A raft of wild turkeys, 30 or more, paused roadside deciding whether to fly, run, or try an impossible plow through 18 inches of heavy, melting snow.
Most birds flew a few tried walking up the road bank but buried their legs and still did not touching bottom.
It’s these and other kinds of conditions that wildlife face during some, but not all, winters in southern Wisconsin.
At times subzero temperatures lasting days on end keep hens, jakes and gobblers roosted most of a day. Each day they lose weight and sometimes die of malnutrition before weather warms.
White-tailed deer have three winter feeding methods. They paw for waste grains and green or dried grasses. Sometimes a bare spot where snow didn’t fall, or melted quicker beside a nearby dark object, give deer their meal.
Lucky are the deer who know of a watercress spring where warm water and green shoots are abundant, unless we got there first for salad greens.
Browsing branches, twigs, and dead leaves still hanging on oaks provide some relief. Giraffing by stretching their necks and finally standing on two hind legs gives way to a few frozen hawthorn or crabapple fruits. Of course evergreens can be quite nutritious with white cedar being the clear first choice, followed by white pine and then the lesser spruces, balsams and tree bark mosses and lichens. Caribou rely on lichens in other climates where trees are scarce.
A call came saying several dozen robins are feeding in the spring. Just passing through? Is it a likely future pick-me-up viewing station? Time will tell. They found water to drink and wash in, tiny organisms to eat, and warm air from the underground water bubbling out.
Squirrels, fox and grays, become tree top travelers. I watched a gray move several hundred yards through trees, encounter a road (no trees), come down the last tree, jump the plowed snow mound, scamper across bare surface and repeat the routine on the other side.
The first greens are choice foods. Turkeys have found skunk cabbage, emerging in January from melting snow with the plant’s cellular respiration pathway that shunts heat until there are rings of melted snow around each shoot. Others birds visit farm yards, bird feeders, and follow dairy farm manure spreaders.
Ruffed grouse “bud” for their breakfasts flying tree to tree and stopping when a hawthorn fruit or aspen buds catch their eyes.
Meat eaters, particularly those who fly, pick on vegetarians animals who start their food chain at the bottom of food webs.
“The critters are still doing very well,” said Doug Williams, at D W Sports Center in Portage. “Snow and cold have come and gone, but will be back; most animals are going to survive. I see turkeys out in the fields most of the time.”
Ice fishing and snowmobiling, are day to day. Be safe, partner for safety reasons and engage common sense. A few trout anglers are out in spite of unfavorable conditions.
Wally Banfi, at Wilderness Fish and Game in Sauk City said that the warming trend made checking every new location just as though it is first ice,
“A week ago there was some really good ice fishing in places, which leads me to believe the first ice thing is behind us,” Banfi said.
Banfi has seen Bald Eagles cluster in convocations below dams where there is open water much of time, but like ice fishing and snowmobiling, these eagle groupings will come and go much of the remaining winter.
First spring things first. Look for green and purple leaves of skunk cabbage poking through the marshland snow. Collect some pussy willow twigs and force flower buds to open indoors for a bouquet by February 14. These will top putting faith in a woodchuck, tucked away in an underground cavity.
Contact Jerry Davis, a freelance writer, at sivadjam@mhtc.net or
608.924.1112.
