Autumn is closing fast. We toss wood on the fire, button up the house, adjust to lengthening hours of darkness, and believe wild things are going about their own preparatory tasks.
My lawns and fields are now sere, and before long snow will blanket the scene. Whatever summer life they held has vanished, and all is quiet. Imagining, I go beneath the crinkling grass into hardened soil, down into the constant temperature sought by creatures if they are to survive.
The eastern mole, whose tunnels erupt everywhere in spring, is now deeper in the ground. It’s not a hibernator and continues lessened activity in a labyrinth of burrows and nesting rooms. The earthworms on which it continues to feed are down there, too, no longer at the surface. Clusters of worms ball together in their hibernating chambers, gaining whatever accumulated warmth a slowed metabolism produces. What a bonanza for the mole!
Balling together is also how our garter snakes spend winters, having left grasslands to gather under the rocky approach to the barn’s hayloft. They emerge to sun themselves in mid-fall if there is no snow, but that’s the last I’ll see of them until late April.
Summer and winter, meadow voles are the most abundant small mammals of our fields. In warm seasons, their branching runways wander everywhere in the grass. In autumn they gather sun-dried stems and leaves while preparing nests in protected spots that will be covered by heavy snow. They remain busy throughout winter, collecting vegetation along winding routes deep beneath the snowy blanket. Close to the barn, they focus attention upon an old apple tree, where their tunnels take a sharp upward turn so that they can gnaw on bark out of sight of predators. I’ve had to wrap the tree’s trunk with hardware cloth to keep it from being girdled. Spring thaw exposes the culprits’ peregrinations in the last inch or two of melting snow.
Not so the chipmunk, a provisioner of its larder in late summer and autumn, but an underground hibernator by late October. In summer I come across small, neat openings that give no clue to the elaborate chipmunk burrows and storage chambers beneath the surface. Sometimes a hole I remember vanishes, plugged by its inhabitant, while a second entrance is opened some distance away. Until they permanently go underground when the temperature plummets, chipmunks are among the busiest animals I see between house, barn, and the hammock grove. Their ability to gather acorns, nuts, and seeds is prodigious, their cheek pouches almost infinitely expansible. Their winter storage chambers must be crammed after such an industrious gathering of staples.
Chipmunks are not entirely safe in their winter retreats, for I’ve found ermine tracks on the surface that abruptly disappear downward. Removal of a little snow reveals a chipmunk burrow at the bottom, its entrance spattered with blood.
Our solitary woodchuck living in the field by the hammock grove is an old-timer. Her burrow is a deep one, extending well beneath the frost line, and no doubt runs a long distance underground with another entrance somewhere along its length. I have no idea where her hibernating chamber is located, although it should be at the end of the burrow’s run. When I see her foraging in autumn, glossy coat rippling over a thick layer of fat, it’s evident she will comfortably survive inactivity underground. In late winter, if a mild day comes along, she may wake to come out briefly, but soon returns to hibernation. These short forays have given rise to the myth of Groundhog Day, February 2: whether or not a woodchuck sees its shadow forecasts the advent of spring.
An enormous American toad we call Winston is a familiar warm-weather inhabitant of our lawn. The Churchillian amphibian is behaviorally complex and accurately memorizes its entire territory, repeatedly visiting favorite feeding sites. In spring it leaves for the nearby pond to seek a mate, but soon returns to home base near a rock wall. In early fall the toad vanishes from the scene, digging into soft soil in preparation for the long winter. It’s an efficient excavator, using hind legs to dig while pushing down with front feet that then pull in loose soil to fill the hole above. At first it buries itself only a few inches, but as the temperature drops, it continues to dig further and keeps doing so throughout the winter, staying below the frost line, at times down to four feet deep. In a chamber at the bottom, it draws in its legs and, with bowed head and closed eyes, remains motionless through the deep winter. For our American toad, it’s a long wait until next summer’s short season of activity.
Don’t we all feel the same sometimes.