Well, that was interesting. The blizzard of Feb. 22–23 was not the worst one I’ve experienced in the 28 years I’ve lived on the Vineyard. But its intensity and impact put it on a very short list. Powerful winds raged for a full day, as gusts flirted with hurricane strength. Snow accumulation seemed to vary considerably with location, and drifting made snow depth hard to assess. But 18 or 20 inches seems like a fair overall guess, and it was wet, sticky stuff. Countless trees were downed or damaged, and I don’t even want to think what the beaches of Chappaquiddick must look like. Human impacts were, inevitably, severe. As I write this, hundreds of Islanders remain without power, and during the storm itself, nearly all of us experienced a taste of de-electrified life. In typical Vineyard fashion, everybody chipped in, checking on neighbors or digging out complete strangers. It’ll take awhile, but we’ll recover.
This column, though, inevitably asks the question of how wildlife fared. While the final word on that will be apparent only with time, I can tell you now that it’s a complicated question. No doubt many species experienced serious mortality, especially since this storm was merely a semicolon (albeit in boldface type) in a run-on sentence of a nasty winter. But for other species, the snow was probably irrelevant, or possibly even a blessing.
Humans, of course, had the benefit of accurate weather forecasts, giving us a couple of days to prepare. Wild animals enjoy no such technology, though some kinds of animals do appear to be able to sense the approach of a storm. The key is the dropping barometric pressure associated with incoming bad weather, a physical change in the environment that at least some kinds of birds apparently respond to with hormonal changes. Experiencing the storm approach as stress, they feed vigorously and competitively, taking on extra calories that will help them survive cold temperatures and reduced food access due to snow cover.
A day or two before the storm, I enjoyed a flock of common grackles perched in a tall tree across the street from our Oak Bluffs home. Singing their hearts out (if you can call grackle squawks a song), these were individuals that had gambled. Moving north early, they were instinctively banking on the hope of arriving early on their breeding grounds, staking out the best territories before competing males and, especially, females arrived.
The risk for these birds, of course, is exactly what happened: running into a bout of inimical weather. I’m sure they all had second thoughts about their early-season travel, and it’s likely that some of them failed to survive the storm, succumbing to cold and starvation. But as I shoveled our driveway the morning after the storm, what flew over but a small flock of grackles! Whether guided by instinct, intelligence, or previous experience, those birds had found sufficient food and shelter to survive.
And it wasn’t just grackles. A few red-winged blackbirds, also risk-taking early migrants, sang from the top of a distant tree. Such behavior, expending energy on song and exposing the singer to possible predation, does not suggest precarious survival: These birds didn’t just survive the storm, they came out of it ready to fight.
Some resident or overwintering birds, as well, emerged from the storm and simply resumed their late-winter routine. At least four song sparrows, year-round local residents for sure, surrounded me with descant accompaniment as I shoveled. A flock of American robins flew overhead, in direct flight and presumably headed toward some known resource. Two male cardinals retained enough moxie for a territorial squabble among the snow-laden branches of a cedar tree.
To be sure, there will be avian impacts from the storm. Marginally hardy species like the Carolina wren often exhibit serious diebacks after hard winters, or even extreme single events. Preferentially gleaning insect eggs and larvae from leaf litter and twigs close to the ground, these spunky little birds find their main food sources inaccessible after a snowstorm. Barn owls, likewise, are notorious for suffering from the combination of cold, which stresses them, and snow cover, which conceals the voles and mice that constitute the vast majority of their prey. The coming year will likely reveal reduced numbers, perhaps approaching temporary extirpation, of these unfortunate residents.
For insects, the news is likely also mixed. But it is sustained cold that is likely to be the issue for invertebrates, not the amount of snow. Snow cover effectively insulates overwintering eggs, larvae, pupae, and adults, protecting against prolonged or extreme cold, and providing the relatively uniform conditions that are easiest for dormant invertebrates to deal with. A few cold-sensitive species will surely show effects; the Huron sachem butterfly, for example, a recent colonizer from the South, will likely show reduced abundance this coming season. But it will be prolonged cold, not the blizzard, that was the issue.
So for wildlife, impacts of the epic blizzard will be mixed. Yes, there will be enduring negative consequences for some species. But others were back to their usual routine even before we humans, with all our technology, had completed digging out.