In watching wildlife react, there are lessons for enduring winter

Convincing a scientist to speak in hypotheticals isn't the easiest task in the world. Especially when the question is a little silly. But Glenn DelGiudice, moose and deer project leader with the Minnesota Department of Natural Resources, took the bait.

"If I were out in the woods and I wanted to mimic the behavior of a deer in order to survive?" asked DelGiudice, who works in the agency's Forest Wildlife Populations and Research Group. "I'd stay out of the wind and I might stay curled up in a dense stand of conifers where I'm sheltered. I'd reduce the exposure of my ears and extremities to the air, and I'd wear layers (to replicate the body fat, underfur and external guard hairs that serve to keep deer warm). And I've have food with me to maintain my metabolism and produce metabolic heat."

Odd as it may sound, there is a lot that humans can learn — and have learned — from animals when it comes to staying warm when the mercury plummets.

While some of it isn't possible (some frog species, for example, are mostly frozen during the winter) and some of it isn't desirable (who wants to pack on a bunch of fat?), some of it makes a lot of sense. Deer, for example, on cold days will lie down and curl their legs beneath them, using their own bodies to keep their extremities warm. Who among us hasn't done the human equivalent and stuck our shivering hands in our armpits? Deer also grow different, warmer fur for the winter, while animals such as muskrats and beavers — even though they live in ponds and wetlands — pack into houses with their families, emerging at various points throughout the day to collect food.

"You can see a muskrat house with steam coming off it on a cold morning, which tells you it's warm in there," said Jason Abraham, furbearer specialist for the DNR. "Clearly, humans also take more of that shelter-type strategy for staying warm, though some of us have more hair than others."

Animals such as badgers, fishers and pine martens stay warm by staying on the move. Want proof humans do this, too? Look out the window to see how many of your neighbors are standing around the next time the temperature dips below freezing. These animals' bodies are shaped almost like tubes and, as such, aren't great for staying warm. So they wile away the winter primarily hunting and eating, hunting and eating — all in an effort to maintain their body temperature. Birds such as chickadees spend a lot of the winter on the move, showing up often at bird feeders. They need to feed to maintain their energy level, but they also have an innate knowledge not to overdo it.

"Your average chickadee is going to want to make sure it doesn't fatten up at the feeder too much," said Nicole Davros, upland game project leader for the DNR's Farmland Wildlife Populations and Research Group. "The birds that fatten up too much at the feeder are going to be too slow to get away when a Cooper's hawk swoops down."

"They hide thousands of seeds, and they remember where they hid every seed," he said. "Chickadees have a really small brain, so to be able to remember where all the seeds are is amazing. In the spring, they basically clear their memory; they erase the part of their brain that remembers where the seeds are. Then they start hiding seeds again and start remembering where they've hidden them for the next winter."

Rather than spend a bunch of time moving around, some animals hunker down. Raccoons, squirrels and skunks, for example, head for their dens, nests or other sheltered areas out of the wind when the weather turns biting cold. "They'll stay there for days or weeks until the weather warms," Baker said. "They save their energy by not moving."

Animals such as mice, shrews and voles use the snow and its air pockets like humans use blankets. They make little burrows and can stay warm enough to survive (presuming coyotes and foxes don't discover them). "Grouse will actually dive straight into snowbanks and sleep under them through the night," Baker said. "The snow insulates them and keeps them warmer."

That's not to say if there's a chill in your home you should run outside and jump in the snow. Still, what kid hasn't made a fort in the snow and then run inside to inquire about spending the night inside of it? But Mom, it's so warm in there!

Some animals spend their winters in ways humans never could. Black bears hibernate, while painted and snapping turtles head for the bottoms of lakes and wetlands, where they burrow in the mud and require little or no oxygen. And wood frogs are in their own category. As much as 65 percent of these frogs' body freezes. "They turn into 'frogcicles,' " Baker said. "They freeze during the winter and then in the spring they start to thaw out." Once they're sufficiently unfrozen, they simply hop away and go on with their lives, all memories of being frozen presumably wiped away.