That was a cold spell of what we used to call "Biblical proportions." It was made perhaps more interesting locally by the old heat-pump in the house, which died on New Year's Eve. For a week, the household was maintained by an old Franklin stove in the living room, and by the old owner, who had to carry in firewood so it could be fed every hour or so. Luckily, there was already firewood stacked on the unheated porch, and more out between the garage and barn.
Here on the old farm, my role is increasingly that of provider: of habitats in the old barn and under the house and in brush piles. Of food, in the form of bird feeders and the kitchen scraps carried well away from the house for the shy folks. There is always the wild food provided by the second-and-third growth crosstimbers forest, providing an unimaginable harvest of acorns, hickory nuts, wild grapes, insects and small animals.
The young opossum in the picture was making a raid on the feeder at dusk; a favorite time for the larger animals to change hiding places, get out and scrounge for food or companionship or water. During the deep freeze, an old cake pan under a faucet left dripping for the sake of the plumbing acquired a network of little trails overnight.
The birds, since they are diurnal as we are, provide an endless display of survival techniques. Some of the birds are easy to feed: those are the seed-eaters, who are happy to visit mounds of sunflower seed in the four feeders. Many of the other wild creatures benefit from the feeders in their own way.
The resident Carolina wrens are among the first to visit a fresh supply of seeds. Not that they are able to crack the little shells or munch the tasty kernels: no, they are called by the invariable supply of weevils and meal-moth caterpillars that come with every bag of seed. Below each feeder, a drift of sunflower hulls and broken nuts attracts the little four-footed folk.
Even near the house, though, there are many small lives being lived in total oblivion to our own. A book would not suffice to describe the ways in which insects survive a winter. Some sleep the cold away encased in tiny eggs, hidden in crevices of bark or in leaf-litter or in the soil itself. These will never know a parent, for those perished after secreting the precious eggs.
Small mouse-like creatures (field mice, voles, cotton rats and pack rats are some of their names), manage to cache supplies of grass seeds and such before the ice and snow cover them or the wind blows them away. They can cozy down in their hidey-holes and spend long periods without needing to go out even for water, existing on the water stored in their food.
Deer, unlike domesticated cattle, are sustained by underbrush. Those leafless twiggy things may not look like food to us, but nothing satisfies a deer like a good lunch of poison-ivy. And for some reason known only to deer, they want to bed down in the cattails and wild iris around the pond, where the soil underneath is always at least muddy and often under an inch of water. The deer which survived the recent slaughter-season have suddenly become rather reclusive, staying in the denser woods where, perhaps, there is more good brush to eat and less exposure to danger.
What of the birds that cannot eat seeds? We have winter flocks of bluebirds, robins and more that find insect food to supplement their common diet of berries and buds. It is comical, on the rare warm day in midwinter, to watch a deeply-furrowed oak trunk when the sun is on it. Insects which have been perfectly safe where they hid themselves last fall will come out and look for a better spot. Often enough, that better spot is down the throat of a bluebird.
One of the comforts in watching wildlife is that you eventually learn that you are not very important to them: their lives are entwined in ours mostly in our imagination. Without my dripping faucet, more of them would winter closer to the pond, perhaps. Without the bird-feeders, maintained to provide myself with entertainment, the seed-eaters would disperse, roaming farther each day for sustenance instead of hanging around the house.
