Winter World_ The Ingenuity of Animal Survival - Bernd Heinrich [17]
Coming off the spruce ridge for a quick lunch at the cabin, I saw a chipmunk scampering off on top of the snow. The chipmunk must have burrowed a long ways through snow to see daylight. It could not hope to find food on the snow, but because it was the mating season for chipmunks, this one came up out of hibernation for another reason.
I rushed back to the cabin to be warmed by the woodstove and to stoke my metabolism with a quick meal of bread and cheese. Rewarmed and refueled, I then headed right back out on snowshoes and walked down the hill toward Alder Stream. Within a few minutes I was on fresh moose tracks. There were many moose tracks, and they were being sprinkled with thousands of snow fleas. Near every moose track the snow was also sprinkled with a strand or two of moose hair, which would likely be used to line bird nests in two months’ time. Occasionally, a deer had followed in a moose’s tracks, probably because that was easier than plowing their own way through the deep snow. The usual background pattern of red squirrel, hare, and grouse tracks crisscrossing was everywhere. A porcupine left a deep groove in the snow where it had regularly traveled between its rock den shelter and a hemlock tree where it fed at night. Two coyotes had been traveling side by side, a bobcat had traveled alone, and one intriguing track in the spruce woods could have been apine marten’s.
I came to a blowdown area of mature balsam fir that had in the last decade become a thicket of young regrowing firs. Strangely, almost all of these young fir trees were missing the top buds of their leading branch, the one vertical twig that would later become the trunk of the tree. What could possibly have happened? I had never seen anything like it. Few tops of young balsam fir trees remained—only 4 out of 56, 3 out of 57, and 3 out of 75—at three different sites. There were red squirrel tracks next to many of the smaller trees where there were fresh chips from chewing and snipped-off tops with their buds removed. Many of the trees whose tops were out of reach of moose and deer were also damaged. So it was squirrels. Normally at this time the red squirrels start to make maple syrup and sugar candy by puncturing sugar maple twigs and coming back to feed after the water from the sap evaporates. But in this patch of these woods there are no sugar maples, so the squirrels have hit on a new snack.
Top of balsam fir sapling with buds.
Decapitated top with buds eaten by squirrel.
By afternoon the tiny wisps of cloud disappeared, and the sky became a deep cerulean blue. The wind died down and the mourning dove called again. Coming back to the hill I heard a raven in the woods. Its muffed voice disclosed that this bird had food in its bill; it was probably feeding at a winter kill. So I walked in the direction of the call and soon found a raven’s track leading to the edge of a stump where the snow was disturbed. I dug there and found buried a fresh piece of red meat that was sprinkled with deer hair. A raven’s cache.
Balsam fir winter buds, harvested routinely by red squirrels.
Twig with male cone buds.
Tip of a fir twig with all the male flower buds chewed off.
Another raven came up to the valley, and as it crossed a canopy opening in the dense spruces, it saw me and shifted its fluid wing strokes to rapid wingbeats that make a loud swoosh-swoosh-swoosh sound. The second raven would notice, and did—it heard and flew up in alarm. I now advanced at a trot directly to where the deer carcass would be.
Most of it was under a mound of snow that had