Michigan Forest Life - October 11, 2025

Good morning forest friends,

Have you ever been in a tag alder swamp? They are distinctive ecosystems scattered

throughout mid-Michigan in naturally shallow depressions that hold water off-and-on throughout the year (Photo 1 and 2). Not enough water to support cattails, but enough for clumps of tag alders to grow old. They range from a few acres to hundreds of acres. The swamps are often laced with animal trails and are known for the year-round habitat they provide for deer, bear, bobcats, and ruffed grouse. They are also home (year-round or seasonal) to many animals

and reptiles that people may not give much consideration to. Several times each year, at Winterfield Pines Nature Sanctuary, we see rare turtles emerge from one of the tag alder swamps, Blandings turtles and Wood turtles. There are snakes beyond the common garter snake that make their home in the swamp. Many songbirds nest in tag alder branches. Skunks, opossums, porcupines, raccoons, and coyotes all use the swamp when it is dry.  For many animals, the swamp is only one part of a larger diverse habitat they roam, made up of forest, grassland, river, and swamp. Animals thrive with such natural diversity. 

Tag alders, also known as speckled alders, grow in clumps from a central root system, with stems springing up as sunlight permits. Individual stems rarely live to more than sixty-years-old. Each stem can grow ten to twenty-five feet tall and rarely becomes larger than three inches in diameter before breaking off from wind, ice, or beaver logging. Broken stems often lay on the swamp floor for several years and decay, adding to the rich (often mucky) soil from which the tag alders grow. New stalks grow from the same root system as the broken stem. A tag alder swamp is a complicated jungle of live and dead limbs. 

Water flowing from a tag alder swamp is often tea colored from tannins in the bark of decaying tag alder stems and from the cone-like seeds.

Because of the complicated entanglement that makes up a tag alder swamp, it is easy to

think of it as a kind of wasteland. To a human that may be so. But, it can be a critical place for the survival of many animals; animals that humans rarely see because of the excellent cover and isolation the swamp provides. It is also easy for humans to disregard the age of a tag alder swamp. Most of these swamps are likely to be many centuries old, maybe thousands of years old.  In fact, the photos I provide today are in a tag alder swamp that was noted in remarks of the State of Michigan's land surveyor in 1856 (Photo 3 - See highlighted remark 29.50).  

I see the beauty of a tag alder swamp and believe that humans should treat it with reverence and respect. The swamp is certainly significantly older than the individual pines, birch, oaks, maples and cedars that often surround it – or the animals that enter it.

If you walk into a tag alder swamp, follow an animal trail.  You will find solitude, wild beauty, and wonder.

I am happy to provide FOREST LEGEND: THE TALE OF OL' SPLIT TOE preview snippet 3 of

27 in today's post (Photo 4).

I wish you a fall day in the wilds, and the wonder of a tag alder swamp. 

Until next time,

Dan

Excerpt from Chapter 4

Context: Waawaashkeshi (Split Toe) is on a journey through the vast white pine forest to a place where he can ask a question of the forest spirits.

AD 1409 - As he crossed the stream, Waawaashkeshi thought of the river it flowed into, and then the larger one beyond that, each gathering water from the one before. All of them were far from the tag alder swamp, where a single raindrop, once fallen, became part of a small, muck-bottom pool—a collective of raindrops. If enough raindrops accumulated, they would trickle from pool to pool, then spill over the beaver rise, joining other swamp-born drops to form a thin creek. That creek meandered to the small river where the Ojibwe built their village. The Kayeskikan-ziibi—Shell River. (Centuries later Waawaashkeshi heard European settlers call this the Clam River.) His raindrops would gather from farther away and merge with raindrops from other tributaries, all swimming as a group to the Muskegon, a much bigger river that collected water from other creeks and rivers as it flowed south and west across the land known to the Ojibwe as Mishigamme—what would one day be called “Michigan.”

It took his swamp raindrop fifteen days to finally reach the huge gathering, Lake Michigan, where trillions of raindrops dissolved into one congregation, including raindrops that traveled down other great rivers: the Kalamazoo, the Grand, and the Manistee.

To Waawaashkeshi, the spirits of the trees and of the ancestors and of all natural things were each like drops of rain that became part of a river. Its current flowed through his own veins.

Copyright @ 2025 by Daniel S. Ellens 

Praise for FOREST LEGEND:

“In this wise, deeply moving modern legend, a majestic deer is chosen by the spirits to travel across time while staying in place—his birthplace, one small corner of Michigan—and to witness the ceaseless changes on Earth by glacier, fire, flood, plants and animal, ever more clever and numerous humans, and Mother Nature’s unhurried, even-handed remediation. Spanning time from the end of the Ice Age to the climax of the Industrial Age, “Forest Legend”, a story for all ages, brings to vivid life the question on which our survival hangs: Can humans ever conquer and replace nature? Should we even try? Can we relearn that we are a part of her, and corral our technological powers within the reverence and respect of our Indigenous ancestors?”

– Annie Gottlieb, author of “Do You Believe in Magic?”, co-author of “Wishcraft” and “The Cube”, critic and commentator in The New York Times, O the Oprah Magazine, VOGUE, The Nation.

Presale Release date: November 25, 2025

Publication Date: March 31, 2026