- Kathleen Scavone
- Posted On
The Living Landscape: Frozen!
“People don't notice whether it's winter or summer when they're happy.” – Anton Chekhov
LAKE COUNTY, Calif. – It's been a winter-wonderland Lake County-style recently, replete with frozen puddles, frost swirling on windshields and lacy, frost-embroidered leaves.
You don't have to look far to enjoy nature's art palate of fanciful design. Frost visits during damp, wintry conditions, when moisture freezes into branches and fractals – those mathematical symmetries.
Since winter has just recently begun, we may be fortunate to enjoy a variety of frost types, including rime, hoar, window, black, and white frost to name but a few.
Nature did a great job of providing many plants and animals with the ability to withstand freezing temperatures. They instinctively “know” to prepare, hibernate or fly south.
A large variety of insects, like the mourning cloak butterfly has the ability to hibernate during the winter. Many other types of insects, along with spiders, survive the cold months as larva or eggs.
Now is the time of year to find the cold-resistant, red toyon berries growing, which provide wintering birds and deer with a bit of nourishment.
The toyon is a hardy, perennial shrub found in oak woodlands as well as chaparral habitats. Robins enjoy the berries, as do turkey, hermit thrush and cedar waxwings.
Since toyon berries are low in calories and protein they are not as hardy a fare as seeds for the animals, but they do have their place in the animals' winter survival food selection. Since these plants are drought-tolerant they make an excellent choice as an ornamental garden plant, too.
Plants have many ingenious methods of winter survival. Some plants die back to preserve themselves, and others use their circulatory vessels to keep frozen sap from “stopping up” their systems.
Here in Lake County we enjoy a temperate climate, so that most animals do not need to hibernate. Our black bears do not usually hibernate.
Some bats do hibernate here, however, finding comfy tree bark, under deck umbrellas or attics to spend the winters when their prey, insects, is hard to find.
Reptiles and amphibians hide out in winter in the safety of burrows, old logs, and sometimes in the bottoms of ponds throughout the winter.
The ingenuity and endurance of plant and animal survival never ceases to amaze.
Kathleen Scavone, M.A., is a retired educator, potter, writer and author of “Anderson Marsh State Historic Park: A Walking History, Prehistory, Flora, and Fauna Tour of a California State Park” and “Native Americans of Lake County.” She also writes for NASA and JPL as one of their “Solar System Ambassadors.” She was selected “Lake County Teacher of the Year, 1998-99” by the Lake County Office of Education, and chosen as one of 10 state finalists the same year by the California Department of Education.