A Northwoods Almanac for 1/30 – 2/ 12/2026
Cold! There’s An Upside
Last week brought some serious cold weather, with lows reaching minus 41° on 1/24. Cold like that always tests the quality of our winter clothing, with cold fingers and feet proving their insufficiency. I suspect outdoor clothing retailers had a very good week, as did the utility companies (a hot bath when you’re really cold? – How wonderful is that!)
A strange thing to say, I know, but I celebrate cold like this, admittedly while inside sitting near our woodstove. I’m happy when it’s bitter cold because overall it has positive environmental impacts. Why? Cold kills.
That may be a strange thing to say because it swings both ways – it depends, of course, on who is doing the dying. The “good” dying occurs on some invasive insects – intense cold helps to keep them at bay. Take, for instance, hemlock wooly adelgids, spongy moths (aka gypsy moths), and emerald ash borers. All three species have killed tens of millions of trees, and will kill millions more well into the future. But all of them begin dying at -5°, and once temperatures reach -30°, up to 99% die.
Unfortunately, some individuals always survive because of microhabitats that insulate them, thus the populations eventually rebound. But the overall population gets knocked back every year as long as winter temperatures regularly reach those intense lows, and thus the insects cause far less harm.
Beech trees also approve of intense cold. Though beech trees don’t grow in our part of the state, they’re common in northeastern Wisconsin counties, and dominant throughout New England. Beech trees have been dying by the millions due to several issues, one being beech scale insects which lead to beech bark disease.
The good news? Extreme cold also kills beech scale insects.
There are many more examples, some positive, some not so much. But while extreme cold has some limitations on killing invasive organisms, without it, we’ll be in a lot more trouble from invasive species.
Does This Cold Snap Prove Climate Change Is A Hoax?
For those folks who want to immediately say this intense cold proves climate change is a crock, I always compare how our climate is changing to a serious, and often fatal, illness. There will be good days when the illness appears to be in remission, days that are a blessing. But the course of the illness continues unremitting and unforgiving. That’s climate change. Just as the warm thaw we had earlier this month doesn’t prove climate change exists, neither does a cold spell prove it doesn’t exist. That’s weather, short term and temporary, not climate, which is long term and far more permanent.
BTW, this was a cold, very cold spell, but not as cold as some of the truly bitter weather we’ve had in the past. The winter of 1995-96 was the worst by far in my experience. For five days straight, Jan. 31 to Feb. 4, real temperatures, not wind chills, were at -45° or lower. The record cold for the state at -55° was set in Couderay, Sawyer County, on Feb. 4, 1996. We had -50° at our house in Manitowish that same day.
The winter of 2013-14 was substantially more severe than this, too – we had 5 days in a row of -30° from Jan. 5-9. The term “polar vortex” came into its own that winter.
Pileated Woodpeckers
Bird numbers continue to be down at our feeders this winter, an observation I’ve heard from many other people, though there are pockets of birds being seen in some areas. We have zero pine siskins, American goldfinches, purple finches, evening grosbeaks, pine grosbeaks, and bohemian waxwings, along with just one redpoll. It’s quiet!!
But we do have a pair of pileated woodpeckers working on some of our dying black ash trees, and occasionally one lands on our suet feeder about 5 feet away from our breakfast table, and that sure wakes everyone up no matter how many times we see it!
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| photo by Bev Engstrom |
Crow-sized, pileateds rank as the largest woodpecker in North America, and the third largest in the world, so they make an impression when flying by one’s window.
They also make the largest feeding holes in trees of any North American woodpecker, holes that are almost always rectangular and can easily measure more than a foot in length. Pileateds predominately eat carpenter ants and woodboring beetle larvae, so the hole size is commensurate with how many ants and beetles are present. They use their long, extensible, pointed and barbed tongue along with sticky saliva to catch and extract the ants and beetles from their tunnels within the trees.
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| photo by John Bates |
They forage in dead trees, dying trees, downed logs, and live trees, wherever the insects are most plentiful. I remember when we first moved here in 1984 cutting down an old, large white spruce that had a pileated feeding hole near its base. The tree was next to our house, and had to come down so we could build an addition. Well, after admiring how the tree fell the direction I wanted it to (a rarity), I looked down at the stump and about a gazillion carpenter ants were streaming out and heading at a full ant sprint for our house. I must have stomped hundreds of ants in a frenzy of fear for what they might do our already very old house, and so I quickly gained an appreciation for just how many ants a large old tree might harbor.
An ecology professor of mine used to say that pileateds were nature’s best insecticide – by eating so many ants and insect larvae over the winter, they reduce the insect hatch in the spring. The prof’s little ditty went like this: “Eat one in winter a day, kill a thousand in May.”
I have often thought of them as surgeons, taking out the invasive organisms attacking a living tree. But a case can be made that their holes make a tree more vulnerable to species of fungi that can kill the tree, so perhaps it’s a wash.
Pileateds also eat fruits when they’re available. I’ve seen them ingesting highbush cranberries below our house, and the list of other fruits that they consume is long, including blackberry, raspberry, woodbine, sumac, elderberry, American holly, various dogwoods, and even poison ivy.
That same prof I mentioned above also believed pileateds were the most ecologically beneficial birds we have, and I agree with him. Their excavations are used for nesting or roosting by at least 38 other bird species, and sometimes even as den sites for smaller mammals like American martens and bats.
These birds can live a long time – the oldest known male was at least 12 years, 11 months old when he was recaptured and rereleased during banding operations in Maryland. So, if you have a pair on your property, they may have been there up to a decade, and their young may have followed them onto the territory upon their death, making your property their family homestead, too.
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| pileated range map |
The Economics of Bicycling in the Northwoods
The Heart of Vilas paved bike trail runs for 52 miles connecting St. Germain, Sayner, Boulder Junction, Manitowish Waters and Mercer. The trail was designated a National Recreation Trail in 2022 in recognition of its exceptional quality and value to our communities.
Mary and I have ridden portions of the trail countless times over the years, sometimes seeing so many riders, riders of all shapes and sizes and ages, that it feels crowded. Well, that occasional sense of “crowdedness” is borne out by a recent report summarizing the use of the trail in 2025. More than 162,500 cyclists rode the trail from May through September of 2025 (October data, prime fall color season, was not yet available), with over 45,000 of those users in August alone.
Let that sink in for a minute: 45,000 riders in August alone, and over 160,000 over a five-month period, just on this trail.
In a detailed survey of riders, on average, trail users spent $188 per day, generating an estimated $25.7 million in economic activity for the area. Lodging was the highest spending category, followed by food and beverages and souvenirs
Overnight visitors spent more, approximately $287 per day, while day trippers spent $43 per day. Their overnight stays varied in length, with almost half (47%) staying one to three days, and more than a third (37%) staying seven days or longer, while another 16% stayed 4 to 6 days.
More than three quarters of the trail users came from out of town, their spending injecting revenue into the five local economies along the trail. The economic study estimates the trail supports 141 jobs and generates almost $2 million in local and state tax revenues.
We tend too often to measure the value of things via the money they generate, but not only does the trail system draw people to the area, it allows residents and visitors alike to travel safely on two wheels to and from campgrounds, resorts, hotels, dining, shopping and even other trails. We see a whole lot of smiling going on from most of the riders. Need I add that biking contributes to one’s health as well.
The future expansion of the trail looks exciting, too. The Great Headwaters Trails Foundation is fundraising for an expansion to link Eagle River to St. Germain and the Heart of Vilas Bike Trail System. Additionally, ICORE (Iron County Outdoor Recreation Enthusiasts) in Mercer plans to create a new trail segment to connect existing trails to the WinMan Trails, an off-road biking and hiking destination that already generates $4.3 million annually in economic impact.
Future expansion plans also include a connection to Arbor Vitae and Minocqua. Not incidentally, that addition will hopefully connect to the 21.5 mile-long Bearskin Trail, which is estimated by the DNR to have drawn over 80,000 users in 2024.
When we first moved here in 1984, folks used to say hikers, bikers, canoeists and skiers came with a $20 bill and a pair of socks, and didn’t change either. There was no truth to it then, but it clearly is nonsense now. Non-motorized recreation is, in fact, a major economic driver.
Celestial Events
Look tomorrow night, 1/30, after dusk, for Jupiter four degrees south of the waxing gibbous moon.
February’s full moon (the “Snow Moon”/“Hunger Moon”/“Sucker Moon”) occurs on the first of the month.
The midpoint between winter solstice and spring equinox take place on 2/3.
We hit 10 hours of sunlight as of 2/7. The sun will now be setting an hour later than the earliest sunsets in December.
For planet watching in February, the action is all after dusk. Look for Saturn in the west, Jupiter in the east, and Venus after mid-month in the west-southwest.
Thought for the Week (Perhaps the Year)
“Here is what I believe: that the natural world – the stuff of our lives, the world we plod through, hardly hearing, the world we burn and poke and stuff and conquer and irradiate – that THIS WORLD (not another world on another plane) is irreplaceable, astonishing, contingent, eternal and changing, beautiful and fearsome, beyond human understanding, worthy of reverence and awe, worthy of celebration and protection.
“If the good English word for this combination of qualities is ‘sacred,’ then so be it..” – Kathleen Dean Moore, Wild Comfort: The Solace of Nature
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