23 minute read
Winter Birds of Prey
The winter avian landscape is usually much quieter than the summer breeding season. Bird activity during the winter is mainly to find enough food and seek shelter from predators. With few insects available to eat, it’s important to provide seeds and suet for both the bird visitors from the north and the yearround residents such as chickadees, nuthatches, woodpeckers and cardinals. Also vital is clean, fresh water every day in a heated bird bath.
The autumn migration is a very gradual one compared to its spring counterpart. Young, newly fledged migratory birds linger until their food supply diminishes and the adults begin to fly south. Now is when some new birds arrive to spend the winter here. Dark-eyed juncos are often the first to show up in September.
There’s another bird group that comes through during the fall, and some overwinter here. Accipiters are fast fliers that do nest here but are also seen during migration. They are often blamed for snatching smaller prey such as our resident songbirds and mourning doves at the feeders. Some of these smaller hawks may remain here during the winter months.
The three species in the accipiter group are the sharp-shinned hawk, Cooper’s hawk and northern goshawk. The smallest of these, the sharp-shinned, is a fairly common nester in Door County. The Cooper’s has become more abundant during recent years, and the northern goshawk is now quite rare.
Accipiters are known by their rounded wing tips and long tails. They often sit in a forest, watch for bird activity below, then swoop in rapidly to snatch their food. They are very adept at swerving among trees with amazing agility and speed. Accipiters, unlike the merlin, pluck the feathers of the bird they catch before eating it.
Buteos are larger, heavy-bodied hawks with long, broad wings that help them soar high over open land. The red-tailed hawk is perhaps the most common in our area and nests in woodland edges. It’s easy to identify an adult by its rusty, red-brown tail. It has a four-foot wingspan and is only slightly smaller than the rough-legged hawk. During mild winters, it may not migrate south.
The open countryside of fields and grasslands is the best place to see the very large rough-legged hawks. Look for their white rump patch, and watch them hover in one place as they spy some food on the ground. This species nests in the Arctic and travels south during the winter as its food supply diminishes. The first sightings in autumn are usually in October, and they can remain here into early May.
You might see rough-legged hawks perched atop power poles or on trees along open fields and marshland. They prey on small- to medium-sized mammals such as mice and meadow voles. During winters of deep snow cover, they may travel farther south, where the ground is bare and hunting is easier.
Another open-country hawk that has a white rump patch is the northern harrier. It flies at a much lower level than the rough-legged hawk and can swoop quickly when it spies a mouse or vole. It has a longer and narrower tail. The adult male is gray above, and the female has brown feathers on the back and tail. During mild winters with light snow cover, it may not even migrate. The harrier is about 17 inches long, compared to the 20-inch rough-legged
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(Opposite) Gyrfalcons, like this one seen in January 2020 near Ellison Bay, are rare winter visitors to Wisconsin, seen fewer than eight times per year. Photo by Joe Rakoczy. 1 A back view of a red-tailed hawk shows its mottled, brown-and-white plumage and the rusty-colored tail. 2 One of the county’s yearround residents is the barred owl. This one cooled off in our cement bird bath.
3 A sharp-shinned hawk patiently awaits a moving target below for its next meal. 4 Great horned owls are also living here all year long and are one of most common and wide-ranging owl species in North America. 5 The tiny saw-whet owl can be very tame and appear on a branch at eye level in a forest when you least expect to see one. Photos by Roy Lukes.
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hawk, and the harrier’s wingspan is 44 inches, versus the rough-legged’s wingspan of 48-56 inches.
Falcons are a group of swift fliers with long, pointed wings and medium to long tails. They attack their victims with sharply notched and curved beaks that help them to sever the neck vertebrae. Species range from the smallest — the American kestrel at about nine inches long — to the merlin at 11 inches and the peregrine at 17 inches. Wingspans for these three are 22, 24 and 41 inches, respectively. We’ve had winters when all three species were seen in our area.
The largest of the falcons is the gyrfalcon, which nests in the Arctic. They seldom migrate this far south during the winter, but a report of one that was photographed near Ellison Bay came in on Jan. 19, 2020. They can be up to 22 inches long, with a wingspan of nearly four feet. They prey on mammals and ducks and like to hunt along shorelines or from an exposed perch. Their ability to fly rapidly allows them to follow a bird that’s swerving to escape, but they rarely do a stoop flight from high up the way the peregrine does.
The bald eagle is a common bird of prey that’s usually here all year. When Lake Michigan waters stay open, they catch fish, but during severe winters with frozen lakes, we’ve seen them acting like vultures by eating dead animals along roadsides. One winter, someone observed an eagle consuming a dead calf in a farmer’s field.
Owls are also birds of prey, and several species live here all year, including the barred owl and the great horned owl. Others that have been seen during the winter are the eastern screech owl and the shorteared owl. There may be more of them than we realize because they are difficult to count. They don’t come
to feeders and are usually active at night, meaning they are seen less often.
Winters with little snow cover help short-eared owls to find food in the fallow fields where meadow mice are sometimes quite abundant. There was a colony of these owls in far Southern Door in January of 1995, and my late husband, Roy, took many photos of them. Northern harriers were also soaring over the same fields to grab voles and field mice.
During some years, snowy owls migrate down here from their farnorthern breeding grounds. Members of that species are seen more often because they are active during the day. Their main food in the Arctic is a small rodent called the lemming, whose populations alternate through high and low cycles. It’s during the low cycle when many of the young snowy owls show up in the Midwest during the winter, often starving.
The eastern screech owl and the saw-whet owl are the smallest of the group and seem to be less afraid of humans. During the extremely cold and snowy winter of 2013-14, when Lake Michigan froze over, we learned of several screech owls that were found on the snow near Northern Door homes. It seemed that they were starving. The deep snow cover made their search for mice very difficult because the mice were taking cover under the snow, staying out of sight of their predators and eating the bark off of shrubs.
These small owls do not vocalize much for fear of being found and eaten by the bigger great horned owls. Obviously, the winter months are a difficult time to survive out in the wild. You might say it’s an owl-eat-owl world out there!
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The Pioneer
High-performance home designer and architect Virge Temme is retiring — but not from convincing people that the world can be changed one house at a time
When I pulled into the gravel drive leading to the home of architect Virge Temme, she was outside rummaging in the back of her Dodge Ram City Van. The white home before me was charming, with clean lines and a simple elegance recognizable even to the untrained eye.
Temme had designed the home located not far from the bay of Little Sturgeon, and together, she and husband Brett had torn down the original 1940s cottage to its foundation, and built their home back up in 2002. Architect Meghan Hawkins, who has been to the home, said that with the exception of its contemporary twist, it looked like it could have been built on the site 100 years ago.
“And it’s hard to get those historic things right,” said Hawkins, who, as founder of Evolve Design Workshop in Madison, designs homes across the state, including in Door County. “There are really particular things with proportion and the size of overhangs that are really easy to get wrong. And she did it with such skill.”
Temme’s American water spaniel, Emmett, bounded toward my car and hopped inside once I opened the door. Temme walked over, smiling. She has been honored with a sustainability award that has been given only to women such as Hillary Clinton, yet she appeared completely down to earth, her attire as casually stylish as her short, blonde hair: longsleeved T-shirt, jeans, boots. She didn’t wear any makeup to define her blue eyes, high cheekbones or classic Czech jawline that even now, at 68 years old, wasn’t surrendering much to gravity.
“Ready for some lunch?” she asked, after completing a tour through the voluptuous gardens surrounding the house, the chicken coop, the plans for future improvements. “I have water or wine.”
A pause. I was sitting on a stool at her kitchen island facing a sunken living room lined with windows that brought the outside in. The harmonious, refuge-like space and Temme’s
by Debra Fitzgerald
photography by Brett Kosmider
warm personality made wine seem like the perfect choice. It was easy to see why she’s remained close, lifelong friends with many of her clients.
“Virge is about relationships — relationships with her clients, subs, suppliers, regulators and bankers,” said past client Steve Mumma.
But the occasion for the visit was an interview. Temme is retiring from 22 years of designing homes on this peninsula through Virge Temme Architecture. Some 200 homes in Door County carry the Temme imprimatur, either through a remodel or custom home.
Her retirement will be official when her final two homes are completed in December 2021.
She’s Got Grit
The homes Temme designs aren’t just pretty. A glance up at the solar panels splayed across her home’s roof reveals a greater purpose.
She’s spent the better part of her Door County career designing environmentally ambitious, high-performance homes that are tight, resilient and energy efficient. Her work is based on scientific design principles from the Passive House Institute U.S. (PHIUS) and Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design (LEED) that can put a home on the path of net zero or net zero ready: generating as much energy as the home consumes over the course of a year, with no use of fossil fuels.
For the bulk of her career, Temme has been the area’s sole designer and voice for sustainability and green building, putting the peninsula on the map for its concentration of high-performance homes.
“I don’t think there is any area in the state that has as many LEED or high-performance homes,” said Hawkins, a cofounder of the Passive House Alliance-Wisconsin, a state chapter of PHIUS. “It’s really incredible what she’s done,
Women in Sustainability Leadership Award
Virge Temme was recognized by gb&d (Green Building and Design) magazine and the U.S. Green Building Council with a Women in Sustainability Leadership Award in 2017.
These honors celebrate the achievements of women who are creating lasting change, and they identify and connect the most powerful women at the forefront of sustainability. The award is considered to be one of the most prestigious honors in the world of architecture.
Past winners include Hillary Clinton; Bea Perez, vice president of Coca-Cola; Angela Forster-Rice, managing director of environmental affairs and sustainability for United Airlines; Arielle Bertman, renewableenergy investment leader on Google’s Green Business Operations team; and Cindy Ortega, chief sustainability officer at MGM Resorts International.
— Virge Temme, architect
going off on her own and really making a name for sustainability and this kind of construction in Wisconsin.”
A high-performance home is one that’s tighter, quieter and more energy efficient because it has better windows, more insulation, maybe double-walled construction and concrete floors. It also means the home is more healthful for its occupants because consideration is given to all the materials that go into building it, from their manufacture, to their application, to the end of their life cycle. The homes are also a lot less expensive to heat and cool without sacrificing comfort.
“If you have a house that was built properly to start with, then you’re offsetting all those costs and saving more and more money as time goes on,” Temme said. She learned about climate-specific housing design and sustainable landscaping while in graduate school as part of a team that designed a fully sustainable neighborhood in Fort Hood, Texas.
That experience formed the basis of her devotion to sustainable design, She learned by doing, her designs evolving with her concerns about the depletion of natural resources and a homeowner’s ability to withstand the ever-increasing energy costs of a climate-changed world. She backed those concerns with research, then blazed her trail through a landscape of large, code-built homes that prioritize bottom lines and profit margins over environmental responsibility.
“Everything I profess states that we should build no larger than needed to consume fewer natural resources, make what you build as environmentally sound as possible, and concern yourself not just with the bottom line, but with the life-cycle cost and overall human benefits of high-performing building,” she said.
If Temme’s unapologetic criticism of mainstream house building has not endeared her to the traditional homebuilding community, she’s captured the hearts and minds of architects, subcontractors, clients and designers who are following the same path.
“She’s got grit,” said Christi Weber, director of design and LEED designer at TDS Custom Construction, a Madisonbased firm that designs and builds netzero and passive homes. “As a woman, growing her career at the time she did was definitely difficult. It’s difficult
MUMMA HOME, SISTER BAY This three-bedroom, two-bath, mid-century modern home in Sister Bay belongs to Steve and Denise Mumma. The 1,418-square-foot home, completed in 2020, illustrates spatial economy and passive solar design details. It’s all electric, with energy-conserving appliances and LED lighting, and it’s considered net zero ready. Many of the materials were sourced locally. The design features include double-wall construction, efficient windows and an efficient heat pump with energy-recovery ventilation. Materials include ZIP System sheathing, which is an engineered wood panel with a water and air-resistive barrier built in. The exterior is a low-maintenance combination of corrugated-steel siding and shou sugi ban cedar siding. The shou sugi ban style is a method of burning the wood, then applying a sealant made of Swedish pine tar and pure linseed oil. The siding is then both fire resistant and bug proof.
KELLEM HOME, STURGEON BAY The LEED Platinum-rated, net-zero, 2,240-square-foot home of David and Chris Kellem illustrates resilient design in a flood-prone area. Because the home is located in a flood plain, piers were sunk down 25 feet, and the home’s foundation was built on those. The Kellems’ monthly utility bills, in total, equal $69.11. That figure includes city water, sewer and trash services. The roof-top solar array generates about $1,400 annually for Sturgeon Bay Utilities, Chris Kellem said. The home is all electric and natural gas powered. The LEED Platinum rating is the highest a home can achieve.
Passive Home, LEED & Net Zero
Architect Virge Temme has been trained and certified in passive homes, and she uses the LEED certification system to rate the performance of the homes she’s designed. For the past decade, she has taken on only those clients who want net-zero or net-zeroready designs.
Passive homes and net-zero homes both aim to reduce energy consumption and carbon emissions through greater efficiency. Passive building achieves this by allowing little energy to escape from the home. Netzero homes achieve it by ensuring that the home generates enough power to balance its energy consumption.
The nonprofit Passive House Institute U.S. (PHIUS) is committed to making highperformance passive building the mainstream market standard, in part through training and certifying professionals. Buildings that meet the PHIUS+ standard use 40% to 60% less energy for space conditioning than conventional buildings.
The U.S. Green Building Council’s LEED program — Leadership in Energy and Environmental Design — is the most widely used green-building rating system in the world. LEED provides a framework for healthful, highly efficient and cost-saving green buildings.
for women in this industry in general, and she didn’t always have the best treatment. There are many women who have paved the way and made it easier for us, and I really appreciate someone like her who didn’t let it get her down or make her do anything less than she believes. I truly consider her one of the pioneers.”
A Circuitous Path
Temme was a 31-year-old, divorced, single mother of a young son when she finally learned that architecture was her calling.
“When the universe wants you to head in a certain direction and you don’t, it gives you a swift kick,” Temme said.
Virgil Tibbs was a general contractor who owned his own company, Tibbs Construction, in Pontiac, Illinois, a city about 100 miles southwest of Chicago. Virgean Tibbs, the youngest of three daughters, was his namesake and the son he never had. She shortened the name to Virge to avoid her teachers’ embarrassing pronunciations and made it legal when she married Brett almost 30 years ago.
Temme grew up in a sawdust pile by her father’s side. She recalled being in his workshop drawing small houses to his big ones, and clambering down off the stool beside him to pilfer wood for the forts she built in the neighborhood cornfields. Her father died of emphysema when she was 11 years old. She remembers him as a quiet, ethical, philosophical man who believed that everyone deserved a good home.
“He ended up building most of the homes in our neighborhood — the postWorld War II, 600- to 800-square-foot homes like the ones on 6th Avenue in Sturgeon Bay,” she said.
Time at Illinois State earned Temme more than enough credits to graduate, but not in any one thing. Instead, a cross-country hitchhiking adventure came next, followed by marriage and the birth of her son, Jake. Along the way, she refinished an attic or constructed a lean-to or reconfigured space wherever she was living. Her husband at the time, tired of being a father, abandoned his wife and young son, forcing Temme into the role of sole provider.
“And I had no marketable skills,” she said.
She took a secretarial class and landed a job as the assistant to the plant manager of a candy company. In a twist of fate
DICKMANN HOME, JACKSONPORT This home is a rare example of one of Virge Temme’s larger designs. At 4,200 square feet, the home has tradeoffs that reduce its carbon footprint and enable it to be more environmentally sustainable and energy efficient. The Dickmann home has in-floor radiant heating under a concrete floor that provides excellent solar heating in the winter and keeps the house cool in the summer. Overhangs on the first and second floors allow the family to have the windows open when it’s raining and keep the air flowing. The native landscaping does not require any mowing; the driveway is not blacktopped; and there’s a rooftop garden. The windows have the highest insulation rating, and the great room’s sliding doors open 25 feet to allow for air circulation and to bring the outside beauty inside. The Dickmanns’ electric bill last month was $3. “Virge taught us about light pollution, so all our outdoor lighting does not disturb the viewing of the nighttime sky,” said Karen Dickmann.
that would seal her own, the company was undergoing a remodeling project, and Temme became the liaison between the plant manager and the architect and interior designer.
The architect noticed Temme could easily read plans and visualize in 3-D; the interior designer saw that Temme talked about long and short views and opening up walls, rather than wall coverings and window treatments. They both told her she should be an architect.
Their advice gave her the clarity she’d lacked at Illinois State. Yet now, as a single mom, she had no flexibility or money for tuition to finish her undergraduate degree. Instead, she called her shop teacher from high school to ask whether he knew anyone who could give her drafting lessons. He said he’d do it.
“He said, ‘It’s about goddamned time,’” Temme recalled. “‘You should have done this right out of high school.’”
Later, a residential construction firm posted an ad for a designer. Temme worked 72 hours straight on her first home design — a cute, little bungalow, she recalled — to meet the application deadline, then put on her best dress and applied.
“I landed the job as the head designer,” she said.
She returned to school and then continued to get her master’s degree in architecture from the University of Illinois-Champaign, meeting her husband, Brett, while he was there finishing his degree in aeronautical engineering.
Brett has been the primary person with whom she kicks around questions and thoughts regarding her business practices and design issues. His job with a nautical engineering firm in Sturgeon Bay brought them here in the summer of 1997 after having visited only once for a weekend.
“It’s almost like Door County calls the people it wants, and when Door County calls you, all the obstacles just disappear,” Temme said. “We have deeper roots here than I’ve ever had anywhere.”
She founded her company a little more than a year after landing in Door County. Her first memorable project was a remodel addition for a farmhouse in 1999 for Bob and Karen DeNoto. Within six months of that, she designed her first sustainable home. She’s never looked back.
A Vision for the Future
Temme’s energy seems the same as that of her husband, who’s 10 years younger. Her clients and peers describe her using words such as “tireless force” and “perseverance,” and as someone who’s still making positive changes to the world of design and architecture.
“She’s got a lot of light and power in her that never seems to go out,” Weber said.
Temme acknowledged that she’s leaving at a high point: proud of what she’s done and knowing she’s helped to change the mindsets of a large swath of the community.
“Virge was intent on educating others — both us as her clients, as well as all the craftspeople she brought to the project,” said Karen Dickmann about the Jacksonport home Temme designed for her and her husband, Jeff. “She would push back on any ideas we had that were not efficient, and she would do so by questioning why and offering other solutions.”
But retirement for Temme means channeling her energy and creativity away from design work and toward research and writing for the cause of sustainable building. With millions of new homes constructed every year, there’s too much at stake to give up that fight.
“The impact of that massive amount of construction obviously has a profound impact on the environment of our future,” she said. “[In] my next phase of my life, I want to really be able to dive into more research on this.”
And Temme is well positioned to make an impact. Gov. Tony Evers appointed her to the Uniform Dwelling Code Council in December 2020 for her knowledge of energy-efficient design. That council has been charged with reforming building codes in the state that haven’t changed since they were developed in the 1970s.
“His and my hope is that I can help guide the state to higher energy standards than current code requires,” Temme said.
She’ll come at this problem not just as an architect, but also as the general contractor she became five years ago. Her sister company, SAGE Homes, oversaw the construction of her own designs.
“I understand pricing and the obstacles they’re facing,” she said. “I feel I have feet in both worlds and hopefully can help builders understand it’s not as big a wall as they think it is.”
That also means educating the banking, insurance and appraisal industries about the costs and values of passive building. It’s more expensive to build a high-performance home — the exact cost difference is being developed by the Passive House Alliance-Wisconsin — but with escalating energy prices and increased durability, the long-term expenses that are saved recoup the higher upfront costs.
“Spend more upfront, and you spend less out of pocket every month to live in your house,” Temme said.
Retirement will mean carving out time to do what she said she’s neglected during a busy, demanding career: spending time with family and friends, doing a home-renovation project, caring for her stunning gardens and practicing the violin her husband bought her two years ago. Woven throughout that life, she’ll also continue doing the same thing, but in a different way: changing the world one house at a time.
“I’m hoping in time it’s not going to be a Virge Temme thing; it’s not going to be a sustainable thing; it’s not going to be a high-performance thing,” she said. “It’s just going to be, ‘This is how we do it.’ That is my ultimate goal. That is what I hope is going to happen.”
