Michigan Forest Life - January 31, 2026

Good morning, nature enthusiasts, 

By the time I left Winterfield Pines Nature Sanctuary this week the coldest of the cold had

already passed. I remember wondering about a disagreement in the Treehouse thermometers. The one on the east side had bottomed out and was reading -19F at daybreak (Photo 1). The one on the west side may also have been bottomed out and read -31F (Photo 2), but I considered that to be impossibly cold and thought that the thermometer must not register properly at those end-of-scale temperatures. Someone in the town of Marion let me know that their thermometer read -20F. So, I assumed that the real temperature at the Treehouse must have been -23F ish. The Treehouse is generally about 5 Fahrenheit degrees colder than Marion.  Later in the week, I stepped into the warm house of my farming neighbor for a bit of conversation. Their thermometer had registered -25F on the cold day. That was that range we were dealing with. There was also a bit of wind layered on top of the raw temperature. True winter cold. 

Twice I heard something below the Treehouse snap. Like a gunshot. Something breaking in the extreme cold – contraction from cold fighting against the shape of the structure, or perhaps a fight between everything that was warm inside the Treehouse and everything that was ultra-cold outside. Differences in thermal expansion. When the sky lightened, I went below the Treehouse to have a look. All seemed well. Solid. Nothing broken that I could see. Time should tell. 

The next day a stream of 27 deer walked single-file past the Treehouse. It surprised me. The

quantity. They just kept coming – one after another. Where were they coming from? Where were they going to?  I was encouraged to see they had made it through the cold night. Were they looking for food? Shelter?  They were walking toward the tag alder swamp. Would they find some warmth there? Perhaps they could hide from the wind. It was a slow, steady march. They made me think of Ol’ Split Toe.

It’s time for another FOREST LEGEND: THE TALE OF OL’ SPLIT TOE teaser. Preview snippet 19 of 27 (Photo 4).

Wishing you warmth when you need it, and a place out of the wind.

Until next time,

Dan

P.S. Another sunrise photo for you (Photo 4).

Excerpt from Chapter 24 

AD 1960 - When the owner put the word out and finally made a deal to sell, it took quite

some time, and it was really Split Toe who sealed the deal—though neither the owner nor Split Toe knew it. It would be a long time before this piece of property had anything to offer that the average person might want.

The person purchasing the land represented a small family group whose main interest was hunting. They hoped to find a parcel of inexpensive property they could gather at each year for the deer hunting season. Given time, as a distant second objective, they might sell the timber again, lease the mineral rights, and find other ways to make the land pay for itself. The buyer had done this before with other property. The equation worked.

But what caught the buyer’s attention most was the large rack of a huge-bodied deer that stepped out of the tag alder swamp onto the gas pipeline just as the buyer stepped onto the pipeline on the opposite side. Split Toe had not expected the human to be around. No one had set foot on the property since the gravel mining stopped. Split Toe stood for a few seconds to assess the human, then dipped his antlers deeply to the ground before leaping back onto the centuries-old trail encircling the tag alder swamp.

Copyright @ 2026 by Daniel S. Ellens

It’s a great time to pre-order FOREST LEGEND from Amazon or wherever you buy books!!! 

Hardcover, paperback, eBook, Audiobook.

Publication Date: March 31, 2026

Praise for FOREST LEGEND:

“Through the eyes of a mythical, time-traveling whitetail buck, this rich tale explores humanity’s relationship with nature. A really good read.”

- E. L. Stanesa, avid fly fisherman and conservationist.