Winter on the Refuge
What's winter like at North Dakota's J.Clark Salyer National Wildlife Refuge? Click the blue highlighted words for a peek.
BRRRRRR! It's cold outside - welcome to winter on the J. Clark Salyer National Wildlife Refuge.
Okay, so at first glance, it looks like a barren white world, fragmented by some spindly, leafless trees. Ice covers wetlands and a winding Souris River that had been teeming with wildlife activity just a few months earlier .
The crisp air bites in the subtlest of breezes. How can anything exist?
But things do exist - in fact, winter on the refuge really does teem with life. It's just that those animals must carefully conserve their energy - which means doing only what is necessary in order to survive.
Sometimes survival means traversing several miles to hunt for a dinner - like the coyote in search of an errant mouse or cottontail rabbit .
Sometimes survival means holing up with entirely too many of your own kind - like large numbers of white-tail deer congregating on the refuge - taking advantage of abundant winter shelter amongst the trees and marsh cattails.
Not all winters on the refuge are brutally cold. In fact, part of North Dakota's uniqueness is its diversity - not just for its ever-changing four seasons, but in the variety each season itself offers.
This winter, snow closes the 22-mile Scenic Tour route - but that simply means a backcountry cross country skier can slice through the crisp, white blanket of snow, basking in a silent excursion.
Sometimes, up to 20 different birds can be found wintering on different parts of the vast refuge. Who knows, maybe this year it will be redpolls , a regal -looking bald eagle or a mallard duck who missed his flight back south to warmer wintering grounds?
But always there will be deer. The refuge's crucial, abundant winter cover invites whitetails from throughout the region.
Maybe some winters are mild and times don't get too tough. But when enough snow forces closure of the Scenic Trail, often times that translates into challenges of finding food or traveling in deep snow for deer, making survival more difficult .
And often that same amount of snow invites snowmobilers onto the refuge - an expanse of virgin white with a view.
Shattered by a snowmobile's 40-mph roar, animals flee - expending vital energy that otherwise could be conserved and put into developing a healthy fawn or antler growth. Succumbing to too much stress can mean an easier prey for a hungry coyote, himself taxed by deep snow.
Winter seems gentler on the refuge's moose population, given their longer legs and bigger split hooves providing better mobility in deep snow.
In an effort to better enable wildlife to survive the rigors of winter, the refuge is off-limits to snowmobiles and off-road vehicles .
Winter can be a test. A test in which the strong survive.
But yet, winter can be - and is - beautiful on the refuge. A solitary commute - the silent serenity of sundogs dancing with the sun, diamond-like snow crystals glittering in the air. The howl of a coyote slicing in the night. A deer , ever alert, nervously twitching her tail.
And the knowledge that spring will soon arrive.
