Adult Great Gray Owl © Brian E. Small/VIREO

It’s been a very mild and almost snow-free winter in Manitoba so far this year. Good news for us. Bad news for mice and shrews and voles. They rely on a thick blanket of snow to survive the winter.

A couple of years ago as I watched a Great Grey Owl along a road in the boreal forest east of Winnipeg, it suddenly left its perch on a hydro pole, swooped over the road-edge, and plunged, talons-first, into the thick snow. It immediately extricated itself and flew back with a small, squirming rodent.

Wow! I wondered. How’d it do that? I knew that owls had great hearing. But the snow was at least a foot thick. That, it seemed to me, was like me hearing a pin drop a block from my house.

Meadow Vole © Rob & Ann Simpson

And what was a rodent doing in a snow-bank? I thought they hibernated all winter or found a warm place like my basement to hang out.

That’s when I first heard about pukak.

Pukak is that small space under the snow and above the ground that forms when the snow piles up more than a foot or so and when the earth’s warmth melts the bottom layer to form passageways for insects, rodents and tiny mammals.

Cinereous Shrew © Audubon Guides

Mice and shrews and voles use these passageways to seek out seeds and grasses and bugs left over from the summer and fall. At irregular intervals vents form to allow gasses to escape. Owls listen to the tiny noises that emanate from these vents.

House Mouse © Rita Summers

With barely three inches of snow on the ground this year, pukak hasn’t yet formed. That means the rodents can’t leave their winter hideouts. They don’t have to worry about owl attacks, but they are in danger of starving. The thicker the snow, the better their chances of surviving the cold.

Icicles by Lisa Densmore

Location: Avalanche Pass, Adirondack Park, New York

Now that the fake icicles adorning houses for the holidays have been put away until next year, I noticed the real icicles are starting to get rather sizeably. This clump of icy stilettos formed on a small ledge of rock above the trail into Avalanche Lake, one of my favorite backcountry ski routes in the Adirondack Park. I’ve admired these glassy spears on any number of overhangs throughout the United States where temperatures regularly drop below freezing during the winter.

Icicles remind me of stalactites inside caves. Both are shaped like a carrot and form by dripping liquid, but they are different. Icicles are made of water that refreezes as it drips. They grow bigger as water continues to dribble down the same spot. Stalactites are made of minerals left behind when water evaporates.

Though icicles are frozen spikes of water, heat is an important part of their formation process. Sunlight or some other heat source such as a warm building melts ice or snow causing it to drip. As the running water moves away from the heat source and cools, it refreezes. This refreezing process also gives off heat at the molecular level which travels up the icicle. As the heat rises, it insulates the icicle. The insulation is thinner at the bottom and thicker at the top causing the tip to grow quickly and the top more slowly, resulting in an icicle’s elongated shape.

Too bad this heat layer is indiscernible to my cold fingers on a subzero day, though I didn’t dally too long under these wintery daggers with my gloves off. I’m always a little nervous under icicles. They often break off due to their own weight and these looked hefty enough to hurt, especially from below.

One group of birds that make winter birding more fun is the ducks. Most species of ducks breed in lakes and ponds scattered across the tundra. As winter approaches, the open water across their breeding range freezes and forces the ducks to migrate southward.

American Wigeon by Drew Weber

The best places to look for ducks are deep reservoirs and lakes that will keep their open water even when it drops below freezing. Species such as Ruddy Ducks, Buffleheads, Ring-necked Ducks and Northern Shovelers can form big flocks at these open lakes and attract other, less common species as well.

Since ducks are generally out on open water, it is often possible to observe them for longer periods of times than the typical songbird. This gives me a chance to practice my photography. I generally rely on digiscoping, which is basically lining up my point and shoot camera behind my spotting scope to get a closer shot of distant birds.

There are two main groups of ducks that we get in good numbers in Pennsylvania, dabbling ducks and divers. Dabbling ducks, like the Blue-winged Teal below, are often found in shallower water, as well as smaller ponds and rivers. They feed primarily along the surface of the water or by tipping headfirst into the water, looking for aquatic plants.

Blue-winged Teal by Drew Weber

Diving ducks, like the Ring-necked Ducks below, feed by diving beneath the surface of the water in search of food and can spend long periods of time feeding along the lake bottom. This can make them harder to observe as they continually disappear from view. The diving ducks are usually found in much deeper water than dabblers. An interesting thing about the diving ducks is that their legs are closer to the rear of the body, making walking on land difficult.

Ring-necked Duck by Drew Weber

When you are out birding your local lake, you are likely to see other birds as well. American Coots are often feeding in medium to large flocks and if you are lucky, you will get to see them wandering around on land, looking positively goofy. Keep an eye out for their big lobed feet that enable them to swim so well.

Ruddy Duck by Drew Weber

For more birding tips and photography, be sure to check out my blog, Nemesis Bird.

American Bison by Jack Ballard

With a large driveway to clear, I’ve joined the ranks of those indolent souls who have swapped a snow shovel for a snow blower. Well, most of the time. Occasionally, Old Man Winter blows the white stuff into drifts too deep and too hard for my small, single-stage snow blower.

When that happens, out comes the shovel. Moving snow by hand is tough work. When a packed clump breaks loose that fully fills my shovel, it takes a concerted effort to heave it from the driveway.

Humans aren’t the only creatures that need to shove snow around in the winter. Many animal species have their own needs and methods. Deer, elk and bighorn sheep paw away snow to uncover forage. But when it comes to snow removal, these creatures are to the animal world what little snow blowers are to human civilization. Down the street, my neighbor clears his driveway with a burly, two-stage snow blower that clears a three-foot path in a hurry. Out in the wild, his machine might be compared to an American Bison. Using their massive head, bison seem to effortlessly shove a couple feet of snow out of the way in a side-to-side motion. Anyone who has shoveled a driveway can appreciate the raw power it takes to move that much snow. Where does all that power come from? A bison’s hump is composed of muscle, attached to long vertebrae. This muscular mass is particularly adapted to forcefully moving the head from side to side, powering the bison’s winter snow removal. I don’t think I’d look too elegant with the hump, but I’d sure like to harness some of their power to my shovel.

Cattle Egrets by Jungle Pete

There are certain birds that you can say with certainty exactly where you will find them. As their name suggests, where there are cattle there are Cattle Egret (Bubulcus ibis). Spot a roadside mower or a tractor in a field and there will be Cattle Egret and where there is smoke in the grasslands, there will be Cattle Egret. Much to my surprise, after departing a well-known fast food chain drive-thru, I discovered that the habitat of this bird can be extended to here as well.

Cattle Egrets found their way to the New World from Africa sometime in the late 19th century and flapped and grazed their way north into the US by the mid 20th century. They have a distinctive head bob that makes them appear to strut like a chicken. In addition to the bovine company they keep and their amusing gait, adult Cattle Egrets are easily identified by the colorful plumage on their chest and cap that has the appearance of lightly toasted marshmallow.

The habit of following in the wake of cattle, mowers, tractors or wildfires tremendously assists the birds as they forage for insects. As they are stirred up by each, the egrets take advantage of the chaos in the insect world. While most birds are escaping a wildfire, the Cattle Egret will swoop in soon after and enjoy the BBQ.

Cattle Egret Adult, Breeding © Arthur Morris/VIREO

When the egrets are full or have tired of walking the tall grass prairies, they hitch a ride and go cattle surfing. The grazing goliaths seemingly ignore one bird on their back but a second bird is the start of a party and a tail slap rectifies the situation.

I don’t make a habit of eating anything that comes from a drive-thru nor do I use Photoshop for any of my Audubon Guides photos, but in this instance, for my amusement and to avoid commercial endorsement I have touched it up a bit.

Why was the Egret in the drive-thru? I hope it wasn’t looking for its surfing partner.

Adult Cattle Egrets © Arthur Morris/VIREO

Bighorn Sheep by Lisa Densmore

Location: Rocky Mountains

Two days ago, as I turned the corner off Highway 191 onto the access road to the Big Sky Ski Resort in Montana, I saw a Big Horn sheep (Ovis canadensis) grazing placidly beside the road. I always look for Bighorns there, and feel cheated if they’ve meandered elsewhere when I come to Big Sky. There’s another dependable herd of them on a hillside west of Denver above Interstate 70. I’ve also photographed butting bighorns atop a 40-foot cliff in Custer State Park in South Dakota.

I’m fascinated by Bighorn Sheep, mainly because of their massive curled horns, the rings of which record their owner’s age. Male Bighorns, or rams, use their signature headgear to vie for dominance in the herd, rearing up on their hind legs and smacking an opponent’s horns with a resounding crash, over and over again, often for several hours. No headaches for the head butters though. Their thick bony skulls usually prevent all but the echo, although a broken horn, nose or more serious injuries sometimes occur if the butt isn’t a bulls-eye. Female Bighorns, called “ewes”, have horns too, but much smaller.

Bighorn Sheep Range Map © Audubon Guides

It’s uncanny how an animal weighing over 250 pounds can be so agile on rocky cliffs. A relative of the goat, their split, rough-bottomed hooves grip mountainous terrain with a tenacity greater than a rock climber’s sticky-soled shoes. The ewes give birth on remote ledges each spring to help prevent predation of their lambs by Wolves, Coyotes and Mountain Lions, though Golden Eagles have no problem swooping down for dinner.

Audubon Guides App / Eastern Towhee Songs & Calls

My wife and I have been leading hikes and trips for what seems like years, but in the grand scheme of things it hasn’t been that long. It has, however, been long enough we can both remember taking papers and books in the field with groups. Being a perpetual “techy”, I couldn’t have been more excited when the “app” revolution began not too long ago.

I first brought an iPod Touch in the field four seasons ago and sadly, was using a competitor’s field guide app. While the hike was successful and folks loved how I was using the app, it was lacking in some areas, most importantly in songs. One of the most requested techniques folks want to learn are bird songs. When you play a song from an app, it better sound like the bird we’re hearing in the field or people’s faces turn to confusion or disbelief, the last thing you want to see when teaching. After a bit of disgust, I went back to the drawing board and found the Audubon Field Guide to North-American Birds. One the smartest features in this golden App is the interface for bird songs, which includes dialect based on the region at which you find yourself. Genius! I can now dial in to not only an Eastern Towhee song, but an Eastern Towhee from New York (typical song of Midwest or the North) or an Eastern Towhee from Florida (typical song from the South). After reading this, I encourage everyone to go check this exact bird song out in the Audubon Field Guide to North-American Birds App and you should notice a major difference in song between these two dialects.

Eastern Towhee Adult Male © Greg Lasley/VIREO

The song interface is one example of where developers go the extra mile. No app is perfect but the beauty of mobile App technology is you can have different versions and brands all on one device. My expertise is more bird-driven where my wife is more of a generalist. Again, this technology and Audubon (Green Mountain Digital) bring to the table, a plethora of apps ranging from Trees to Flowers, Amphibians to Birds, or even basic Apps for enjoying nature while in Florida or out west. We love using this technology in the field but it has to be done discretely and at the right time. We choose to hike along with groups while the technology is in our pockets and then as we take breaks, the technology can come out and do its job.

It’s definitely safe to say the App revolution has changed the world we live in but don’t get so immersed in your devices that you start missing those true moments in Nature.

White-breasted Nuthatch by Jack Ballard

Riding up a chairlift at a popular resort in Montana my son and I are engaged in conversation. Suddenly, an unknown interloper boldly interrupts us with its own communication. From a stand of mixed evergreens near the lift, we hear the iconic call of a Nuthatch, the nasal “yank, yank” that characterizes much of the vocalizations of these species.

“What was that?” Dominic asks.

“A Nuthatch.”

“What kind?”

“Don’t know.”

My son is familiar with the two species of nuthatches common to the evergreen forests of our area, the Red-breasted (sitta canadensis) and White-breasted (sitta carolinensis). But it is beyond the ability of his father to distinguish the species simply based on sound. Try as we might, we can’t catch a glimpse of the noisy bird.

Red-breated Nuthatch - Adult Male © Claude Nadeau/VIREO

On the next lap on the lift, the little rascal again takes up his chatter in the timber. A thin streak of feathers swoops from the inside of a lodgepole pine to perch momentarily on the leafless trunk of a mountain maple. We can now easily identify the spike-beaked sprite as white-breasted. A picture, in this case a visual image, is indeed worth a thousand “words,” even from the beak of a nuthatch.

Hairy Woodpecker by Joann Ecker

Imagine a Hairy Woodpecker with the beak of an American Woodcock. That’s the photograph that greeted me when I opened an email last week from my friend and ultra-observant naturalist Jo-Ann Ecker. The freak woodpecker has been visiting her suet feeder and despite a wild bill, appeared to be healthy.

Hairy Woodpecker by Joann Ecker

Scattered reports of bill deformities are to be expected, but a sudden and large outbreak in a region can be a sign of a much larger ecological problem. In the 1970s there were high rates of crossed beaks and other malformities in Great Lakes waterbirds, later linked to organochlorine contaminants. In the 1980s agricultural runoff that contained high levels of selenium was implicated in nestling beak deformities in southern California.

Odd bills are usually quite rare for songbirds. I have capture, banded and released thousands of songbirds over the years and I can only recall handling one bird with a deformed bill. After banding a Gray Catbird with a grossly crossed bill in 1993 at the Rogue River Bird Observatory in Michigan, Julie Craves, an ornithologist and fellow Audubon Guides blogger, examined published rates for songbirds and found them to be variable but generally low.

Hairy Woodpecker by Joann Ecker

Recently, ornithologists in Alaska have documented an unprecedented number of bill deformities around the state, which has extended southward along the Pacific coast into Washington.

“The prevalence of these strange deformities is more than 10 times what is normally expected in a wild bird population,” said research biologist Colleen Handel to the Associated Press.

Handel and her colleagues recently published an article in the American Ornithologists’ Union journal, The Auk, which described their findings. Over the last decade they documented 2,160 Black-capped Chickadees and 435 individuals of 29 other species of birds with grossly overgrown and often crossed beaks. They found very few incidents of nestlings with abnormal bills suggesting it mostly occurred later in life.

A bird’s beak consists of bone overlaid by keratin, the same protein that makes up hair, feathers, claws and fingernails. The keratin constantly grows and wears away just like your fingernails. But these birds have keratin growth that is about two times faster than normal.

Hairy Woodpecker by Joann Ecker

The exact cause remains a mystery. Possible causes include nutrient deficiencies, disease or parasites, trauma, genetic abnormalities, or contaminants. Scientists are looking at all of these, but the evidence thus far seems to point to contaminants as a likely culprit, perhaps combined with some other disorder.

Meanwhile, like my friend Jo-Ann, you can help scientists unravel this mystery. Keep a close eye on the birds visiting your feeders this winter and if you see any with even a slight abnormal beak, try to get a photograph of it and report it to the Alaska Science Center.

Softshell Turtles and American Alligator by Jungle Pete

There’s a tremendous advantage to having a tall carapace (upper shell) and sturdy plastron (bottom shell) if you’re a turtle in the southeastern United States. Here there be alligators and despite the fact that an alligator can exert thousands of pounds of pressure of chomping power on their prey, if they can’t slam their jaw shut on their oversized meal, they have to look for lunch elsewhere.

Sliders and Cooters are the SUVs of the turtle world. They’re hefty, relatively slow moving but strong bodied. I’ve often seen tooth marks where an alligator has cracked a hole in the carapace but got no further. Florida Softshell Turtles (Apalone ferox) on the other hand have soft, flexible upper and lower parts that are covered in skin as opposed to the keratinous, fingernail-like covering on other turtle shells. Softshells are the Ferraris of the turtle world. While the shell doesn’t afford them much protection against the crushing bite of an alligator, I have seen them use their speed to their advantage. The bottom right photo shows the head of a large female softshell in the toothy grasp of the alligator. The turtle didn’t panic and seemed content to be escorted around. Instead of struggling and wasting energy, it was biding its time. When the alligator opened up to get a better bite, the softshell took off with a burst of speed. Sorry gator.

American Alligator © Robert P. Falls Sr.

The Florida Softshell can be distinguished from other softshells by the bumpy ridge above the head on the carapace. Males grow to be around 12 inches while females are sizably larger at 20 inches. Florida softies are omnivorous and aquatic, although they do bask out of the water and cross roads as necessary. In the spring the females will find a soft-soiled area to lay their eggs or if they’re feeling lucky, the female will sneak her eggs into the side of an alligator’s nest where ironically they are protected from nest predators by the mama alligator.

Ultimately it doesn’t matter if you’re an SUV or a Ferrari. What matters is how long you’re in the race.