I was asked this question before and just last week, Joe, a reader from western Carbon County asked a question about ducks surviving the cold and I thought I could address this and a few other questions in this week’s column.

First, wildlife that remain active throughout our winters and especially farther to our north, have developed many adaptations to survive the cold, and sometimes, extreme cold. Ruffed grouse have learned to dive into deep fluffy snow where, believe it or not, it provides a little buffer from the biting winds and is a bit “warmer.”

Ducks and geese can be seen standing on the ice of a pond or lake on a 10- or 15-degree morning and seem oblivious to the cold. Why don’t their feet freeze? First, they have very little soft tissue in their webbed feet. If we exposed our skin to those conditions, it would freeze in a short time. Waterfowl, especially, have an intricate design of arteries and veins in their feet that allows the warm arterial blood to immediately warm some of the venous blood returning to the heart. The arteries and veins nearly touch each other. Also, birds’ feathers are great insulators, and only about 5 percent of body heat loss is through their feet. Given enough food, they can maintain body temperatures pretty well. They can also stand on one foot and tuck the other up into their feathers.

By the way, this also works in the summer time. If you ever walked across the sand at “the shore” on a hot, sunny day, you probably quick stepped to the surf to avoid burning your feet. Well, gulls also have webbed feet, and similar foot anatomy as ducks and it works basically in reverse to avoid the scorching sands.

Another question I was asked last autumn is how long can a duck can remain underwater before resurfacing again? I think the bird they were watching was a loon. I know I’ve tried to photograph some loons that were relatively close to shore. When the loon dove to catch fish, I would try to hurry closer to the shoreline to try for a better picture. Sometimes it seemed like an eternity until it emerged. (Most of the time much farther away than I hoped.) I did research this, and apparently as a maximum, they could be submerged up to 5 minutes. However, their normal dive for food is usually less than a minute. They can dive up to 200 feet deep in pursuit of their prey.

I probably mentioned this before, I was a regular official hawk counter at Bake Oven Knob. In my first year assisting, I learned “a bunch” of neat facts about the migration. You would think that a migrating hawk flying in a general south/southwestern route would hope for a tailwind to push them along with less effort, however Cooper’s hawks, sharp-shinned hawks, red-tailed hawks, and golden eagles prefer a strong northwest wind (a head wind) which causes deflective currents along the ridge aiding in their migration and conserving energy. Meanwhile, Canada and snow geese follow a different strategy. They sense a warm front approaching in spring bringing with it strong southerly winds and the tailwind works to their advantage. Just this morning numerous flocks of “Canadas” were winging their way northward. I looked in my nature log and found that from my vantage point in East Penn Township, on March 1, 2018 I observed 83 flocks of both Canada and snow geese in one hour. A warm front, similar to this week’s weather, sparked their mass migration.

Nature is amazing. They didn’t watch the weather forecast or check their emails, yet all these geese set out on the long migration at almost the same time. Nature, wow.

Test Your Outdoor Knowledge: True/False: Male white-tailed deer shed their antlers when temperatures reach 15 degrees or colder.

Last Week’s Trivia Answer: The majority of duck species do not eat fish. Mallards, pintails, Widgeon, and black ducks are dabblers and usually feed on aquatic vegetation they glean from shallow waters.

Email Barry Reed at breed71@gmail.com.