The Lake Where You Live

In 2023-24 we largely dispensed with winter. Hardly any snow fell. The snowmobile trails never opened. The ice here on Birch Lake never got much more than a foot thick. I fished on many days in temperatures above freezing. The ice went out on the middle of March — highly unusual.

Now in a sense we are paying for it all by missing out on summer. The weather is chronically unstable. There have been no long spells of blissful sunny days in the low 80s. Instead, we’ve had a couple of warm or hot days, then a storm and a cold front, followed by a few nice days, then two or three days of wind or rain or both.

The lakes have felt the effects. I’ve heard about strange phenomena that could be related to the early ice-out and the longer season of warm water (though a direct cause-and-effect picture is not easy to draw amid numerous variables). 

 On Birch Lake the fishing went dead, and I mean stone cold dead, in mid-June. Generally the fishing slows down considerably as summer advances, but not until July or August. My last two June walleye outings produced not a single tap on a jig and leech, and not a single twitch of a slip bobber — this in spots I have favored for years.

Small clumps of filamentous algae began appearing on the surface by the first week of June. As for water clarity, the lake turned a bit pea-soupy with green algae by late July, earlier than is normal (although the early-August Secchi disc reading of seven feet was pretty typical). 

One property owner on a lake west of Minocqua reported an unusual murky brown cast to the near-shore water. In late June on a lake near my own, large floating balls of bright-green algae made fishing difficult. Tall grass-like vegetation sprouted abundantly amid beds of cabbage weed; lake residents didn’t know what it was.

As for lake activity, boating traffic here on Birch Lake has been down, likely owing to the cool and rainy weather. Even the July 4 week and weekend were quite tame compared to other years. I have not yet taken a swim this year; I generally do that only in order to cool down on hot days, and those have been rare to nonexistent. Our season’s air conditioning bill will be small.

My fishing on Birch has been mostly limited to a couple of bluegill-and-perch outings with grandsons Tucker and Perrin. I have not caught a walleye since June; I hold out hope that action will improve as usual in September and early October.

While last winter and this summer are so far outside the norm as to be chalked up to weather, not climate, the data does show that the seasons, and winters in particular, are becoming more variable. Some scientists have referred to the long-term changes underway not as global warming but global weirding.

After some of the brutal winters we’ve gone through since we moved here 11 years ago, I must say I didn’t mind getting off easy last year. But I would like to see a return, both winter and summer, to seasonal conditions more like those we’re accustomed to.

Ted Rulseh is a writer, author and lake advocate who lives on Birch Lake in Oneida County. His new book, “Ripple Effects,” has been released by UW Press. You can learn about it by visiting his website at https://thelakeguy.net.