What to look for in nature in Minnesota this January

Where can you see golden eagles in Minnesota in January, and how are they counted?

• The Golden Eagle Survey

  Usually the third Saturday of January · Blufflands of southeast Minnesota, western Wisconsin, northeast Iowa and beyond

  The survey grew out of the Golden Eagle Project, which joins Audubon Minnesota and the Wabasha eagle center with the Minnesota DNR’s nongame program. On the 22nd survey, held January 17, 2026, the center says 227 volunteers drove 97 routes covering about 25,000 square miles, and the tally came to 111 golden eagles. The birds that winter here nest as far as 2,000 miles away in northern Canada. The 2027 date is not posted yet, so if you would like a route, write to the center well before mid-January.

• Telling the two eagles apart

  November through March · Coulees, goat prairies and wooded bluff slopes above the Mississippi

  A young bald eagle is dark brown with untidy white blotches, and it is the bird most often mistaken for a golden. The National Eagle Center’s field trips are built around telling the two apart, and the center offers a free sheet of golden eagle ID pointers for the Upper Midwest. Search where open prairie meets forested bluff, the hunting ground these eagles prefer, rather than along the river. Both species have wingspans of roughly 6 to 7.5 feet.

• The Midwinter Bald Eagle Survey

  Early to mid-January (January 7 to 21 in 2026) · Standard routes along rivers and reservoirs

  Nationwide eagle counts began in 1979, and volunteers and agency staff still drive fixed routes each January to track wintering bald eagles across the lower 48 states; the U.S. Army Corps of Engineers posts the national survey dates. The 2026 window ran from January 7 to 21, with January 9 and 10 as target days. Along the Mississippi below Red Wing, check shoreline cottonwoods beside any stretch the current keeps open.

How does Minnesota count its moose each January?

• What the 2026 survey found

  Flown in January, reported in March · The Arrowhead and the Boundary Waters

  Observers saw 385 moose: 163 bulls, 143 cows, 63 calves and 16 adults they could not classify. Adjusted for the moose they could not see, the estimate came to 4,470, up 11 percent from 2025. The report warns that the margin is wide (3,354 to 6,173), and it describes a population that fell steeply from 2009 to 2013 and has more or less held steady since.

• Moose in deep snow

  All winter · Young aspen stands, old burns and cutovers

  Moose browse twigs all winter, and the DNR lists quaking aspen among their important foods. Calves face their hardest stretch now: DNR researchers note that calf survival can drop sharply between January and April. Look for clipped twig ends at moose height, beds melted into the snow and long-legged tracks that plow straight through drifts a deer would go around.

When do wolves breed in Minnesota, and where can you hear them?

• Courtship and scent marking

  Building through January toward a peak in February · Wolf range across the northern forest, from the Arrowhead to the northwest

  Sources differ a little on timing: the University of Minnesota Duluth puts mating in February, Voyageurs National Park says February and March, and the Voyageurs Conservancy says the season starts in late January. Wolves mark their territories with urine and scat, and biologists describe more marking and more defense of territory as breeding approaches, so January trails are a good place to find it on snowbanks and at trail junctions. Pups follow about 63 days after mating, in an underground den.

• Howling

  Calm evenings and nights, most often in midwinter · Remote lakes and forest roads in the north

  Wolves howl to announce where they are and to keep neighbors out. A U.S. Geological Survey study in the Superior National Forest found that packs answered human howls more often in midwinter, a rise tied to the breeding season, especially in groups with a breeding pair. Stand on a frozen lake on a windless night, keep quiet and listen; sound travels a long way over snow and ice.

• Tracks on the lakes

  After any fresh snow · Frozen lakes, shorelines and plowed park roads

  Voyageurs National Park says six to nine packs hold territory in or around the park, and wolves are often seen crossing its entrance roads or trotting the shorelines of the big lakes. A wolf print runs about 4.5 inches long by 3.5 inches wide, clearly bigger than a coyote’s, and a pack on the move often steps in one shared trail.

When are black bear cubs born in Minnesota?

• Birth in the den

  Usually January, sometimes early February · Dens across the northern forest

  According to the DNR, cubs are usually born in January, and Minnesota litters most often hold three (an average of 2.6). The North American Bear Center in Ely says a newborn weighs half a pound to a pound, and the mother licks the cubs clean and answers each cry for warmth and milk. The cubs themselves do not hibernate. They reach five or six pounds by mid-March, and mother and cubs usually walk out in early April.

• How the mother gets through

  Late fall to spring · The same den

  A hibernating bear lives on stored fat, and in the far north the sleep can last more than seven months. It neither eats nor drinks, recycles its body wastes, and wakes in spring with little loss of muscle. The Bear Center notes that its body temperature stays above 88 °F, within about 12 degrees of normal, while its metabolic rate drops by half.

Which owls and northern birds can you find in Minnesota in January?

• Great horned owls on eggs

  Eggs laid from January into early February · Woodlots, river bottoms, farm groves and city parks statewide

  The DNR says these owls begin nesting in January or February, usually taking over a stick nest that hawks, crows or squirrels left behind. The female lays one to five eggs, which hatch in 30 to 37 days, and the male feeds her while she sits. The University of Minnesota’s Raptor Center points out that she incubates through subarctic cold. An incubating owl often shows only two feathery horns above a crow or hawk nest, so check old nests with binoculars from a distance.

• Northern owls and boreal birds at Sax-Zim Bog

  Most reliable from early December to the beginning of March · Sax-Zim Bog, northwest of Duluth

  The Friends of Sax-Zim Bog list great gray and northern hawk owls, black-backed woodpeckers and boreal chickadees among January’s specialties, along with pine and evening grosbeaks and redpolls. Their Welcome Center on Owl Avenue welcomes visitors every day, 10 a.m. until 3 p.m., into mid-March, and public feeders there and on Admiral Road make an easy start. Stay on the roads unless the land is public, and pull over for local traffic.

• Finches in the north woods

  All winter · Conifer and birch stands of the Arrowhead and north-central lakes

  The Finch Research Network’s 2026 to 2027 forecast predicted that thin seed crops in the middle of the boreal belt would send finches toward the Great Lakes, but it also expected heavy cone crops in northeastern conifers to hold many birds out in the forest, away from backyard feeders. Listen for redpolls and siskins in birch and alder tops, and look for crossbills working cones high in spruce and pine.

Why do Minnesota lakes boom in January, and what lives under the ice?

• Pressure ridges and heaves

  After big swings in temperature · Big lakes such as Lake of the Woods

  When ice contracts in hard cold, it cracks, and lake water fills the cracks and freezes. When the air warms again, the sheet has nowhere to expand, so it buckles into ridges, and a big swing from below zero to near freezing is the usual trigger. Where one side heaves up, the ice nearby can split and open water can appear. Treat every ridge as unsafe: check the ice yourself going out and again coming back, travel along a heave rather than over it, and keep well away from any ridge that is still moving.

• Burbot spawning in the dark

  Midwinter into early spring, before ice-out · Shallow sand and gravel bars in northern lakes and rivers, and Lake Superior

  The burbot, known around the state as eelpout, is the cold-water oddity of Minnesota fish. The DNR describes how it spawns under the ice, in pairs or in writhing groups of dozens or even hundreds, and how one female can carry up to a million eggs that hatch in four to five weeks. It looks more like an eel than most freshwater fish, with mottled brown skin and a single whisker on its chin. The state record, 19 pounds 3 ounces, came from Lake of the Woods.

How can you identify Minnesota trees in winter?

• Box elder, the bent maple

  All winter · River bottoms, yards and fencerows statewide

  Box elder is a maple, so its buds and twigs come in pairs. A DNR lesson for teachers notes that its trunks are often bowed and rarely straight, that forest trees may grow several trunks, and that the twigs can be green. Sugar maple, by contrast, grows a straight trunk that often carries dark sap stains, and ash twigs are stouter than maple twigs.

• Paper birch and quaking aspen

  All winter · North and central forests, lakeshores and cutovers

  Both are pale, but the DNR describes paper birch bark as white with many pores, peeling in thin curls, while the aspen’s bark is greenish white to gray, almost smooth, with black patches below the branches. Paper birch twigs are dull orange or red in their first winter, and its inch-long catkins hang on into the cold months, dropping tiny seeds onto the snow.

• Oak, elm, hickory and cottonwood

  All winter · Woodlots, savannas and river bottoms of the south and center

  Oaks have thick twigs and fat buds, which is why deer and rabbits browse young ones so hard; bur oak bark is deeply furrowed into ridged plates. Elm bark shows a diamond pattern. Bitternut hickory has bright yellow winter buds that look painted on. Cottonwood buds are covered in shiny, chestnut-brown, resinous scales.

How cold is January in Minnesota, and what might El Niño bring?

How much daylight does Minnesota gain in January?

What can you see in the Minnesota night sky in January?

• Earth closest to the sun

  Saturday, January 2, 8:33 p.m. CST · Everywhere

  Perihelion, Earth’s nearest point to the sun, arrives on one of the year’s coldest weekends, at about 91.4 million miles. Cold January days are the work of the tilted axis and a low noon sun, not of distance.

• The Quadrantids

  Night of Sunday, January 3, into dawn Monday, January 4 · Anywhere dark; meteors come from the northeast

  Predictions put the peak at about 9:30 p.m. CST on Sunday, with one forecast nearer midnight, and the burst is short, only a few hours. Early in the night the radiant hugs the horizon; it rises higher hour by hour, which is why Monday’s predawn usually rewards watchers most. Only 15 to 18 percent of the moon is lit, a dim sliver hanging low in the east toward Monday’s dawn. The American Meteor Society suggests about 25 an hour under dark skies; a sharp peak can briefly give more.

• Venus at its greatest morning elongation

  Sunday, January 3, and all month · Southeast before sunrise

  Venus hits greatest western elongation on Sunday the 3rd, standing 47 degrees out from the sun, and it outshines everything in the dawn sky through the month. Through a backyard telescope that week, the planet looks like a tiny half moon.

• The Wolf Moon, a supermoon

  Friday, January 22, 6:17 a.m. CST · Rising in the east at dusk on the 21st

  No full moon of 2027 comes nearer: it lies about 222,229 miles off, with perigee roughly 14 hours earlier. Because the exact moment of full falls in Friday’s predawn hours, Thursday night gives the classic show of a round moon rising at dusk and setting at sunrise; Friday evening it still looks complete.

• Jupiter, Saturn and Mercury

  All month; moon beside Jupiter Saturday evening, January 23 · Jupiter east in the evening; Saturn low in the southwest; Mercury low west-southwest in the last days of the month

  Jupiter rises earlier each night ahead of its February opposition. Saturday the 23rd brings a pretty pairing after dark, when the moon, one day past full, passes about 1.5 degrees from the planet, with the star Regulus close to the moon before dawn. Saturn is sinking into the evening twilight. Mercury, the shy one, starts showing near the west-southwest horizon in twilight during the last few evenings of the month, ahead of its best evenings in early February.

What can Minnesota families do outside in January?

Safety notes for January in Minnesota