Local Features

On Wednesday afternoon, Zach Suchomel strategized with his four teammates in advance of a match of Smite, an online battle arena game. He suggested characters to use and to block as part of the game, each calculation aimed to give Tomahawk High School a better chance to beat Two Rivers High School . Suchomel is a junior at Tomahawk and one of the leaders of the school’s eSports team. With their hands on controllers, eyes on the screen of a gaming computer, and mouths constantly communicating

During the Second World War, raw materials were in high demand and difficult to obtain. This made recycling of metal, rubber, and paper more important than ever. Oneida County met its scrap collection goal but had to sacrifice an historic treasure to do it. When Congress declared war in December 1941, the nation had to mobilize industry quickly for full-time military production. The U.S. needed raw material to manufacture the steel and rubber necessary to construct ships, tanks, guns, and other

On Tuesday morning, Brendan Tuckey was putting the finishing touches on a germination incubator he built at his farm in Sugar Camp. The chamber, about the size of a large locker, is heated to help vegetable seeds begin to sprout in the spring. It will get its first use in the coming weeks. Tuckey and his wife Jenny own EverGood Farm, an organic vegetable farm serving the Northwoods. Most years, they sell much of what they grow at local farmer’s markets. But as the pandemic spread last spring,

Today, travel in and out of the Northwoods can be accomplished by private automobile or airline. In prior decades, people had multiple options for traveling, including that most mundane of all modes, the bus. Buses are often ignored in the history of transportation because they have an image problem. While they are the cheapest form of public transportation, they are also the slowest. They are not as glamorous or romanticized as passenger rail or airlines and are often associated with

As we move from winter toward spring, (a little sooner than I would have liked) I am getting excited to start biking around the Northwoods. I spend quite a bit of time road biking, which is not always compatible with one of my other favorite pastimes, looking for flowering plants. By early summer, my bike group and I will be logging 50 or more miles at a time, and there is plenty of Northwoods plant life to appreciate from a bike. We mostly ride on county and town roads out of town, so we aren’t

Different animals use different strategies to get through the winter. Some are more obvious than others. What about turtles? The Masked Biologist gives us a glimpse into their lives in this week’s Wildlife Matters. Recently a large snapping turtle garnered some attention on social media by doing what turtles do—swimming around slowly under water. What was a little unusual, at least for the photographer, is that the turtle swam right under where they were standing—there were a couple of inches of

Nathan Nuszkiewicz’s paintbrush is a chainsaw. His canvas is a tree or a massive wood slab. On Monday, he was outside his Rhinelander home and shop, working on a woodcarving to go on a roof peak at a customer’s home. “It’s going to be a whole scene, where we’ve got the trees and the sky and the clouds and the sunset in the middle, and then, through that, there’s going to be an actual six- to six-and-a-half foot eagle flying out over the trees,” he explained. Nathan’s wife and business partner,

News is just coming to light about a momentous wildlife management event from last December. It involves a little black-footed ferret named Elizabeth Ann, who along with a horse named Kurt, inspired this week’s Wildlife Matters. Black-footed ferrets have had a long, slow road back from the brink of total extinction. They are victims of their prey; prairie dogs were the target of farmers and ranchers on the prairie shot them, poisoned them, and destroyed their colonies early in the last century.

People interested in polar geography may know about the Eklund Islands in King George the Sixth Sound southwest of the Antarctic Peninsula. What might be less commonly known is that the Eklund Islands in Antarctica are named for a Northwoods native. The southernmost continent of Antarctica is cold, inhospitable, and not the sort of place that most Northwoods residents think about when looking for adventure. But for one Northwoods native, the chance to live and work in Antarctica was a dream come

Heather Berklund never envisioned herself as the Chief State Forester. She had worked for the DNR forestry division for two decades in the Northwoods, but didn’t have her mind set on the top job. “I would say it was never on my radar that I would ever be talking to you in this role or be in this position,” Berklund said on a recent interview, conducted while snowshoeing through the Northern Highland-American Legion State Forest near Woodruff. But hard work and dedication paid off, and the DNR