing down characteristics through "blood" is now rendered obsolete.

These may seem like trivial issues to some people, but for many Orthodox Jews, they are serious challenges to our faith.  If the Sages were wrong about lice and mice, are they also wrong about other things, too?   Can we trust anything the Talmud says in the face of these absurdities?

If you see Judaism (or any other religion) as a house of cards that will tumble with even the slightest question or error, then science can seem very threatening.  But if you can make a distinction between science studying the "how" of the  natural world and theology dealing with the "why" of human existence, there is no conflict between science and religion.   Science tells us how things work, but it is neutral on questions about God, the soul, and religious laws.  Scientifically, there is no reason I should not eat pork or mix meat with milk, because these laws are not about science per se.   I don 't keep kosher because is is more healthy or more natural,  but because it is the will of God for me as a Jew.   And if I had lice (which I thankfully do not!) it would still be permissible to kill them on the Sabbath, even though we now know they do  not spontaneously generate from sweat.  This is also why, when I see birds migrating, it is no challenge to my faith.

(For an in-depth discussion of spontaneous generation and Jewish law, see  The Sweat-Louse, the Dirt-Mouse and the Dong Chong.)

Geese migrating over my land in Minnesota, 2011