Winter is not a desert for new outdoors actions, revising old ones, and tinkering indoors until weather is more accommodating to venture.
Remaining safe and staying warm is tops on many moves. Ice fishing is a great example and challenge. Wait to be the second person on the ice and consider a fishing shelter, better clothing, and a fishing partner to ease the drama.
Enjoy the holidays by decorating and sending hand-crafted cards with photographs of winter’s outdoors. Country living usually means woods and marshes with characteristic plant structures. Invite a friend to come cut evergreen boughs, limbs, and stems from white pine, white cedar, red osier dogwood and others. This adventure usually reveals city folks are interested in country life, plants and animals, as well as evergreens’ need or lack of short term care and preservation when cut for decorations.
Trout season will open January 4, 2025 for the catch and release season until May 3, 2025, when the general season begins. All trout must be immediately released during the early season, during a bag limit of zero.
Fly-tying and ordering supplies can consume zero degree temperature days, starting with those lures most used and most successful during 2024.
Still have unused hickory nuts or walnuts not likely to be eaten? Feed the birds and squirrels instead. No need to pick the meats, just crack the shells and place them on a platform feeder or slab of concrete. Birds’ bills will extract every morsel of “meat” from the shells.
Snow backgrounds are excellent backdrop for photo images. The leaves are gone; the twigs are bare, providing an excellent perch. Other animals may be bedded so disturbing them causing expending get away energy is ill-advised.
Cold, sunny day drives are days for staying inside a vehicle, out of the wind, with a partially open window as a lens rest. That is as good as it gets to build an album or capture next winter’s Christmas card.
Still too cold to step outdoors? Assess 2024 and plan some 2025 outings, changes, and short vacations.
“Just get outdoors and enjoy the snow and cold, beginning understanding the outdoors and the weather, pay attention because things are changing all around us,” said Wayne Smith, a Lafayette County, Wisconsin outdoorsman and trapper. “Study the deer registrations from the nine-day, gun deer season and not only where you hunt but around the state.”
The past year’s highlights and disappointments locally included another downer year of spring mushrooms as well as scarce options for chicken-of-the-woods October beauties. These complex organisms cannot be measured by too dry, too wet, and too cold alone. There must be more to it but maybe a single overriding influence. That makes three years in a row in most mushroom journals, so let’s hope for a change of scenery. Start now by noticing dead elms (morels) and dead oaks (sulfur fungi). Mark the wait for the 17-year periodic cicada that came above ground in 2024. If you close your eyes you can probably hear them signing, still. Or maybe you even recorded a swarm or two. Maybe you took a few images, too. Date the photos if the camera didn’t already print a mark. Then add 17 years to 2024. If you’re 83, you’ll be 100!
Mark the camera for November 22, the opener of the gun deer season, which is one calendar day earlier than 2024. It may make a slight difference in bucks seen during the 2025 hunt.
Finish the deer hunts, pheasant and turkey seasons, begin the rabbit and squirrel seasons, stop by the Hyde Store for their 2025 squirrel hunt contest and notice the Hyde Mill down the road in Iowa County, Wisconsin. There’s an all new Iowa County Highway T along Trout Creek that comes all the way down from Birch Lake near Barneveld, Wisconsin where ice anglers are sure to be jigging for bluegills; they were saved when the lake was dredged.
Look at the outdoors and ask why. Why are the leaves still on the red oaks? Why do the white cedars look like their bases were pruned? Many saplings bark is gone. Deer rubs or rabbits gnawing?
Contact Jerry Davis, a freelance writer, at sivadjam@mhtc.net or 608.924.1112.
