Friday, September 4, 2026.
Saginaw Bay is 78 degrees, 0 mph out of the and 0.3-foot chop. Good water for getting the kayak out along the beach. The Kawkawlin reaches the bay a half mile down the shore, and the Saginaw River up the way is running 1910 cfs, rising. Degree days stand at 1947 against a normal of 2156, so the season is running about 13 days late. Against the long-term normal, accumulated heat is running ahead by 228 growing degree days. Daylight is 13 hours 3 minutes, shortening about 2.9 minutes a day, and the soil at six inches is 76 degrees, warm enough for morels and the warm-season garden. First frost here typically comes in early October, leaving about 31 days of growing season. The Trico is the hatch on the water now. Velvet shedding marks peak summer in the woods and the buck's transition toward rut; the bucks start moving more aggressively. On the bay, 1 notable bird is being reported, including Red-necked Phalarope. Bay County is in abnormally dry on the latest Drought Monitor.
Correlation: First hard frost and Walleye fall feed-up overlap on the calendar right now. Watch whether they track together as the years bank up.
Where the year stands, read from the day's numbers and the calendar. Written each morning, kept as a record. Not a field report.
Goldenrod has opened along the Thumb roadsides and aster is coming on behind it, purple and white in the low wet edges, though both are arriving nearly two weeks late by the record. The soil still holds 73 degrees of summer, enough to keep the trico spinners working the AuSable riffles in the early morning, their white wings nearly invisible until the light catches them. Katydids have taken up their nighttime rasp in the woodlots. King salmon are pushing in from the lake, feeling what the shortening days insist upon even when the warmth lingers. Sugar maple and the first hard frost are perhaps three weeks out, perhaps less. Stand at the river's edge before sunrise and watch the spinner fall over any slow flat water.
2026-09-04
The signals nature is giving right now, and what each one points to on the rivers, in the woods, and in the garden.
All seventy-one events, filed under the month each one peaks in. These are the ordinary dates, the year as it usually runs here. This year is running about 12 days behind normal, so the heat-driven ones are arriving off these dates by about that much. The months are uneven on purpose. May carries fifteen of them and January carries two, which is what the year is actually like here.
The lakes sit at their yearly low and the great horned owls are already on eggs. The first insistence that something has begun while everything looks finished.
Bucks drop their antlers into the snow and the eagles settle onto nests. Nothing is green, but the year has committed itself.
Sap runs in the maples, red-wings come back to the cattails, and the woodcock begins his sky dance at dusk over wet ground. The first month you can hear the change.
Ice leaves the inland lakes, steelhead push up the tributaries, and the Hendricksons come off the AuSable. On the bay the northeast wind season opens.
The crowded month, and the one that rewards attention most. Lilac, morels, warblers, apple blossom, the median last frost, and oak leaves reaching the size of a squirrel's ear.
Fawns in the tall grass, fireflies over the ditches, and the Hex hatch on the AuSable, which is the one night of the year the big trout feed without caution.
The bay comes to its warmest and its calmest, the lakes to their seasonal peak. Basswood in bloom, and the year holding still for a few weeks.
Trico spinners at first light, katydids after dark, and the first goldenrod along the roadsides. The turn begins well before anyone admits it.
Velvet comes off the antlers, the warblers go back south, and the sugar maples show their first color in the crowns.
Peak color through the northeast, the first hard frost on the garden, and trout moving onto the spawning gravel. The walleye feed up for winter.
The rut, the cranes staging, the swans going south. The last of the moving, and then the woods go quiet.
Ice takes the inland lakes, and in some years the snowy owls come down out of the north. The year closes as quietly as it opened.
This season's accumulated heat against known degree-day thresholds, with the aquatic hatches cross-checked against the live AuSable water temperature. Estimates, not promises; emergence shifts with the weather.