Our ever-changing winter world has certainly been tumultuous this year so far. It seems Mother Nature can't seem to make up her mind. In "weather speak", ours has been "all over the charts", to say the least!
*Monday: All-day blizzard, turning to light fluffy flakes, magical.
*Tuesday: Beautiful snow from night before turned to RAIN! aagh.
*Wednesday: Clear, cold (32 ish) and gorgeously sunny, aah.
*Thursday: Even colder, 20 -ish and sunny again, nice.
So what's in store for tomorrow and the weekend, more snow! Yeah, I just hope it doesn't turn to rain again, but we'll see...
What does all this meandering around with the weather have to do with anything, not much, except that I'm totally engrossed in re-reading my most awesome winter nature read right now, Bernd Heinrich's Winter World (thanks McBeth). As an amateur naturalist, I have so much respect and awe when reading works like his. Especially in winter, it kind of renews ones sense of the natural world and what it must do to survive during some pretty bizarre weather. Much like what we've had as of late. I imagine that it is wreaking havoc on the "subnivian" layer and it's creatures. My kids thought this was a really cool thing to look at all the little beings that count on the subnivian layer to survive the winter through. In fact many meadow creatures, mice, voles, etc. start breeding well before Spring and can even raise their young at this level under the snowpack before the first snowdrops show their heads to the world above.
I mentioned in this post that we have a few pairs of goldfinches visiting our feeders, well since then we've had a veritable explosion of them! It seems that it's true, especially in winter, that "birds of a feather flock together"! Heinrich accounts for this as such:
For the last ten years I have kept a tally and made observations of these flocks in the winter woods in Maine because it seems odd that these birds, which are solitary in the summer, would so dramatically change their behavior in the winter. Whay would very different kinds of birds that feed on very different insects, and almost never on clumped seed or berry bushes, follow each other around in winter only? (pg. 243)
The insect-eating winter birds minimize competition among themselves because each species forages on different trees, different parts of the same tree, or different prey....I suspect flocking is advantageous at any time of year, but it is constrained in the summer when the birds are tied to a nest site. In winter, when a limited food supply becomes a factor for survival, flocking may also become evermore advantageous, provided there is no competition for food. That is because it permits the birds to pay more constant attention to searching for food, and less on vigilance for predators. (pg 244-245)
So this would explain the veritable explosion of finches at my feeders right now. The first few pairs discovered our new seeds, and they told two friends, and so on and so on...! They are such a joy to watch, these winter beauties in our ever-changing winter world!
Now I wonder what the resident fox is up to and his subnivian prey....
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