The making of a magnet

Fisheries research today shows a powerful connection between “wood in the water" and a lake's fish populations. Trees fallen over from the bank and into the lake provide cover that protects fish fry from predators so they can grow up. How much wood is in your water?

Birch Lake, near Harshaw, where I live, is relatively barren of fallen timber, although I got to watch one specimen make the transformation from shade provider to fish haven, Just down the shore from our pier stood a tall white pine, its roots right at the waterline, its imposing trunk angled over the water at about 30 degrees from the vertical. We wondered if it ever would tip into the water -- it seemed to be defying the tug of gravity.

Well, two years ago, we got our answer. By early summer, the tree had tipped to about 45 degrees, and as I paddled by in a canoe one day I noticed a large, lengthwise crack at the base of the trunk. After a few weeks, the old pine came down, but not with a spectacular splash. It eased down, like a staccato second-hand on a watch, tick, tick, tick.  

During a couple of quiet evenings, sitting on the screen porch, I could hear the periodic cracking noises as the tree kept ticking down. Then one morning the tree lay in the water, extending out some 60 or 70 feet from shore. It was sad to see a venerable pine go down, but the plus side is that the tree now lies in what already was a fair walleye hole, just off the edge of a bed of emergent reeds, at a U-shaped dropoff that anglers like to call an inside turn. Snorkeling around the tree soon after it fell, I saw young-of-the-year smallmouth bass darting amid the twigs and still-green needles. The old pine was becoming a fish magnet. 

Of course, if we want more fish magnets on our lakes – more wood in the water – we have to do more than let nature take its course. The state Department of Natural Resources now promotes “fish sticks” – placing whole trees, or bundles of trees, in the shallows – as a fish habitat builder. Maybe if your lake isn’t rich in sunken timber along shore, it’s worth having your lake association consider a “fish sticks” project.

Diatoms: Where lake life begins

Weeds are springing up in your lake by now, or will soon – but the most significant plant growth that’s happening is not obvious to the eye.

As the water warms and sunlight continues to penetrate deep, diatoms are proliferating. These are one-celled algae that multiply profusely in colder water, which is high in silica and nutrients that built up over the winter.

“Diatoms use silica to build their cell walls,” according to an article in Minnesota Conservation Volunteer magazine. “They grow quite rapidly and often give the water a brownish hue. Because they cannot regulate their buoyancy in water, diatoms rely on currents or wind and wave action in lakes to keep them in the lighted zone, where sunlight penetrates shallow water. In the absence of wind, waves or currents, diatoms settle to the bottom of the lake and die.”

Later in the season, other kinds of algae take over. But a few more words about diatoms are timely and appropriate. For one thing, diatoms, seen under a microscope, are incredibly beautiful – the many species exist in a variety of symmetrical shapes.

More important, diatoms are an important part of a lake’s phytoplankton – the tiny plants that float in the water and form the base of the lake’s food chain or, to put it differently, the foundation for the lake’s food web. Diatoms and other phytoplankton perform the same basic function as grasses in prairies that support grazing animals.

Just like large rooted plants, diatoms live by photosynthesis. They make their food from sunlight, carbon dioxide and nutrients; they are called primary producers. Diatoms become food for plant-eating zooplankton – small animals like Daphnia (water fleas). These in turn are eaten by smaller fish, including game fish and panfish fry, which in turn become food for larger fish – bass, walleye, northern pike.

This of course is an over-simplified description of the food web, but it illustrates how important the diatoms and other phytoplankton are. Without them the food web would collapse – there would be no fish.

Another function of diatoms is that through photosynthesis they release oxygen. In fact, the diatoms, other phytoplankton, and larger aquatic plants make a net positive contribution to the dissolved oxygen on which fish and other lake creatures depend. 

So as you watch the water lilies, cabbage weeds, bulrushes, coontail and other plants pop up in your lake this summer, give a thought to the diatoms, out there by the billions, not doing much besides floating, yet helping to make the whole lake system function.

How we met: Dinner Lake

I just headed north on Highway 45 from Land O’Lakes, saw a plain wooden “Dinner Lake” sign at the first side road, took a right in the direction of the arrow, and followed the signs from there. The roads twisted back into the trees, first nice smooth asphalt, then much rougher asphalt, and then a skinny, bumpy gravel road for the last quarter-mile or so. The road dipped sharply down and bent around to the right, revealing the lake, a small blue jewel in a wooded hollow. Logs lay in the water on both sides of the boat ramp, and among them small bass hung motionless. I broke a piece off a twig and tossed it onto the water; a fish darted up, took it, and spat it out.

The boat ramp was on an almost circular bay, a narrow outlet giving way to the lake proper. I couldn’t see much of the lake itself, but several bare logs jutted out from the bay’s shore – great-looking cover. I hung around for a few minutes teasing the baby bass with bits of twig, then drove away, filing the spot in memory.

The next summer I bought a used blue fiberglass canoe. On a June weekend my friend Ed and I strapped it atop my 1964 Plymouth Valiant and drove north. We tented at the National Forest campground on Lac Vieux Desert and in the morning drove over to Dinner and slid the canoe in. We immediately found smallmouth bass among the logs, more than willing to smack a floating plug. As it turned out, loggy cover nearly surrounded the lake. We caught dozens of bass, about half of them above what was then the legal size of 12 inches.

I’ve returned almost every year since, with friends or alone. In time I discovered a rocky hump just off the east shore that is productive even when fish have deserted the shorelines. It’s a quiet lake, about 150 acres, ringed by small, well-kept cottages, most occupied just sporadically. I’ve never been able to spend an evening or weekend on the lake. In the early years there was a private campground on the east shore, but that soon closed. So it’s a lake I simply fish, once a year (with rare exceptions), almost as a matter of principle. After all, I discovered it. I don’t tell many people about it. My stock comment about it is: I’ll take you there, but I won’t just tell you where it is.

How about you? Where did your romance with your favorite lake begin? How did you two meet?

What a difference a few days make

It’s amazing how fast things change. One day your lake is an ice desert. A few days later the ice is gone, the race is on. The race to life.

The loons don’t even wait for full ice-out – soon as a suitable patch of water opens, they’re back, plying the water, calling. The lake, freed from its ice insulation, starts warming rapidly, especially when full sun hits the bottom in the shallows.

As the temperature rises, the fish spawning procession begins. It starts with northern pike, seeking out marshy areas as soon as ice melts along the shorelines. Male walleyes begin staging in rocky, gravelly shallows while the water is just a few degrees above freezing; females follow, and activity peaks as the temperature reaches the mid-40s.

Yellow perch closely follow the walleyes, spawning as the water reaches the high 40s. The females lay eggs in long, accordion-like ribbons of jelly that sink to the bottom, where males fertilize them. The egg strands may drape over plants or tree branches in the water; early-season canoeists might see them in the shallows.  

These early spawners don’t guard their eggs; the next groups of spawners do. As the water heads into the high 50s and low 60s, male largemouth and smallmouth bass start fanning out spawning beds over gravel substrate in water from a foot to several feet deep. Crappies like it a little warmer; bluegills a little warmer still.

Meanwhile, every living creature – amphibian, reptile, mollusk, insect – gets active. Sit on your deck at night and you’ll hear the frogs and toads sing. Search up “frog calls” on the Internet and you’ll easily find sites where you can listen to spring peepers, chorus frogs, mink frogs, and others, and so distinguish the individual sounds as you might instruments in an orchestra.

This is also a time to watch the migrating through – a pair of binoculars and a field guide can help you expand your vocabulary from “ducks” to buffleheads, widgeons, mergansers, teal.

There’s a current of urgency to it all: time is fleeting. These springtime weeks are a great time of year – maybe the best of times to spend with your lake.

How we met: Birch Lake

My memories of summer vacations on Duck Lake in the Upper Peninsula stayed with me and ran deep. And so I wanted to create a similar tradition with my own family, wife Noelle and kids Sonya and Todd. We tried week-long vacations at cabin resorts on Moon Lake (Duck’s neighbor in the UP) and Presque Isle Lake in far northern Vilas County, Wis. But I was looking for a place we could return to year after year, and for various reasons neither of those two quite fit.

In 1987, when Sonya was five and Todd two, we wrote to the Minocqua Chamber of Commerce for information on housekeeping cabins. Dozens of brochures came by mail; the one that appealed most was for Jung’s Birch Lake Cottages, near a place called Harshaw that we had never heard of, about a dozen miles southeast of Minocqua. We bought a week in a cabin called Bayside, sight unseen, for $400 (enough money back then to ensure, pretty well, a quality experience).

It was love at first sight. Noelle fell for the cozy two-bedroom cabin, with new furnishings, knotty pine walls and, as bonuses, a fireplace, microwave oven, and deck – in her words, “all the comforts we don’t have at home.” For me it was about the lake, 180 acres with expansive beds of cabbage weeds on the edges of which I could catch walleyes, bluegills, perch, and the occasional largemouth bass. The romance was sealed when, on our first night, I caught a 38-inch muskie right off our pier. There was a nice swimming area for the kids, and all the Northwoods icons were there -- loons, ospreys, eagles, deer, raccoons.

We visited Birch Lake for a week almost every summer thereafter, usually staying in the Lakeside cabin, right next to Bayview. Then in 2009, a wooded lot came on the market, straight across the lake from the cottages. We closed on the lot in December of that year, parked an RV trailer there, and by fall 2011 had our own cottage. The way we came to buy the land is a story in itself, for another time. Suffice it to say our relationship with Birch Lake has bloomed into something deeper and longer-lasting.

How about you? How did the romance with your favorite lake begin? How did you two meet?

One lake, many worlds

It’s easy to think of a lake as a pool of water in which to drop a fishing lure or on which to float a boat, canoe or air mattress. But your lake is really a collection of worlds, each in its own way teeming with life. There’s the water’s edge where otters prowl the sandy fringes, where deer slip out from the cover of the trees to drink, and where eagles and ospreys perch in tall pines and scan the wavelets. The air above the water is another world, of those big raptors soaring and circling; of buzzing dragonflies, silent and delicate damselflies, and flying insects of many descriptions; of mallards and mergansers arrowing overhead.

On the surface we find ducks and loons skimming; the occasional muskrat dragging strands of cattail leaves; clusters of darting black beetles; water striders floating on surface tension, propelled by oarlike legs; ephemeral mayflies with wings raised like sails; and painted and snapping turtles, snouts poking skyward, sipping the air. Beneath the surface the lake is a thin soup of microscopic plant and animal plankton, base of the food chain for fish, not just those we like to catch but for many small and secretive species we rarely see, even if we peer into their world through a glass mask while snorkeling.

The bottom sand and muck are marked with the serpentine trails of clams and mussels and speckled with the curled shells of snails and the molts of crayfish. Buried in the sediment lie an assortment of worms, along with immature forms of various flies and other insects, metamorphosing. And that’s not even counting the different zones of vegetation; the variations in bottom character (rock, gravel, sand, muck); the dropoffs, flats and mid-lake humps; or the temperature-related strata of the water itself. Or, for that matter, the way these and all the other worlds change with the seasons.

Yes, every lake is much more than what appears to the casual viewer. And every lake rewards those who look closer and deeper.

How we met: Duck Lake

Every romance story starts with how they met. How did your romance with your lake begin? My story begins with Duck Lake – I have known it since I was eight years old. It lies in the big woods of Michigan's Upper Peninsula, just over Wisconsin line from the little town of Land O' Lakes. It’s about two miles long, shaped something like a plump L with a short horizontal stroke.

A co-worker of my father owned a cabin on Duck Lake. He and his two sons took my dad, my older brother and me there for a visit on a Memorial Day weekend. It was there I saw eagles and loons for the first time, and heard the hammering of pileated woodpeckers deep in the forest. How to describe the allure of the North? The trees are taller, the white pines especially standing in majesty. The wind sounds different. Storms loom larger; thunder booms across the vast stretches of woods and water. The night woods are full of animal noises, rustles and footfalls. Loon calls ring out over the lake – what benignly demented sort of deity would create such a creature as a loon?

My family rented that cabin one or two weeks each summer until I was in my early 20s. A great fishing spot lay just a few dozen oar strokes out from the cabin. We fished there morning to dusk, two or three of us kids in each boat with mom or dad. As I grew older, I took a 14-foot wooden rowboat on fishing explorations from one end of the lake to the other. Since then I’ve fished Duck once or twice a year almost without fail and have come to know it well. The public boat landing is right next to the old cabin property; that spot in front of the cabin is still the best spot on the lake.

In future posts I’ll tell you about my other two loves, Dinner and Birch lakes. Meantime, what’s the story of your favorite lake? How did you two meet?

Bottoms up: The lake unveiled

If yours is like most lakes in the Lakeland area, you’re still waiting for ice-out. Will you be there to observe it? I had always wanted to see the thaw happen, and last year, at last, I did. It wasn’t (as I expected) a matter of observing slow changes over a number of days. In fact, it was sudden, much of the process unfolding in little more than an hour.

Did you know (I didn't until I recently did some reading) that your lake ice thaws from the bottom up? First the snow melts off the surface. Then the sun penetrates the ice and warms the water underneath. Warm air above the ice accelerates the thaw, of course, but it’s the warming water below that really does the trick.

On April 28 last year, Birch Lake was still frozen stiff. That day and the next two days were in the 70s to 80s. Then came three more days of below-freezing temperatures, rain, snow and sleet, before winter's grip finally broke. At that point, the lake ice still looked solid – we heard reports from other lakes of remaining ice up to two feet thick. Who knew how long it would be until our lake opened up?

Saturday, May 4, saw highs in the 70s, as did Sunday, and Monday, the day it finally happened.
When I visited the lake’s shore Monday morning, ice still covered all except a small area on the far north side. There had been little change (that one could see) when I left for town about 2 p.m. But when I returned around 5 p.m., about 30 percent of our lobe of the lake had cleared, the remaining ice forming an irregular pattern, like continents in an ocean.

Then, at about 6 p.m., a wind brewed up from the east and began pushing the ice away, at more than glacial speed. Sitting on our deck, I could mark with my eye a feature on an ice sheet and note its progress relative to the trunk of a tree in our woods. It was a bit like watching the minute hand on a clock, the motion barely perceptible, yet unmistakable.

Within about an hour, all the ice had blown off to the west, the stirring action of wind-driven wavelets surely speeding up the thaw at the same time. Just like that, our entire end of the lake, some 100-plus acres of it, lay fully open. By morning, the entire lake had cleared, and loons plied the water, crying out with joy.

After the longest winter or the worst spring I could remember in my 60 years, a new season had arrived. And now, at long last – after what is officially this area’s the worst winter on record – we’re about to see it happen again. And all I can say to that is: Bottoms up!

Growing to love your lake

I have three mistresses. My wife not only knows but approves. The mistresses are Wisconsin northwoods lakes, two just far enough north and one just far enough south to be spared most of the tourist noise. I've carried on affairs with each for at least 25 years, in one case for more than 50. Their names are Duck, Dinner, and Birch. My relationships with them are somewhat one-dimensional: Mostly I fish them. And yet, through the years, I weigh each visit less in fish caught than in ambience, comfort, memory. I promise not to stretch the romance metaphor too thin, but I do love these waters.

You may have a  favorite lake, or more than one -- a place where you vacationed as a child, where your family owns a cabin, where you rent a summer cottage year after year, where you go on a ritual long-weekend camping trip with friends. It's easy to love a lake, especially one you found on your own fairly early in life and have known for decades. What is love, after all, but genuine concern for someone or something outside ourselves?

What I hope to do here is help you love your lake even more -- by getting to know it intimately, as I have come to know mine. I've finally chosen one lake -- my wife and I have built a cottage there that has now become a home. So I'll share with you what I observe about my lake and what I've learned about lakes in general, through experience, observation, reading, and even lab, field and classroom study. In the process, because for all their differences lakes have much in common, you will learn about your lake and come to appreciate it more.