In this month's installment of Field Notes Scott Bowe of Kemp Station discusses bird’s-eye wood, some of the most beautiful material a woodworker can use. When I say “figure in wood” you may not be familiar with the phrase. But if I say bird’s-eye maple, an image of beautiful swirls pops into your mind. There are many other types of wood figure such as curly, tiger stripe, fiddleback, and quilted, but I would like to focus on bird’s-eye today. First, we should cover some basic wood anatomy.

Years ago Dave Daniels from Rhinelander heard of a research project that really interested him, but he never heard what came out of the project so he sent a question to WXPR’s Curious North series asking us to look into it: What ever became of the Little Rock Lake Acid Rain research project conducted by water scientists at the Trout Lake research station near Boulder Junction? For this month’s Field Notes, Susan Knight recounts the entire story of Little Rock Lake, the site of an experiment

In this month's installment of Field Notes, Scott Bowe of Kemp Station discusses trees and their resistance to decay fungi. If you have had the opportunity to travel the forests across Wisconsin, you will notice that we have an impressive variety of tree species. These tree species are an important source of food and shelter for wildlife, but also an important raw material for human use. But not all wood from trees is created equally. We favor some species for their aesthetic beauty such as the

For this month's Field Notes feature, Susan Knight discusses Wild Rice, and its amazing transformation from spring to fall. It’s almost spring. You can feel warm air wafting amidst the chill. The lakes are starting to melt; it will be paddling time soon. My favorite paddle any time of year is the south basin of Allequash Lake. If you could take a time lapse sequence of yourself paddling on Allequash you would see a remarkable metamorphosis. In the first frames you are paddling on a quiet lake in

In this month's installment of Field Notes , Scott Bowe of Kemp Station discusses snow load and how it impacts our homes. The snowfall this year has been incredible! We set a record in February with 57.5 inches of snow in the Rhinelander area, and we are on our way to setting an annual record for the 18/19 winter season. When I recoded this broadcast last week, we were at 97 inches, about a foot short of the 13/14 season record. And, I’m sure we added to this amount last weekend. This much snow

In this month's installment of Field Notes , Susan Knight discusses the importance of seedbanks - in the past and in the future - for the survival of our food crops in an uncertain future. One of my work projects is learning and writing about wild rice, and I got to thinking about preserving wild rice seed into the future. This led me back to an old Field Notes story about Soviet genetics. In this earlier Field Notes, I told the story of Lysenko, a Soviet pseudo-scientist who rejected the

It's the second Tuesday of the month, which is when we hear from our commentators in the field. In this month's installment of Field Notes , Scott Bowe of Kemp Station discusses how trees adapt with changes in elevation. In my last Field Notes broadcast, I spoke about the amazing human body and how it adapts to working and playing at high elevations. Elevation has impact on other organisms besides humans. Let’s look at elevation and how trees adapt to this harsh environment. Imagine a mountain.

With Christmas on the horizon, many of us are thinking about gift giving. In this month's installment of Field Notes , Susan Knight discusses the virtues of coal (just in case you get some in your stocking). Christmas is coming. Are you worried about what you might find in your stocking? I am hoping for chocolate and gummy bears, but a nice lump of coal might not be too bad, either. Coal burning is now considered an environmental scourge. But the phenomenon of coal itself is fascinating and in

In this month's installment of Field Notes , Scott Bowe of Kemp Station discusses how the body adapts to recreation in high elevations. Last month I had the opportunity to spend some time in Colorado’s Flat Tops Wilderness Area, about two hours west of Denver. We were not successful in our pursuit of elk, but we had a great time and met a lot of nice people. One thing that always amazes me are the challenges presented by camping at higher elevations. We don’t see those types of challenges here

In this month's episode of Field Notes , Susan Knight of UW-Madison’s Trout Lake Station describes an unusual growth pattern of an aquatic plant, reminiscent of mushroom fairy rings. Over a year ago, a colleague sent me a fuzzy photo of a lake with what looked like two rings, or rather, doughnuts, of floating plants in the middle of a lake. The plant was probably water shield, and while water shield often forms a ring around the perimeter of a lake, I had never seen a ring out in the middle of a