Wild Life In Winter

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Title:     Wild Life In Winter
Author: John Burroughs [More Titles by Burroughs]

To many forms of life of our northern lands, winter means a long sleep; to others it means what it means to many fortunate human beings--travels in warm climes; to still others, who again have their human prototypes, it means a struggle, more or less fierce, to keep soul and body together; while to many insect forms it means death.

Most of the flies and beetles, wasps and hornets, moths, butterflies, and bumblebees die. The grasshoppers all die, with eggs for next season's crop deposited in the ground. Some of the butterflies winter over. The mourning cloak, the first butterfly to be seen in spring, has passed the winter in my "Slabsides." The monarch migrates, probably the only one of our butterflies that does. It is a great flyer. I have seen it in the fall sailing serenely along over the inferno of New York streets. It has crossed the ocean and is spreading over the world. The yellow and black hornets lose heart as autumn comes on, desert their paper nests and die--all but the queen or mother hornet; she hunts out a retreat in the ground and passes the winter beyond the reach of frost. In the spring she comes forth and begins life anew, starting a little cone-shaped paper nest, building a few paper cells, laying an egg in each, and thus starting the new colony.

The same is true of the bumblebees; they are the creatures of a summer. In August, when the flowers fail, the colony breaks up, they desert the nest and pick up a precarious subsistence on asters and thistles till the frosts of October cut them off. You may often see, in late September or early October, these tramp bees passing the night or a cold rain-storm on the lee side of a thistle-head. The queen bee alone survives. You never see her playing the vagabond in the fall. At least I never have. She hunts out a retreat in the ground and passes the winter there, doubtless in a torpid state, as she stores no food against the inclement season. Emerson has put this fact into his poem on "The Humble-Bee":--

"When the fierce northwestern blast
Cools sea and land so far and fast,
Thou already slumberest deep;
Woe and want thou canst outsleep;
Want and woe, which torture us,
Thy sleep makes ridiculous."

In early August of the past year I saw a queen bumblebee quickly enter a small hole on the edge of the road where there was no nest. It was probably her winter quarters.

If one could take the cover off the ground in the fields and woods in winter, or have some magic ointment put upon his eyes that would enable him to see through opaque substances, how many curious and interesting forms of life he would behold in the ground beneath his feet as he took his winter walk--life with the fires banked, so to speak, and just keeping till spring. He would see the field crickets in their galleries in the ground in a dormant state, all their machinery of life brought to a standstill by the cold. He would see the ants in their hills and in their tunnels in decaying trees and logs, as inert as the soil or the wood they inhabit. I have chopped many a handful of the big black ants out of a log upon my woodpile in winter, stiff, but not dead, with the frost, and brought them in by the fire to see their vital forces set going again by the heat. I have brought in the grubs of borers and the big fat grubs of beetles, turned out of their winter beds in old logs by my axe and frozen like ice-cream, and have seen the spark of life rekindle in them on the hearth.

With this added visual power, one would see the wood frogs and the hylas in their winter beds but a few inches beneath the moss and leaf-mould, one here and one there, cold, inert, biding their time. I dug a wood frog out one December and found him not frozen, though the soil around him was full of frost; he was alive but not frisky. A friend of mine once found one in the woods sitting upon the snow one day in early winter. She carried him home with her, and he burrowed in the soil of her flower-pot and came out all right in the spring. What brought him out upon the snow in December one would like to know.

One would see the tree-frogs in the cavities of old trees, wrapped in their winter sleep--which is yet not a sleep, but suspended animation. When the day is warm, or the January thaw comes, I fancy the little frog feels it and stirs in his bed. One would see the warty toads squatted in the soil two or three feet below the surface, in the same way. Probably not till April will the spell which the winter has put upon them be broken. I have seen a toad go into the ground in late fall. He literally elbows his way into it, going down backwards.

Beneath rocks or in cavities at the end of some small hole in the ground, one would see a ball or tangle of garter snakes, or black snakes, or copperheads--dozens of individual snakes of that locality entwined in one many-headed mass, conserving in this united way their animal heat against the cold of winter. One spring my neighbor in the woods discovered such a winter retreat of the copperheads, and, visiting the place many times during the warm April days, he killed about forty snakes, and since that slaughter, the copperheads have been at a premium in our neighborhood.

Here and there, near the fences and along the borders of the wood, these X-ray eyes would see the chipmunk at the end of his deep burrow with his store of nuts or grains, sleeping fitfully but not dormant. The frost does not reach him and his stores are at hand. One which we dug out in late October had nearly four quarts of weed-seeds and cherry-pits. He will hardly be out before March, and then, like his big brother rodent the woodchuck, and other winter sleepers, his fancy will quickly "turn to thoughts of love."

One would see the woodchuck asleep in his burrow, snugly rolled up and living on his own fat. All the hibernating animals that keep up respiration, must have sustenance of some sort--either a store of food at hand or a store of fat in their own bodies. The woodchuck, the bear, the coon, the skunk, the 'possum, lay up a store of fuel in their own bodies, and they come out in the spring lean and hungry. The squirrels are lean the year through, and hence must have a store of food in their dens, as does the chipmunk, or else be more or less active in their search all winter, as is the case with the red and gray squirrels. The fox puts on more or less fat in the fall, because he will need it before spring. His food-supply is very precarious; he may go many days without a morsel. I have known him to be so hungry that he would eat frozen apples and corn which he could not digest. The hare and the rabbit, on the other hand, do not store up fat against a time of need; their food-supply of bark and twigs is constant, no matter how deep the snows. The birds of prey that pass the winter in the north take on a coat of fat in the fall, because their food-supply is so uncertain; the coat of fat is also a protection against the cold.

Of course, all the wild creatures are in better condition in the fall than in the spring, but in many cases the fat is distinctly a substitute for food.

The skunk is in his den also from December till February, living on his own fat. Several of them often occupy the same den and conserve their animal heat in that way. The coon, also, is in his den in the rocks for a part of the winter, keeping warm on home-made fuel. The same is true of the bear in our climate. The bats are hibernating in the rocks or about buildings. The muskrats are leading hidden lives in the upper chambers of their snow-covered houses in the marshes and ponds or in the banks of streams, feeding on lily-roots and mussels which they get under the ice.

The lean, bloodthirsty minks and weasels are on the hunt all winter. Our native mice are also active. That pretty stitching upon the coverlet of the winter snow in the woods is made by our white-footed mouse and by the little shrew mouse. The former often has large stores of nuts hidden in some cavity in a tree; what supply of food the latter has, if any, I do not know. In the winter the short-tailed meadow or field mice come out of their retreat in the ground and beneath stones and lead gay, fearless lives beneath the snow-drifts. Their little villages, with their runways and abandoned nests, may be seen when the snow disappears in the spring. Their winter life beneath the snow, where no wicked eye or murderous claw can reach them, is in sharp contrast to their life in summer, when cats and hawks, owls and foxes, pounce upon them day and night. It is only in times of deep snows that they bark our fruit-trees.

We have in this latitude but one species of hibernating mouse--the long-tailed jumping mouse, or kangaroo mouse, as it is sometimes called from its mode of locomotion. Late one fall, while making a road near "Slabsides," we dug one out from its hibernation about two feet below the surface of the ground. It was like a little ball of fur tied with a string. In my hand it seemed as cold as if dead. Close scrutiny showed that it breathed at intervals, very slowly. The embers of life were there, but slumbering beneath the ashes. I put it in my pocket and went about my work. After a little time, remembering my mouse, I put my hand into my pocket and touched something very warm and lively. The ember had been fanned into a flame, so to speak. I kept my captive in a cage a day or two and then returned it to the woods, where I trust it found a safe retreat against the cold.

[The end]
John Burroughs's essay: Wild Life In Winter

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