A Northwoods Almanac for 8/28 - 9/10/26
Border Lakes Forest Legacy Conservation Easement
The policymaking board for the WDNR recently approved the agency’s request to purchase a conservation easement from the Michael A. Uihlein Exemption Trust near Land O’Lakes. The acquisition was made possible through a roughly $600,000 grant from the federal Forest Legacy Program and more than $305,000 in the last remaining funds set aside under the now-expired Knowles-Nelson Stewardship Program.
The property will be known as the Border Lakes Legacy Forest Conservation Easement and consists of two separate parcels that include a roughly 481-acre-tract of land near Forest Lake and 771 acres surrounding Emil Lake, a 29-acre lake with a maximum depth of 3 feet.
Here is the key fact to keep in mind about conservation easements - the land remains private property. The Uihlein family trust will continue to own the land, they can sell it to whoever they like in the future, and the land will stay on the property tax rolls. The land simply can’t be subdivided or developed beyond the scope of the limits placed upon it
The Uihlein family will open their property for hunting, trapping, hiking, fishing and cross-country skiing, but most private conservation easements remain closed to the public.
The property will also continue to be sustainably managed under the state’s Managed Forest Law program as it has been for roughly 30 years. The property is enrolled in the MFL Certified Group which is dually certified under the American Tree Farm System and the Forest Stewardship Council, assuring the forests are managed to the highest environmental and social standards. Forestry generates more than $25 billion annually in Wisconsin, creating 57,000 jobs. Most conservation easements allow for timber harvesting and many are also enrolled in MFL.
In 1990, the federal Forest Legacy Program was established to conserve forest land that is under threat of being converted for other uses, and it had bipartisan support, as it does now. Wisconsin has been part of the program since 2000.
The property includes red and white pine, aspen and northern hardwood trees along with wetlands and meadows. The Emil Lake tract also includes nearly three miles of scenic bike and pedestrian trails.
In previous years, the Michael Uihlein family had allowed the beautiful three mile Forest Lake segment of the Wilderness Lakes bike trail to cross their land, so they’ve been providing recreational opportunities for the public for quite some time.
Joe Hovel, director of the nonprofit Northwoods Alliance, worked with the Uihlein family and the DNR over several years to secure federal funding and local support for the project from the town of Land O’Lakes and Vilas County.
Land conservation via easements is an essential part of property rights. People have the right to leave a conservation legacy with their land, and all of us for generations to come are the beneficiaries.
Sighting - Juvenile Summer Tanager
Janell Westimayer in Hazelhurst sent me a photo on 8/20/26 of a juvenile summer tanager at her feeder. The coloration on the juveniles is a wild combo of yellows and reds and greens. This is an unusual sighting - summer tanagers nest only as far north as northern Illinois, so this bird must have ridden north on one of our recent storms. However, a confirmed active nest was recently documented at Blue Mound State Park in southern Wisconsin. This marked the first verified nesting record in the state since the 19th century.
photo by Janell Westimayer
Walter Piper Loon Studies Show Common Loons in Decline Walter Piper has been conducting two studies on common loons - one in northern Wisconsin since 1993, and the other in northern Minnesota since 2021 (see loonproject.org). Piper has recorded careful data on 105 marked breeding pairs in chiefly Oneida County and 110 marked pairs in north-central Minnesota (Crow Wing and Cass counties). He’s published 35 scientific articles on loon behavior, ecology and conservation, and is a nationally recognized expert on common loons.
Besides Piper’s work, Breeding Bird Surveys conducted by expert birders on fixed routes across North American also have been providing a picture of loon populations. This comprehensive statewide data shows that common loon populations were on an upswing from 1967 until about 2010 in Wisconsin and Minnesota, but have been falling sharply in the past decade and a half.
Data collected by Piper’s team in northern Wisconsin since 1993 echo those results; breeding success and population size in our area rose in the late 1990s and early 2000s but are now in sharp decline.
Piper’s research data in northern Wisconsin shows that the loon population has declined overall by 22% during the past quarter century. He’s determined that Wisconsin loon pairs are producing fewer chicks; chicks are growing more slowly; and chicks are dying at much higher rates now than 30 years ago when his work began. His data further suggests that the northern Wisconsin loon population is shrinking by as much as 6% each year, which is roughly consistent with the BBS data.
The decline is not so much taking place among the breeding adult pairs, but rather among the young adults who have returned from the Gulf of Mexico in recent years but have yet to find a breeding territory. Piper’s findings suggest that many young adults have received insufficient food as chicks, a pattern that he has found is linked to lower survival and breeding success during adulthood.
Piper is still assessing the specific causes of all this, but in part, he believes declining water clarity is responsible for the poor feeding conditions. But why are our waters becoming more turbid? Is the reduced water clarity due to increased fertilizer and other nutrient inputs? Or is climate change the larger culprit due to warming our waters?
Other factors are also part of the picture. What about black flies forcing the loons off their nests, eagles harassing and/or eating the chicks, and speedboat wakes destroying nests?
Understanding these causes is at the heart of Piper’s work now. Whatever the causes turn out to be, if his findings are accurate, Piper believes we will see noticeably fewer loons on northern Wisconsin lakes within the next five to ten years.
Sanford Lake Study - Wood Is Good
On a more positive note, a recently released DNR study on 100-acre Sanford Lake near Boulder Junction tested whether adding “fish sticks” - coarse woody habitat, like tree branches and trunks - would improve fish population. The researchers first documented the fisheries in the lake from 2015 to 2018 for baseline data. They then dragged or dropped 140 full-sized trees into Sanford’s shallows along one-fourth of its shorelines to document if and how much the toppled trees attract and produce fish.
Following the 2018 tree additions, the fish community biomass and production significantly increased. Fish productivity more than quadrupled, growing from roughly 3.3 lbs/acre to nearly 13 lbs/acre, with the spike in production largely driven by smaller prey fish like bluegill.
The study provides further proof that submerged branches create a thriving base for the aquatic food web by fostering a complex mixture of algae, cyanobacteria, microbes, and detritus, which provide food for insects and small fish.
The lesson here? After a tree falls in the water, leave the dead. The trees in their death may provide as much, if not more, habitat for a myriad of life forms than when alive.
A Bumper Year for White Cedar Cones
Mary and I continue to notice white cedar trees laden with cones. The cones appear almost yellow against the green background of the cedar’s needles. Mary thought they looked like Christmas tree lights on the cedars.
This abundance will hopefully result in some seedlings eventually making it into the canopy. Unfortunately for white cedars, deer find their foliage heavenly, so it’s a rare seedling that makes its way to adulthood in our deer-overrun forests.
Cedar seeds germinate well on rotting logs and moss in undisturbed forests, allowing them to continually replace themselves in forests without needing a fire, windstorm, or other major disturbance. The seedlings can withstand shade for many years while waiting for a canopy gap to appear.
If and when a seedling does make it into the canopy, it can live for centuries. The oldest living white cedar in Minnesota is believed to be on Basswood Lake. The center of the tree has become pulpy, so the rings are unclear, but it’s estimated to be over 1,100 years old.
The oldest known white cedar in North America juts precariously out from the Niagara Escarpment in Ontario and was found to begin life in 688 A.D. making it now 1,338- years-old. A dead one was aged at the base of a cliff at 1,890 years.
In Wisconsin, white cedars on the Niagara Escarpment have been aged up to 900 years, but older ones are likely if only we had a courageous PhD student or researcher willing to invest the time and the rappelling skill to core more of the trees jutting from the cliff faces.
Drought!
It sure is dry! According to the Palmer drought severity index (PDSI), a regional drought index commonly used for monitoring drought events, as of mid-August, nearly all of northern Wisconsin is in moderate to severe drought. The PDSI is updated weekly by the Climate Prediction Center and is based on rainfall, temperature and historic data.
According to the UW Trout Lake Limnology Station, we’re also in the early years of an average 13-year low water level cycle due to these warm and dry conditions. We had low water from around 2000 to 2010, and then high water beginning 2010 to 2021. But since then, water levels have again declined. Most lakes in our area are low this summer, and in years when water levels are low, the forest marches in on the exposed sediments. When the cycle flips and we have high water again, those new shrubs and trees will be drowned out.
Celestial Events
Looking for planets in September? Look just after dusk very low in the southwest for brilliant Venus, and also look in the east for Saturn rising after 8 p.m.
Before dawn, look for Mars high in the east and Jupiter lower and rising also in the east.
On 9/6, look before dawn for Mars three degrees below the waning crescent moon.
On 9/8, look before dawn for Jupiter less than a degree below the waning sliver moon.
Thought for the Week
“Summer is walking down the long hill toward Autumn and Winter beyond . . . The trees show the true season, and so do the grasses in the meadow and the tall weeds at the roadside. Early apples begin to ripen. Daisies fade and goldenrod shows impatient yellow . . . seed pods fatten; the soft growth of May hardens toward maturity. Dog days are virtually over. Another Summer sweeps away as dusk settles in the valleys a few minutes earlier one day after another.” - Hal Borland, Sundial of the Seasons
