John Pepin

(ITALICS)

“Come on Pearl, come on Kitty, if you feel inclined, down around the bend in the water, bring your fishin’ line,” –Gordon Lightfoot

In the evenings now, if I travel along the county road, the deer are gathering in any place where there’s bare ground.

The surrounding landscape remains largely covered in deep snow. The Wintermaker doesn’t want to let go. He’s enjoyed a tremendous season.

The deer — slow to run or even move — appear worn out and tired, hoping to find something green to munch on, like fresh grass or the stems and leaves of early spring flowers, like the daffodils and crocuses.

Deer are gathered in the small forest openings, in fields and yards and along south-facing ridges and roadsides looking for these intermittent refuges of food and comfort.

Sometimes, instead, the bare ground yields only the brown and withered grasses of last year’s forgotten seasons. The open areas to bed down in often only provide cold ground, mud or frosty, wet grass.

These animals are hanging on to what strength they’ve got left, willing the spell of winter to break and evaporate into the chilly, gray skies.

Their eyes look sad and wanting. I can empathize with them. It’s been a long winter, and it looks like spring’s arrival, in any practical sense, is going to be late.

I saw and heard my first robin of the year a day or so after the big March blizzard — the annual “St. Patty’s Day Storm” of Yooper lore.

The robin was in the company of a red-winged blackbird who was singing, too. I haven’t heard or seen either one since that day. I put some meal worms out for the robins and there’s sunflower seeds at the feeders the blackbirds would eat.

Perhaps they have perished.

I’ve seen a grackle at the feeders and a couple of chipmunks running around with the gray and red squirrels on top of the snow. These are more signs of spring.

As one would imagine, the coyotes are aware of the withered state of many of the deer. In addition, the persistence of the late winter snow, coupled with an easy-to-walk-on crust over the snow, makes finding a venison supper easier than usual for the coyotes.

A few evenings ago, about an hour before dark, I saw a group of deer gathering on the ice of an inland lake, getting ready to walk out to a tree-covered island situated about 250 yards offshore.

The deer walked cautiously, single file, out to the island, where they likely found remaining cedar boughs to chew on and nighttime places to bed down.

However, later that night, after darkness had long since fallen, I heard a few coyotes barking and yipping. The high-pitched sounds were coming from off the lake, out toward the island.

I don’t think this was a coincidence.

I also heard a pack of coyotes a couple nights later, vocalizing from the back end of our property. It sounded like they were right in the backyard, not far from the back door.

Their position was close to a trail. Deer travel along this route to move between sheltered cedar bedding areas and some of the places where open areas of bare grass or exposed rocky and grass-covered knolls or bluffs are located.

Again, not a coincidence.

Other animals use the trail in the woods, including bobcats and foxes. I’ve seen their tracks in the snow and, at other times of the year, in the mud.

I ducked out the back door into the darkness with my flashlight, but I didn’t find any eyes shining back at me. No sight of the coyotes. The canine voices stopped singing soon afterward.

When they stopped, the great horned owls started.

I like to imitate their deep hoots. They sing back to me, but despite their closeness in the surrounding woods, they don’t often make an appearance. Sometimes, they do land or roost during the day in the big pine tree in front of our house.

I tried to get a northern saw-whet owl to sing back to me from out of the darkness with an imitation of their call, but for the fifth night in a row, none were responding.

The snow in many places is still deep enough to be measured in feet.

Looking at the significant depths out in our backyard, it makes it hard to imagine those summertime days of mowing the lawn or sitting outside on warm summer nights.

The cold weather and continued snow do make for good times to enjoy the sauna and burn hot fires in the fireplace. It is also still a good time for soups and chili.

I’ve still got a few in-house wintertime projects to start and/or complete, and there’s always reading to enjoy. Things to learn. Things to do.

I need to let those things be my focus to help burn away these last few weeks of wintertime. I want everything in the house done now before spring truly arrives, so that I can spend my time outside as much as possible then.

There’s less than a month before the inland trout season opens. I need to have my trout fishing tackle tuned up and ready to hit the creeks, lakes and streams.

But ready I do plan to be.

I can already imagine those first couple of trout outings will expose just how long the wintertime has been and, beyond a lot of snow throwing, how much I have been stuck in the house instead of outside walking in the woods.

It will soon be time to bang the rust off my casting arm and get out there — bugs be damned for fish in the pan. Yummy.

Driving home down the county road, a deer stumbles out onto the blacktop ahead of me and stops. I slow my Jeep down to a crawl and the deer doesn’t move.

I slowly drive around her and she stands right there. It’s very strange to see. No white tail flag flying, no high jumping into the brush.

Down off the shoulder of the road, I spot a couple more deer. They don’t even look up at me as I drive past them. For all their sake, I hope the winter weather breaks soon.

It’s plain to see that the deer are struggling.

For me, it’s best when all four seasons get their due. The more evenly they are distributed throughout the year, the more I feel in tune with the earth and what’s happening — not ahead of myself or lagging too far behind.

The lingering winter weather has left me struggling too — not physically like the deer but certainly psychologically. Even a small amount of sunshine brings relief.

In my head, I hear old John Denver singing, “Sunshine on the water looks so lovely; sunshine almost always makes me high.”

Outdoors North is a weekly column produced by the Michigan Department of Natural Resources on a wide range of topics important to those who enjoy and appreciate Michigan’s world-class natural resources of the Upper Peninsula.