Snow travel

I was wearing muck boots instead of snowshoes when I took Bear for a walk today, so when we detoured into the woods I sank in with every step. The dogs leapt joyously about like little springboks, but then woodland travels are recreation to them instead of occupation. A wide path behind our house was dotted with the deep imprints of resting deer and laced with their tracks. With no food bowls, these deer probably didn’t appreciate a deep cover of late winter snow. I often find deer beds in the spruce stand, where the ground cover is thinner because the evergreen branches intercept a good amount of snow. Worse for small animals who use the snow for shelter and cover, but better for those of us too big to tunnel.

Deer and most animals find paths of least resistance, and even the dogs readily follow an existing trail in the snow. Deer tracks often follow the driveway, or the trails at work. One aspect of roadways that make them so deadly to our fellow creatures is that they are inviting for travel, although frequent vehicle traffic may make them less so. A common combination of mowed areas and sheltering tree lines makes them attractive as hunting grounds for certain raptors. Hence the ease of seeing red-tails on the highway up to Snowstorm City, but there are less pleasant consequences as well. One study found many dead rough-legged hawks near roads, some of which had been shot by humans who also prefer easy paths.

Late winter is a dangerous time for herbivores because food supplies have been heavily exploited but the cold and often the conditions still require extra energy. Females have the additional burden of carrying one (or more) fetus which will be born in late spring. Deep snows would make stressed deer vulnerable to predation. Winter die-off, while very unfortunate for the individual, can function to decrease competition for scarce resources in the remaining population and results in healthier herds.

At one point, human hunters almost eradicated white-tailed deer in the northeast, but nowadays we’re busy encouraging them to overpopulate. When not feeding them directly, we provide more food to get them through the winter by managing for young forests, which have tasty young trees and sprouts, and planting edible (to deer) landscaping. We’ve decimated or extirpated predator populations. Human predation on deer for sport is less than optimal as long-term population control because humans like to target big, healthy males, whose genes would benefit the population, and are reluctant to kill females who are the real reproductive powerhouses. Ten does can have as many fawns with one buck as with ten. Killing fawns also reduces the reproductive future of the population, but while fawns are the easiest prey for non-human predators, laws and mores prohibit human hunters from taking them.

Although white-tailed deer are native species, their ascendance negatively affects many of our native plants. Their browsing on young trees can inhibit forest regrowth and provide for the increase of less palatable exotic species. Fortunately this edge species spends less time in our forest as the warm seasons begin, because they particularly like to dine on my favorite spring flowers.

Winter sights

I’m not a huge fan of birding by car –over two summers I spent months driving to find birds in a land of bad radio. I do like to keep a look out when I’m in a car anyway. I notice a lot of raptors; mostly red-tails perched in trees near the road but sometimes a smaller hawk or even a northern harrier floating over rolling hills. In a couple of months kestrels will be impersonating mourning doves on telephone wires, or hovering high above some unlucky meadow vole (or grasshopper).

Kestrels are still here, although in reduced numbers. Our winter bird population is poor in species because the ones we keep are outnumbered by those we lose to milder climes. Some of these areas might dispute that description this year with all the snowstorms, but chance weather events are a danger which birds cannot completely avoid. Migrating can make the long-term chance of catastrophic weather events much less. Fortunately for those of us feeling the February blues, migration gives us a few surprises from the depths of the arctic that don’t involve ice and snow.

Snow buntings littered the edge of the field as I drove down our road last week. Come spring, these creamy white and brown birds will trade our forest-edged fields and beaches for the tree-less tundra of the high arctic. Males will wear down the tips of their feathers to expose pretty black and white birds beneath the bland façade we see. No need to be striking (and more exposed to predators) when they’re not interested in carving out territories on our lands.

Predators can better afford to be striking year-round. On a recent drive up to Snowstorm City, a hawk soaring just above the highway struck me as more patterned than the red-tail I was expecting. She alighted onto a nearby tree and her dark patches revealed that she was a rough-legged hawk, another arctic visitor. Both of these species have benefited from the increase in open land created in this area through European settlement, but the mammal-eating rough-legged hawk has been hurt more by the conversion of grassland to cropland. Maybe she’s feeling her own version of the February blues. Maybe it will be a relief to get away from the land of snow and ice to what she experiences as a land of grass, flowers and skittering mammals. Just as it will be a relief to me to go back to birding on foot.

Lilliputian neighbors

Protected mouse runway.



Evidence of a rodent taking advantage of birdseed on the porch.




Interface between the worlds above and below the snow.

Mice

A week ago I went to pick up the coffee mug I’d left in our car when I noticed mouse sprinkles on top. It’s bad enough that mice are hanging out in our car, but I’d rather they didn’t use my coffee mug as a perch.

My glimpses of live mice tend to be as they dash across a trail or down a hole. Occasionally I encounter stunned juveniles that the cats have been batting around the house. Deer mice and white-footed mice are common and populous throughout North America. I can accept that my cats kill mice in the house since that’s the human-cat contract that underlies the whole domestication of cats. However, outside I feel the predators that don’t have their lives catered to don’t need extra competition.

Mice must hide from aerial predators – hawks and owls, as well as mammals as small as the short-eared shrew and as large as foxes, or even coyotes. Mice move under cover of snow and night. In the morning tracks appear on the snow surface, moving from woody cover to woody cover. Snow melt exposes their long tunnels, still roofed or collapsed into trenches. While some larger-bodied rodents such as chipmunks lie in torpor underground next to their personal food stash, mice are out searching for edibles to stoke their internal fire.

Smells don’t travel as well in the cold, yet our woodland mice sniff out seeds, insects, and sometimes small dead bodies for sustenance. They found the bag of grass seed carelessly left in the shed and left a mess of husks and mouse sprinkles. We should have known better, but then we stuff our lives full of tasks while mice have the long winter night to focus on a few essentials.