Keeping warm

It's been longer than a week since my last post - sorry about that. My job requires staring at a computer for 8 hours a day, so at home it can be blissful to completely ignore the laptop. The northeast was in the grips of arctic temperatures last week, therefore much of my time at home lately has been dominated by hauling in wood and feeding the fire. Some nights our task has been to keep the house over 60 degrees (F) warmer than our surroundings.

Snowshoeing through the woods with a freezing wind on my face, it occurred to me that my body was using metabolism and insulation to stay 90 degrees above the air temperature. Everything may be one in a spiritual sense, but life depends on staying separate. As well as temperature, we maintain specific balances of water and salts, not to mention organic chemicals, which are very different from the environments we inhabit.

Cold temperatures are a fact of winter which any organism must deal with to live here. Some avoid the stress by taking on a different difficult endeavor: migration. Others rely on food to stay warm and active, such as the ubiquitous gray squirrels and the chickadees that chatter as they forage in our spruce stand. Still others, such as many insects, wait out the winter. Insects are the most diverse group with this strategy, but they're not the only one. Frogs and toads hibernate underground and wood frogs even freeze completely, yet revive in the spring. They pack their cells with glucose to prevent ice crystals from damaging them while allowing ice to form between the cells. Toads stay under the frost line, which allows them to keep their bodies a few degrees above freezing. Unfortunately they sometimes hibernate in garden beds, and last spring I dug up a rather large, pale specimen (I didn't think to follow its fate at the time).

Some mammals can't count on finding enough of the right kind of food all winter. Chipmunks are larger than some migrating birds, but long-distance travel on the ground is too time-consuming and dangerous. Keeping warm is difficult with a tiny body even compared to other squirrels, so chipmunks burrow underground where they maintain a body temperature around 40 degrees Farenheit. For the energy they still require, the burrow is stocked with food hauled in the chippy's big cheeks - especially important in the unpredictable beginning of spring.

Another rodent whose green food stores poorly takes a different strategy. We no longer see roly-poly ground hogs grazing along the interstate. Instead they too are hibernating and making good use of all that fat to fast until the world is again dressed in green. Sometimes I wish I could do the same. But we can take one lesson from the ground hog in light of the recent holidays and frigid temperature - it's not necessarily a bad idea to add a few pounds for the winter.