Signs of Winter 7: Observations

Photo by D. Sillman

It was very cold a few nights ago. Deborah’s phone app registered -8 when we got up a bit after 7 am. I took Izzy out for her morning “business” and to fill the bird feeders and add water to the bird bath. Deborah made coffee (it was hot and wonderful!). Sunrise was coming soon (7:42 am that morning) but there was already a lot of light in the sky. Daylight periods are lengthening by almost a minute a day. That day we had ten more minutes of light than we did on the Winter Solstice two weeks before.

It was the last day of that intense cold spell. I am sure that all of my bird feeder birds and bird feeder mammals were as glad of that as Deborah and I were. Interestingly, Izzy doesn’t seem to notice the cold. She races around in her usual exuberance until one of her paws freezes up, and then she limps back to the front porch door. I have only had to carry her home once this year. When we got Izzy from South Carolina the rescue group sent her to us with a warm, winter doggie coat (complete with a furry hood!). We never put it on her, though. The rescue people greatly underestimated Izzie’s hardiness and terrier metabolism!

Photo by D. Sillman

This past fall I kept to my plan of raking fallen leaves into piles scattered about the yard. I have been doing this for the past six or seven years and have noticed, among other things, an increase in tree frogs in the spring and summer possibly due to the formation of high quality hibernation spots in the thickening piles of leaves. I also have more slimy salamanders in my driveway drain that I did before letting the leaves pile up.

Right now the tops of the leaf piles are poking up through a scattered snow cover. Juncos, cardinals, blue jays, Carolina wrens, and white-throated sparrows spend most of the day digging down into the piles looking for food.  The wrens sometimes bury themselves in the leaves and then pop up through the snow cover with some tidbits in their long, pointy beaks. The gray squirrels rip around at leaf pile surfaces, too, probably looking for the acorns, chestnuts, and shelled corn from my bird feeders that they have stashed there.

Photo by D. Sillman

The gray squirrels have been very interesting this winter. I remember reading many years ago an article by Chuck Fergus. Chuck talked about gray squirrels tending to stay in their winter nests when temperatures fell below freezing. The squirrels would rely on stored and stashed food stuffs in their nests until the weather eased off. You can picture an energy-return graph for these squirrels: at very cold temperatures it would be too metabolically costly for them to be out foraging for food that was scattered across a natural landscape. So, it made sense for them to hunker down and wait for less stressful conditions. The equation gets shifted quite a bit, though, when the abundance and predictability of food is increased. Gray squirrels that have bird feeders to rely on stay active even in subzero temperatures. In fact, my gray squirrels only stayed in their winter nests when wind chills hit the negative teens. The combination of wind and cold was too much for them (prompting my cousin’s wife, Charlene, to call my squirrels “wimps” (her squirrels were still raiding her bird feeders up in Rochester, N.Y. when temperatures were well below zero!)). This morning, though, there were two gray squirrels waiting for their peanuts out at the bird feeders when I was out with Izzy at 7:30 am (and -8 degrees). I gave them an extra-large pile!

We drove to the grocery store yesterday and saw two flocks of Canada geese flying in extended V’s over North Apollo. They seemed to be cruising up and down the Kiski River looking for open water. The length of the Kiski between the Apollo and Vandergrif Bridges was frozen solid. The geese may have to land on the ice. I hope that they are finding food.

Late Friday night I was lying in bed listening for the furnace to click on when I heard a great horned owl hooting outside. Thus is the time of year when the great horned owls call each other and set up mating pairs, but it seemed far too cold to even think about that! The calling only lasted a few minutes (mating calls sometimes go on for hours!), so whomever it was must have realized the futility of his (or hers) efforts.

Photo by D. Sillman

We went several weeks without seeing the three wild turkeys that have been regular visitors to our yard since July.  Two of them showed up a few mornings ago to feed on the shelled corn under the bird feeders and then, very unexpectedly, a flock of seven or eight showed up and paraded around on the neighbor’s lawn across the street. This morning one turkey came into the back yard and headed directly to the front feeders to get his fill of corn. He looked extremely healthy and fit (and spent almost 30 minutes feeding in the yard!).

I found an old barometer when I was straightening up some of my bookshelves here in my home office this Fall. I set it and

Photo by Daderot, Wikimedia Commons

have been watching the air pressure slide up and down the scale as the weather fronts poured over us. The lowest barometric pressure I observed (which was also, according to the Weather Underground, the lowest pressure of our local weather year) was 29.14 inches of mercury (on November 19, 2017). The highest pressure I observed (which was also, according again to the Weather Underground, our highest pressure of 2017) was 30.72 inches of mercury (on December 28, 2017).

There are many diverging opinions about the impacts of barometric pressure on our health. There are a few studies that categorically state that changing barometric pressure does not affect joint pain or the incidence of migraines or any other possible human health metric. There are, though, even more studies that back up the “common sense” or “folklore” ideas that you can, indeed, feel storms and weather changes coming “in your bones and joints.”

For example, there seems to be a widespread consensus that people are most comfortable at air pressures around 30 inches of mercury. “High” air pressures (those that exceed 30.3 inches of mercury) are associated with blood vessel constriction and an increased resistance of the circulatory system (which puts stress on the heart). “Low” air pressures (those that are less than 29.7 inches of mercury) allow blood vessels to expand which can also make it more difficult for the heart to pump efficiently. Both of these events, then, stress the heart and can lead to an increased incidence of heart attacks. “Low” barometric pressures can also increase sinus pain and exacerbate joint pain especially for those with joints already inflamed with arthritis. “Low” pressures can also trigger migraine and other types of vascular headaches via dilation of the blood vessels going into cranium.

I do have days when my knees ache more than usually. I will try to match up the barometer readings to my daily need for ibuprofen!

Spring is on the way! Stay warm!

 

 

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