The secret side of winter

Animal tracks, signs tell stories of the forest in winter

By Tim Rowland

Walk through the forest with Elizabeth Lee and you will never look at a forest in the same way again.

Cold, frozen and lifeless to the untrained eye, these spartan white landscapes are in fact teeming with life, whose stories are etched in snow and ice, rotting trees, boulders and boughs, representing high drama in the wilderness as the daily struggle to find food and keep from being food plays out.

A small group of us stalked around in the shadow of Poke-O-Moonshine on an unseasonably civilized Sunday in January, courtesy of Friends of Poke-O-Moonshine and Champlain Area Trails, which each winter sponsor a tracking program with Lee, who is among the premier guides in the North Country.

We saw tracks, of course. Here went a coyote, there went a racoon. But the tracks themselves aren’t the story, or not the whole story, anyway.

Lee encouraged us to take in the forest as a whole, seeing it as an animal might. “Follow your nose, notice the features of the landscape,” she said, the mounds, undulations and ridges that are more apparent when leaves are down.

These travel corridors are enhanced by a variety of species. A red spruce is going to look good to a red squirrel, a hemlock to a porcupine. She directed us to a yellow birch, which holds onto its seed pods late into the winter. The seeds resemble a tiny moth, with little wings to catch the wind. They comfortably fit within your fingertip, and don’t particularly stand out among all those other dark little bits of organic matter endemic to the snowy forest floor.

I’ve walked over hundreds of them, I suppose, never noticing them nor understanding of what material consequence they would be had I been a mouse. With furious metabolisms, mice would find these high-energy morsels to be life-sustaining. 

Something else I might have tramped right over was a disturbance in the snow, nothing really, just a little space that’s been roughed up a bit like someone scrambling egg whites. The mice that eat the seeds exist below, often in a little space in the snow created by the residual warmth of the earth.

Those who feast on mice know this, and burrow and scratch into the snowpack hoping for a meal. “Everything has meaning,” Lee said. A slight, rounded depression in the snow might indicate that the hunt had been unsuccessful, and rather than, as humans are likely to do, stubbornly keep at it, the predator decides to cut its losses and curl up for a nap.

Much of what goes on in the forest can be understood if we think in terms of calories. This raw input of numbers, calories in, calories out, is an animal’s survival guide, and it will not waste energy on pursuits that do not pay back the energy spent, with some left over.

“It’s all an energy game,” Lee said. That’s why animals don’t travel in extreme cold; even if it found food, the caloric cost would likely outweigh whatever it might gain in return.

Conditions matter in other ways. An icy crust on the snow may protect rodents beneath; that’s bad for the predators, obviously, yet at the same time, walking on a solid surface burns less fuel than wading through the powder, allowing a broader range of travel.

It was fascinating stuff, and as the years go by, subtracting from my own range of travel, I’m discovering that hiking slowly and appreciatively has its own set of rewards. There are still days I might want to lay down 15 determined, fist-clenched miles — and this has its own rewards, but in some ways it’s like fast-forwarding through a Broadway show.

To take one small example, Lee, who sees everything, pointed out a half-eaten acorn wedged in the bark of a massive, dead white pine. Sad to say, left to my own devices I might have assumed the acorn had fallen there itself despite evidence that, to wit, pine trees do not produce acorns; even if they did, this tree had been in no condition to produce anything for a decade or more; acorns do not eat themselves, nor do they, without the most incredible of bounces, lodge themselves in tree bark.

The pine itself told a story — the stubs of its low, lateral branches indicated that when it was a sapling a century or more ago, sunlight was all around it. There was no need to go shooting skyward in competition with other trees. Hence the name “pasture pines,” which sprouted when the ground was otherwise an open field.

Lee assured us skeptics that despite appearances, this dusty, dead carcass of a tree still teemed with life. She pulled away a fragment of dried-up fibers and rolled it through her fingers, and out of these lifeless crumbs a spider popped out and went scurrying back to the anonymity of the tree. A dead, frozen forest — hardly.