Autumn is closing fast. Right now, my lawns and fields are sere, and snow will soon blanket the scene. Whatever summer life they held has vanished, and all is quiet. But come spring, when the snow recedes, there will be evidence of all kinds of activity having taken place on the lawn over the winter – burrows, tunnels, mounds, and the remnants of an under-snow civilization.
The eastern mole is the primary excavator whose tunnels will appear everywhere in the spring. Right now, however, moles are underground, preferring the constant temperature of deeper earth to the fluctuations of autumn at the surface. The eastern mole is not a hibernator and continues lessened activity in a labyrinth of burrows and nesting rooms. It’s still hungry, and the earthworms on which it feeds are down there too – balled together by the dozens in hibernating chambers, gaining whatever slight accumulated metabolic warmth their slowed circulatory systems produce. Finding such a chamber is a bonanza for the mole.
Balling together is also how the many garter snakes on my property spend winters, leaving the lawns and fields to gather under the accumulation of rocks that form the approach to our barn’s hayloft. The garters emerge to sun themselves in mid autumn if there is no snow, but that’s the last I’ll see of them until late April.
Both summer and winter, meadow voles are the most abundant small mammals of our lawns and fields. In the gentle seasons, their seemingly random runways branch everywhere in the grass. Voles follow similar routes beneath deep winter snow, but not underground. Spring thaw exposes these extensive peregrinations in the last inch or two of snow.
In autumn, meadow voles construct bulky nests of dried grass in protected spots that soon will be covered by drifts. In midwinter, our local voles focus attention upon an old apple tree, where their tunnels take a sharp upward turn in deep snow 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.
Not so the chipmunk, a provisioner of its larder in autumn. In summer I come across small, neat, round holes in the lawn that give no clue they lead to elaborate chipmunk burrows and storage chambers far below. Sometimes a hole I remember vanishes, plugged by its inhabitant, while a second entrance is opened some distance away. Until chipmunks go permanently underground to hibernate as the temperature plummets, they are among the busiest animals I see between house and barn. Their ability to gather acorns, nuts, and seeds is prodigious, their cheek pouches almost infinitely expansible.
Chipmunks are not entirely safe in their winter retreats; I’ve found ermine tracks on the snow that abruptly disappear downward. A little snow removal reveals a chipmunk burrow at the bottom, sometimes spattered with a bit of blood.
Our solitary woodchuck, living in the field by the hammock grove, is an old-timer. Her burrow is a deep one, extending far beneath the frost line, and it 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, her glossy coat rippling over a thick layer of fat, it’s evident she will comfortably survive underground inactivity. In late winter, if a mild day comes along, she may wake to come out briefly, but she soon returns to hibernating sleep. These short forays have given rise to the old adage of Groundhog Day, February 2.
Another familiar lawn inhabitant of mine is an enormous American toad. This Churchillian amphibian is behaviorally complex in its warm-weather activity, having accurately memorized its entire territory, repeatedly visiting favorite feeding sites. In spring it leaves for the nearby pond to seek a mate, but it soon returns to home base. 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 legs that then scrape 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 it keeps doing so throughout the winter, keeping below the frost line, no matter how deep. In a chamber at the bottom, it draws in its legs, bows its head, closes its eyes, and remains motionless.
For our American toad, it’s a long wait for the short period of activity that begins in early May and ends by mid-September. Same for the rest of us, too.