The winter of 2012 has been anomalous here in southeast Michigan.  Warm, warm, warm.  All winter long.  It’s a little frightening, knowing how we need cold freezes to kill back certain pest species, to reset the clocks for certain plant and crop species.  It’s a little frightening, knowing how temperatures help regulate tree bud production, so that they don’t erupt too early and the little fruits get frozen off by late cold snaps.

But I’m a science guy.  I wanted to know HOW warm it’s been.  Is it my imagination, or did January feel more like February?  Did we just skip January’s weather altogether?  I want data!

So I got some data.  Bottom line: We did skip January.  And more.  Let’s go over things a bit, starting in December and running til March 11, when I started gathering this data (hence, my spreadsheets stop there, unless I do an update sometime in the future).

About the Data:

I went online, and used a variety of sources.  Because there are lots of sources to choose some, including some very local ones (like the Adrian Airport, just a few miles south), it was tough.  But in the end I chose to report on weather station KDTW, which is at the Detroit Metro Airport, because it has a long historical record (back to 1874).  And this report is not so much about our precise weather at Dragonwood, so much as about the weather all of us here in the Midwest have been through of late.  I downloaded daily temperatures and made plots.  You could do this too.

Perspective:

Let’s look at a graph of southeast Michigan year-round average temperatures.

What do we see? In round numbers,

1. Summer peak daily average temp is around mid-70s.

2. Winter peak daily average temp is around mid-20s.  This is about 50°F lower than the summer.

3. In the fall and spring months, temperatures fall and rise quickly, about 10-12°F each month in Sep-Nov, and Mar-May.

What we don’t see?  How much monthly variety there is from year to year. Answer? Not that much.  The majority of months average within 2-3°F of their long-term average.  It’s a fairly rare month that is as much as 4-5°F above or below average.  On the average, roughly 80% of months fall within about 4-5°F of the normal, leaving those extra warm or extra cold months as outliers in the top or bottom 10% of records.

Example: this past November 2011 at KDTW, average temps were 46.6°F, which was 5.1°F above normal.  That was the 5th highest November average temperature in 130+ years of record keeping.  So November was really warm, as Novembers go.

Quick Overview:

Warm winter.  Really warm.

December: 5.4°F above normal (12th warmest on record):

So, what do we see?  First, the “normal” green solid line is the mean average temperature across the month, just like the imaginary line down the middle of the annual graph for KDTW up above.  Just eyeballing it, you can see that the average December “normal” temperature is about 30°F.

The daily data is the three wiggly lines representing daily high, low and mean (average) temperatures for last December.  Again, it’s easy to see that it was a warm December.  I’ve added a “2012 averaged” red dashed line that is a rough estimate of how much warmer than normal the month was.  Detail: it’s an 11-day moving average line, meaning the value represents the average of that day plus those of 5 days before it and the 5 days after it.  For the month as a whole, we averaged 5.4°F above normal (normal is 30.1°F).

January: 5.1°F above normal (17th warmest on record):

January average daily mean temp is 25.6°F.  January 2012 however averaged 30.7°F, a good bit higher.  In fact, astute readers will note that the January average temperature was actually just a tad warmer than the normal December is supposed to be.

We skipped January, in weather terms.

February: 4.5°F above normal (12th warmest on record):

February is normally almost as cold as January: just 3°F warmer, averaging 28.1°F.  But this February was a whopping 32.6°F, again being warmer than the average December, let alone Jan or Feb.

March: ??°F above normal (?th warmest on record):

March normal average temp is 36.9°F at KDTW.  So far we’re well above that, and the month is nearing the halfway mark, with nothing but warm weather forecast.  Normally, this is maple sap weather, with nice warm days, but good freezes on most nights.  And you can see two good freezes, the second one around March 9-10.  But that looks like the end of our season.  Without further nightly freezes, there’s no sap to flow from our sugary friends, and with extra warm days the maple buds get ready to bloom and end the season altogether.

Note: Observant readers will note that I can’t have a valid red-dashed moving average line for the March 6-11 end of the graph, because I would need data from March 12-17 in order to calculate it.  So just ignore this… I’ll post an update in April with the full month of data for March.

Quick Look at the Region:

Here’s a look at December temperatures across the US.  The top map is mean temperature: SE Michigan is running about 35, and it’s the expected cold-in-the-North pattern.  But it’s the second map below that shows what it means.  For each tiny point on the map, the colors indicate how much warmer or colder the area was in December compared to “normal” years (monthly mean temps).   In short high numbers (red and brownish colors) mean hotter than normal temperatures.  Roughly two thirds of the country had a hotter than normal December.  The Dakotas and Minnesota were about the hottest.

There are other maps for the other months, but this post is too long already.  Go look them up yourself in the links below.  Short story: we stayed hot.

Summary:

I think the best way to look at this winter so far is this:  Spring has been shifted backward nearly a month.  It’s mid March now, the peepers are peeping madly, the robins woke us up this morning, the crocuses are well displayed, and I got buzzed by a honey bee yesterday.  This is all a bit early for us.

On the plus side: the deer had an easy winter, and didn’t chew up our young fruit tree branches like usual.

On the flip side: the fruit trees might bud too early and get nipped by a “normal” frost (ie., if the fruit trees bud early, it doesn’t have to be a “late” frost to nip the buds.  Even a regular frost can do the job.

There’s probably fifty plus and minuses we could do here, but I’m done.

Enjoy the nice weather.

Postscript:

As I post this it’s March 13, and we’re clearly in a very warm spell that will kill our maple season.  No freezes since last Friday, none in the forecast.  So the maple sap run will definitely be over for us… hope you got started early this year (our maples started dripping in late January! we got tapped on February 4, two weeks earlier than ever for Dragonwood).  I’ll follow up with a full March report later, in April.  Remind me if you don’t see it.

Oh!  And don’t forget if you haven’t been there, the USDA released their new Plant Hardiness Map a few weeks ago (here’s a write-up about it from Mother Jones), and it’s interactive this time, click to get your own state map.  Our farm?  Surprise!  We’ve moved from Zone 5 to Zone 6 (a more southern, warmer zone).  Here’s the direct link to the map at the USDA.

Data Reference Links:

1. US Temperature Anomaly Map (from NOAA):
http://www.cpc.ncep.noaa.gov/products/tanal/temp_analyses.php

2. Monthly Climate Report For DTW Airport, Detroit (by NOAA; 12 months available):
http://forecast.weather.gov/product.php?site=NWS&issuedby=DTW&product=CLM&format=CI&version=1&glossary=0

3. Seasonal Weather Averages Plot (available for many localities, from Weather Underground):
http://www.wunderground.com/NORMS/DisplayNORMS.asp?AirportCode=KDTW&SafeCityName=Southgate&StateCode=MI&Units=none&IATA=DTW&MR=1

4. History Data (Weather Underground) - really powerful ability to bring up nice graphs of the temperature and other weather facts for just about anywhere in the U.S., with customizable date ranges.  BETTER YET: at the bottom of each page is a tabular version of the data, and a link to get it all as CSV (comma separated variables) that you can plug into a spreadsheet, like Open Office (what I used):
http://www.wunderground.com/history/

5. Historical local daily averages and record high/low temps (NOAA) - this is for DTW Airport, but other places and other dates are available.  Look around:
http://www.crh.noaa.gov/dtx/display_climate.php?file=records_DTW_Dec_inc.htm

6. NOAA Climate data from all over the U.S. - this is the site that leads you to #5 above.  Just click an area on the map, then click the tab for “Local Data/Records” and follow links to the data you want.  Different areas have different kinds and amounts of data, depending on the local weather recording stations:
http://www.nws.noaa.gov/climate/

These three heralds of winter’s end are here, and have been keeping us busy for the last month!

Seed starting, maple syrup making, and egg collecting all burst out of the depths of winter at about the same time.  Although, we didn’t really have any “depths” of winter around here this year!  The mild weather I complained of in January continued right on through for the most part, and brought about an oddly early maple sap run in the last couple weeks of January, of all things.

Collecting sap, scrounging wood, cutting and stacking wood, nursing the fires, and boiling down and processing the syrup kept us up late nights off and on throughout February.

Sometimes, in critical times of a big sap run, we set our alarms to go off every few hours through the night, and got up to feed the fire under the reducing sap.  Once, I got called out at 3:30 am to a birth, and P just got up along with me and stayed up to keep the sap boiling. 

More than once, we finally completed and canned the finished syrup around midnight, because that’s when it was done.  Leaving for work in the morning, and getting home after 6pm mean catching up on farmwork after dark.

Soon after the days start getting longer and the light comes back, the chickens start laying again after the winter break that most of them take.  But they seem sensitive to cold as well as light, and their egg-laying only really has a burst of speed when the days start to warm above freezing, same as maple sap.  So I always associate maple sap running with the hens laying - bringing in a daily bounty in egg baskets and sap buckets.  Both were unusually early this unusually warm winter.  We’ve started our local egg sale deliveries again, as well as supplying eggs to Selma Cafe.

And, it’s seed-starting time.  I love the process of watching next summer’s plants start off from the tiniest sprouts.  It’s incredible to me that a frail little sprout becomes a giant bunch of celery, or that bushels of tomatoes come out of just the few seeds you can hold in the hollow of a cupped hand.

So far, we’ve got leeks, onions, celery, celeriac, multiple kinds of peppers, eggplant, and various early greens started under lights near the woodstove, or out on the sunporch. 

A week ago, it was around 50 degrees…..in southern Michigan, in January.

Starting a soup: Cubed celeriac stand in for both celery and potatoes at once. Browning lightly in a little chicken fat or olive oil starts laying the foundation for flavor depth in a good soup.

I got all riled up about it.  Granted, it was hard to complain….getting around without snow is so easy, less fuel use for heating, chickens laying in record numbers for this time of year, and digging in the garden as though it was October.  I generally try to avoid complaining about the weather, and I find wonder and joy in weather changes, season changes, and day-to-day differences.  However, I found myself longing for snow and worrying that it wasn’t cold enough.  After a super-hot summer, and ground that still hasn’t really appreciably frozen, in January, (I easily dug carrots and leeks today), it can be a little scary to contemplate the climate changes I believe I’ve seen in my own back yard.  What if every year increases in temperatures the way this past year increased over the year before?

Next ingredient - some of our lovely leeks, dug from the garden earlier today.

But now, with the temperature in the teens this morning, and the longed-for snow covering the ground,  I feel a little better.   Waking to the brilliance of sunlight reflecting off snow, and filling the house with light is a welcome change from the two months+ of warm but sullen grey skies and ground.  Even though I could still dig vegetables out of the garden, we came in with bright-pink faces from the cold.   Settling down with seed catalogues and a cup of tea feels much more in-tune with my expectations for this time of year.  And soup is a frequent quick meal.

One thought that has struck me this winter was to contemplate how much more food I might have grown if I had known the late autumn and early winter would be so mild.  I’m missing lettuce and spinach.  In our hectic fall, I passed the usual dates for re-sowing these greens, and figured I might as well not try.   Turns out, they would have

Some of our piddly carrots - small, yet brilliantly-colored and amazingly sweet. Sliced carrots, a chopped onion, and minced garlic all get added to the pot.

done well.  We’re not suffering for salad, we do fine substituting cabbage, endive, baby chard, tatsoi, and baby kale for other raw greens.  But lettuce and spinach would be a welcome touch of luxury.

My next thought was that if we are indeed experiencing warming of climate, there is even less reason for us northerners not to grow our own food.  There is even less reason to ship in food from milder climes, when well into December, (and now even January) it is possible to harvest greens and roots - even without a hoophouse.  If you cannot grow your own, you can buy it locally.  Support and pay for local farm goods, and more farms will come into being, increasing availability even more.  And at the same time, we will be working to reduce what food transportation contributes to global warming.

Growing our own food or purchasing it from someone close by, and learning how to cook it solves so many problems at once.  Last month, a study determined that eating commercial canned soup for just five days raised urine BPA levels 1221%. The lining of the cans contains this chemical, leaching it into food. “Bisphenol A is an endocrine disruptor , which can mimic the body’s own hormones and may lead to negative health effects. Early development appears

When the veggie mixture is lightly browned and softening, I deglaze the pan with a little white wine. This really rounds out the flavor and makes a soup delicious, but it can be omitted. All the veggies added to this point are only the ones that need time cooking - the roots, mostly. Save the delicate things for later.

to be the period of greatest sensitivity to its effects, and some studies have linked prenatal exposure to later neurological difficulties.” (Wikipedia)  As a midwife, you can guess how that makes me react.  Why do humans tend to take a nourishing food and ruin it?  (Unfortunately, it’s not just soup.  BPA is also found in many other food containers, cans, lids, and the lining the metal canning lids that many of us use to preserve our food at home.  The price of lovely Weck jars still makes them prohibitive to me - but they would be a safer solution for home canning.)

Every day, I am upset with what our species is doing to the world we live in, the food we ingest, the chemicals we instill in the bloodstreams of our unborn fetuses.  I am trying to do my small part by refusing to participate with at least some of it.  I wish more people would join those of us who are making these choices.  Maybe it sounds silly to talk about changing the world by growing and cooking your own soup, but maybe it doesn’t.  Because every time each of us purchases something like canned soup, we consent to waste, pollution, and chemicals in our food.  If you buy it, if you eat it, you have agreed to it, you have helped put off demanding that manufacturers must change.  I am not suggesting I am perfect - there are many ways in which I am still too complacent.  There are many days I am exhausted from late work hours and feel forced to resort to food I haven’t grown or cooked.   But I’ve got the soup down, at least!   Here’s a recipe that starts with pre-made chicken stock, and

Adding more flavor: For this soup I added a pinch of tumeric, a very light sprinkle of cayenne, and generous amounts of dried summer savory and parsley. We dried the peppers, savory, and parsley in the food dehydrator. Savory has proven easier to grow in quantity than thyme, for me, with a similar flavoring.

pre-cooked beans. (Many blogs cover how to make broth or stock, so I won’t - here is a good one, for example.)  Except for salt and tumeric and sweet corn, every ingredient in this soup was grown or harvested by us, on our land.  Most of them are doable for a backyard gardener.  Most of them can probably be obtained locally in most northern areas, unless you are in a food desert.  No cans were opened, all garbage from the making of this soup could go onto the compost pile.  This is not my once-a-week local challenge meal - this sort of eating is daily fare for us whenever possible.  If nothing else - learn to make soup.  A pot can provide meals for days, and keep chemicals out of your food.

What is this?? This is what good homemade broth looks like! It has gelled nicely. A couple of our excess roosters went into the making of this stock a couple days earlier.

Adding the cold broth to the soup pot. Add some water too, and bring the whole thing to a simmer.

The stock is steaming - now is the time to add some precooked beans. These “Snowcap” beans grew in the backyard garden, and they’re better than any beans I’ve ever bought from a store. Add precooked beans near the end of cooking so they don’t fall apart.

Add the delicate vegetables closer to the end of cooking, after the stock has been bubbling for awhile and the root veggies are cooked through. Here, I added kale picked frozen from the garden today, and some frozen sweet corn. Other things to add now would be green beans, peas, or broccoli.

Finished soup! Chopped chicken was also added near the end of cooking. This soup can be stretched over several days, by adding some more water and seasonings and another vegetable here and there.

I’m not counting chickens before they hatch, I’m counting eggs as they’re laid.  It’s less than a fortnight past solstice, and already the egg count is starting to rise.  No, we’re not getting dozens a day yet, and it’s not enough to put out the newsflash bulletins for everyone to start putting orders in for eggs.  But it’s definitely an uptick and numbers, and the color mix of our daily eggs has changed.

Maybe it’s just the excessively warm spell we’ve had this December, and not the passing of solstice at all.  It’s definitely clear though that some of our layers are back after their molt… we haven’t see a blue or green Auracauna egg for a month now, and in the last three days two of the Auracaunas have started laying again, nice big eggs.

We love how big the eggs are from the older birds.  We love having older birds around, actually, and not just because their eggs are among our largest.  Our two flocks have great leadership, both from the roosters and the hens.  A couple months ago now we took the thirty or so new pullet hens and their roos from their chick-to-pullet-coop and split them up and introduced them to their permanent flocks… the new Welsummers went west to the bigger flock, and the Cuckoo Marans to the east flock.

Having older birds and a stable flock/coop situation allows newcomers to settle in quickly.  There’s some initial confusion and a bit of put-you-in-your-place pecking, but that’s why it’s called a pecking order.  New birds come in near the bottom of the order, and work their way into a comfort zone.  Everybody finds a place, and within a short time, everybody knows everyone else and things are fairly settled socially.

Brunch with friends in the snow.

I read once that 50-60 birds in a chicken flock is about the most that they can handle well, because more than that and their little chicken brains can’t keep track of the social structure and civilization breaks down.  We haven’t pushed the upper limits of that range too much;  our west flock is around 70 right now.  But it’s very clear that everyone knows everyone else, and they all understand the pecking order.  So I think the maximum reasonable Facebook friendslist for chickens could actually be much higher, given a comfortable coop and roosts at night and plenty of room for free-ranging during the day.  Not such teeny chicken brains after all.

Back in November, there were three Barred Rocks from the east side flock that refused to stay in their fenced pasture, and kept escaping to greener pastures.  The west flock has better fences, so after a week or so of this, we simply took the lead escape artist and carried her back to the west flock, setting her on a perch after dark so that in the morning, she’d find the new water, food and “friends” before setting out for the day’s foraging in new territory.  We’ve found this a pretty reliable way to introduce birds to different flocks, that they always seem to find their way back to the coop after waking up there.

Two more escape artists headed for the West Flock.

In the morning at roll call, the escape artist found she’d fallen a few notches (plummeted, more like) and needed to find her new place.  Everyone in the West Flock knew this was someone different and yet someone who could belong here.  There were no death struggles, just don’t-stand-so-close-to-me messages and minor display-fight skirmishes.

Our wild/tame Tom turkey (who lives outside the flock in the trees, but spends all day with the west flock chickens) knows instantly who any newcomers are and quietly chases them around the hen yard, walking along with his long strides causing them to hop and run a little and behave themselves.  After an initial chase, Tom leaves the newcomers alone most of the day unless they get into skirmishes (which they do).  He’s our cop, breaking up all the fights, or trying to by sticking his head in and getting between skirmishers and *peenting loudly at them.  I don’t think the peenting does much, it’s not a very threatening sound, but he’s getting to be so massive that he’s definitely imposing.  He takes this job seriously, always picking out who he thinks is the troublemaker and targeting him/her specifically for little snakelike jabs with that big head of his.  So the newcomers learn fast to work their way up the ranks gradually, and not set off The Big Guy too much by being too much the social climber.

And it works.  We have happy flocks.  Whenever there’s a singleton newcomer introduced to a flock on either side, the process seems about the same.  Brief universal shunning, a few short spats, begrudging acceptance into the lowest tier, and gradual tolerance of the newcomer and a place on the roosts at night with opportunities for social advancement, given time.

Are you my neighbor?

It’s not a bad system.  Better than some human ones I’ve participated in.  Similar to several of them, more humane than a couple.  I think it’s closer to being a newcomer in high school than to being a new professor in a mid-tier academic department… the latter situation can range from uplifting to downright horrifying, depending on the roosters in that flock.  I’ve seen it both ways, occasionally at the same time in the same department.  Being now a bit removed from the daily academic environment affords me the luxury of looking back and seeing it with new eyes.

Roosting neighbors

Overall, I loved being a professor.  And now I love being with my chickens even better.  Happy New Year.

*note to birders: I know that only woodcocks are said to “peent”, yet this unique and seldom used vocalization of the turkey reminds me of peenting (search “peenting” and you can hear woodcocks on YouTube), although it’s far from being the same call.  Someday I’ll record this insistent, nasal warning the turkey makes and post it.  Meanwhile, I’ll call it a peent.

It’s not really Dragonwood’s first ground-coating snow of the season… but we missed the first one, being away on visits.  So it’s OUR first snow, and it didn’t arrive until after Christmas!

So, to celebrate my morning walk with birds and cats, here are the first snow footprints that I found this morning:

1. Unknown polydactyl cat print, front foot, five toes across the front.  Non-polydactyl cats normally have five toes on the front paw, but arranged as four across the pad and one behind, as a dew claw.  Gina and a couple other kitties here have five toes on the front, but arranged straight across the top like this one.

2. Sassy (aka Sasquatch), who came running through the snow to see me.  On the bottom is her front paw print, with seven toes, and on the top is her back paw, which has five toes (non-polys have four in the back).  It’s harder to see the fifth claw and matching pad, but they’re on the left of the main print and other toes.

Sassy has 24 toes altogether, tied for our local record holder.  You can only see six toes/claws on her front paw print here, arranged with four across the front and two out on a “thumb” (to the left, since this is her right paw)… the seventh claw has no pad, and grows neatly between the thumb-pair and the four-pad above, and curls under (rarely leaving a mark).

Also… Sassy seldom retracts her claws, and we’ve never known her to do so while she walks.  Normally cats retract their claws, leaving a distinctly different pawprint (like #1 above) from their friends like dogs and raccoons (always show claws in their prints).  But Sassy walks on her claws, whether in the snow or on our hardwood floors… you can always hear her click clacking along in the night.

3. The turkey.  Our Tom greets me every morning, and on a morning like this it’s easy to see where he’s been exploring before I get out to greet him in return.  Tom is now 2-1/2 years old.

I shoulda shot the chicken prints too, I suppose.  And the juncos flitting around the kitchen garden’s remains.  But this isn’t a documentary, it’s a celebration.  It snowed!  Yay!