The lake really is warmer

Plus: a $1M bear professorship, oaks under siege, and Devil's Lake construction

Author

Forrest Koslowski
August 13, 2026

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Mornin’ to anybody who’s ever thought about poaching a run. Tyrol Basin’s owner pleaded no contest to disorderly conduct after following a 17-year-old off the property over a day pass and making him come back and pay double. All over sixty bucks. This is the Wiscampsin Weekly, the email that gets you in the know on the Wisconsin outdoors in 5 minutes or less. New reader? Subscribe here.

This week’s weekly:

🐻 $1 million bear professorship lands at UW-Stevens Point

🌳 Stacked stressors are hammering Wisconsin's oaks

🚧 Devil's Lake North Shore parking lots under construction

🌡️ STORY OF THE WEEK: The lake really is warmer

🐻 $1 million bear professorship lands at UW-Stevens Point LINK

  • The Boone and Crockett Club and the Stephens Family Foundation put up a permanent $1 million endowment at UW-Stevens Point for a wildlife professor focused on black bear research and management.

  • Cady Sartini, an associate wildlife professor at UWSP, takes the job. She'll also run a bear fellowship that puts undergrads and grad students out doing real field research instead of reading about it.

  • The money covers salary, research, coursework, and outreach. Sartini says it lets UWSP team up with the DNR on bigger bear questions the agency couldn't take on alone. Wisconsin's bears finally get their own faculty appointment.

🌳 Stacked stressors are hammering Wisconsin's oaks LINK

  • Wisconsin's oaks are taking it from all sides. Spongy moth defoliation, years of drought, and now storm-broken branches that open the door to oak wilt.

  • DNR pest coordinator Michael Hillstrom says three dry springs in a row let the spongy moths boom, since the fungus that keeps them down needs wet soil. Trees are still recovering from that 2022-2024 outbreak.

  • Storm-hit spots like central Wisconsin and the Fox Valley are the ones to watch, since oak wilt can take a red oak down inside a month. Waukesha County arborist Rachel Lilla says if the color looks off, get somebody out while there's still leaves in the canopy.

🚧 Devil's Lake North Shore parking lots under construction LINK

  • Heads up if you're going by Devil's Lake this fall. Crews started pulverizing and repaving the North Shore lots in early August, and they'll be at it into spring 2027.

  • It's happening in phases so there's always some parking, and when it's done you get new lighting, better drainage, and a universal kayak launch. The North Shore Chateau and Rock Elm Shelter close for renovations late this year.

  • Shelters and day-use areas stay open, but access is tight and the DNR wants folks out of the work zones. South Shore has nothing planned, and Mirror Lake and Rocky Arbor are right up the road if you'd rather dodge the cones.

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🌡️ STORY OF THE WEEK: The lake really is warmer LINK

You know how you keep saying the lake doesn't feel as cold as it did when you were a kid? Turns out that's not your memory going, it's the lake.

The UW Trout Lake Station has been taking Trout Lake's temperature for about 50 years running, with patchier summer readings going back to the 1920s. For most of that stretch the warming was slow and boring. Then the last 25 years happened.

Trout Lake now runs roughly one degree Celsius warmer in summer than it did a century ago. Down in Madison, Mendota has 150 years of records telling the same story.

"The July and August average temperatures are statistically, significantly higher than they were in the early 80s," said limnologist Carol Warden.

One degree sounds like nothing. But Warden points out you can feel the difference between the water at your feet and the water at your chest just treading in place. Your toes have been running this experiment for years. If we can pick up a gradient that small on a quick swim, everything that spends its entire life down there can too. And they don't get to towel off and go inside.

Fall's shifting too. "When you go for a late September swim thinking you're going to be a cold-water dipper, that might not be the case anymore," Warden said. Ice cover is down about 10 days since 1982, and the ten warmest years on record worldwide have all landed since 2015.

Here's the part anybody who read our walleye item last week will recognize. Cold-water fish handle a warm surface by heading deep. The deep water stays cold. Trouble is it runs out of oxygen, because warm water grows more algae, and when that algae dies and sinks, the bacteria eating it use up the air down there.

Which doesn't make algae the bad guy, and Warden is careful about that.

"If you want to go to a fish fry, you got to have some algae to start that process," she said. "It's always about when it gets out of balance."

And balance is partly on us. The best thing lakefront folks can do is leave the shoreline natural. Less runoff, fewer nutrients, fewer blooms.

So maybe skip mowing clear down to the water this year.

Now send this to a neighbor and get out 'der!

WISCAMPSIN WEEKLY POLL

Last Week's Trivia Check

We asked what a Piping Plover parent does when a hungry predator gets a little too close to the nest. A solid 69% of you knew exactly how these protective shorebirds operate! And shoutout to the reader who left this perfect comment: "Just assumed they did the same as cousin killdeer..."

The Correct Answer: Fakes a broken wing and staggers off to lead the predator away.

The Takeaway: Piping Plovers (and their common Killdeer cousins) use a dramatic tactic called a "broken-wing display." By dragging a wing and flopping on the sand, they trick foxes, raccoons, or gulls into thinking they are an easy, injured meal, slowly luring the danger safely away from their tiny, camouflaged chicks!

This Week's Trivia

As we head into mid-August, the evenings are starting to get slightly cooler and the late-summer insect chorus is at its absolute peak. If you are sitting around a campfire this weekend, you can actually use a cool biological party trick called "Dolbear's Law".

By counting the rapid chirps of a Snowy Tree Cricket and applying a simple math formula, what can you accurately estimate in the outdoors?

Give it a gut check and click a response below:

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A review from the trail… Three words, five cheeses. We'll take it.

Well, how'd we do this week?

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