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Transcript 3/12/22:
I asked a hairy woodpecker what its favorite music was. The woodpecker said, “hair metal, of course,” and proceeded to head bang. Welcome to The Nature of Phenology where we share the cycles and seasons of the outdoors. I’m your host, Hazel Stark.
Both as the producer of The Nature of Phenology and a year-round hiking guide, predicting seasonal patterns and trail conditions a few weeks in advance is something I frequently have to do. Our increasingly unpredictable winters have made that quite challenging in the last few years. While even six years ago I could reliably guess when conditions would be suitable for snowshoeing and ideal for animal tracking, it has felt impossible to do so lately. Towards the end of February, I was scheduled to lead a women’s outing which I cleverly described as a hiking or snowshoeing opportunity focused on looking for animal “signs,” not just tracks. It was lucky I did so because even after the snowstorms and deep cold of January, February brought Downeast Maine bouts of warm winds and rain. The crusty and old snowpack next to patches of ice and bare ground recently heaved by frost meant there wasn’t a clear animal track in sight. Fortunately, there are always ample animal signs no matter the conditions or weather, so we began our hike seeking signs of bugs.
Within just a few hundred feet of the trailhead, there was an impressive snag, or dead-standing tree, clad in shelf mushrooms, a mosaic of lichens, and positively riddled with holes in a variety of shapes and sizes. The biggest ones were of course made by a pileated woodpecker seeking a meal, but the smallest holes—less than one inch in diameter—were made by a variety of insects. From a maze caused by beetle larvae to the round exit holes of beetles who had spent their youthful egg and larval stages inside the tree before heading out to the big world, this old dead snag alone had clearly been teaming with life as a key part of the habitat of countless species. At the base of the snag, there was even a pile of fine sawdust, or chaff, caused by the carpenter ants that the woodpecker no doubt sought.
While we did not see any living insects on that snag, there were surely many living insects hidden within. There are many strategies that our local insects have to ensure their species makes it through the cold, and often turbulent, winter.
For yellow jackets, all adults but the queen die off after one of our first hard frosts. The queen is the only one in the colony that will ensure the species’ survival come spring, so she goes into a state of dormancy in a snug and secure spot through the winter. Bumblebees have a similar strategy where only some young juvenile queens survive the winter. Honeybees, however, work together by pumping their flight muscles to create heat in a dense insulating ball of bees rivaling the insulating capacity of mammal fur.
But if you can’t make your own heat or seek shelter that reliably shields you from freezing temperatures, like those ladybugs or cluster flies in the corner of your house right now, you need to ensure that freezing won’t hurt you. As a result, many insect species produce a sort of antifreeze effectively lowering the temperature at which they would freeze solid and die. Many beetle species do this as do snow fleas, snow flies, stoneflies, and even some spiders. Much like the mouthful that was that last sentence, a mouthful of these bugs in winter would taste sweet, if you were to be so bold as to eat them, due to the glycerol compound they produce to lower that freezing temperature. I don’t know that from personal experience, and wouldn’t recommend it, but you can read about Bernd Heinrich tasting a cold bug in his book Winter World.
So the next time you’re outside, you could look for evidence of bugs on the late winter landscape, made easier if there is snow, but an even more rewarding scavenger hunt if there isn’t. Now is the time when you’ll start seeing active bugs begin to emerge, whether it’s a winter cutworm moth caterpillar, an early mourning cloak butterfly flying out of its bark-covered shelter, snow fleas peppering the melting snow or the surface of a puddle, or a winter stonefly with its characteristic forked tail cruising the ground near a river or pond. While you might feel resistant to the oncoming bug season, those little critters are what bring the beautiful songs and colors of insect-eating birds back to our area and a plethora of wild fruits to eat in just a few short months due to their pollination services.
You can download this episode and find a link to our easy to search blog where you can find in-depth episodes about many of the bugs mentioned in this one, along with photos, information about podcasting and more by visiting archives.weru.org. Thanks for listening and please join us next week for another dive into The Nature of Phenology.
References:
Vezina, K. (2009, December 24). How Insects Survive the Cold of Winter | The Outside Story. Retrieved February 23, 2022, from northernwoodlands.org website: https://northernwoodlands.org/outside_story/article/how-insects-survive-the-cold-of-winter
The Nature of Phenology 
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