The wrong turn

Plus: plovers back after 49 years, a new trout preserve, and Copper Peak's Olympic push

Author

Forrest Koslowski
August 27, 2026

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Mornin’ to everybody who’s spent years blaming Illinois for what lakefront costs. Turns out Minnesotans have been quietly outbuying them since 2021, 9.5% of our waterfront to Illinois’ 9.4%. Been pointing at the wrong border this whole time. Though at Lake Geneva, Illinois still takes 47.5%, so hang onto the grudge for that one.

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:

🐦 Piping plovers nest on Wisconsin Point after 49 years

🌲 New trout stream preserve opens in Marathon County

⛷️ Copper Peak wants an American on the Olympic podium

🦆 STORY OF THE WEEK: The wrong turn

🐦 Piping plovers nest on Wisconsin Point after 49 years LINK

  • A pair of piping plovers nested on Wisconsin Point in Superior this summer, first time in the St. Louis River estuary since 1977. The birds are endangered in the Great Lakes.

  • The beach they picked was built for them. Crews dropped 87,000 cubic yards of dredged sand from the Duluth-Superior harbor in 2019 to make 14 acres of nesting habitat, a $4.5 million job with the Army Corps, DNR and the St. Louis River Alliance pitching in. Took 'em six years to notice.

  • That makes four plover nesting sites statewide, along with the Apostle Islands and two down in lower Green Bay. The point stays closed to people April 1 through Aug. 24 each year.

🌲 New trout stream preserve opens in Marathon County LINK

  • The North Central Conservancy Trust just opened Big Cain Creek Preserve in northern Marathon County, 30 acres of forest, wetland and trout water that anybody can now go walk.

  • Mary Binkley grew up in Wausau and donated the land her parents bought in the '60s. A quarter mile of Big Cain Creek runs through it, rated a Class 1 trout stream, which means the trout reproduce on their own. There's a half-mile trail, a few benches and a kiosk.

  • Open daylight hours, no motors, and they routed the trail around the sensitive spots on purpose. NCCT protects more than 5,500 acres of central Wisconsin through easements and owns four preserves open to anybody. Gentle recreation, they call it.

⛷️ Copper Peak wants an American on the Olympic podium LINK

  • Bob Jacquart's pitch to donors is pretty simple: want to help put an American on an Olympic podium? It's working. Crews are pouring concrete across two acres of landing hill at Copper Peak in Ironwood, just over the line from Hurley.

  • U.S. jumpers currently finish around 16th out of 22 nations. Copper Peak wants them in the top five, and Norway is rooting for it. The Norwegians partnered with the U.S. team back in 2022 and figure this hill is the sport's next step.

  • Nobody's flown off Copper Peak in 30 years. A $20 million Michigan DNR grant and donors are changing that, with October 2028 the target. Adventure Ride to the top runs Sundays only during construction.

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🦆 STORY OF THE WEEK: The wrong turn LINK

Matt Scott and his buddy went out on Lake Superior this month and ignored the fishing report. Went somewhere they had no business going.

Best wrong turn anybody made in Wisconsin this year.

Scott spotted a loon with its head shaped wrong. Too blocky. He got the binoculars up and there it was, a big pale bill where a common loon's would be black.

"I saw the huge yellow beak, bone-colored beak, and panicked initially," he said. "I scrambled to get my camera out of the bag."

He fired off a few frames and sent them to an online bird ID group. Word came back quick. Yellow-billed loon. The first one ever recorded in Wisconsin.

Scott, it should be said, lives in Minnesota. First our lakefront, now our bird records.

Yellow-billed loons are the biggest loon there is and the rarest. They belong in Arctic water, off Alaska and northern Canada, and when they do wander they usually turn up along the California coast. Not Douglas County.

Greg Neise of the American Birding Association says the whole Midwest has maybe 20 records in the last hundred years, and that Wisconsin was "kind of overdue."

Here's the part that makes birders lose sleep. It's August, still breeding season, and this one was in full breeding plumage, black with rows of white spots across the back. That makes it only the second yellow-billed loon in breeding colors ever recorded east of the Rockies.

Nobody knows what it was doing there. Neise figures it finished breeding and just wandered off. "Birds that are done breeding for the year, they just wander about until it's time to do the other thing they do."

Nobody has seen it since Aug. 1. Two birders drove up from Milwaukee to look for it. Scott went out with them. They came up empty.

Cold water, plenty of fish. Neise thinks it's still out there in the Great Lakes somewhere, and that a bird like that can put a couple hundred miles behind it in a single night.

"Typically when you're finding something like this, you're looking for it," Scott said. "We were doing quite the opposite."

Now go ignore a fishing report and get out 'der!

WISCAMPSIN WEEKLY POLL

Last Week's Trivia Check

We asked what actually kicks off velvet shedding. Dead even split, 50% of you got there. The other half figured those cold late-August nights were doing the work, which is a reasonable guess and also wrong.

The Correct Answer: Decreasing daylight triggers a testosterone spike that cuts off blood flow to the antlers.

The Takeaway: It's the daylight, not the cold. As the days get shorter a buck's testosterone spikes, the antler hardens up, and the blood vessels feeding the velvet pinch shut. Cut off from blood, the velvet dies and comes away in about a day. Which means all that tree rubbing you see this time of year isn't a buck wearing the velvet off. It's already dead. He's just scraping off what's left.

This Week's Trivia

Late August, and the chinook and coho are already stacking up off the Lake Michigan harbors and piers, waiting on their run up the rivers. Twenty-plus pounds of silver and about the best fight you'll get in this state. Here's the thing though. Not one of those fish belongs here.

Why were Pacific salmon deliberately introduced into Lake Michigan by fisheries managers back in the 1960s?

Give it a gut check and click a response below:

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A review from the trail… Ten for ten. Getting this framed before you change your minds.

Well, how'd we do this week?

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