Winter World_ The Ingenuity of Animal Survival - Bernd Heinrich [0]
WINTER WORLD
The Ingenuity of Animal Survival
CONTENTS
Introduction
A Note on Terms and Definitions
01
Fire and Ice
02
Snow and the Subnivian Space
03
A Late Winter Walk
04
Tracking a Weasel
05
Nests and Dens
06
Flying Squirrels in a Huddle
07
Hibernating Squirrels (Heating Up to Dream)
08
The Kinglet’s Feathers
09
The Kinglet’s Winter Fuel
10
Hibernating Birds
11
Torpid Turtles under Ice
12
Iced-in Water Rodents
13
Frozen Frogs on Ice
14
Insects: From the Diversity to the Limits
15
Mice in Winter
16
Supercool(ed) Houseguests (with and without Antifreeze)
17
Of Bats and Butterflies and Cold Storage
18
Aggregating for Winter
19
Winter Flocks
20
Berries Preserved
21
Bears in Winter
22
Storing Food
23
Bees’ Winter Gamble
24
Winter Buds
25
The Kinglets’ Key?
References
Searchable Terms
Acknowledgments
About the Author
Cover
Copyright
About the Publisher
INTRODUCTION
When I was a teenage boy in western Maine, I read the books of Jack London, books about a world of rugged people and hardy animals at home in the frozen woods of the north. Dreaming of that world, I ventured out into the forest on snowshoes, and if it was in the middle of a storm, all the better. Deep in the forest I would dig a shallow pit in the snow and using the papery bark peeled from a nearby birch tree and dead twigs broken from a red spruce, I’d start a crackling fire. The splendor of sparks shooting up into the dark sky, the acrid smoke rising through the falling snowflakes, and hare or porcupine meat roasting on a stick over the flames, all enhanced the winter romance. Warming myself, I would think of London’s “To Build a Fire,” a story about how in the northern wilderness, heat meant life. To one unfortunate newcomer in the frozen Yukon in that story, the key to life was keeping dry and having a match, but because of careless mistakes, he got his feet wet and his fire and life were extinguished.
The trouble with that newcomer, London wrote, was that “he was without imagination. He was quick and alert in the things of life, but only in the things. Not in the significances. Fifty degrees below zero meant eighty-odd degrees of frost—[it] was to him just precisely fifty degrees below zero. That there should be anything more to it than that was a thought that never entered his head.” The newcomer, the cheechako, knew about the abstract thing, frost, and the numbers. But he did not yet know what they meant. And with good reason, too, as we’re adapted to a tropical environment and maintain it around ourselves all year long, through our housing and our clothing. Most of us already feel uncomfortable experiencing 32°F (or 0°C), the temperature at which water turns into ice. What would we know of -50°F? We don’t experience such temperatures, so we can hardly imagine how animals survive; by the time the winter world descends, most of us have surrounded ourselves in an artificial tropics.
In my Jack London–obsessed adolescent self, I may have occasionally experienced chilling, but it was not sufficient to grab my attention. I was focused on making each of my outings into the winter woods an adventure. I remember creeping out of my bed with two friends at school one midnight to ski in the milky moonlight through the pine and hemlock woods by Martin Stream, in western Maine. In our minds we were on the Dawson Trail in the Yukon, where we had to be tough. After all, anything could happen at the edge. In our imaginations we could fairly hear the huskies’ breath, and the dogs barking at a distant farm seemed like howling wolves. Just as London said, the northern lights flickered under greenish-purple curtains draping the heavens, giving legitimacy to our fantasies. A barred owl hooted nearby in the dark cedar swamp, snowshoe hares crisscrossed the balsam fir thickets in utter silence, and