A Northwoods Almanac for 1/16-29/ 2026

 A Northwoods Almanac for 1/16-29/ 2026  

 

Adult Painted Turtles Extreme Responses to Winter

            Cold-blooded animals (better referred to as “ectotherms”) like reptiles and amphibians have to go to great extremes to survive northern winters. Even mild freezing temperatures will cause the water inside their bodies to expand and freeze, the sharp ice crystals potentially shredding cell membranes and rupturing the cells, leading to a quick death.

            Thus, every species of ectotherm has had to evolve a strategy to make it to spring, and sometimes even within a given species, the strategy may differ. Take, for instance, painted turtles. Adult painted turtles can’t survive below-freezing temperatures, and adapt by typically ensconcing themselves onto lake or river sediments prior to ice-up and waiting out the winter.

            The minor problem with this strategy is that turtles breathe via their lungs, and lungs, if you haven’t noticed for yourself, don’t work underwater. To survive, painted turtles drop their internal body temperatures to the same as the water, usually a few degrees above 32°F, and their

metabolic rate drops by about 95%. This reduces their oxygen demand so much that they usually can get all the oxygen they need by respiring through their skin, especially the skin inside and around their mouth as well as their cloaca (less scientifically called “butt breathing”).

Turtles under ice

            But oxygen levels in shallow lakes often crash as the winter progresses (a process called “anoxia”), which can kill fish, reptiles, and amphibians. At this point, painted turtles are unable to get any oxygen via “butt breathing” and compensate by dropping their metabolism to just 1% that of summer levels. Now with no oxygen available whatsoever, they start burning glycogen from muscle tissue to produce enough ATP (Adenosine Triphosphate, the fundamental energy currency for all cellular activities) to power their cells. 

            Now, however, a new problem arises. Lactic acid is produced as a byproduct and steadily rises during periods of anoxia, eventually leading to a condition called anoxic acidosis, which leads to an eventual death. Of all the turtle species in North America, painted turtles have the greatest tolerance to anoxia and the resulting acid buildup. They balance out the lactic acid by precipitating calcium and potassium from their skeleton and shell into their blood stream, which buffers the acidity and staves off the symptoms of acidosis. 

            Remarkably, they can survive without food or oxygen for 100 days. One study found that painted turtles can reduce their heart rate to 8 beats per hour, or 1 beat every 7 ½ minutes.

            Even so, some adult painted turtles die after prolonged periods in anoxic conditions. The best solution for defeating anoxia is to have an early ice-off so atmospheric oxygen can mix with the water. So, while early ice-off is great for anglers, or for those of us starved to see open water, it can be crucial for adult painted turtle survival.

            

Hatchling Painted Turtles Do Something Different, But Equally Extreme

            Painted turtle hatchlings offer a different story. Painted turtle eggs typically hatch in the early fall and the tiny hatchlings head immediately for open water. But some hatchlings remain in their shallow underground nest all winter, and are regularly exposed to freezing temperatures that kill adults. 

            To survive, the hatchlings have evolved two methods of coping with the freezing temperatures. They can “supercool,” a process by which liquids in the turtle’s body drop

to well below their normal freezing points without actually freezing. It’s basically like using an antifreeze, but in this case using high concentrations of glucose and other cryoprotectants

(compounds that protect tissue from freezing conditions). High glucose concentrations can allow the hatchlings to remain unfrozen down to an average of 14°F. 

            There are variables, however. The moisture in the soils and the type of soils surrounding the nests impact the temperature to which the turtles can supercool. In wet sandy soils,

turtles can only supercool to about  28°F before freezing, but in clay soils they can chill to 9°F, the difference being with how ice crystals form in the different substrates. 

            The second strategy they use is extra-cellular freezing whereby water is drawn out of the cells and into the spaces between the cells where it can freeze and expand without rupturing the cells. All but the liver and other vital organs freeze solid and can remain so for several days without causing harm to the hatchlings. 

            Bottom line: For most of the winter, the hatchlings utilize supercooling because they can’t tolerate long periods of being frozen.

            Come spring, the hatchlings will emerge and head for the nearest water.

            Amazing!

 

Garter Snakes Can Freeze, Too!

            Well, turtles don’t have the market cornered on freeze tolerance. Common garter snakes typically swarm together in an underground site called a hibernacula where they can freeze, too (they are known to also spend the winter underwater). They, too, are capable of supercooling to about 23°F, though this apparently isn’t an adaptation to winter freezing, but rather to freezing in the spring when they have emerged from their hibernacula and there’s an overnight frost. They can only freeze for a short period, around 10 hours, but that’s enough to get them by, and explains why garter snakes range so much farther north than other snake species – as far north as the southernmost tip of the Northwest Territories in Canada. 

Common garter snake range map

 

Some Species of Northern Frogs Also Freeze!

            Four out of our nine native species of frogs in the Northwoods – spring peepers, wood frogs, Eastern gray tree frogs, and boreal chorus frogs – also freeze over the winter. They freeze via a very similar mechanism to that of hatchling turtles, drawing water out of their cells so that freezing occurs outside of cells rather than within. 

            These frogs appear from the outside to be entirely frozen, their skin and eyes rock hard and most of their bodies solid – about 60% frozen. Their liver and heart, however, remain in a super-cooled state, though the heart ceases to beat and no breath is drawn. Basically, they’re in a state of suspended animation, appearing totally dead to the world.

Frozen wood frog

            Then in mid-April, they begin to thaw, and something yet more remarkable happens. In the fall, they freeze from the outside to the inside, but if the frog’s tissues and organs thawed in that same order, the frog would die. The skin, limbs, and eyes would thaw out without being connected to a beating heart, and tissue on the frog’s exterior would become necrotic – dying due to no blood flow.

            Instead, the frogs thaw from the core outward, starting with the heart beginning to beat. As each subsequent layer of tissue thaws, blood flows to the tissue until the skin and eyes soften, a process that only takes a couple hours. And then they can begin calling. and the

frogs can resume normal body function immediately afterward.

            Winners of the award for the most frozen of all organisms, wood frogs in Alaska were found to survive freezing to temperatures as low as zero and remained frozen for upwards of 200 consecutive days. Those Alaskan frogs concentrated ten times the amount of glucose in their musculature compared to Wood Frogs studied farther south.

            It should be noted that these four species of frogs overwinter in upland forests under leaf litter, logs and tree roots while air temperatures regularly fall way below that  in which the frogs can survive. But the frogs survive because of the snow cover that insulates them those microhabitats, providing yet another reason why having good snow depth beyond skiing and snowmobiling is important in the North country.

            BTW, where do our other five species of frogs overwinter (mink frogs, leopard frogs, green frogs, bullfrogs, and American toads)? Except for toads, underwater. Toads dig down into loose soil to below the frost line and spend the winter underground.

             

Sightings – Leucistic Black-capped Chickadee and Northern Shrike

            Zach Wilson sent me a photo of a leucistic black-capped chickadee that is coming to a feeder on the Turtle Flambeau Flowage. If you’re not familiar with leucism, it’s a partial loss of pigmentation in animals, causing patchy coloration.  

Leucistic black-capped chickadee, photo by Amanda Griggs

            We continue to have a northern shrike perching atop a large silver maple and overlooking our bird feeders. Our songbird numbers have been low so far this winter, and I suspect the shrike’s predilection for eating songbirds is partially responsible for that.

 

Great Lakes Ice Cover

            Great Lakes ice coverage stands at 14.43% as of January 05, 2026. What the future holds for ice formation depends entirely on the weather. Prolonged periods of below freezing temperatures and calm winds enhance ice formation. High winds, warmer temps, and wavy surfaces inhibit ice formation.

 

Celestial Events

            Our days are growing longer now by more than two minutes per day.

            The new moon occurs on 1/18.

            The year’s coldest days on average occur between 1/20 and 1/29, though the first week of February has a history of also being pretty brutal.

            On 1/23, look after dusk for Saturn about 4° below the waxing crescent moon. 

            Best planet watching for the rest of January? Jupiter rises in the east at dusk at -2.7 magnitude, so it’s the brightest star in the night sky these days. And Saturn (1.1 magnitude) is high in the south at dusk, then setting in the west.

 

Thought for the Week

            “ In winter the stars seem to have rekindled their fires, the moon achieves a fuller triumph, and the heavens wear a look of a more exalted simplicity.” –  John Burroughs, "The Snow-Walkers," 1866

 

Please share your outdoor sightings and thoughts: e-mail me at johnbates2828@gmail.com, call 715-476-2828, snail-mail at 4245N State Highway 47, Mercer, WI, or see my blog at www.manitowishriver.blogspot.com

 

 A Northwoods Almanac for 1/2-15/2026  

 

Christmas Bird Counts

            I participated in two Audubon Christmas Bird Counts – the 126^th year of the counts – beginning on 12/18 with the Minocqua count. Here the group tallied 24 species, a typical number, despite the mist and rain that morning. Most counters, however, felt the woods were abnormally quiet – the abundance of birds was well down.          

            For me, the keynote of this count was the finding of nine brown creepers, a species we struggle to find even one of on most count years (see more on brown creepers below).

            The second count took place on 12/20 in the Manitowish Waters area, and we also tallied 24 species (the average over 33 years for us), though again the woods overall were quiet. The strong winds may have had a lot to do with that – high winds push birds into cover and away from searching eyes and ears.

            The keynote of this count was the sighting of three predators: a northern shrike, a northern goshawk, and a merlin. The shrike appeared at our feeders in Manitowish, and he/she (the genders are identical) is still around, now perched at the top of a silver maple outside my office window as I’m writing this (12/26). Shrikes are masterful predators of small songbirds, so the large birds at our feeders, like blue jays and mourning doves, pay the shrike no mind. But the chickadees and nuthatches and goldfinches, well, I sure wouldn’t like to know something is perched nearby that is very capable of eating me, and there’s very little I can do about it other than be eternally vigilant.

northern shrike capturing a pine siskin, photo by Bev Engstrom

            To date this winter has produced only small numbers of Canadian migrants. Evening and pine grosbeaks are visiting some feeders, but darn few. Bohemian waxwing flocks have frequented some crabapple trees, but again not many. Very small numbers of redpolls and pine siskins are scattered here and there, and there aren’t any purple finches or crossbills to be found. 

            This can change as the winter progresses and food sources deplete north of us. We’ll see what January brings us!

            

Brown Creepers

            This quote describes perfectly the physical character of the tiny brown creeper: “The brown creeper, as he hitches along the bole of a tree, looks like a fragment of detached bark that is defying the law of gravitation by moving upward over the trunk, and as he flies off to another tree he resembles a little dry leaf blown about by the wind.” – W.M. Tyler, 1948. 

            “Inconspicuous” and “cryptic” serve also as descriptors. The creeper has no interest, no ego whatsoever, in preening out in the open, wearing brilliant colors to attract attention, or singing anything other than a high-pitched song that is hard to detect. 

            Nor does its behavior draw attention. Creepers are in endless pursuit of bark-dwelling invertebrates, doing so by beginning at the base of a tree trunk, climbing slowly upwards, and often spiralling around the trunk until they near the top. Their slow progress up a tree draws almost no notice, and then they fly to the base of a nearby tree and start over again. The creeper's short legs, long stiff tail, and long curved claws and toes are perfect adaptations to climbing nearly always upward. 

            I wonder if brown creepers are really quite numerous in the Northwoods but simply don’t register on our perceptual radars. They’re pretty much everywhere throughout North America, widely distributed in coniferous, mixed, and deciduous forests, from Alaska and Canada south to northern Nicaragua. They just don’t demand much attention.

brown creeper range map

            It wasn’t until 1879 that naturalists discovered the creeper’s unique habit of building its hammock-like nest behind a loosened flap of bark on a dead or dying tree. In fact, creepers almost always build their nests between the trunk and a loose piece of bark on a large, typically dead or dying tree. Thus, they favor forest stands with an abundance of dead or dying trees for nesting. But large live trees for foraging also are desired because creepers may be able to increase their energy intake by foraging on one large tree instead of numerous small ones. For example, in one study on douglas-fir forests in Washington, a creeper was determined to need to fly to 13 young trees or 3.3 mature trees to obtain the same number of spiders as are available on 1 old-growth tree.

            They’re a year-round resident for us in the Northwoods, and we hadn’t seen one on our Manitowish Waters count until we were eating lunch in town and one of our participants spotted a creeper working its slow way up a red pine right out the restaurant’s window. In winter, they eat a variety of insects and larvae, spiders and their eggs, and ants, but rarely has one has been observed caching sunflower seeds. I’ve never seen one come to our sunflower feeders.

 

Bird Feeding

            Northern winters are the greatest limiting factor for our bird populations. Among all of Wisconsin’s resident and overwintering bird species, winter mortality typically ranges from 10% to 50%, depending on species, age, and weather severity. However, that last factor – winter severity – is key for up here. The clearest example of this is to compare average Christmas bird counts from the southern part of the state to here. Over the last 33 years, we’ve averaged 24 species in our Manitowish Water count, while counts in the south typically exceed 50 species with sometimes as many as 97 species, and they tally a far greater abundance of birds.

            Most Wisconsin birds are well adapted to the cold, but food availability creates a very thin margin of error for our northern birds. More than half of all birds born last spring won't survive to next spring. They’re inefficient foragers and take too long to open seeds or find shelter during storms.

            Lots of factors conspire against adult survival, too. Ice storms coat seeds, extended severe cold snaps require greater calorie intake to stay warm, deep snow covers seeds and buds, short winter days and long winter nights constrict feeding times, and predators know where the action is – household feeders.

            What to do? Supplemental feeding helps. Research shows that during severe weather, survival rates for birds with access to feeders are nearly double the rates of those without.

            To maximize the help you can offer birds, feed sunflower seeds because they’re high in fat and protein (don’t bother with bags of mixed seed that have fillers like red milo that most birds ignore). Put out suet – just about every bird visits suet cakes, even chickadees. If you can provide a water source via a heated bird bath, well, you’ll be consider the best B and B in town (bird and bath). And if you grow low conifers near your feeders that provide cover from storms and predators, altogether you’ll have the best chance of attracting birds and helping them make it to spring.

 

Marge Gibson Wins Lifetime Achievement Award 

            If you’re not familiar with the work of Marge Gibson, you really should be because she’s one of a kind. Her work with raptors, particularly bald eagles, gained national recognition during

the Exxon Valdez oil spill in 1989. As the leader of the Eagle Capture and Assessment Team there, Marge conducted groundbreaking work in assessing and treating affected eagles, helping set the foundation for future oil spill wildlife response efforts. 

            Her training as a medical technologist, her understanding of each species’ biological history, plus her prioritization of low-stress handling – honestly, she’s a bird whisperer – has resulted in remarkable success in the rehabilitation of injured birds and their successful release back into the wild.

            She has served as the President of the International Wildlife Rehabilitation Council (IWRC), and her dedication to education has taken her across the world, bringing the IWRC Basic Skills course to Turkey and Greece, where she trained both veterinarians and rehabilitators.            

            Marge’s legacy also extends well beyond the animals she has saved – she has shaped the

careers of countless rehabilitators worldwide.

            She and her husband Don founded the Raptor Education Group, Inc. (REGI) in Antigo in 1990, which specializes in the rehabilitation of injured and orphaned native bird species, particularly raptors. REGI takes in anywhere from 800 to over 1,000 patients each year and provides educational programs to hundreds of people.

            In 2025, Marge was awarded the highest honor in her profession, the Lifetime Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Rehabilitation Association. In 2020, she received the National Conservation Achievement Award from the National Wildlife Federation for her extraordinary contributions to conservation and wildlife.

            I’ve been remiss in mentioning her awards in my column. Marge deserves all her accolades and more, and all of us in the Northwoods should applaud and support her work.

 

The Economic Value of Outdoor Recreation

            From a recent analysis by the Outdoor Recreation Roundtable (ORR): “The single largest, most beneficial economic engine on federal land is not oil, not gas, not mining, and not timber. It’s outdoor recreation.” 

            ORR pulled together federal data from every major land management agency and found that Americans recreating on their federal public lands generate more wealth, more jobs, more wages, and more tax revenue than all extractive industries on federal lands combined. 

·      Outdoor recreation on federal public lands generates $128.5 billion every single year. 

·      It supports over 900,000 jobs and provides over $43.5 billion in wages.

·      It pours nearly $6 billion in tax revenue straight into the Treasury annually. 

            Comparatively in a typical year, the entire market value of onshore federal oil and gas production hovers around $20 to 25 billion dollars. Recreation dwarfs it five to one.

            The entire federal timber program yields far less – just $200 to 300 million in stumpage value each year. Million, not billion. On those same specific Forest Service lands, recreation generates $23 billion a year. 

            This is not to say extractive industries are unimportant. However, outdoor recreation produces more value, more jobs, more wages, more revenue, more long-term growth than extractive projects, is sustainable without leaving behind a clean-up, and promotes human health. It’s an economic powerhouse, anchors local small businesses, and is booming. We just have to recognize it both personally and politically, and act accordingly.

 

Thought for the Week

            “Many people think that the best stage of life is childhood or youth. But I’ll tell you something: the best stage is when you start to think clearly. When you stop complaining, stop dramatizing, and start to truly appreciate everything you have: your body, your freedom, your loved ones, the simple fact of being alive. That’s when true happiness begins. And the best part is that it doesn't depend on age.” – Rafael Santandreu