Dangling my feet off the end-gate of our old white farm truck parked along our ridge, I was waiting for the wand pump to inhale the sap stored in the tote. The totes, placed at the bottom of a south-facing ridge, is the perfect set up for sap collecting and convenient to unload. It’s a hobby my husband and I enjoy. Early spring, as soon as the weather cooperates, we’re up in the woods as often as the trees release their ambrosia.
So as I was daydreaming that one mild spring day — the sky cloudless, the wind speechless — I noticed an industrious ant making its way through dry leaves and twigs. It hadn’t warmed up very much, we were only in the mid-40s, so I was surprised to see insects. This ant was on a mission, intent on going somewhere and doing something.
Totally engrossed in the little bugger, I asked my husband, “Where do ants go in the winter?”
“They burrow underground. Remember we see them in the wood we cut sometimes?” says he.
As we split wood in the winter, at times I’d see a bunch of ants looking dead as a doornail. They’re not in every hunk, just some of the ones that are hollow. (We call them dozy and those quickly burn.) The ants looked like they burrowed right into the wood, sort of calcified, and had gotten stuck there as the weather abruptly turned cold.
Because I’m naturally curious, I double-checked with Siri and she informed me: “Ants don’t hibernate but enter a dormant state called ‘diapause,’ retreating deep underground below the frost line where temperatures remain stable. The queen stops laying eggs, workers stop foraging, and the colony seals its entrances to conserve heat until spring.”
Aren’t they the clever little things? They take a winter hiatus.
Along with creepy crawling insects, our woods is alive with motion. Before we’d put up trail cameras, we had little idea of the vibrant, busy night life of our forest.
Now with multiple trail cams in our woods, we capture, not those creeping insects but much larger wildlife. We have discovered to our great amazement that we have a remarkable variety: bear, fisher, bobcat, fox, coyote, woodchuck, raccoon, opossum, squirrel, deer, skunk and turkey — all caught one time or another on our trail cams. Those seem to be the regulars. We then discovered a very different one on camera that completely floored us — a badger.
Our state animal resides in our Leopolis woods? It’s rather flattering.
Our good buddy, Tim, who is a lover of all of God’s woodland creatures, laughed when we shared that trail cam picture with him, retorting, “Oh, those things are grizzly bears with short legs!”
We indeed discovered they are aggressive, or can be, and 80% of their diet is earthworms. No wonder they have those long claws.
From www.woodlandtrust.org.uk, I found that, “Badgers can eat several hundred worms each night, but being omnivorous, they will eat almost anything, from flesh and fruit to bulbs and birds’ eggs to slugs and insects. They also have a keen sense of smell.”
Along with collecting sap and harvesting wood to keep our farmhouse warm and toasty (there’s nothing like wood heat), my husband likes to hunt.
One night as dusk was hunkering down, he was walking the trail from his hunting stand to the four-wheeler, parked a ways down. All of a sudden along Highway 29, about a quarter mile from our woods, an ambulance came screaming down the highway toward Green Bay, sirens blazing.
Just then, my husband heard a sound that made his blood run cold.
Coyotes — provoked by the sound of the siren — started howling. He realized then that he was encircled by a pack. He never even saw them and didn’t know they were there, but after he heard them, and that close, he scrambled to the four-wheeler as fast as his legs could carry him.
Afterwards he told me, “It was pretty spooky.”
If I’d have been there, “pretty spooked” was the least I’d have been. I’d have had goosebumps reproducing along with cold chills down my spine.
“Did you feel like the hunted instead of the hunter?” I asked, eyes wide, reliving it as he explained.
“Ya.”
While our busy and beautiful woods produces for us in so many ways, I rather prefer to visit during daylight when the wildlife is snoozing.
(“Four things on earth are small, yet they are exceedingly wise: the ants are a people not strong, yet they provide their food in the summer; the badgers are a people not mighty, yet they make their home in the cliffs.” Proverbs 30:24-25, English Standard Version)
Kay Reminger was born and raised on a dairy farm, and she married her high school sweetheart, who happened to farm for a living in Leopolis. Writing for quite a few years, she remains focused on the blessings of living the ups and downs of rural life from a farm wife’s perspective.
