While this thought can be unsettling, there is some solace in the fact that, from a zoological perspective, dying from old age is a luxury. After all, animals in the wild almost never make it that far. (When was the last time you saw an elderly raccoon hobbling around your garbage cans, gumming at your refuse and cursing the young whippersnapper raccoons?)

Fact is, raccoons seldom make it past five years in the wild. That’s impressive compared to an ermine (short-tailed weasel) – they’re lucky to see the first half of their second year.

If you’re a wild animal, you’re almost always killed by something other than the slow, peaceful death-in-sleep we all hope for. Be it bus or bear, weather or wolf, rabies or red-tailed hawk, something comes along and picks you off before you have the chance to live out your golden years in a cozy den. Odds are, you don’t even see the first gray hairs in your pelt before death sweeps you away.

Nevertheless, animals sometimes do reach old age. A raccoon subject to the comforts of captivity (all the crawfish it can eat) might make it to 21 years – more than quadruple the lifespan of its average wild counterpart.

This difference is even more pronounced in the common raven. These largest of North American corvids (crows, jays, and their kin) have a recorded wild lifespan of almost 22 years, yet there are reports of individuals at the Tower of London having persisted in excess of 44 years. There’s even an unsubstantiated report of one individual hanging on to the perch for 80 years.

There are trends in longevity as well. The clearest is this: the larger an organism is, the longer it tends to live. The lowly common vole, even in the comforts of captivity, won’t make it much past three years. Captive red foxes have seen 21 years; captive black bears have made it to 34. This large-small divide often mirrors predator-prey relationships. A mature cougar, a whopping 138 pounds on average, can live to be 18 years in the wild. On the other end of the food chain, eastern cottontails, a wimpy 2.75 pounds, max out at five years and average only 15 months.

There are also trends among taxonomic groups. Turtles generally can last longer than a half-century. Snakes can’t. Wild garter snakes live up to 14 years, and the black racer doesn’t usually survive far past 10 years.

Insects have it the worst: in their adult phase, monarch butterflies never live longer than eight or nine months. Bumblebee queens may persist all of a year, while their workers can look forward to a few months of forced labor before they kick the honey-bucket. And in the live fast, die young competition, the mayflies have it wings down – after a year as aquatic larvae, they ascend to the skies and taste sweet freedom for all of a day before dying en masse.

And, of course, some species buck the trends. Snapping turtles, the largest turtles in New England, have lived to be 47 years old. Painted turtles weigh less than a tenth as much as an average snapper, yet at least one has been recorded as living to the ripe old age of 61. Captive bobcats have lived to 32 years, while the oldest captive cougar has only seen 23 years, 8 months. This could all be chalked up to a lack of good comparative data, but the numbers are intriguing, anyway.

Amid all the scientific uncertainty, aging continues. Eyesight weakens; tendons slacken; reaction times slow. You miss a few more rabbits; it’s harder to make the dash for cover. Fur loses its luster, talons their edge, scales their sheen – every organism lurches over the hill of life and begins the ignoble, tumbling descent down the other side.

But hey, there’s always a hungry bear or a hurtling bus, and it’s liable to get you first.

The humble hobblebush (Viburnum lantanoides) is one such plant, a companion to hikers year-round. You can be reasonably sure of encountering it on just about any hike through the forests of northern New England.

Hobblebush is a scraggly, sprawling shrub that favors moist deciduous forests up to about 3,000 feet in elevation. It is rarely more than five feet in height, with large, round, slightly pointed heart-shaped leaves, and a half-dozen folk names that indicate it has long been a curse to anyone trying to bushwhack through the woods: hobblebush (its sprawling branches hobble you); witch-hobble (it even hobbles witches!); tangle-legs, and so on.

Actually, the “witch” in witch-hobble doesn’t refer to supernatural beings. It’s a word descended from the Middle English word “withy,” which means a strong, flexible switch-like branch. It’s the same “witch” as in “witch hazel,” another withy or switch-like shrub.

Some hunters refer to the plant as “moosebush,” as in winter the leathery brown buds look like moose ears. Some loggers used to refer to the plant as “she-moosewood,” in the mistaken belief that it was the female form of the striped maple (Acer pensylvanicum), another understory plant, but related in no way to hobblebush. Striped maple is sometimes referred to as “moose maple,” and in fact, moose feed eagerly on both plants.

In any case, hobblebush can be a witch-like impediment to anyone who hikes cross-country through the mountains of New England. Its branches can be four feet in length or longer, and they are both strong and supple. They have the ability to root themselves from the tip, wherever those tips touch the ground, thus creating wicket-like snarls of branches. As a result, they arc throughout the forest understory, quietly growing into devilish thickets guaranteed to impede the progress of the unmindful.

The plant has no commercial uses and therefore should qualify only as a nuisance to human beings. But there is another side to the hobblebush. Especially in May, the hobblebush is undeniably beautiful.

The plant leafs out in early spring and blossoms in mid-to-late May, about the same time that painted trilliums, trout lilies, and Canada mayflower can be found on the forest floor. Hobblebush blossoms spectacularly, extending bright white clusters of blossoms, sometimes six or eight inches across, out on the ends of its long, supple branches.

The blossom clusters are complex, with the central portion composed of tiny waxy-white flowers, complete with stamen and pistils, bunched tightly together in a snowy mass. They are surrounded by much larger five-petaled flowers, about an inch across, that are also brilliant white, but are sterile – they have no stamens or pistils and thus do not produce fruit or seeds. It is surmised that their function is to attract insects to pollinate the inner cluster of fertile flowers.

There are many mountain trails in Vermont, New Hampshire, and Maine that are replete with stands of hobblebush, especially at lower elevations. This time of year, hikers who time their outing right can climb through blossoms and descend through blossoms – usually batting clouds of hungry biting insects out of the way. Every glimpse of beauty has its price.

Nevertheless, to walk one of these trails at dusk, surrounded by the humble shrub’s fresh green foliage and clustered white blossoms, is to know what springtime in the mountains really means.As the season progresses, the clusters of white blossoms will transform into clusters of small green berries, which gradually ripen over the summer and fall – first to pink, then bright red, and finally black. The hobblebush leaves, so fresh and bright green in May, gradually darken and become mottled red and purple as summer turns to autumn.

As the season progresses, the clusters of white blossoms will transform into clusters of small green berries, which gradually ripen over the summer and fall – first to pink, then bright red, and finally black. The hobblebush leaves, so fresh and bright green in May, gradually darken and become mottled red and purple as summer turns to autumn.

Blame not the harmless pollen grain, but rather an antibody known as immunoglobulin E (IgE). IgE evolved to protect us from parasites, but some people are so sensitive to foreign substances that their body makes IgE when confronted with pollen. When IgE meets pollen in an allergy sufferer’s airways, it causes tissue mast cells to release histamine. The result – swelling, itching, sneezing, and mucus production – is good for ejecting parasites, but also a source of misery.
 
The pollen-shedding culprits are everywhere. Most trees in the Northeast rely on the wind to waft their pollen from male to female flower parts. These trees flower in early spring, before leaves unfurl and get in the way of pollination. Wind pollinated trees have pollen grains that are tiny, dry, and light. At about 25 microns long, it takes about 40 pollen grains, lined up end to end, to equal one millimeter. That’s a handy size for blowing about, and for penetrating nasal cavities.

Because they don’t need to attract bees, wind-pollinated flowers are generally greenish with scale-like petals. In many trees, such as oak, beech, and birch, the pollen-producing male flowers are massed on dangling catkins while the female flowers are separate. The anthers, the business part of the male flower, hang in the breeze and release millions of pollen grains. These vast numbers increase the likelihood of a pollen grain randomly blowing onto a female flower.

Female flowers can be easily overlooked on some trees. In red oak, for example, they are grouped on bud-like protrusions – each female flower is a mere one-eighth of an inch across. Large or small, what female flowers of most tree species have in common are feathery extensions, called stigmas, which catch airborne pollen.

Generally, we don’t see tree pollen, with the exception of white pine. Its yellow, cone-shaped male flowers release large pollen grains in enormous quantities that can be seen drifting in clouds, making a visible layer on windshields and puddles. Pine pollen grains are three to four times larger than those of most other trees, due to a pair of inflated air sacs that help the pollen stay airborne.

Although it looks like the perfect recipe for a sneeze, pine pollen doesn’t cause allergies. Oak, ash, and box-elder pollen provoke the strongest allergies.

While most trees are wind pollinated, 90 percent of flowering plants take advantage of insect pollinators. They produce typical flowers that lure insects in with bright colors, perfumes, and nectar in exchange for taking their pollen away and depositing it on the female parts of another flower. But allergy sufferers fear not: pollen from insect-pollinated flowers does not cause allergies.

Pollen from insect-pollinated flowers is designed to be readily picked up by an insect as it probes the flower for nectar. The pollen grains are big and rough, often revealing patterns of ridges or spines under the microscope. They are also covered in a viscous, oily fluid known as pollen kitt. This causes the pollen to stick together in clumps that adhere first to the insect and then to the prominently positioned stigma of the recipient flower. These sticky pollen grains don’t blow around like dust, so they don’t enter nasal passages and provoke allergies.

Despite being so tiny, pollen is more complex than it appears. It bears two sperm cells. After a pollen grain lands on a stigma, it germinates like a tiny plant and puts out a long pollen tube. This tube grows down into the flower’s ovary. Here it encounters an ovule, which holds an egg cell and a large central cell. The two sperm cells burst from the pollen tube. One fertilizes the egg cell, which develops into an embryonic plant, while the other fertilizes the central cell, which grows into a source of stored food called endosperm. This process is called double fertilization. The embryonic plant and the endosperm are packaged together into a seed that, with any luck, will reach the ground and grow into a self-sufficient plant, such as a rose or an oak tree.

Unfortunately for allergy sufferers, trees are just the first in the yearly succession of wind-pollinated plants. Soon there will be grasses, although only a handful out of a thousand or so species cause hay fever. Ragweed will later round out the season.

Although scientists have identified several pollen compounds that provoke the immune system to make IgE, the reason why only some people are sensitive remains poorly understood.

Lacking any dispersal mechanism of their own, fairy shrimp are permanent residents of temporary pools. We can only assume they are dispersed inadvertently by other animals, such as waterfowl and amphibians, or by wind and flooding events. Worldwide, there are some 300 species scattered across all seven continents, with 64 known in North America. Generally about ¾-inch long, fairy shrimp are easily recognized by their combination of stalked eyes, upside-down swimming behavior, and often orange, reddish, bronze, or bluish coloration. Fossils of fairy shrimp date back to the Cambrian Period, more than 500 million years ago, long before the first fish introduced simple vertebrate anatomy to the world. Originally populating the world’s oceans, over time fairy shrimp were forced by evolving predators into shallow, temporary freshwater habitats.

In New England, at least two species of fairy shrimp live in vernal pools. The vernal fairy shrimp (Eubranchipus vernalis) is fairly widespread in southern New England, while further north it is replaced by the knob-lipped fairy shrimp (E. bundyi). This reddish-orange fairy shrimp is most often seen in early spring, shortly after ice-out. Although little is known about the distribution and abundance of the knob-lipped shrimp in Vermont and New Hampshire, my only encounters with it have been in larger pools located in relatively undisturbed forest. I have not found them in roadside pools affected by run-off, or those in fields or other open, “disturbed” habitats.

After fertilization, fairy shrimp eggs – technically called cysts – settle to the bottom of the pool where they enter a state of dormancy, called diapause. Resistant to desiccation, the cysts, which are fully-developed embryos, remain in the sediment throughout the summer when most vernal pools dry up. Cysts provide a great advantage over eggs when an organism lives in a quickly disappearing habitat like a drying vernal pool. The embryo can emerge as soon as conditions are right for hatching, which tend to be specific for each species (or even each population), including a narrow temperature range with sufficient light and oxygen levels, combined with low osmotic conditions. In addition, studies of some fairy shrimp species have demonstrated reduced hatching success if the cysts are not exposed to pool-drying and/or freezing temperatures. This may explain why, after being present in a given pool for several years, fairy shrimp may seem to disappear for a year or two, only to suddenly reappear one spring for no apparent reason.

Since there is always a risk that a dry spring will not fill a pool long enough for fairy shrimp to complete their reproductive cycle, they have evolved a unique bet-hedging strategy to avoid extirpation. In any year, only a portion of the previous year’s cysts will hatch, resulting in a “bank” of dormant eggs that can last for decades, possibly even centuries. One study of vernal pool sediments reported 1,000 cysts per square foot, of which only 3 percent hatched during any given flooding event. Such bet-hedging ensures that it would take a long series of false starts and unfavorable conditions to empty the cyst bank that rests below the leaf litter.

In our region, Eubranchipus eggs hatch in late winter or early spring as well-developed larvae called metanauplii. After several molts, they add appendages and, over the course of one to two weeks, gradually mature into adults with the full complement of 11 pairs of feathery legs. Adult male bundyi appear to patrol territories, waiting for receptive females to approach them. Mature females, which tend to remain hidden in the leaf litter, can be recognized by paired egg sacs located just behind their legs, while mature males appear to have enlarged heads due to the presence of claspers – modified antennae used to grasp females during mating.

The adult life cycle is fleeting, lasting only one to three weeks. Once the water temperature approaches 60° F, usually by mid- to late-May, fairy shrimp populations decline rapidly. As oxygen levels decline and predators, such as dragonfly and salamander larvae, increase in both abundance and size, conditions become increasingly inhospitable for these slow-swimming crustaceans.

Vernal pools are critical components of healthy forest ecosystems in the Northeast, and fairy shrimp, which spend their entire lives in these tiny wetlands, are indicators of vibrant, unpolluted systems. Do yourself a favor and visit a vernal pool in your neighborhood this spring. If you’re lucky, perhaps you’ll become acquainted with these intriguing crustaceans.

Bark landscapes are amazingly varied, with complex topography, many microclimates, and habitats both harsh and mild. Old trees offer the best flora-watching, as their thick, furrowed, spongy bark holds enough moisture and nutrients to support a mini-rainforest; young trees, on the other hand, seem relatively desert-like.

On most trees in our area, you’ll find three distinct types of nonvascular flora – mosses, liverworts, and lichens.  Non-vascular means that these organisms lack water-transporting vessels, and absorb their water from the tree bark or the atmosphere.

If you view tree bark as a micro-landscape, the lush, green patches of moss most resemble forests, and for good reason: like trees, mosses are green and have leaves. The leaves are tiny and soft, with a central vein, and spiral around the stem. I’ve noticed that mosses often cluster around knots, furrows, or old branch scars on tree trunks, the ‘mountains’ in the topography of bark. With greater relief, these bark features catch moisture and (sometimes) sunlight, and are some of the most fertile parts of the trunk. Mosses also drape emerald skirts around the bases of many trunks.

Liverworts grow almost everywhere, and a few moments studying bark will probably turn up these little plants. Frullania eboracensis, a leafy liverwort, looks like a miniature brownish, living version of rickrack (that flat zigzag sewing material). It also occurs frequently around bark knots, appearing from afar like a dark patch of felt. Up close, it’s a riot of compact branches and hand-lens-worthy round leaves that alternate on the stem, unlike the spiraling leaves of mosses. Like impeccable handwriting caught daydreaming, Frullania branches outward from a central mass, undulating tightly across the mesas and canyons of tree bark, branching repeatedly into fragments and unfinished thoughts.

Frullania’s little brown leaves provide habitats for even smaller creatures: bdelloid rotifers. These animals measure less than a millimeter and live inside Frullania’s tiny, spherical leaf lobes, projecting their mouths out to feed from films of water that coat the liverwort and bark. Frullania not only provides moisture and shelter, but its branches net insect dung, bits of soil, feathers, and tree detritus – a cornucopia to its animal inhabitants.

Lichens often grow amid, over, and alongside mosses and liverworts. These odd organisms are not plants at all; they result from two or more organisms, including fungi and algae, forming a symbiotic relationship. Some leafy lichens can be the largest organisms on a tree trunk. One of these, Punctelia rudecta, ripples from a central point in overlapping, pale gray-green wavelets, like a fossilized splash of milk. Individuals can be several inches in diameter.

Crustose lichens look like splotches of paint, from delicate watercolor washes to thick oil brushstrokes in colors from white to orange to green. One, Conotrema urceolatum, appears almost exclusively on sugar maple bark, and can help you identify the tree. It’s a flat, opaque white patch with tiny black dots. Up close, the dots look like microscopic bagels.

Mosses, lichens, liverworts, rotifers, and the myriad other species that populate tree bark interact in complex ways that scientists are still working to understand. For example, mossy trunks have more diverse leafy lichens, while less mossy trunks host more crustose lichens. Out in the woods, I like to remember how findings like this began: with a curious, patient observer, wandering into exotic worlds nestled in the crevices of one tree.

Is the boom about to come to Vermont and New Hampshire? In a word, no. And not because Vermont recently enacted a three-year moratorium on new drilling in the state.

Vermont and New Hampshire have been cursed (or blessed, depending on your point of view) with a lack of fossil fuel deposits, and it looks like we’re going to miss this latest bonanza as well. As with so many other features of these small, quirky states, you can blame it all on the mountains.

Crude oil and natural gas form under very specific geological circumstances. First you need a mountain range from which water is going to flow, carrying rich nutrients with it. Then you need an adjacent ocean or sea, preferably shallow, where plankton and algae can thrive in the nutrient-enriched waters and where their remains can filter to the bottom and slowly accumulate. Then you need an oxygen-poor environment so that the organic matter doesn’t preemptively decompose and disappear. Then you need a whole bunch of time.

During all this time, the carbon-rich sediments become buried under evermore silt and sand as the nearby mountains continue to erode. Eventually, the weight of the sediments grows heavy enough to convert the ooze into oil and, if the pressure and resulting heat are intense enough, into natural gas.

In other words, if you want to find rich deposits of oil and natural gas today, look on the flanks of where the mountains are (or used to be). In our case, those mountains would be the Appalachians, and those flanks are either the deep inland basin (and former sea) that runs down the western side of the range, from Quebec to New York to Pennsylvania and beyond, or the offshore continental shelf, presently under the Atlantic Ocean, where oil and gas have also been found. But don’t look in the core of the mountains themselves because they were the source, not the sink, for the sediments.

If you drew a line through northern New England along the center of the old Appalachian range, you’d draw it right across New Hampshire, from southwest to northeast. There’s scarcely a sedimentary rock to be found in the entire state – it’s the land of the granites and metamorphics. You can’t be both the Granite State and the Natural Gas State, so no go in New Hampshire.

Vermont is a more complicated story. While the eastern side of the state is close to the core of the range, the western side, including the Champlain Valley and the Valley of Vermont, abuts the inland basin. In fact, these valleys are geologically part of the inland basin, and the Essex shale found in Vermont, for example, has produced natural gas farther west in New York. So Vermont could, in theory, have some natural gas.

But to have natural gas, you also need to have just the right combination of geological formations: a relatively porous formation (like the Essex or Marcellus shale) where the gas can accumulate, and a non-porous trap rock (like a sandstone) to act as a lid and trap the gas underneath instead of allowing it to seep away and disperse.This layer cake of formations needs to be intact, but the closer you get to the mountains, the more likely it is that these layers were broken or folded long ago, allowing the gas to escape.

Drilling for natural gas has not yet been done in Vermont, so it’s impossible to say for sure whether there is any to be found. But given the fractured bedrock of Vermont’s mountainous topography, it’s not likely to be there, especially in commercially viable quantities.

But that’s the final piece of the story – the changing definition of “commercially viable quantity.” The natural gas in the Marcellus shale wasn’t recently discovered; geologists have known about it for decades. But they couldn’t get to it until they had the new tools of horizontal drilling and hydrofracking.

In other words, technology changes, so never say never. But mountains don’t change, at least over human lifetimes. If someone tries to sell you shares in the Vermont and New Hampshire Natural Gas Company, you’d be much better off keeping your cash under the mattress.

Whether you’re a hunter looking to see if the buck that got away survived the winter, or a nature enthusiast looking to bring a part of the world you love home, antler shed hunting is gaining more and more popularity. It is a difficult and sometimes frustrating venture, but one that has many rewards for those who enjoy spending time in the woods.

Before we get to the finer points of shed hunting, we should review the antler. Unlike the “horns” that animals like cows and goats sport year-round, antlers grow from scratch and are discarded each year. Deer and moose begin growing their antlers in March or April, and they’re fully grown by late August. When the antlers are growing, they are covered in a velvet-like material that supplies blood to the growing antlers. Prior to the breeding season, shortening day length causes a rise in a buck’s testosterone levels, which directly relates to the hardening of the antler and the shedding of velvet.  A buck will scrape off the velvet and polish the antlers in preparation for breeding season, during which time he may use them in a dominance fight with another buck. When the breeding season ends, usually late December in the Northeast, the buck no longer has any need for his antlers, and shortly thereafter, the antler, devoid of any blood flow for several months, drops off, leaving a small bloody stump that quickly scabs over.

Finding shed antlers is an exercise in patience. It takes a lot of luck and hours of roaming the woodlands the bucks inhabit. The season for shed hunting begins in February – when most bucks around the northeast lose their antlers –and continues through April. Shed hunters have to figure out where the bucks have been resting, feeding, and find the paths that they travel on. During the early season, especially in far northern areas, finding buck tracks in the snow and simply following them is very effective. Heavy snow will concentrate deer and the antlers they shed. Do be conscious, though, of animal stress, and avoid disturbing deeryards: the dense, evergreen forest stands in which they congregate. Instead, backtrack the animals from their core yards towards adjacent hardwood feeding areas, and look for shed antlers there.

In southern areas of Vermont and New Hampshire where deer don’t, as a general rule, yard in winter, it’s harder, but not impossible, to find sheds. Concentrate your search by eliminating areas where a buck is not likely to lose them. The middle of a field is a rare spot to find antlers, but areas of thickets and woods with heavily traveled deer trails are good places to look, as the thicker cover can simply tug the antlers off the buck’s head. Fence crossings, fallen logs, and any such areas where a buck would have to leap over to cross are often worth an extra glass, as the impact of landing can jar the antlers to the ground. Both moose and deer are drawn to pathways. If you cannot locate any active deer trails, simply follow and search snowmobile trails and power lines that are naturally easy travel routes for these animals. The truth is that there is no definite formula to finding shed antlers; dropping off of bucks’ heads at random times and places, the only sure way to find them is to get out and look.

March and early April are great times to find shed antlers; on good days the antlers will glow on the barren forest floor. But be aware that you’re not the only one looking for sheds. Squirrels, mice, porcupines, even foxes and bears eat antlers, which are full of calcium, phosphorus, and mineral salts. By summer, wild animals large and small will have nearly devoured every antler in the forest.

Spring lake turnover is the process by which a lake mixes itself, thereby replenishing its oxygen supply. Oxygen is vital for lake quality – it is the gas that drives the life cycles of aquatic plants and animals. Algae, fish, aquatic insects and crustaceans are sustained only in waters that contain adequate oxygen. Trout, in particular, require consistently high levels of oxygen for survival.

So how does a body of water accumulate oxygen? To understand, we must first be aware of the temperature-density relationship of water.
The density of water changes with temperature. We know that 212°F is the boiling point for water, and 32°F is freezing. A third significant number regarding water chemistry is 39°F – the temperature of maximum water density.

We’ll begin our spring lake turnover story in autumn. In the fall, a lake cools until it reaches a uniform 39°F. As the lake continues to cool it becomes stratified – the heavy, 39°F water stays on the bottom, while the water near the top is chilled by the below freezing air temperatures. Ice, less dense than water, forms when the lake’s surface temperature reaches 32°F. The ice acts as a barrier to wind, which prevents the lake water from mixing; it also inhibits the lake’s exchange with oxygen in the atmosphere. Once a lake is frozen, the depletion of oxygen by the lake organisms begins.

Just when the lake’s oxygen supply is nearly exhausted, spring arrives and the ice cover slowly melts, exposing the surface to warmer temperatures and vigorous vernal winds. The lake’s surface water begins exchanging gases with the air. When the surface water warms to 39°F, it sinks, pushing through the deeper water and infusing it with oxygen. This process creates a powerful convection current that continues to churn until all the lake water is an even 39°F, top to bottom, and the water has reached its oxygen saturation point (approximately 12 parts per million).

In late spring and early summer, solar energy warms the water’s surface. Warmer water, being less dense than colder water, remains on the surface and the lake once again begins to stratify. Swimmers routinely experience the phenomenon of summer stratification, usually preferring the warm layer of surface water to the more frigid depths below. Trout have the opposite preference.

Once summer stratification occurs, the lake water no longer mixes, and the depletion of oxygen reserves begins. The oxygen levels will continue to deplete until fall, when the air temperatures drop, the surface cools, and the lake water is again blended – and re-oxygenated – at 39°F. The cycle continues.

A winter with so little snow has its share of winners and losers. Skiers and snowmobilers lose. Hikers, and even golfers, win. People who don’t have garages to park their cars in win big.

The same is true in the natural world.

White-tailed deer are well-known winners in a winter with little snow. “A winter like this is great from a deer’s perspective,” says Kent Gustafson, deer project leader for the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department.

In northern New England, white-tailed deer are at the northern end of their North American range. So not only do more deer survive the winter, but healthier does produce healthier fawns, so more fawns survive.

Moose, on the other hand, are at the southern edge of their range in Vermont and New Hampshire and find warm winter temperatures stressful. Winter ticks are another big source of winter stress. During bad years, heavy tick infestations of up to 70,000 ticks per animal can turn this majesty of the north into a thin, bald ghost.

It’s the snow and cold in fall and spring that are key to winter tick populations, says Kristine Rines, the moose biologist with the New Hampshire Fish and Game Department. Ticks quest for moose in September or October, and early snow can mean fewer ticks. Conversely, if there’s no snow into December, ticks benefit.

What may save the moose in this low snow winter is last year’s high snow. There was snow and cold in April, meaning ticks couldn’t lay their eggs as proficiently. Rines says that there may have been fewer ticks questing for moose through the warm and snowless fall and early winter.

While we have to wait and see winter’s effect on deer and moose populations, unusual fluctuations in local bird populations were evident everywhere this winter.

The “irruptions,” or occasional influxes, of snowy owls (like Harry Potter’s Hedwig) and pine siskins likely had nothing to do with the unusual weather, says Chris Rimmer, director of the Vermont Center for Ecostudies in Norwich, Vermont.

Weather probably did have something to do with the tundra swans on Lake Champlain, as the open water and the balmy temperatures resembled their usual wintering grounds in the American South. The weather also probably contributed to the unusually high numbers of robins that stuck around this winter.

“Robins have been the big story this winter,” says Rimmer, “and I don’t think there is any doubt that weather has played a large part in their historic (at least in recent memory) abundance.”

A wealth of berries and a bumper crop of beechnuts meant that we saw a lot more of black bears this winter too, says Andrew Timmons, bear project leader for New Hampshire Fish and Game.

“Bears hibernate to deal with the lack of food,” he says. While breeding females need to den to have their cubs, males and non-breeding females can roam all winter if there is food. And roam they did. “People were seeing bear tracks well into December,” Timmins says.

Timmins expects bear hibernation season to be over early this year, and that’s what Jim Andrews, director of the Vermont Reptile and Amphibian Atlas, has already seen with frogs and salamanders.

Andrews observed frogs and salamanders migrating from their wintering spots in the woods to their mating grounds in a swamp in Salisbury on March 8 this year. That’s the earliest he’s ever seen a migration in Vermont. Unlike bears, something – perhaps the length of the day – prevents migrating amphibians from wandering in midwinter, even if there are warm rains.

“The ones that made that mistake died out a long time ago,” Andrews says.

Vernal pools depend on melting snow so they may not fill in a low-snow year. But it would take several years of low snow to wipe out the population of amphibians breeding at a particular vernal pool, Andrews says.

Spring peepers live for about three years, so as long as the snow or rain returns within that time, the population will survive, he says. Wood frogs live four or five years, and spotted salamanders live for 20 years.

Those patient amphibians might offer a lesson to those unhappy with this winter’s lack of snow (and perhaps a warning to those who thrived): Just wait until next year.

“In the summer, the martens have this unbelievably bright orange throat patch – like hunter orange,” says Jillian Kilburn, a wildlife biologist with the New Hampshire Department of Fish and Game. That patch makes the marten the most brightly-colored mammal in our region, she explains. The rest of its body is a deep chocolate brown in summer and a lighter tawny color in winter.

Marten are a threatened species in New Hampshire and endangered in Vermont. They’re known for favoring spruce-fir forests in the far north. And they love snow – thriving under a deep snowpack where they hunt mice, voles and red squirrels.

Martens also love trees. They love to climb them, and they love the little spaces in the snow made by roots and fallen branches. Martens thrive in old growth, Kilburn says, where there are lots of fallen trees and gnarly root systems, though it is possible to manage the landscape [for “manage,” think logging] and keep martens pretty happy. To coexist with martens, a logger would look to retain 60% canopy cover after a harvest, leave a few big, dead trees, and leave lots of tops and branches on the ground.

Something in the northern third of New Hampshire is making martens very happy. While attempts were made to restore the marten population in the 1950s and 1970s, Kilburn says the population has really taken off in the past 10 years.

She even gets calls about martens breaking into northern camps and stealing food.

Martens are not as happy in southern Vermont. Twenty years ago, when the Vermont Fish and Wildlife Department tried to restore martens to the south-central Green Mountains, camera traps recorded only two of the 115 released animals in the area five years later.

Part of the problem may have been a lack of deep snow. The other problem, though, was competition: the cameras did record an awful lot of fishers

A fisher is another member of the weasel family that can weigh up to 10 times more than a marten. “Fisher and marten are prime competitors,” says Chris Bernier, fur-bearer biologist for the Vermont Department of Fish and Wildlife. “Martens do better in deep snow. Without deep snow, the fisher has the advantage.”

Bernier says that Vermont’s trapping records indicate that the fisher population surged during the time the marten were released. He suspects it was just unlucky timing for the marten reintroduction project.

Last year, trappers reported two martens in southeastern Vermont, offering hope that either martens are returning to the area on their own, or that the survivors from the restoration effort hung on long enough to reproduce.

Alexej Siren, a graduate researcher at the University of New Hampshire, also wonders about the effect of fisher on New Hampshire’s martens. When his research projects began in late 2010, Siren says, the state didn’t have much information specific to New Hampshire martens. “What are their home ranges compared to martens in Maine or out West?” he wondered.

Siren has radio-collared 13 martens and tracks them with a hand-held receiver on weekly trips to the study site, and with a receiver mounted in a newly built wind farm. Because Siren began collecting data on the marten before the wind project was built, he will be able to see what influence the wind farm has on the martens’ home ranges.

He also samples the tracks of other predators in the area. Because martens thrive in deep snow, Siren is curious about what effects the maintained road to the wind farm and the packed snow on winter hiking and snowmobile trails might have in bringing competing predators to the site.

“Out West, backcountry roads and trails are introducing coyotes to lynx habitat,” Siren says. With the martens in New Hampshire, “I’m most worried about fisher.”

Siren is just halfway through his fieldwork, but he’s already learned that martens migrate from low-elevation hardwood forests to higher elevation spruce-fir forests after the leaves fall. In Vermont, Bernier plans to survey for martens with camera traps and hopes that DNA tests will show where those trapped martens came from, or if they are descendants of the restoration project.

Now that marten numbers are increasing, perhaps we’ll be able to learn a lot more about this secretive animal.