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Please feel free to share this post with your friends and networks and to subscribe to this blog.  On Saturday morning Birch Lake lay covered in virginal white, not a mark on the fresh snow except a few hoofmarks of deer and a straight-line string tracks of what might have been a fox. That soon changed.…

Please feel free share this post with your friends and networks — and to subscribe to my blog! December 8 Every year I watch the ice form here on Birch Lake, and every year it happens differently. Sometimes the ice gradually creeps out from the shoreline, and an entire sheet takes shape over several days.…

Please feel free to share this post with your networks and to subscribe to my blog. Lake residents and lake lovers fear zebra mussels perhaps more than any other aquatic invasive species. They encrust pier supports and boat hulls. They cover almost any hard object in the water. Their broken shells can cut waders’ feet.…

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…

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…

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…

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…

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,…

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,…

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,…