The Register Citizen (Torrington, CT)
Robert Miller: How the animals spend CT’s winter
Find a den, a hollow tree, a stand of hemlocks or space under a deck.
Make your territory smaller. Find food. Go hungry if you can’t.
Sleep, if your metabolism says sleep. Freeze, then defrost in March.
Humans, for the most part, have it easy in winter – heated rooms, warm food, fleece coats, long johns, leggings.
But to be an animal exposed to New England elements takes some fortitude, some evolutionary adaptations and knowing the territory.
Some snakes — solitary the rest of the year — curl up together in underground dens for the winter. They’re cold-blooded and can’t raise their body temperatures on their own. Collectively, they have enough warmth to stay alive.
Theodora Pinou, a professor of biology at Western Connecticut State University in Danbury, was once with her students at a nature center in Stamford when they saw garter snake after garter snake slip underground in the same spot.
“They crawl back en masse,’’ she said.
Underneath the surface, Pinou said, there was a chamber, probably created where fungi hade decayed the roots of trees. There, the snakes could gather together and doze torpidly for the winter months, in a state of lowered metabolism called brumation – snake-napping,but not the full sleep of hibernation In spring, they crawl out to warm up and go off on their own..
“I would encourage people to leave stumps in their yards,” Pinou said. “The space underneath them really doesn’t freeze.”
Salamanders burrow under leaf litter and, upland, away from the vernal pools where they come in spring to mate.
“Salamanders go deep in the ground,” said Billy Michael of Bethel, a longtime amphibian chaser.
Marbled salamanders come late to those pools, breeding in the fall. Their chilled offspring swim around for the winter.
“Marbled salamander larvae are swimming in the vernal pools now,” Michael said.
Wood frogs have maybe the most amazing adaptation for dealing with winter. They burrow into the ground near vernal pools, then literally freeze.
“They’re little frog Popsicles,” said Jenny Dixon, director of the wildlife division of the state Department of Energy and Environmental Protection.
But their metabolism creates a sort of antifreeze — a combination of urea and glucose — in their tissue and organs that lets them survive being iced
Michael Klemens, a noted herpetologist and coauthor of the new book “Conservation of Amphibians and Reptiles of Connecticut’’ said wood frogs, while frozen, are ready to mate. When spring comes, they thaw out, croak and hop without a hitch to the vernal pools to procreate.
‘It happens very quickly,’’ Klemens said.
The DEEP’s Dickson said bats and woodchucks are the true hibernating mammals of our landscape — the ones that stay put, sleeping.
Chipmunks fill their underground dens with nuts and seeds. They stay there throughout the winter, mostly sleeping, waking to feed on what they’ve cached, and then sleeping again.
Likewise, black bears are almost hibernators — they mostly sleep and live off their fat, with their metabolism slowed way down.
But if there’s a January thaw, they may get out of their dens and move around, looking for berries or a bird feeder for a midwinter snack.
“It depends on the weather and the bear,” Dickson said.
For others who wake up every day to face the weather, it’s a tougher life.
Urban wildlife expert Laura Simon said skunks just mostly live off their accumulated fat and try to survive.
“It’s a lucky skunk who finds cat food people leave out,’’ she said.
Opossums have paperthin, hairless ears and naked tails, Simon said. So they are prone to frostbite as well as hunger.
The predators — coyotes, foxes, bobcats — have to hunt every day. Luckily, there are mice, voles, squirrels and rabbits out and about as well.
Dickson said all mammals learn in winter to conserve energy. They have smaller territories. They stay closer to food sources they depend on. When it gets stormy, they find shelter in a den, or a thicket that provides a windbreak.
Small birds, she said, know to roost in thickets, or evergreen stands. Not only does such a spot shelter them from the wind, it also gives them a hiding place from hawks and owls.
Humans — warm inside their homes — also provide shelter from the storm, under decks and tool sheds, and in attics.
“People can have a family of skunks living under their deck all winter and never know it,” Simon said. “It’s a perfect place. It’s better than a hollow log.’’