Has anyone else recently had a discussion about this unusual winter? If we were to personify the season, it would be dreary, sleepy, and boring as bricks. And when it wakes up, in the form of howling wind storms and freezing rain, it seems to be undeniably grumpy.
To describe this winter statistically, it is evolving into one of the warmest, least sunny, and most snowless winters in decades as we move into mid-January. An area exempt from this theme would be Lake Erie’s shoreline and its recent lake-effect snow roller coaster, accelerated by mild weather disallowing lake freeze.
Otherwise, this winter is quite balmy and feels remarkably bland. Even I find myself susceptible to feeling the sleepiness of it all. However, I cannot turn off my biology brain, and I hope sharing this epiphany will liven up the party in an otherwise grey and muddy world.
You are surrounded by the same quantity and quality of wildlife in the dead of winter as you are in the summer, with the exception of some migratory birds who flocked to their subtropical resting places. This is where the term ‘snowbirds’ originates from.
This is something to think about while walking the brisk wintry rim of the Niagara Escarpment, or perhaps in the local woodlot near your house. There are the same number of snakes, owls, beetles, frogs, newts and bats around you as there would be on a more energized summer day. This is a sort of psychological take on your experience in the woods.
When a person resides in the density of a big city, for example, we are subconsciously aware that there is a family living above, below, beside and across from us at all times. Sometimes, this collision of worlds is separated by nothing more than a thin wall. This is what is happening with the animals when you walk among the damp and dead-feeling forest at this time of year. They are unseen and tucked unimaginably tight into the recesses of tree bark, hollow logs, boulder piles and underground crevices all around you.
Some are hibernating until spring, and some are just seeking temporary shelter during winter storms. Others have evolved to survive with a delicate middle ground approach, like bats.
I know of a locations along the Niagara Escarpment in NOTL where a species called the little brown bat takes refuge on the ceiling of a small cave. Locked into a semi-hibernating state, known as tupor, they are perhaps located several feet somewhere under your hiking boots, rather than flying around you in the winter. You would never know, though.
Like skyscrapers in the city, let’s consider all of the trees you see standing tall around you. They are essentially storage tubes for life over the winter months. Take a pause in the visually bleak forest, and an intentional moment to imagine you have infrared vision. There would be clumps of body heat stacked up and down the bareness of the trees.
Peeling away a sheet of bark would reveal up to a dozen different insect species clumped together, waiting for the heat of March. In the depths of a black walnut tree, a bundle of honey bees is quietly vibrating away and generating their own unified body heat, like some sort of super-organism. Although not a true hibernator, Canada’s only marsupial, the Virginia opossum, will hole up inside an ancient red oak stump during nasty winter weather. In the meantime, true hibernators, like toads, will push their stubborn-
looking faces deep into the unfrozen mud at the centre of a tree base.
I feel like a walk in the eerily uneventful forest is like walking into a kid’s birthday party, where all of the children decided to play a game of hide and seek. You know they’re still in there, just hiding away with perfection. If you really think about it, the energy is still in the room.
