What Happens to Wildlife in Winter?

The Gardens are habitat in Winter

The plants in the Beaver Hollow garden are left standing in the winter. It may look a bit messy to us, but it looks inviting to wildlife.

• Ground-nesting bees and other insects use the dead plant stalks as winter habitat or as a safe place to lay their eggs.
• Standing dead plants also provide food for birds, places to hide or perch, and protection from the wind.
• Leaves from the garden plants cover the soil in the winter and prevent compaction, suppress weeds, and increase soil fertility. Under the leaf litter, or burrowed into the top few inches of garden soil, small centipedes, spiders, beetles, earthworms, and even some species of frogs, toads, and salamanders, are spending the winter in a dormant state.
• Some spent perennials, such as grasses, seedheads, or retained brown foliage reward the gardener with added winter interest.

Leave your garden to the wildlife and go out for a walk – perhaps at Beaver Hollow!

The Ponds, Creeks, and even Snowpack, offer Winter Refuge

As ice forms over the water and snow covers the ground, we give little thought to the creatures that are spending their winter beneath the snow or ice.

• Otters live in bank dens along the creek and ponds and feed on fish, crayfish, frogs and large insects. They can only hold their breath for 8 minutes, so they keep a series of breathing holes open in the ice along the routes they typically travel. They usually keep a breathing hole open near the last boardwalk platform in the area pictured above. They are semi-aquatic mammals and are sometimes spotted on land or on the ice at Beaver Hollow.
• Beaver ponds are particularly good winter habitat for trout. The deep pond water is warmer than the stream water above and below the pond, and hosts the food that trout survive on over the winter, such as minnows, leeches, snails, and amphibians.
• Aquatic turtles, such as the painted turtles plentiful at Beaver Hollow, bulk up in the fall in anticipation of their winter torpor. They “sleep” on the bottom of ponds, sometimes lodged beneath logs, while absorbing the small amount of oxygen they require through their skin. When they sense the change in light intensity in the spring, they come to the pond surface and fill their lungs with oxygen.
• Some frogs, like our Beaver Hollow green frogs, overwinter below the ice on the bottom of streams, ponds, and marshes. Like the painted turtle, the green frog enters a state of torpor in which they stop eating and their metabolic rate slows way down.
• With a deeper snowpack, the small mammals of Beaver Hollow will head into a subnivium ecosystem where they can continue to be active all winter – in tunnels under the snow.

There is a lot going on under the water and snow at Beaver Hollow in the winter!