The Grim Reaper is White

      Light enough to travel on top of the snow when it crusts just a little, bobwhites have to find food above it, and they are easily picked up by the eye of any predator, especially a hawk.  It takes twice as much foodto keep their body heat at a constant level when the temperature is 10 degrees, compared to 40 degrees.

 Twenty inches of snow fell on this wooded ridgetop where I live. In all my life living in the Ozarks of southern Missouri or northern Arkansas, I never saw more than twelve inches of snow fall at one time. Even in Canada, and in the mountains out west, where snow accumulates to several feet over the course of a few winter weeks, I don’t know if they have twenty inches fall all at once.

I know this; a snow of that depth is tough on wildlife, even wild turkeys. I have noticed that in a deep snow, winter flocks of turkeys which have been using fields to feed in, forsake them and remain in woodlands. The reason for this has to be in part the inability to escape predators in deep snow. The wild turkey may fly when surprised by a hunter or a bobcat or fox, but he needs to run a little ways first. If he isn’t hard pressed, he will just run and never fly at all. This snow nearly eliminates that possibility. In the timber, a turkey, especially the young ones, can take to sudden flight and gain the protection of overhead branches where they can perch, and be out of reach of most ground predators. I have seen young turkeys do this often in the winter in snow.

But food is going to be tough to come by, because in a snow of this depth, it is tough to find places where turkeys can scratch through it. In a situation like this, all wildlife, including deer, depends on heavy thickets, and especially thick stands of cedar. For a covey of bobwhite quail, those cedar thickets may be the only chance. In the cedar thickets, the snow is much less deep. The berries on buckbrush and juniper, (what we refer to as red cedar) are not highly prized for food by anything but a few species of small birds, so they last all winter long, off the ground. But right now those small bitter, blue cedar berries can mean survival for quail, turkey and all kinds of small birds. Even deer and some predators like the fox will eat them.

But all birds need grit, and if quail are deprived of access to small gravel, they may die in less than a week. Surprisingly, they can live without water for weeks. In the winter, when severe cold freezes everything up, all wildlife species live for prolonged periods without water, even doves, the one bird species which seems to need water the most in the summer and fall. The grit which must be in the bird’s crop (which old time Ozarkians pronounced ‘craw’) is necessary to grind up and digest larger seeds and acorns. That’s why right now you will find quail and all other birds coming to roadways, both paved and gravel, where bare surface is created by man’s machinery.

Rabbits and small ground mammals are much more exposed to predation in this kind of snow, but again, they find the heavy cover and thickets and burrow in.  They too do without water, but they can find food in the bark of small woody growth and saplings.

Some small ground mammals, in mice and rat families, will not hibernate at all in the winter, but most will hibernate some. And there are others which hibernate the entire winter, a matter of months perhaps. Squirrels and raccoons, skunks and opossums will hibernate for only short periods, during times of extreme cold and heavy snow, and survive it that way.  Fox squirrels hibernate for a longer period of time, it seems to me, than do gray squirrels, but never more than just a few days.

For predators, it is not as hard to survive in a difficult stretch of winter, but when you have twenty inches of soft snow, foxes, coyotes and bobcats have to find it difficult to maneuver. The eagle, owls and hawks aren’t much affected by it. All three will eat carrion if they have to. But a hawk after a mouse or bird, plunging into a deep, soft drift, can struggle to get out of it and into flight.

I feel sorry though, for the quail more than anything else. Bobwhites have been declining in the Midwest for two decades to some extent, and each year it seems to more likely that someday there will be none at all in the Ozarks, or any state north of the Ozarks for that matter. If you feed them, you have to remember how vulnerable they are to predators and house cats when they become concentrated and depend on food provided by man in some regular place.  They need open patches of ground to find grit, and they need heavy cover close by to escape. Next time you think about clearing out a cedar thicket, think about what it is like right now for a covey of quail in an area with little protective cover.

I am amazed that wildlife survives the winters they seem to be able to survive. It seems so amazing that wild creatures can function without water… and if you are thinking they eat snow, they get almost no water that way. Have you ever once observed a wild bird or mammal in the wild eating snow? In all my time outdoors, I never did.

Somehow though, enough of any species survives the bottleneck of winter to keep that species going.  And I have observed that in almost all wild creatures, there are cycles. When a species seems hard hit by some disease or hard winter or flooding or whatever, it seems to have a strong comeback by increased production of young. Some may want to refer to it as ‘mother nature’, but as I watch and learn, I realize that a mind greater than men can comprehend must be behind this amazing plan of survival.

Once many years ago, when I was a Naturalist for the National Park Service on the Buffalo River in Arkansas, I and two other young men set out to float a long length of the river in johnboats with basic supplies. We intended to film and photograph the river in winter, to show at summer night programs to visitors from the city. It was in January, and we got our tent set up one evening just before a major ice storm which kept us there for three days and nights, hoping the tent would hold up. One night as we huddled in that tent listening to light freezing rain and sleet peppering our shelter, we wondered how wild creatures around us coped. I would have felt better sitting around a fire in a river bluff cave, but it made me think about some things. Survival suddenly became the only important thing. We didn’t have to worry about the teeth of a predator, we had guns. The only concern then, for three days, was enough to eat, and the ability to stay warm.

A wild creature’s life is nothing else but that, always. Stay sheltered, stay fed, and stay hidden. In twenty inches of snow, those simple things become the most complicated tasks, and more wild creatures will die of predation, starvation, freezing or disease in the next month than any other three months of the upcoming year.

Our February-March issue of the Lightnin’ Ridge Outdoor Magazine is out. They are now in the magazine racks of 120 Wal-Mart stores in Missouri, north Arkansas and east Kansas. You can see the new magazine on my website… www.larrydablemontoutdoors.blogspot.com.   If you can’t find one any other way, call my executive secretary, Ms. Wiggins, at 417-777-5227 and she will tell you how to order one or get a subscription.  Write to me at Box 22, Bolivar, Mo. 65613, or e-mail me at lightninridge@windstream.net