Water Closet for March 13, 2015
[pullquote]”The big lesson for him and all of us from his books and those of other naturalists and scientists is the diversity of adaptations to cold temperatures and their effects on internal water”[/pullquote]This cold snowy winter the pine log raft supporting the Stream Teamers’ shack is locked in the ice of the Ipswich River. Snow is up to window ledges. There is no open liquid water in sight unless we open a trap door in the deck. Our wood stove makes it a cozy hide-a-way. We are tightly moored in the lee of a knoll covered with pines that whisper in the breeze. Drafts were felt up from the sills before the skirt of protective snow. One old timer from Salisbury remembers his boyhood days when salt marsh grasses were piled against house foundations in winter. Snow though less predictable is probably better insulation. It is certainly one many animals find important. We peer out of frosted windows at the surface of three plus feet of snow and see few signs of life except for sleeping trees, a few squirrel tracks and one deep deer path. Large animals both predators and prey have had a tough time since deep snow finally came in the latter third of January. Yet we know largely from reading that we aren’t alone. Under the snow in warmth emanating from the Earth are mice, shrews, voles, chipmunks, frogs, insects, and hunkered down birds. Most can survive the winter even without protective snow when the frost in the ground some years is down three feet. This winter the deep frost line in January has risen close to the soil surface under deep snow. We’ll see signs of life when the snow melts. The snow-duff line will be laced with vole tunnels roofed with residual snow. Check your lawns. Many young trees and bushes will have lost their bark to near snow surface levels.
Folks know Stream Teamers are interested in wildlife so a common question this winter has been how do animals survive out there where we can’t? The old Closeteer’s good wife has been asking this every few days as she awaits bird and squirrel visits to her feeder. The danger for all organisms is losing body heat; if internal temperatures drop low enough cell and tissue water freezes. Ice crystals forming within cells pierce membranes causing cell death. Heat flows from higher to lower temperatures. Those with the greatest surface area relative to volume lose heat faster in cold air. Think of tall skinny Maasai compared with stocky Eskimos. If tiny animals with large surface-to-volume ratios didn’t have countering adaptations to heat loss or self-made antifreezes lowering the freezing point of blood and tissue fluids they would soon die. Air layers between hairs and feathers greatly slow heat movement but aren’t often enough.
Topsfield Audubon Wildlife Sanctuary field, Saturday March 7, 2015, the winter of deep snow. A week before it was up to the top rails. Many small mammals (voles, mice, shrews, mice, chipmunks) are active under the snow and in the soil. Heat comes from the Earth below. The snow above insulates. – Judy Schneider photo
Our amateur answers to the questions about winter survival would be too glib by far. We’d anthropomorphize by guessing they all grow thicker hair (more “layers”); eat more fuel to provide more heat; shiver, muscle fiber contractions without locomotion; move around more, muscles producing heat; seek shelter from deadly wind chill; hunker down in insulating snow; knock on peoples doors and ask in, etc. Different species do all these things except for mice and red squirrels who don’t knock. Fortunately we have a highly valued reference in our shack that has become more worn each winter since acquired soon after publication more than a decade ago. Naturalist Bernd Heinrich has given us Winter World1 in which he tells of secrets most not learned from the internet or even in his University of Vermont libraries and labs. Heinrich, emeritus professor of biology, has been a life long outdoorsman extraordinaire both day and night in all weathers and seasons. The famous 19th century Harvard naturalist Louis Agassiz urged his students to “Study nature not books.” Heinrich and the late Agassiz have done both, many times the former to correct the latter. Text books have passed on errors for centuries until someone checked in the field. When Heinrich isn’t teaching, writing, sketching, or doing research he is an ultra marathoner who runs 100 kilometers for fun or other reasons beyond our ken.2 Maybe it is on these runs that brilliant ideas and questions arise.
He certainly doesn’t run away from winter in northern Vermont and Maine where he digs into snow, drills holes in ice, climbs trees, cuts others for fuel, and goes out all times of the night and day even in bad weather to get closer to his subjects in efforts to see what they are up to and how they survive in whatever conditions they find themselves. He has had the help of many spunky students over the years. His scientific papers and popular books would fill a couple of the Closet’s shelves. Greatly adding to his science is his prose which in the opinion of some of us is right up there with Thoreau and Muir. His prize winning books are illustrated with his own fine sketches. What really pulls readers in, such as some Stream Teamers, are his sharp eyed-eared observations that raise questions that lead to often simple experiments with important findings, and of course more questions. Heinrich is constantly asking how and then trying to find out. When he finds chewed off spruce twigs on snow, he, no longer young, might climb to the tree top to see what is going on.
The big lesson for him and all of us from his books and those of other naturalists and scientists is the diversity of adaptations to cold temperatures and their effects on internal water. Chipmunks sleep for periods; weasels keep moving, hunting and eating. Wood frogs osmose water out of their cells into surrounding tissue fluid and with natural antifreezes keep ice crystals from forming. The result are rock hard frogs who when the temperature rises in spring will resume their activities. Many insects also use antifreezes. Woodchucks and bears hibernate to varying degrees, their greatly slowed metabolism runs on stored fat. Golden-crowned kinglets3, the crown jewel of Heinrich’s research for Winter World, who have a large surface area to volume ratio, do several things to survive day-night temperature ups and downs from 20 to -50 F degrees. We will give no more away about this great survival story except to say that despite these temperature changes many kinglets awaken and are active in the morning.
An old Stream Teamer has also again awoken. This morning inspired by Heinrich he will dig a hole through three-feet of snow with many strata covering his garden.4 He bets there is no frost in the ground.
1 Heinrich, Bernd. Winter World: the ingenuity of animal survival (HarperCollins, New York 2003.
2 Heinrich, Bernd. Why We Run: a natural history originally in hardcover as Racing the Antelope.
3 An adult Golden-crowned kinglet weighs about 1/5 oz. Many stay year around in northern New England.
4 The Stream Teamer lost the bet. The soil surface is still frozen hard. The long cold spell preceding the January-February snows must have gone deep. How deep is the frost line now? Don’t know. He doesn’t have an ice chisel or the strength to wield it.
____________________________________________________________________________
WATER RESOURCE AND CONSERVATION INFORMATION
FOR MIDDLETON, BOXFORD AND TOPSFIELD`
| Precipitation Data* for Month of: | Dec | Jan | Feb | March | |
| 30 Year Normal (1981 – 2010) Inches | 4.12 | 3.40 | 3.25 | 4.65 | |
| 2014 – 2015 Central Watershed Actual | 8.45 | 3.67 | 3.55 | 0.4 as of 3/10** | |
Ipswich R. Flow Rate (S. Middleton USGS Gage) in Cubic Feet/ Second (CFS):
For March 10, 2015 Normal . . . 113 CFS Current Rate . . . Unavailable
*Danvers Water Filtration Plant, Lake Street, Middleton is the source for actual precipitation data thru Feb.
**Middleton Stream Team is source of actual precipitation data for March.
Normals data is from the National Climatic Data Center.
THE WATER CLOSET is provided by the Middleton Stream Team: www.middletonstreamteam.org or <MSTMiddletonMA@gmail.com> or (978) 777-4584