Spring exciting time for wildlife lovers, animals

By: 
Ross Bielema
Columnist

As the brown, dry landscape recently freckled with snow yields to the ever-spreading greenery, hope for life and renewal swells in all of us.

After my recent column on hunting turkeys in the snow, I was surprised (as we all were) to see a few days in the 80s! That’s one of the dangers of a two-week lag time on columns. But it wasn’t too many days later that snow returned to Shawano County and areas north. I hope my column didn’t get blamed for that.

As much as I enjoy hunting and even hiking in the snow, I’m rapidly losing my love for cold. Maybe it’s my slightly poor circulation that makes it harder and harder to keep my fingers and toes warm, or maybe it’s the early onset of neuropathy in a couple toes (I blame my type 2 diabetes, although I’ve lost at least 30 pounds, thanks to Oh-oh-oh Ozempic. Face it, this ol’ fart is getting old (63 isn’t that bad, is it?)

I didn’t get drawn for a turkey permit this year, for the first time in 22 years, so I had to buy a surplus Season 4 tag (May 10-16). That should put me in the mosquito- and tick-infested woods about the time you read this. The gobblers have been teasing me on my commutes to work. One morning, I saw three toms in full strut on the 30-mile drive. Today (May 4) I saw a nice gobbler in full strut on my hunting field. When I came home, he was strutting again even closer to one of the permanent deer blinds I hunt from. Will he be there in a week? I’ll let you know.

The most amazing thing amid spring’s budding trees, bursting flowers and popping Mayapples are the magically appearing deer. Farm fields greening with alfalfa and grasses are suddenly filled with deer that just a month or two ago were hidden in the gray brush. I counted more than 40 deer in one small New London farm field in late April. Hunters complain about the lack of deer for the few days they are in the woods, but here’s real proof that the deer were there all along. The smaller ones were born last year.

We are fortunate to live in a backwater area of the Wolf River, where a slough, backwater lake and marsh surround our house. The cacophony of spring peepers, American toads and other amphibians is an amazing sound, and helped my real estate agent make a quick sale one spring night in 2000. We’ve already had several tiny painted turtles on our blacktop driveway and we often walk across the road to get them safely to the slough.

During spring rainstorms, the leopard and other frogs gather in the puddles of our road, and it’s almost impossible to miss them all when driving, no matter how slow you go. Warmer weather brings adult painted turtles to our back yard, where the soft sand becomes a nesting site. We typically get four or five mama turtles laying their eggs after digging holes. Later we find the remnants of turtle egg shells, and I’m never certain whether the baby turtles hatched successfully or if a raccoon had a tasty meal.

Brush piles provide hiding places for the cottontail rabbits, Eastern chipmunks, mice and occasional snakes on our 2-acre paradise. Brush piles also bring ticks, and sometimes I feel like torching them all, but maybe it’s the fond memories of bouncing on brush piles to flush bunnies during childhood rabbit hunts that stops me.

My older brother, Brian, who did his master’s thesis on massasauga rattlesnakes, taught me to protect snakes, since they do more good than harm. Venomous snakes are largely confined to the Mississippi River bluffs, so a painful bite from a bull snake or a stinky arm from the poo of an angry garter snake (if you know how to catch them) are the worst things spring snakes will deal out.

As a child, I had a pet hognose snake for a few weeks. Their self-defense tactics are striking without opening their mouth, hissing, rattling their tails in the leaves (most snakes do this; if you have ever heard a real rattlesnake buzzing, the two sound nothing alike) and eventually playing dead like an opossum. Devious grade-school boys can have so much fun unnerving pigtailed girls with hognose snakes! Do kids really go outside and look for critters these days? Probably not.

I’m also a birdwatcher and the migrating birds are always a welcome sight. The sandhill cranes are everywhere, with their rusty gate call second only to the sound of tundra (formerly called whistling) swans for my nature-starved ears. As I drove into Oshkosh one morning this week, I was shocked to see a sandhill crane pair with a chick in the grass of a business on Algoma Boulevard. I made a U-turn and snapped a few photos and a short video of the unafraid trio.

Welcome to springtime in Wisconsin. There’s a reason it’s called God’s Country. I call it home.


Ross Bielema is a freelance writer from New London and owner of Wolf River Concealed Carry LLC. Contact him at Ross@wolfriverccw.com.