Animals in Winter
(Originally written for a college creative nonfiction writing class in March 2018)
One of the things I like best about snow is its ability to easily record the movements of living beings across its surface. This is especially apparent with the tracks of animals. During a walk in the SUNY Potsdam quad last Friday, I noticed squirrel tracks coming out of a bush in front of the Crumb Library. This bush is behind that grey metal statue my dad once mistook for a phallic symbol.
That got me thinking about how I saw grey squirrels coming out of hibernation late last month. I remember wondering if it was a bit early for that. I thought about how they may have reacted when the winter snow started returning these past two weeks. Would the continuing winter have a negative effect on their health? Then I looked on Wikipedia and discovered that eastern gray squirrels don’t actually hibernate…damn it.
When I went home that weekend, I looked around the barn on my parent’s property for signs of a cottontail rabbit that had been seen around the west end of the building. I didn’t see the rabbit, but I did find more tracks. They couldn’t belong to my dog because it would be too heavy to leave footprints with such a shallow imprint. Then again, they probably didn’t belong to the cottontail either because I think he would also be too heavy, and the tracks didn’t seem to have the large back feet that are so common in lagomorphs. They probably belong to a smaller animal like a chipmunk (which does hibernate in the winter) or perhaps a rat or squirrel.
As I observe these signs of animals struggling through the winter, I keep being reminded of Richard Adams’ musings on this very subject in the last chapter of one of my favorite novels, Watership Down: “Many humans say that they enjoy the winter, but what they really enjoy is feeling proof against it.” He compares the fires and warm clothes we possess to the complete lack of such niceties in the natural world. However, he notes that rabbits, while suffering from food shortages and disease, are comparatively warm in their burrows and can enjoy a rather productive mating season. “For rabbits,” says Adams, “winter remains what it was for men in the Middle Ages- hard but bearable by the resourceful and not altogether without compensations.”
I wonder if that holds true for the herd of deer that we often see feeding in a pool of meltwater in the field down the road from our house. Or the deer that started munching on the Christmas tree that the members of my church disposed of in the woods out back last January. I wonder if they are on the same level as rabbits with their ability to find food in the winter. Then again, the cottontail rabbits don’t live in burrows or warrens like the European rabbits in Watership Down; instead, they prefer above-ground nests. In fact, around the time I was revising this piece, my dad discovered that the cottontail had built two separate nests on our property, one near the end of the barn where he was usually seen and the other in the asparagus patch behind our house. Maybe that levels the playing field a bit.
I also remember a much more gruesome reminder of the harshness of winter on the same day the church’s Christmas tree was thrown out. I was helping to put away Christmas decorations in the basement when I noticed the frozen body of a dead mouse on the floor. I wondered how the unfortunate little creature had come to this. Did it have a disease that was exacerbated by the cold weather? Did the relative shelter of the church basement prove insufficient to ward off the effects of hypothermia? Either way, it wasn’t alone, as a second dead mouse was discovered shortly afterward. My dad threw the bodies out into the backyard, and the deer, still helping itself to the Christmas tree, was spooked and bolted back into the trees.
I guess the point is that we humans don’t truly realize how lucky we’ve got it. We’ve had the ingenuity to create all forms of advanced technology to guard us from the biting winds that the other animals could never comprehend. Still, this technology is all a very recent invention. For thousands of years, humans were on the same level as the animals during the winter months, having not yet found ways to create insulated architecture or cold-resistant garments. Our weapons to take down the mastodons that made up our diet were merely carved out of tree branches and didn’t have the destructive efficiency that modern-day hunting rifles have today.
Let it not be said, however, that the animals who don’t have our proclivities toward technological advancement are totally helpless in the face of winter’s onslaught. If the deer and the rabbit had not been able to battle the cold head-on, they surely would have gone extinct centuries ago. As Richard Adams once again so eloquently puts it, wild animals have “a blessedly circumscribed imagination and an intuitive feeling that Life is Now. A foraging wild animal, intent above all else upon survival, is as strong as the grass.” And what an apt simile that is. The grass doesn’t just die off when the snow covers it; it just waits until the sun melts the icy blanket away and reignites its photosynthetic processes. The deer, the rabbit, the squirrel, and all the other animals have found their own ways to survive, just as we humans have found ours.
Well, I finally did it! I uploaded one of those creative nonfiction pieces I wrote in college, something I’ve been promising to do for a while now. I know I promised you guys an article about my favorite animated movies and TV shows of 2023, but I quickly realized that it would take a lot longer than two weeks to formulate. I’ll talk more about how I’ll approach that subject, along with the rest of my future plans for this blog, next week in my yearly New Year’s update. I hope to see you guys next week and all through the rest of the new year. See you soon!
