Animals are entering bottleneck of winter

Fawn finds the least snow is beneath conifers

Whitetail doe also stays under cover

There is a time in the Boreal Forest when some animals simply are not going to survive the winter. That time begins now.
Two feet of snow have fallen in the past week. That makes nearly three feet on the ground in the Nolalu area. Travel is now difficult for whitetail deer and timber wolves and the snow depth even begins to restrict the activity of the longer-legged moose.

I clear trail through bush...

Deer are staying under the cover of conifer stands, especially balsam fir. Most of the snow in these places is caught up on the branches. There can be as little as a foot on the ground.
Timber wolves are no better able to travel atop the snow than the deer unless a thick crust forms, and that may actually be in store. Temperatures this week are expected to be several degrees above freezing in the day. The melting snow will freeze again at night and that is how a crust is made.
Some animals are adapted to stay atop the thick snow cover. Lynx, snowshoe hares, marten and fisher all have fluffy feet that act as snowshoes. So do ruffed grouse which have feathers

... and within minutes a deer takes advantage of the walkway

between their toes. Red fox can stay aloft simply because they don't weigh much. Ditto for red squirrels.
So it is the deer and moose that are most at risk. They will stick to their heavy cover, even if it means fasting from now until spring. They will tramp down a maze of trails and these will reduce the energy needed to move around.
Wolves, however, are not stupid. They know exactly the places their prey is likely to be and will hunt those spots thoroughly.
The heavy snow cover may send great grey owls southward. They arrived here about a month ago from farther north. Deep snow prevents them from reaching their prey of mice, in these parts, and lemmings farther north.
March is normally the month that brings the most snow so the situation could get even more serious as time goes on.

Snow now is taller than Cork

Snowbanks are up to the mailboxes along our road

He went thata way

Two-by-two tracks identify the marten

You can find these tracks just about anywhere you walk in the Boreal Forest during the winter. They are from the marten, known in the U.S. as the pine marten.
This is the main animal sought by trappers. They are easy to catch, easy to skin and bring a premium price per pelt, usually $80-$160. And, as indicated by their tracks, they are abundant.
The track sign is a little bit misleading, however, as one animal covers a lot of territory.
Marten are a mid-size weasel and kill virtually anything they can catch. Their main prey is the redback vole, a small, short-tail woods mouse. The population of marten explodes during years of heavy production of cones by spruce and pine. That's because the seeds in the cones are the main food of the vole.
Marten are expert climbers and are known to also catch red squirrels. They don't catch enough of them to suit me. I sometimes think that the weight of the squirrels on our acreage is greater than the whitetail deer.
Other than trappers, most people never see marten. They are wary of people and disappear like greased lightning.

Three wolves go for a walk

Time stamp shows spacing of the wolves

They are not nose-to-tail

Each one sniffed this same spot

Three timber wolves walk single file through the bush, only a dozen or so seconds apart, behind our home in Nolalu.
My trail cameras always photograph wolves on our densely wooded property in this fashion -- single file -- as they follow my trails in their quest for whitetail deer. In more open country, such as in a cutover, I have observed a different hunting technique. There they seem to fan out hundreds of yards apart. When an animal finds a hot scent it follows it and when it has flushed the deer it vocalizes to the rest of the pack what is going on. The excited call sounds like ki-yi-yi, sort of like a dog when it is hurt. The others then come running to the sound.

The treasure that others think is trash

Dead balsam with missing bark is what I want

I haul the wood out of the bush by using two snow scoops

Necessity may be the mother of invention but it is also the father of discovery.
For 20 of the 33 years that we have lived in Nolalu we heated our home with firewood that I cut from our property. In our first home, the old squared timber house built 75 years earlier, there was a single woodstove. In our present home, which Brenda and I and our two children, Matt and Josh, built ourselves, we installed an outdoor wood furnace which we used for 13 years before switching to a propane furnace.
We had no sooner bought the property and moved in when the entire region was hit by a spruce budworm outbreak. The spruce budworm is a tiny caterpillar that eats the new growth needles of its host tree. Despite its name, the favourite host of the spruce budworm is not the spruce but the balsam fir. After eating the new soft green needles the budworm makes a cocoon and re-emerges as a moth which lays its eggs in other balsams. The next spring the cycle repeats.
Balsams naturally shed one-fourth of their needles each season; so, after four seasons of having their new needles eaten by budworm, the trees die of starvation since they have nothing left to produce food. The budworm outbreaks cover enormous areas at one time. They are often the size of many European countries. They leave behind forests of grey, dead trees, devoid of needles. And that is the end of the outbreak because there is nothing left for the budworms to eat. But it is not the end of the balsam fir nor even the end of the budworm.

Primo dry, solid, white balsam is surprisingly good wood

Although every growing balsam is killed by the budworm during the outbreak, the mature trees left so many seeds on the ground before they died that new seedlings will sprout for the next 10 years. And since the budworms will also have died with the demise of the mature trees, the seedlings will grow like mad in a pest-free environment for about 40 years. Then the few budworms that are always present, nibbling on spruce as well as balsam, also go mad and the whole thing starts over.
This cycle has been documented in the Boreal Forest in Canada since the very first explorers started recording history and was undoubtedly well-known to First Nations people before that.
The only thing that can interrupt the chain is forest fire that simply burns up the balsam seeds on the ground. Other trees like jackpine, red pine and white pine have cones that open after a fire and also benefit from the fertilizer effect of the ash. So the pines take over.
Balsams are unique in Northwestern Ontario in that they are the only conifer that is truly shade-tolerant. In areas that burned many years earlier and are covered by large spruce or pines the balsams will eventually get a foothold again just from seeds carried on the wind. They become the understory, waiting for a storm or disease to topple the big trees. This is especially true on clay or loamy soils. On sandy soils only the pines with their taproots that can dive down to the deep water table can survive.

Large birch logs serve as a sawhorse

In Nolalu the budworm outbreak hit about 1985. About half of the trees on our 65 acres were balsam and it was obvious that within a few years they would all be dead.
Commonsense told us that since we heated with wood we should use the balsams but there was only one problem: they suck as firewood and are absolutely miserable to cut. Nonetheless I put up many cords of the stuff for the first few years, cutting the trees green while they were still solid and getting covered with sap in the process. The sap is impossible to get out of clothes. I split and dried the wood for a summer and burned the limbs in immense brush piles. My guess is that 50 per cent of the weight of the tree is in the limbs, far greater than other species.
And for my effort I was rewarded with wood that barely generated any heat in the stove.
I learned what everybody else already knew: balsam sucks.
Balsam firewood has such a poor reputation you can't even give it away.
Then we built our new house and installed the outdoor wood furnace about 100 feet away. (Outdoor wood furnaces heat water that is delivered to the house in underground pipes where it is either circulated for heat in room radiators or as in our case, in a large radiator with a massive fan as part of a forced air heating system.)
The furnace and house were surrounded by dead balsam trees. I had to get rid of them anyway so I just cut them down and fed them into the outdoor stove despite their low heat value. It took an awful lot of them but then there were an awful lot. It took me years to clean them up and over that time I gradually became aware that it was taking less and less wood to heat the house. In other words, the wood itself was producing more and more heat as the years went on! This wood was far superior to that which I had cut green and dried years earlier. What was going on?
Eventually I depleted the nearby supply and had to start roaming deep into the bush looking for more. I couldn't afford any machines for a long time and had to carry or pull the wood out by hand. That is when I developed an expert eye for the wood that would generate the most heat for the least effort.
First, the trees must be upright. Fallen-over trees are always wet.
The trees must have been dead for several years. Not only must they be devoid of needles but also largely of branches. The bark must be either split or missing. Without the bark the tree dries rapidly and that appears to be the key. Trees with intact bark are rotten inside.
When cut the wood should be white, not red. This white wood is sound and tinder dry. It produces good heat and burns about as long as jackpine which is one of the favourite Boreal firewoods. In fact, in some areas it is THE favourite although in Nolalu people think paper birch is best.
Balsam must always be kept covered. It absorbs water like a sponge. Even a light rain or melting snow ruins it.
We are installing a wood stove in our new sunroom and I have spent the past week hauling in dry firewood for it. The only trees that fit the bill on our acreage are still balsam which now are few and far between. It took me about three days to put up a cord.
Balsam has a lovely smell when burned. It smells very much like sandalwood incense.
Starting tomorrow I will start cutting green birch which I will split and stack for next winter. Green birch is far heavier than the dead balsam but fortunately I now have a tractor to move it around. I have kept a road clear all winter into a birch stand.

Wood is split and stacked and will later be covered, ready for new stove

Coyote with mange could be in trouble

Coyote has lost hair on its tail due to mange

This coyote with mange is the first animal I have seen this winter with the skin disease. Although there is never a good time for an animal to fall victim to this parasite, I would think it would be especially perilous this winter with the long run of bitter temperatures we have experienced.
Mange is spread animal to animal by the sarcoptic mite.
For some reason Nolalu seems to be a hotspot for mange. I have frequently photographed wolves and coyotes with the condition.
We give our dog, Cork, a drug to make sure he does not contract mange.

Living and dying with timber wolves

Eagles and ravens were picking on the carcass when we found it

The whitetail deer are clustering every day right in our yard and that should have been a clue as to how close the timber wolves were getting.
Today Brenda was on her way into town and phoned back to say there were bald eagles and ravens on a deer carcass about a half-mile down the road. I investigated and found the deer shown above. It must have been killed during daylight since it wasn't frozen. The temperature last night was -30C and didn't get above -12C in the day.
I can't swear it was wolves that killed this deer since it was within 50 feet of the road. But there were no car parts or headlight glass left on the road and there were wolf trails leading away from the carcass. The trails also seemed to indicate that wolves, not dogs, were to blame. I would suspect dogs would have made their trails between the road and the kill site.
Tracks show that wolves routinely come within 100 yards of our house. We wouldn't be worried except for our dog, Cork. We don't let him outside unsupervised.
I am trying something this year to keep the wolves farther away and it seems to be working. When I take my walks with Cork in the bush behind our house I take off my mitten and grasp branches that are growing near the trail, about a foot from the ground or right at wolf nose height. It occurred to me that touching anything when trapping spooks any canine -- wolves, coyotes and foxes. I've also "marked" some trees at the corners of our property. I've done this before but only when I see wolves doing the same thing. My message to the wolves is: this is my territory, not yours, so get lost. It seems to work but it also must be continuously kept up as the wolves recognize when the scent becomes old.
Wolves are a vital part of the Boreal Forest ecology and we don't consider them villains. They are absolutely no threat to people, just their dogs.

The deer are right outside our sunroom's windows

Sunflower seeds are good but so is the protection from wolves that comes from being near to houses

Blowing up the winter night

Balsam that just couldn't take it any more

When the mercury is cringing at the bottom of the thermometer you can sometimes hear shots coming from the bush. It sounds like a .22 rifle. Who would be shooting in the dead of a cold winter's night and with such a small caliber? No sane person, that's for sure.
If you mark the direction carefully and investigate the next day you won't find the snowshoe tracks of a human being but rather just a tree with its trunk split. Trees with lots of moisture, like balsam fir and balsam poplar are the usual victims. The sap freezes deeper and deeper, expanding all the while, until eventually the pressure is too great for the strength of the wood. The tree ruptures in an explosion and in the stillness of a crisp Boreal Forest night the sound carries like a rifle shot.
So there wasn't a Mad Trapper out there after all, just trees driven insane by unrelenting cold.