New Hampshire Nature Notes
by Eric Orff

Living on the edge.

Wednesday 12/14/2005

We, and the things around us, are so living on the edge this time of year.

First of all, winter has pretty much closed in around us. By 10:00 PM tonight my thermometer had dropped to only 6 degrees. The last two morning it has been below 10 degrees when I have first checked it. Ice has nearly sealed the Suncook River below my house except for a narrow band in the middle. My guess is by Thursday morning the river will be totally enclosed in ice for the balance of the winter. Sea smoke, as it is called, slowly rose from the section of the river not frozen this morning into the super cold air. It mimicked a scene from some scary movie as it crept from the icy surface. So we are truly at winters edge. Northwood Lake iced over this week with the smaller lakes and ponds, like Harvey Lake in Northwood, freezing over the weekend of December 3/4.

I was reminded today how close we humans actually are to the edge of life, though few of us can imagine it. A stop by the grocery store this afternoon was shocking. To spruce up my winter evening I enjoy lots of fresh salads. As I picked a couple of rather bland looking cucumbers from a bin (Ones that just 10 or 12 weeks ago would be too fat, punky or not choices for the table and would be tossed to the gardens edge.); I was taken back by the price. It said $179 per cucumber. What a high price for lousy food. But a price I gladly paid as I packed the nearly $200 worth of groceries into the car for a snowy, frigid trip home. We are at the end of a very fragile chain in the food chain here in the north. We take so much for granted compared to just a generation or two ago.

So too is the wildlife. December is the month in New Hampshire that many of the young born this spring disperse from their mothers home range. Young of the year fisher, foxes and coyote are venturing forth under terrible conditions of fairly deep fluffy snow and near zero temperatures. If the mother is to survive to possibly produce another litter next spring she needs the food in her home range. The young are now expendable. In fact many, if not most, will die in the next few weeks. Mortality of these young typically reaches 60 percent under good conditions. These are not good conditions. This is an early harsh winter for this part of the state compared to many of the winters the last decade or more.

Good news! The gray squirrel count at my bird feeder continues to mount. There were five over the weekend. Lots of blue jays continue to feed, eleven on the platform at one time on Sunday. A night like tonight has got to be a long one for the birds shivering the night away to keep from freezing. These cold nights will not doubt take a toll on some of the young birds as well. So many things can slide of the edge of life under these conditions. The edge grows sharper as the nights grow colder. Life can be just a few degrees from be extinguished these frigid nights.