• Bighorn Sheep
• Clubmosses
• Mud Puppies
• Cattails
• Hibernating Poorwills
• Snowy Owls

Jim Brandenburg/Minden Pictures

Bighorns, the world's largest wild sheep, can weigh more than 300 pounds and carry 20 pounds of horns. So when rams butt heads in late autumn, the percussions carry for miles through the thin mountain air of the American West. Competing for control of a band of ewes, two jousters, steadied by rubberlike cushions on the bottom of their hooves, will clash at speeds of about 20 miles per hour from as far away as 30 feet, and they may keep at it for 20 hours. Rarely do these contests result in serious injury, because the shock is absorbed by double-layered skulls. Bighorn populations have been drastically reduced by parasites and pathogens associated with domestic sheep, by habitat destruction caused by livestock grazing, and, in the days before modern wildlife management, by unregulated market hunting. Now, with the help of sportsmen, they are being restored to much of their former range.

Lilliputian Forests

Imagine earth a quarter-billion years ago--before dinosaurs, before flowering plants, when our planet was cloaked in towering forests of primitive, spore-producing trees. Today we burn them as coal. But as with so many ancient life-forms, they did not disappear; instead, they miniaturized. There's no better time to walk through these relict Carboniferous forests than November, when their evergreen foliage imparts a sense of warmth and wonder to the otherwise bleak landscape of the temperate United States. But watch where you step, because the canopy won't make it past your boot tops. These tiny "trees" are called club-mosses, but they are more closely related to ferns than to true mosses. Some of their names are richly descriptive--wolf's paw, for example, and Robin Hood's hatband, forks and knives, tree branched, princess pine (aka ground cedar). The use of club-mosses in Christmas wreaths has reduced their abundance to the point that picking them is now illegal in some states. A spore, less efficient than a seed, can take 7 years to reach the gametophyte stage; then the gametophyte can take an additional 10 to produce a mature plant--good reason to let club-mosses keep decorating the yuletide woods.

Wet Dogs That Don't Shake

Quite regularly in the eastern half of the nation, save the extreme South and Southeast, a fisherman soaking a worm or minnow will haul out a creature "new to science." The fearsome-looking beast, which may approach 20 inches in length, has frog feet, leopard spots, a dog snout, an eel tail, and an otherworldly collar of fleshy red frills. Usually the local wildlife expert identifies it as a mud puppy, a permanently aquatic salamander with external gills (its lungs are used as a fish's swim bladder is: to regulate buoyancy). A winter evening is a fine time for mud-puppy watching, especially if the pond ice is walkable and clear.

In your flashlight beam you'll see them stalking across the bottom. You may witness their courtship--the male walking around, over, and even under the female as she stands on rigid legs.

Cattail Comforter

When the wild, discordant barking of geese turns your head toward Polaris, and the north wind sends cattail fluff swirling across the frozen marsh, it seems, as Tom Rush sings, that "all that stays is dying, and all that lives is getting out." It's an illusion. Pick apart some cattail seedheads (common in most of our nation), tossing the tiny parachutes soap-bubble-style to the breeze, but keep your eyes on the cigar-shaped seedhead. Where the fluff is still held together by silk you'll find yellow, brown-striped worms about a quarter-inch long--the half-grown larvae of the cattail moth. The superb insulation of their winter homes allows the larvae to postpone pupation till late spring.

Will's Winter Nap

Had you suggested to biologist Edmund Jaeger on December 28, 1946, that it was time to search for hibernating birds, he might have smiled indulgently and explained that, while a few birds, such as white-throated swifts and certain hummingbirds, become briefly torpid in cold weather, none can slow its metabolism to the point of true hibernation. But the next day, as he and two students hiked a narrow canyon in the Chuckwalla Mountains of southern California, he had an epiphany. There, in a rock crevice, perfectly matching the coarse, gray granite and with its beak toward the desert sky, was what looked to be a dead common poorwill--a diminutive cousin of the whippoorwill and the nighthawk that haunts dry, brushy areas of the West. Jaeger picked it up, felt its cold feet and eyelids, then placed it back on the crevice--at which point it opened and closed one eye. For three winters the bird returned to that spot, hibernating through early March. Its heartbeat was barely detectable; its temperature, recorded by Jaeger and other researchers every two weeks, averaged 64.4 degrees Fahrenheit --42 degrees below normal. The news stunned the scientific world but not the Hopi Indians. Long ago they had named the poorwill holchko--"the sleeping one."

Owls in Winter Sun

On our frozen beaches and marshes, on bitter, wind-blasted prairies, at large metropolitan airports, and in any habitat vaguely reminiscent of tundra, North America's heaviest owl finds winter refuge from the even more brutal cold of its breeding grounds. In normal years the northern tier of our contiguous states is its sunny south. Flights are heaviest when the lemming population has crashed in the far north. Unlike most owls, this one often hunts by day because it raises its young in a land where summer night, if it occurs at all, is fleeting as the blush of wildflowers. Over surrogate tundra south of the Canadian border or real tundra in the high Arctic, the snowy owl floats like the angel of death, swooping down to talon rodents and swallow them headfirst. You're apt to spy it while it roosts on the ground--a pair of fierce yellow eyes looking into the sun, then a white, black-flecked body taking form around them.