Who Lives Out There

The animals of this peninsula are worth knowing, and one of them will probably cross in front of you.

White-tailed deer are everywhere and are the genuine driving hazard here — dawn and dusk, field edges, and never alone. Black bears are present in modest numbers, shy, and mainly a problem where people leave food out.

Then the odder ones. Porcupines, which are slow, unbothered, and climb trees to eat bark — if you see what looks like a large dark football wedged in a branch, that is one. Coyotes, heard far more than seen. Bobcats, which almost nobody sees. Beaver and river otter in the inland lakes and creeks.

And in the water, the reason the fishing towns exist: lake trout and whitefish deep offshore, salmon that were introduced in the nineteen sixties and now run up the rivers in autumn, and steelhead in spring.

The invasive story is worth a line too, because it explains why the water is so startlingly CLEAR. Zebra and quagga mussels arrived in ballast water and now filter enormous volumes of the lake, stripping out the plankton that used to cloud it. Beautiful to look at, and a serious problem — that plankton was the base of the food web, and the whole fishery has been rearranged around its loss.

Clear water is not always good news. Sometimes it means something has been eaten.