In a winter like this, you may wonder, “Where have all the
critters gone?”—and it’s optional to say this with a melody from the old folk
song with similar lyrics. Where I am, in northern New Jersey (End note), many animals have “disappeared.”
With all the snow, even the squirrels are scarce, and in this area, they
usually appear throughout the winter. I do hear the simple songs of the
cardinal (the bird), which is a typical winter phenomenon here. And in recent
weeks, some other birds have turned up, these specific ones out of season, like
robins a couple weeks ago, apparently because their food elsewhere (where they “winter”)
is scarce.
And now for a few oddities:
A winter rabbit
We’ve have wild rabbits in evidence off and on through the
years. Some years, you hardly see them; others, you see them a surprising lot.
But you typically see them in the warm weather (spring maybe, and definitely summer
and much of the fall), and they can be spotted, out eating either in the very
early morning (before the sun is up) or the late afternoon, in lawns, hunched
down, mouth a-munching, maybe eye catching sight of you apprehensively. You
often suddenly come upon them while you’re least expecting them, and you become
alerted to them when they startle at you, as you lumber along like an oblivious
lummox.
But none here are a wintering-over variety, like a snowshoe
hare.
So this winter, it was odd to see a rabbit—a rather big, or
adult-sized, one—show up first in very late December, out near (or on) lawns
eating. We’d already had (in later December) bitter cold and snow. The lawns
had become yellow, dead-looking. And yet this rabbit turned up, eating
something. (Could it get any nutrition from yellow lawn grass?)
Then we had an extreme cold snap in early January. Then the
rabbit showed up again, around January 7, somehow finding something to eat amid
the yellow lawn, and in areas where weeds usually are and that look dead and
unable to sustain life now. (The last I saw it might have been mid-January or
the third week of that month.)
Why wasn’t this fellow hibernating?
Since (in later January and in the first half of February) we’ve
had weeks of repeated snows and polar-vortex cold—lately there is about two-and-a-half
to three feet of snow on the ground, from several falls—this rabbit has not reappeared. Maybe he finally decided
to stay in his hibernating hole (or was forced to by snow cover).
Hard to figure out.
Rodents crawl out from under the snow pack
One little item of conversation (a sort of general-topic
kind) that I’ve had with my mother, who is an avid observer of wildlife herself,
is how might it be that local chipmunks—generally, ground squirrels who live in holes
in the ground—survive the winter, especially with a lot of snow on the ground.
It does seem reasonable to suppose that some die. For instance, after
Superstorm Sandy, it seemed we had distinctly fewer chipmunks in the yard in
the spring of 2013 than were still running around in fall 2012. So it was
reasonable to hypothesize that some had drowned underground with the
phenomenally heavy rain we had with the storm. But what about with a normal
winter?
One would assume, first, that when they hibernate—they do
take food into their burrows, it seems, but one wouldn’t expect they would eat normally underground for three or four
months—their metabolism slows down quite a lot, and they’re in a state of
almost coma-like “sleep.” But don’t they still need air? If the ground,
including their holes, is covered with a layer of snow, especially if the snow
gets denser and surface-hardened by being on the ground a long time (and
subjected to sun-induced thawing-then-refreezing), don’t they start to lack
air? Can they suffocate?
Well, this was the “academic” question. Then, just yesterday—and
this surprises me as much as it may you—I found one possible “semi-answer” to
that question.
After I’d been working—as so many of us have—to remove the
huge dump of snow from a driveway at a house across from mine, for which I
serve as a sort of “night watchman”/concierge when its owners are away, there resulted
(from the shoveling) a large bank of snow on either side of the driveway. Maybe
two or more feet tall on either side.
Well, in the afternoon yesterday, following the end of snow’s
falling and after the temperature has risen above freezing level, I found
something odd. Down a flat stretch of snow not yet shoveled from the driveway
just mentioned, I saw sets of tracks, as from a rodent (actually, at least two).
They were spaced as to suggest a quick scurrying.
Later I found that the tracks seemed to go to, or come from,
a hole (about an inch wide or a bit more) in the bank on one side of the
driveway. I peered in. The hole threaded its way down into the snow, going
beyond how far I could see in. Did a creature crawl its way out of the snow, say, from the ground?
Or had it crawled in and down? A
whole lot of scuff marks lay in the snow just down the sloped bank from the
hole. It made more sense to suppose a creature (or two or more) had tunneled up
through the snow, from the ground,
and out. This because, why would something that was already outside the snow
come along and think, “This looks like a good place to tunnel down,” and dig
into the snow and go down? Something that small couldn’t know where the ground
was, or in what condition it was, beneath all the snow.
So, safe hypothesis
#1: One or more rodents had tunneled
up through a lot of snow from the ground, apparently in a prodigious effort to
get out.
Now, what kind of rodent? A mouse? The size of the tracks—including
toe marks—seemed a little big for the type of field/house mice I can see around
here. And they definitely were smaller than a normal squirrel’s. And why would mice (which are about half the size of
chipmunks) have been in the ground and tunnel up (through approaching two feet
of snow) with the energy required? It just seemed, size-wise and considering
the energy needed, that it had been chipmunks that had done this.
The tracks, I found, went to the bases of two “columns”
(decorative woodwork) at the corners of the carport that is a feature of this
house. It was as if the rodents sought out the columns and crept underneath
them. (There may well be spaces up inside the wood structure in which they
could “burrow.”)
Which I believe I’ve seen furtive chipmunks do, not dealing
with the challenge of snow, in the warm weather.
So, fairly-safe
hypothesis #2: Chipmunks near the area of that hole had reached a point
where they had to come up from their underground burrows, and had drilled
through the snow to do it, and ran to the next best place they could find
shelter.
Now, why could this have been? Were they starting to
suffocate with the snow cover? Or, somehow, had they detected that it had
gotten warmer outside, and they were triggered into thinking spring had
arrived? (By the way, within a mass of snow, it is always 32 degrees, from what
I’ve heard.)
It was hard to say. Certainly, as to the temperature
trigger, the jury is out. As a matter of fact, we’ve had unseasonably warm days
before this season, and chipmunks didn’t seem to come out then.
As for the suffocation hypothesis: If the critters who made
the hole and marks were starting to feel there was a danger to them with all
the snow above their holes, whether or not breathing was an issue, their will
to escape certainly would have made sense. But imagine the “heroic” efforts:
Say, you live underground (in a bomb shelter), and suddenly you’re aware you’re
covered up above by something that could eventually snuff you out, like a newly
arrived snow avalanche. You start digging through the snow by hand. Up through
the snow, not knowing how deep it is. You get out and run along the ground to
shelter.
The stuff of an adventure movie, perhaps? (Starring the
likes of Lee Marvin and Charles Bronson?) But for a creature that might have
been suffocating, to make that physical effort would be a marvel. You need
oxygen to exert a lot of physical effort. And of course, chipmunks don’t have
the conscious thought of humans; they had their instincts to “guide” them. And
the blind faith of simple animals. I guess, in their shoes, if you’re
desperate, you’ll try what you can with what oxygen you have, and if you get
out, hooray. If not, at least you tried.
Too bad the U.S. Congress doesn’t make the same heroic effort.
##
End note
As for my location: look on a map: look at the top border that
New Jersey has with New York State, follow it about two-thirds of the way from
the right, and right next to New York: that’s where I am, and figure out the
latitude on your own. Also, I live on a mountain at an altitude of about 1,150
feet.
