The holidays are over, and winter has set in. Many people prefer to spend most of the season inside in front of a warm fire. The greens of summer and warm colors of autumn have been replaced with uninspiring grays and browns. The skies are quieter as migrating raptors, waterfowl and songbirds have reached their wintering grounds. But winter reveals beauties of its own for those who take some time to explore.
Chesapeake Bay waters may look dark and foreboding. Look again. Odd sculptures of driftwood, deposited by winter storms, adorn the shorelines. Brown grasses glisten with morning frost. Crystalline waterlines mark the rhythm of the tides.
Trees bare of leaves may look lifeless, but, like other living creatures, they are merely dormant. Their twigs hold tightly packed buds that contain next spring’s foliage. The buds of each species are distinctive; like the bark, winter buds help to identify the tree.
Naked trees also unveil last year’s nests.
A clump of leaves in an oak is the treetop home of a gray squirrel. Vacated nests of wasps, shaped like upside-down spinning tops, hang delicately from tree branches.
Bird nests still attached to tree limbs tell much about their inhabitants. A loose nest of thorny branches with an inner layer of moss and grass might have been that of a mockingbird. A deeply cupped, neatly lined nest in a thicket probably belonged to a catbird. The small, drooping pouch of soft plant fibers is likely the handiwork of the northern (Baltimore) oriole. If you see what looks like a small knot of moss on a tree branch, look more closely. It might be the tiny nest of the ruby-throated hummingbird.
Quiet and still as winter may be, wildlife still abounds. Anyone with a passion for feeding birds is treated to a daily performance as sparrows, chickadees, finches, nuthatches, juncos, cardinals, woodpeckers, crows and blue jays all vie for space at a feeding station. Squirrels busily search for the nuts they buried in the summer or fall — or, failing that, they merely raid the nearest un-squirrel-proofed bird feeder.
Most of the mammals in this region do not actually hibernate. Deer, mice, foxes, squirrels and rabbits are active throughout winter. Even beavers remain active, though they spend most of their time in their lodges. When water freezes, the beavers feed on the bark they stashed at the bottom of the pond during the fall.
Meanwhile, groundhogs (also called woodchucks) do truly hibernate. Others, like chipmunks, raccoons and skunks, go into a semi-hibernating stage. They may sleep for days or weeks at a time but occasionally emerge for food or when drawn out by an unusually warm winter day.
You may not realize that other wildlife lives near you until a little snow blankets the ground. Take a walk immediately after a snowfall and look for telltale tracks. Begin by studying familiar tracks. The tracks of a dog are different from those of a cat. Whether wild or domestic, canine prints show claws, while feline prints do not because cats retract their claws when walking, running or at rest.
Dog prints differ from those of foxes, too — not so much in the individual print as in the pattern of the tracks. Because of the way they walk, foxes leave tracks that form what appears to be a single line; dogs leave roughly parallel pairs of tracks.
A rabbit’s tracks, with its pair of large hindfeet and smaller forefeet, are distinctive and easily identified.
A field guide on animal tracks (Peterson, Audubon, et al.) is helpful to both the novice and experienced tracker. By carefully studying tracks, you can not only identify the animal that made them but also make an educated guess about where it might have been headed. Tracking also includes trying to deduce why this animal was moving and what may have occurred during its journey.
So when the winter blues bring you down and cabin fever abounds, look to the outdoors for a new experience. Quietly wander alone and look up, down and inward. The winter air is very quiet when there’s snow, which muffles ambient sound and makes it easier to hear telltale noises. Listen for the rustling of birds and other wildlife seeking food and cover. Listen as the trees sway and groan in the wind. The absence of foliage reveals otherwise invisible patterns — complex branch structures in trees and shrubs or graceful slopes and swales that you’ll never see in the summer.
Freezing temperatures create other works of natural art, like evergreen branches drooping artfully under the weight of snow, icicles decorating branches or rocks in a stream and the fairy-tale quality of an ice-glazed forest after freezing rain.
If you explore with your eyes wide open, you may see all of this. Soon, you may feel like you, too, are part of this winter landscape, and spring won’t seem so far away. Or maybe it won’t even matter.
Kathy Reshetiloff is with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service’s Chesapeake Bay Field Office in Annapolis, Maryland, and is a columnist with Bay Journal, where this was first published.
