Check out this photo of Howey Bay in Red Lake, yesterday, taken by Red Lake Marine's Sherry McCoy.
All the snow has melted off the lake ice.
Then check out the snow cover layer on Windy.com website and app. It shows Red Lake and areas all the way west to Lake Winnipeg being barren of snow.
I'm moving my ice-out date back to May 8.
And if you are wondering where the snow-line is in North America, look at this clear view from NASA Worldview today.
The first week of April could easily have been the first week of March, weather-wise. There was zero melting and a big dump of snow. So, I have adjusted my ice-out slide rule accordingly. At this point, I would say it will be a week late or May 15.
Just in case you haven't been plugged in, a lady from Red Lake caught a record lake trout through the ice this winter, apparently at Trout Lake.
At 58 inches and 57 pounds, it was certainly an ice fishing record in Ontario.
Here's a link to the CBC news story.
And in other big news, a professional angler from Kenora won the Bassmaster Classic, the first Canadian to ever do so. Here's a link.
Red Lake anglers should take note that Jeff Gustafson, aka Gussie, won the tourney using his own Smeltinator jig.
All fish, including walleye, in Red Lake key-in on smelt. There's a tip for ya!
In the old days when my dad, Don Baughman, and step-mom, Anne, operated Bow Narrows Camps they would travel to Red Lake from Mentor, Ohio, the first week of May and settle into the Red Lake Inn while they waited for breakup.
With nothing much to do, they would drive around and look at the lake ice from various locations. It was during these little sightseeing trips that dad made a discovery. Every year the ice went out in Howey Bay seven days after it disappeared from Skookum Bay.
Skookum Bay is a long, narrow, creek-like bay that you cross on a small bridge on Forestry Road.
When I came back to the business in 1992 I would get telephone reports from Dad as he watched the bay. Our home in Nolalu, near Thunder Bay, is just a six-hour drive from Red Lake so there was no point in me waiting at the Inn with Dad and Anne.
Finally, Dad would say the ice was gone in Skookum and so I should arrive in Red Lake seven days later. I would do so and would find Dad and Bob Uhrina from Red Lake Marine launching the Banana Split -- the camp's large trip boat. The ice was breaking and either we could go directly to camp that day or wait until the next to give the big ice pans a chance to blow against one shore and leave a clear passage on the other.
After Dad passed, I would try to get reports from Red Lake residents on how Skookum Bay was melting. I even phoned people who worked at the Forestry Point and had to cross the bridge every day. None ever paid any attention to the bay and its ice. That's how I came up with my alternative method of calculating ice-out which I have documented here on the blog.
I've always wondered about how Skookum Bay got its name. I have read enough Jack London novels and Robert Service poems to recognize that Skookum is a west coast name or at least a far northwest name. There were lots of Skookum references in the Klondike gold rush. That rush took place in 1896 and was the second largest in history. The biggest was the San Francisco gold rush of 1849. The Red Lake rush in 1926 was the third-largest.
Could someone from the Klondike gold rush with a name like Skookum Joe have lived on the bay in Red Lake? It's possible.
But what does Skookum mean anyway? I found an interesting website called Indigenous Corporate Training Inc. that tells how First Nations had a special trading language called Chinook Jargon which let them do business with each other, especially the west coast nations. Non-indigenous people came to use this language as well and some of those terms are still used by us. Anyway, one of those Chinook jargon words is Skookum meaning big or powerful.
Skookum Bay is neither which makes me wonder if someone like "Skookum Joe" might have lived there. Anybody know?
Long-time Trout Lake fisherman George Miller provided his technique for figuring ice-out on this big lake northeast of Red Lake. George is always an opening week angler at Booi's Fly-In Lodge.
George had just read on the blog my system for predicting Red Lake's break-up and writes:
In this photo you can see the town of Red Lake labelled about mid-image, slightly to the right. Look at all the smoke plumes streaming from left to right, that is, west to east!
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| Sunrise on March 20, 2023, the Vernal Equinox, in Nolalu, Ontario |
Our driveway in the photo above is looking directly east. I always think the sun on the equinox should rise directly in line but it's always a shade to the north. Why? According to a writer at Space.com there are a couple of reasons but perhaps the largest is the lens effect of the atmosphere. This makes the sunrise look like it is farther north than it really is.
See the hills in the distance? These are part of the Nor'Wester Mountains which are much higher nearer Thunder Bay. Here's an interesting fact. The other end of this mountain range (hills really) is Niagara Falls. Down there it is called the Niagara Escarpment.
And here's another surprising tidbit: the escarpment also goes under Lake Huron. A story in this month's Canadian Geographic is about how researchers have discovered man-made blinds made of rock along the underwater ridge. These were used by First Nations people 9,000 years ago when there was still a glacier from Northeastern Ontario to Greenland.
The escarpment in those days made a land bridge between two enormous lakes and the caribou used it during seasonal migrations.
Using remote underwater vehicles the researchers were also able to sample sediments along the ridge and found obsidian tool flakes left behind by those ancient hunters. The obsidian came from Oregon! The trading that took place back then and the transportation routes they had are just incredible.
Eventually, of course, the glacier melted all the way to Greenland, raising the water level in the Great Lakes and submerging the caribou corridor.
On Nov. 29 I had a posting entitled Species Dwindling Except the One that Needs It where I linked the demise of thousands of species on the planet to the increase in human population. That part of my essay is accurate. It was the reason I gave for why the population was swelling that was wrong or at least outdated.
I said the Boomers -- my generation -- weren't able to control our birthrate. Turns out we actually did.
The authors of Empty Planet --The Shock of Global Population Decline use statistics from every region and country to prove that the world population is going to plummet. The reason is humans are not having enough babies to sustain the status quo. And yet, as I pointed out in my blog, the world population went from three billion to eight billion in just 50 years! How can these two things be true?
Well, it turns out that while the fertility rate around the world was decreasing, the longevity rate was increasing. People are living longer. New additions to the population outnumber the people leaving the planet. Thank modern medicine, including vaccines, and the Green Revolution in agriculture for that.
The message that Canadian authors John Ibbitson and Darrell Bricker are conveying is earth-shattering. The leaders of every level of our government need to understand the implications of what they are saying. We all do.
Everything in our modern society is based on perpetual growth in population. When a municipality, for example, figures out what some new piece of infrastructure is going to cost, be it a sewer plant or a street, it assumes there will be more people to pay for it as time goes on, not fewer. Ditto for bigger things like old age pensions and national security. Everything.
The first thing we need to realize is the downsize in fertility rates is not something predicted for the future. It is happening now and in fact has been happening for a hundred years. My parents came from families of 7-10 kids. My generation had two. You need 2.1 just to keep the population stable. The .1 comes from the fact that not all women live long enough to reproduce.
With the exception of countries in Africa, almost every nation has a fertility rate less than 2.1. And even in Africa where disease, famine and political instability are the worst, the rate is plummeting and will be below 2.1 in just decades. It already is in some countries.
Just last month it was reported that China's population has started to decline for the first time ever.
The key to understanding why this is happening is the urbanization of human society, say Ibbitson and Bricker. I think many of us have heard that education, especially of women, was integral to lower birth rates. That is not wrong, say the authors, but before education becomes widespread, urbanization takes place and the whole world is rapidly becoming urban.
In cities, children are an expense, not an asset the way they might have been on the farm. Everybody has access to education and better access to medicine. Family -- clan -- tribe -- religion -- connections are not as important. Couples do what makes sense for them rather than being pressured into things.
A future with fewer people is obviously good news for the planet but it spells big trouble for how we run our societies. In the near term, like for the next 50-100 years, the countries that are going to fare the best will be the ones who take in the most immigrants.
But don't think immigrants are going to boost the fertility rate. They don't have any more kids than the natives. However, they do add to the population, the tax base, the need for consumer goods. They keep things running. And contrary to naysayers, they become the employers, not the opposite -- taking jobs from the domestic workers. Six out of 10 business start-ups in the U.S. are made by immigrants.
To hinder, or prohibit immigration -- the way Japan has done, for instance -- is economic suicide. What was the last great invention that came from Japan? The Sony Walkman. That was 50 years ago. The population is declining there and so is the economy. It's the same for lots of countries.
Guess what country is the best at bringing in immigrants? Canada! As a percentage of population Canada welcomes three times more immigrants than the U.S. which by shear numbers is still the largest.
Empty Planet notes that both the right and left misunderstand immigration. The right thinks that immigrants are taking "all the jobs" and the left thinks it is the charitable thing to do. Neither of these things is correct. It is good for business.
After I finished reading Empty Planet, I read it again, and then again. I dog-eared the pages that had important facts. The book is almost totally dog-eared. I have practically worn it out and I didn't even get it until mid-December.
I would say it is one of the three most important books I have ever read. It explains what is happening in the world and what is going to happen in the future.
Here's something to think about: since the 1950s the Boomers have done everything in record numbers. Now they are leaving the planet in the same way.
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| Doc waits for me at my toboggan loaded with dry balsam lengths for firewood |
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| Live balsam fir |
When you spend as much time as me cutting and hauling balsam fir by snowshoe and toboggan, you notice things. Like, why does about one tree in a thousand ooze blue sap? These are live trees, of course.
The best answer I can find on the Internet is not about balsam fir but other species and even then the experts are concerned with blue-coloured wood which is caused by a fungus.
I have cut down thousands of balsams over my life and I have never seen the blue wood inside. I think this is something different.
One possibility is something that occurs in Borneo.
There a latex-producing tree oozes blue sap that has been found to contain high amounts of nickel. Well, there is nickel around here too. About 15 miles from here there are serious nickel deposits that would be mined if the price for this metal was higher.
The balsams that ooze blue sap here on our property are along a rocky ridge.
Our property is at the base of Silver Mountain which was mined for silver back in the late 1800s.
If a reader has any insights, I would love to hear them.
Diana Beresford-Kroeger looks at it from the bio-chemical level and Malcolm Squires from the macro-economic. She is an academic and he is an industry forester. There is no right or wrong here, in my opinion. They are both right.
Arboretum goes into fascinating detail how each species of tree and shrub in the Boreal provides a life-sustaining function to the entire planet. This is the largest forest ecosystem in the world. It goes completely around the globe at the northern latitudes.
Few of us realize how trees filter the atmosphere, removing toxins and particulates. They do the same with water. If there is one thing most of know about plant medicine it is that willow bark contains salicylic acid which is a pain reliever. Think acetasalicylic acid -- ASA -- Aspirin. Well, other trees, such as alders, have this too. They all grow along creeks and marshes. As streams flow around these tree roots this chemical is released into the water and helps purify it.
Trees such as pines and firs release aerosols into the air. That is how we can smell them, of course. Did you also know that these aerosols have healthy effects on us? Just by breathing in cedar and fir scents we help prevent diseases such as cancers. It makes me feel good knowing I have 65 acres of cedars and firs wrapped around our house here in Nolalu.
Needless to say, Beresford-Kroeger doesn't want to see the Boreal Forest cut down. She starts her book by telling how she was at a forestry conference in Northern Ontario where to her horror it was being discussed how to log off half the Boreal Forest! She might be a fine scientist but she is a poor journalist since she doesn't say where or when this conference was held. Well, there is only one forestry school in Ontario and that is Lakehead University right here in Thunder Bay so that must be where she was. It took some digging but I finally found on the Internet that the conference was in 2003.
This explains why I don't remember this event. I was the environmental reporter for the daily newspaper here and also worked awhile in the forest industry from 1979 to 1992. But by 2003 I was back in the tourism business at Bow Narrows Camp in Red Lake. If this had occurred while I was here I would have been all over it. I live and breathe this stuff.
I'm sure Dynamic Forest author Malcolm Squires was at this same function. He was a senior forester for Abitibi-Price which had several pulp and paper mills in Thunder Bay and others elsewhere in Northern Ontario.
Knowing what I do about the forest industry I would guess that 50 per cent of the Boreal Forest in Ontario had already been logged by 2003. Did Beresford-Krueger misunderstand that they were talking about logging the remaining half? I don't know but this is where Squires book comes in although it is unrelated to the conference.
Squires spent his life cutting and regenerating the Boreal Forest. The title of his book Dynamic Forest is a clue to his perspective. The Boreal Forest changes if you cut it. It also changes if you don't cut it. It is continually changing. How can that be?
To understand the Boreal Forest you must first know that tree species are soil-specific. Guys like Squires can look at high-resolution aerial photographs and know what the soil is just from the species of trees growing there. Where is the best place to build a road? Right where there is a continuous stretch of jackpine. This will be a sand esker, a ridge of sand and gravel created when a glacier paused in its retreat at the end of the last ice age. Jackpine have taproots and therefore can go deep-diving in the sand for water. A good example of a road built along an esker is Hwy. 105 -- the Red Lake Road -- from Perrault Falls north to Red Lake.
A mature jackpine forest is just beautiful for camping. The trees are spaced probably 20 feet apart. About the only ground vegetation is blueberries. The trees are probably 80 to 120 years old. It is picture postcard perfect. But these well-drained soils also dry-out the quickest. One lightning bolt and the whole place can burn down. This happens all the time. Eventually the fire goes out, of course. The forest is still standing there, now just blackened posts. The jackpine cones will have opened with the heat and now sprinkle seeds all around. The forest is renewed but for decades to come it will be impassable to humans as the burned trees fall to the ground. The blueberries love the extra sunlight and black bears love the extra blueberries. Woodpeckers, especially the black-backed woodpecker, appreciate the standing dead trees and their insects. The mature forest would have been great for woodland caribou since the trees would have been draped with lichens, their favourite food. After the fire there is nothing for them. Moose will increase a bit with the brushy vegetation that will temporarily increase with the extra sunlight but jackpine stands are poor moose spots. They want hardwoods.
So, speaking of hardwoods, let's look at areas with clay soils. The predominate tree species there will be quaking aspen, paper birch, white spruce and balsam fir. These areas don't get as dry as sand eskers but eventually they burn up too. When that happens, the entire place comes back as quaking aspen. That is because the aspen send up hundreds of shoots from their roots. They are the fastest-growing trees in the Boreal. In the first year after a fire these saplings might be 10 feet tall. They shade out the birches and spruce although a few of those species will break through the canopy eventually. The fire will have wiped out balsam fir, temporarily, but this shade-tolerant tree will start spreading in from the edges of the burn or from unburned spots. If the area goes more than 100 years without burning, the aspen will have fallen over from old age and the balsams will predominate. Anyway, you can see how the Boreal Forest is anything but static.
Logging imitates fire disturbance, to some extent. It doesn't recycle the nutrients, true, but it takes so long between harvests -- 60 to 80 years -- that it might take many centuries to see a depletion in soil fertility, if it happens at all.
Something that people like Beresford-Kroeger don't take into account is that unlike the destruction of the Amazon Rain Forest, no one here is converting the Boreal Forest into farmland. It is immediately regenerated back into more forest. In Ontario, for the past 40 years, forest companies and the Ontario Government have created agreements where the amount of cutting that can take place must match the amount of growth from regeneration. And they also try to take other user groups into account when doing their cutting. These can be First Nations, trappers, the tourist industry, regular hunters and fishermen, etc. It isn't perfect but for the most part it works pretty well.
The hardest places to regenerate are swampy areas and those with thin soils. The swamps contain the most-valuable species -- black spruce -- whose pulp is prized for its long fibers. This makes paper exceptionally strong. These trees can be more than 200 years old but might only be eight inches in diameter. How do you plant a tree in a swamp? It might have taken nature hundreds of years of blanketing the whole place with spruce seeds just to find the right spot for one to grow. You might think leaving seed trees would be the answer but these typically just blow over. I've been out of the business for a long time so maybe someone has come up with an answer by now.
When you drive through the bush of Northern Ontario it is easy to believe that it always has looked the same. The reality is it has done nothing but change. Lots of what you are seeing is second-growth after logging. It has all burned hundreds of times.
It does perform myriads of life-giving functions, just as Beresford-Kroeger explains. One of the biggest right now is extracting carbon out of the atmosphere and producing oxygen but there is much more as well. She is absolutely correct that the Boreal Forest is vital to the planet.
Fox on the run.Big lynx on the prowl for bunnies during a full moon.
There is now two feet of snow on the ground and more is arriving every day.
Here is an actual headline from our local newspaper: "Snow and cold predicted for this winter."
Shades of the Hippy Dippy Weatherman: "Sunny today, getting darker towards evening."
If you are a Glass Half-Full person, you can see the benefits of lots of snow -- plenty of moisture for trees, less chance of forest fire next summer, etc.
If you are a Glass Half-Empty guy you can see that the snow is breaking the trees and we could be in store for another flood year come May.
If you are a household member who doesn't get involved in its removal, snow is, "Just beautiful!"
But if you are a member of the shovel brigade, snow means ibuprofen, heating pads and liniment.
Most of the creatures in the Boreal Forest figured out what to do long ago. They don't go floundering around with just their little noses peeking above the white stuff. No, they grew snowshoes to stay on the top.
First Nations people took their clue from nature and made their own snowshoes, and toboggans. By the way, do you know how to say moose in Ojibwe? Oh, I guess you do.
I'm headed out now with our lab, Doc, to break trail, again, on our acreage in Nolalu. If I don't get back in time, Merry Christmas, everyone!
Incidentally, the clean-burn of these stoves also means less chimney-cleaning. I inspect our chimney annually but it has never needed cleaning. I have a friend with a much taller chimney than mine who also hasn't needed to sweep his chimney after switching to a high-effer. He used to clean his chimney monthly.
It's Sunday and that means I always read the obituaries in the newspaper. Just about every week one of these will include a photograph of a person holding a fish. It always strikes me that the family who supplied the information for the obit thought the fishing picture best depicted this man's life. It was when he was at his happiest. It's how we always want to remember him.
Having watched thousands of fishermen at our former business, Bow Narrows Camp, I understand it wasn't just the fish in the photograph that made the man so pleased. It was the entire experience that came before and after. There is something about fishing that transcends sport. I wrote about this one time in my old blog at the camp. See Fishing, Spirituality and Us.
We realized over time how important fishing and the trip to camp was to some people. As one of our guests told me, "I'll be here next year the same week. If I'm not here you'll know I died."
And one year he wasn't there.
We also had several people who hung on just to make one last trip. They died almost immediately afterwards. That fishing trip was how they wanted to remember their own lives on Earth.
Not many hours of sunlight now to harvest dry firewood. I'm scrambling to find enough dry balsam fir and spruce to supplement the couple of cords of birch I put away last spring. There was just too much snow for me to get more birch at the time.
I would like to recommend a new CBC show about nature and climate change. It is done by meteorologist Johanna Wagstaffe and I think most of you will find it fun and extremely interesting.
Just the name of the first show: What are Trees Saying To Each Other About Climate Change? should perk your curiosity. One of her guests is Suzanne Simard, the British Columbia forester who discovered how trees communicate.
Here's the link: Planet Wonder.
If you want a hoot, listen to this Bob Snider song about climate change.
