Creating Habitat: Nature's Way

It’s a good bet that warm, cozy and secure in their homes throughout the land, most traveling bird hunters remained blissfully unaware of nature’s rampage in Michigan last spring.

- By Tom Carney

From March 28-30, 2025, ice storms unleashed their fury across the northern part of the Lower Peninsula and into the Upper Peninsula, snapping trees, cutting power and reconfiguring the forest floors in unimaginable ways.

In Rogers City, located on the shores of Lake Huron at the tip of the “index finger” of the state’s mitten, the early part of the storm and the speed with which it developed terrified Brittany VanderWall. Its intensity left her feeling helpless and powerless, both literally and figuratively. Her electricity went out for six days. She lost phone service for 24 hours. There was nothing she could do other than to sit there and watch the ice accumulate in her backyard, watch the “strange intersection of freeze and thaw,” watch the tree limbs just “bow and bow and bow.” Then snap!

“The amount of ice we had and the amount of time we had it in, I don’t think anyone could imagine that,” she said.

Nighttime made things worse, especially in areas far from town where trees dominated the landscape. In the dark one could hear trees and branches: “Crash! Crash! Crash!”

VanderWall called the ordeal “our own version of a psychological and physical grief” shared with the landscape. She felt a double tug, the first as one personally affected, watching the storm develop in her own yard. Then, as the professional forester for the American Forest Foundation, she cried every time she encountered the destruction up close. The first time she shed real tears, and the rest, “metaphorically.”

As he encountered the storm farther west, Randy Claramunt remembered, “Watching it was devastating.”