Animals prepare for winter by caching nature's bounty

As gardeners were harvesting the bounty of their summer’s garden before the first frost, animals were harvesting nature’s bounty.

Stockpiling food for winter is important when an animal’s food source will be hidden by snow.

Just as gardeners follow specific instructions for preserving food, animals have their own techniques to prevent spoilage.

With a bumper crop of mushrooms this fall, squirrels have been harvesting and stashing them for winter.

You may have noticed random mushrooms tucked in the crotch of a branch, on top of a stump or in a hollow cavity of a tree.

Being off the ground helps the mushrooms dry quickly and become tough and brittle.

These dried mushrooms resist decay, unlike mushrooms still on the forest floor, and are a meal for squirrels during the winter.

Squirrels are also known for their caches of cones, called middens. While squirrels could leave the cones on the trees to harvest as wanted, they don’t because the cones become less palatable as they dry.

To prevent cones from drying out, squirrels store them in the cool, damp depths of their middens which are covered by heaps of cone scales.

During the winter, the squirrels bring a damp cone from inside the midden to a perch above the midden for a fresh meal.

Keeping seeds from spoiling is important for animals to survive the winter.

Clark’s nutcrackers supposedly check every seed before they cache it. They cache seeds in hundreds of different locations so one bad seed doesn’t spoil the whole food supply.

Beavers use water to keep their food source available during the winter. Beavers cut and store cottonwood and aspen saplings in their pond so they can access them when the pond is frozen.

Some beavers bury branches in the bottom sediment while others construct floating caches. Beavers begin a floating cache with less palatable species because those will be frozen in the ice. The desired cottonwood and aspen are then placed beneath to feed on.

For many animals, their food source is best left intact to be found when needed.

Numerous berries stay on plants through winter and offer a food source to the first animal that finds them.

Variable distribution makes the berries and seeds unlikely candidates for caching because of the energy needed to cache them and the distance between food sources.

Bright red mountain-ash berries remain on the tree through winter and are an important food source for songbirds, upland game birds, small mammals and even grizzly and black bears in the fall.

Pine grosbeaks and Bohemian waxwings are two birds that frequently flock to mountain-ash and quickly consume all the berries on the tree.

Snowberries, kinnikinick berries and rose hips also remain on the plant in winter and provide food for many birds.

Flocks of pine siskins and common redpolls can be seen flying from tree to tree feasting on the small seeds of birch and alder.

Animals out of sight feasting on their harvest include pikas, mice and voles.

During the sunny days of summer, pikas harvest grass like farmers, dry it beneath rock overhangs and then place it in their burrows to eat during winter (since they do not hibernate).

Deer mice and meadow voles dig extensive tunnels under the snow to access caches of seeds, sedges and other food they stored away when conditions were prime. But living under the snow doesn’t protect them from other creatures looking for meals.

Weasels, coyotes, owls and raptors can hear mice and voles scurrying beneath the snow and pounce for their mid-winter meals.

Whether food is on the move or stashed in a cache, animals have various means of capitalizing on nature’s bounty to survive the winter.