October Goodbye

If I took a picture of Birch Lake’s wooded shoreline with my phone and went to work on it with the fancy editing functions, I couldn’t do much to dial up the color, nor would I want to – there’s such a thing as too much. Anyway that’s the scene as I pilot the pontoon…

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Bernie and me

Please feel free to share this post Aging is an insidious thing, for people as well as pets. I remember clearly the moment I discovered I had, as they say in sports, lost a step. I was in my late thirties. At a company softball game, the team captain assigned me to right field. I…

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Home Water

I’m just back from five days at a lodge on a huge lake in Ontario. My companions and I enjoyed good fishing, but to find walleyes we had to feel our way around, using a map, advice from the lodge owner, our knowledge of fish behavior (such as it is), and information from the boat-mounted…

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Inside the glow

Inside the glow It’s a Tuesday evening about eight o’clock, the July 4 weekend just over, the visitors to Birch Lake gone home. I’m out in the boat watching a couple of slip bobbers as the sun slowly dips through the horizon’s haze toward the treetops. Mine is the only boat on the lake. There…

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It’s about more than fish

I didn’t catch any muskies on a recent guided trip on a lake I am not at liberty to name, but the outing was worthwhile for what I learned about fish behavior, and about my lake, even though that’s not the one we were on. Who knows more about lakes than fishing guides? Limnologists, I suppose,…

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“Protecting Our Waters: We’re All Connected!”

We tend to think of lake, streams, groundwater and wetlands as separate water resources. In reality, they are all one interconnected system – just as we are connected in treasuring, sustaining and improving them. “Protecting Our Waters: We’re All Connected!” is the theme of the annual Northwoods Six-County Lakes and Rivers Meeting set for Friday,…

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Turtle Rescue

I often wonder how turtles evolved the practice of laying eggs far inland from the lakes they inhabit, so that their newly hatched young have to struggle their way back to the water, most of them dying of the way from predators or desiccation. Last week I helped one baby snapper improve its survival odds,…

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The boys grow older

“One gray night it happened; Jackie Paper came no more…” The lesson of the Peter Paul and Mary song “Puff the Magic Dragon” is that little boys grow up, and in some ways it’s sad. I am watching it happen to grandsons Tucker and Perrin, and as I look forward to their visit early next…

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No loon music?

In one of his essays the naturalist Aldo Leopold wrote, “And when the dawn wind stirs through the ancient cottonwoods, and the gray light steals down from the hills over the old river sliding softly past its wide brown sand bars – what if there be no more goose music?” Given recent findings in the…

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The great re-freezing

The ice on Birch Lake went out on March 14. Eight days later we woke to a new skin of ice over nearly the entire surface. As I write on March 28, the ice remains and is covered with almost a foot of snow. This is the first year in which we will have to note…

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