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Did you know that a chipmunk can throw its voice? Or that Wisconsin has a venomous mammal? What about the answer to the question: can porcupines throw their quills?Every Monday on WXPR at 7:45 a.m. and 5:45 p.m., the Masked Biologist answers questions just like these about living here in the Northwoods.You can keep track of Wildlife Matters and all of WXPR's local features on the WXPR Local Features podcast, wherever you get your podcasts.

Fall Colors In The Northwoods

image by valiphotos on pixabay.com

When you ask people what they like most about autumn, usually the beautiful fall colors are near the top of the list. In this episode of Wildlife Matters, the Masked Biologist examines the science behind the beauty of autumn leaf colors.

Autumn has arrived. Depending on who you ask and where you live, we are at or just past peak color. I always regret that fall colors just don’t look as good in a photograph as they do to my eye. Every year, I marvel at the brilliance of color, like I had forgotten how amazing it can be. Grouse hunting right now is not necessarily ideal; the leaves assist the birds in their hasty getaway. I still like to get out, even taking the family along, because then I get to see how each individual tree puts on its own show. My favorites are trees that have multiple colors, like yellow fading to red. This year it seemed to me that we had a lot more of those kinds of combinations than usual—and not just maples, even oaks seemed more colorful this year.

Every fall, I hear from people that colors are triggered by cold temperatures. This is not exactly true. Temperature has its role to play, but it is not the primary factor. In fact, leaf turn is the result of a change in chemical activity, and is triggered by a change in length of daylight.

Tree leaves are green because they are filled with chlorophyll, a crucial pigment that helps the tree in manufacturing its own food from a combination of water, nutrients, and sunlight.  When the days start to shorten, the trees are spending less time making food from sunlight. They produce less chlorophyll, the dominant green coloring in leaves. As the chlorophyll reduces, the second pigment, carotenoids, become more prominent. Carotenoids are also utilized during the growing season; you may recognize carotene as that helpful nutrient in healthy foods like carrots, corn, squash, and peppers. Yellows, oranges, and browns all derive from this pigment.

How about the reds? The third pigment comes into play only at the end of the growing season. Anthocyanins add red coloring to plants; apples, cherries, cranberries, raspberries, basically any red fruit contains this pigment. Anthocyanins have one task to perform in tree leaves. When food production, photosynthesis, drops off in the fall, the tree’s productivity drops off—especially when we have warm, sunny days and cool (but not freezing) overnight low temperatures. It can produce a lot of valuable sugary sap during the day, but without continued transport the sap stays in the leaves where the tree risks losing it with the next strong breeze. The red anthocyanins are pumped into the leaves to help the tree ensure it gets as much sap out of the leaf before it shuts down. This could explain why we’ve seen trees with red colored or red-tipped leaves more recently. Last month was cool, one of the coldest on record, but over the last week we have had warmer days and colder nights.

Although daylight length is the primary trigger of leaf change, weather does play a role in the ultimate quality of our fall color show. If we get a really hard frost early, trees can lose leaves without having them change to anything but brown. In very dry times, color can be delayed by weeks. Fall colors can be muted by a significant long wet stretch of weather too. This year, although recently it has been cool and cloudy, the rain events have brought relatively little precipitation since the leaves began to turn, so our northern forests have put on quite an enjoyable color show.

Get out in the woods and enjoy them for yourself. A photo may not do it justice; in my opinion, though, fall colors in the Northwoods are something to be experienced, not merely seen or photographed. Don’t let the stress of everyday life keep you from refreshing your spirit. Even a few minutes of “nature bathing” can make you feel refreshed and help improve your outlook.

The Masked Biologist is a weekly commentator on WXPR talking about natural resources and wildlife in the Northwoods. He is anonymous so that he can separate his professional life as a biologist from his personal feelings about the natural world.
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