12-point buck spotted swimming miles between Apostle Islands
Aug 19, 2021 07:34AM ● By Editor
By Chelsey Lewis from the Milwaukee Journal Sentinel - August 18, 2021
Kelly Peterson was driving on Madeline Island in Lake Superior on Friday when her son’s fiancé spotted what looked like a person in the lake.
“She thought someone had their hands up in the air, looking for help,” Peterson said.
They pulled over, and Peterson put a telephoto lens on her camera and zoomed in on the person.
Those weren’t arms, they were antlers. What Peterson estimated to be a 12-point buck was swimming hundreds of yard offshore, making its way to Michigan Island more than three miles away.
Peterson said they first tried to contact wildlife rehabilitators and first responders to help the deer, but when they struggled to reach anyone due to poor cell service, they walked to a home nearby where a couple people were sitting on a dock.
“They said, “Oh yeah, the animals do this all the time,’ ” Peterson said. So she and her family continued watching the deer swim. After an hour, the deer was only about halfway to the other island, but its head never went below water, she said.
It was Peterson’s first trip to Madeline Island, which is part of the 22-island Apostle Islands archipelago but is not part of the national lakeshore off the Bayfield Peninsula. The Eleva native called seeing the swimming deer a once-in-a-lifetime experience.
“It was amazing,” she said.
She noted that on their drive up to the Apostles, she wondered if there were any animals on the islands besides birds, and if so, how they got there.
Both questions were answered when she spotted the Michael Phelps of deer.
Eddie Shea, a wildlife biologist with the Wisconsin Department of Natural Resources who works in Ashland and Bayfield counties, said he wasn't surprised someone spotted a deer swimming in the lake. He used to work in southwestern Wisconsin, and people regularly saw deer swim across the Mississippi River there.
"Water is not really that much of a barrier for wildlife,” he said, but noted the cold water of Lake Superior made this incident interesting and it could be a "physiological stressor" for a deer, even if it had a little extra fat leading up to the fall rut. The surface water temperature in the Apostle Islands right now is about 68 degrees.
In addition to deer, the islands are home to American martens, bobcats, coyotes, fishers, gray foxes, gray wolves, raccoons, red foxes, weasels and black bears — which have also been spotted swimming between the islands.
The National Park Service notes on the Apostle Islands website that bears have “expert swimming skills” and may be found on any of the islands. Tracks have been spotted on Outer Island, the island farthest from the mainland. Stockton Island has one of the highest concentrations of black bears in North America, according to the NPS.
Julie Van Stappen, chief of resource management for the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, said the NPS is studying how animals, and American martens in particular, move between the islands, whether that be via swimming or walking over the ice when the lake freezes in the winter. They're especially interested in how climate change might affect the connectivity of the islands.
She said while it's not unheard of to see bears and deer swimming, "it is a rare event." In her 30 years of working for the park service, she's only seen a couple bears swimming in the lake.
Julie Van Stappen, chief of resource management for the Apostle Islands National Lakeshore, said the NPS is studying how animals, and American martens in particular, move between the islands, whether that be via swimming or walking over the ice when the lake freezes in the winter. They're especially interested in how climate change might affect the connectivity of the islands.
She said while it's not unheard of to see bears and deer swimming, "it is a rare event." In her 30 years of working for the park service, she's only seen a couple bears swimming in the lake.
But bears do still move between the islands, and Van Stappen said if you see one — or another animal — in the water, you should give it space.
"Give it some distance and leave it alone. ... It doesn’t need to be rescued,” she said. “The big thing is we don’t want somebody going with a kayak and going next to a bear. That would be dangerous for them, and you don’t want to harass the bear, either."
But if it's wearing a blue and orange jersey, well, that's a different story.
To see the original report and read related stories, follow this link to the jsonline.com website. https://www.jsonline.com/story/travel/wisconsin/outdoors/2021/08/18/deer-spotted-swimming-miles-betw...
