Cottontail Rabbits Shed

Cottontails are shedding their summer coat and growing a longer, more grey one for winter. This will help them keep warm and blend in with grey winter trees. If camouflage doesn't work, the creatures are great at freezing to avoid detection. They can also run at speeds of 13 mph, often in zig-zag patterns, to evade their predators. Look for the Y-shaped patterns their feet make in fall mud and snow.

A rabbit's teeth are constantly growing. This keeps their incisors nice and sharp for snipping off winter twigs from young trees. A clue that a rabbit has been feeding in an area is cleanly cut branches 3 feet off the ground or lower (deer make higher and messier cuts). Rabbits are crepuscular, which means they are most likely to be feeding and active at dusk and dawn.

Did you know? To digest their food rabbits use a process called caecal fermentation. This basically means that at certain times of the day, rabbits need to eat their feces to get all of the nutrients from them.

Learn more: Natureworks

The Art of Pishing

What is Pishing?

Pishing is a sound that birders make to encourage birds to come closer. It sounds a lot like the "sssshhhh" noise that we make when quieting someone, just add a 'P' sound to the beginning.

Why Does it Work?

When small birds find a predator nearby, like an owl or hawk, they group together and mob (chase) the predator off. Pishing may sound like the noises these birds make when driving away a threat. The noise then attracts other birds curious about what's going on. Pishing is best done when you are hidden by trees and can hear or see a bird in the distance and want it to come closer. Pishing doesn't attract all birds, but chickadees and nuthatches are good responders. The next time you're on a wooded trail at CWES and hear a chickadee nearby, try this birding trick out!

Learn more: PDF Article by Ryan Zimmerling

Amazing Black-capped Chickadees

In spring and summer these little birds love to munch on small insects, spiders, slugs, and snails. In fall, they store seeds for the long winter ahead in loose bark, piles of needles, and knotholes. Each item is placed in a different spot, and chickadees are able to remember the location of thousands of them! How do they do it? A chickadee's hippocampus (the area of the brain in charge of spatial memory) actually expands by 30% in the fall. This allows the chickadee to remember its many hiding places. In the spring when a massive memory isn't needed, the hippocampus shrinks back to its normal size. Wouldn't it be great if human brains could do that!

Year-long, this little bird is wonderful at saying its own name with a nasal "Chik-a-dee-dee-dee." Recent research has shown that this call is more complex than we had originally thought. The chickadee's call is actually an alarm, alerting other birds to the presence of a predator. The more "dees" added to the end of the call, the more dangerous the predator is to the chickadee. Scientists have also found that nuthatches have learned to decode and respond to the alarm calls of chickadees! Even with this great defense mechanism, most chickadees live less than 3 years.

Learn more about the chickadee and hear its call: Cornell Lab of Ornithology

Learn more about the chickadee's brain and memory: Science Daily Article

​Where Have All the Herps Gone?

Herps is a term used to describe both reptiles and amphibians, creatures which both have amazing cold weather adaptations.

Aquatic frogs: Leopard and pickerel frogs hibernate at the bottom of deep ponds and lakes where there is the most oxygen in the winter. Frogs can breathe through their skin as well as their lungs, and they get their oxygen from the water in this way.

Terrestrial frogs: Wood frogs, spring peepers, and grey treefrogs burrow in leaf litter and wait for something amazing to occur. Special chemical changes take place within their cells, which pack them with glucose (sugar). This allows the frog to freeze solid! While frozen, both the frog's breathing and heart stop.

Turtles: Snapping and painted turtles make their way to the bottom of deep ponds and lakes and lie dormant there through the winter. Their metabolism slows drastically, so much so that their heart beats only once every 10 minutes! The little oxygen they need is exchanged through membranes in the lining of their mouths.

Toads and Salamanders: These creatures dig into the soil to get below the frost line and spend the winter hibernating there.

Learn more and see some amazing footage of a wood frog thawing: Nova