Long Lake Yarns

Steve scattered some extra sunflower seeds under the feeder. Look who arrived to check it out. I’m fairly certain this little guy is Michigan’s most common shrew: the Northern Short Tail Shrew a/k/a Blarina Brevicauda. We watched for about half an hour while he ducked in and out of a hole burrowed through the snow, [...]

Our young neighbor Zach says the walleyes on Hillman’s Long Lake bite most frequently through the ice at twilight.  They are probably so distracted by the beautiful sunsets that they lose their sense of self-preservation and just decide to nibble those tasty minnows after all. Steve caught this nineteen-incher a little before sunset, on a [...]

Hoover the cat is set in his ways. He sits at home in his cat tree looking out from a second floor bedroom. He sits in his kittypod in the living room window and watches the neighborhood’s activity. In the summer, he sits on the back porch staring at the air conditioner unit waiting for [...]

Eastern Gray Squirrels come in a range of colors. Michigan has the “classically” colored Gray Squirrels that are brown with white bellies.  But many of our Grays are of the black (melanistic) color variant. Some are colorfully confused, part brown, part black, part white. Plus we also have the smaller red squirrels. All of them, [...]

They made it to October!  There were four eggs in two nests this year. All hatched but one baby was never seen. These twins were born in late June in the south part of the lake. The twins and their parents were the more approachable of the two loon families. Sometimes they swam toward my [...]