Same here. When I focused just on herps, winters were grim. Birding and some mammaling filled in those ugly long months of frozen hell. (I’m not a cold weather fan.)
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I agree I don’t like late fall and winter. If it’s frosty and snowy, it’s fun to have a walk, but I’m not good at observing game traces and have no camera suitable for birds. So I can take photos of lichens on trees. But with the climate changes, we have less frost and snow. The world looks pretty depressive, but I can find more lichens, fungi and mosses. Another option is recording bird voices. So somehow we’ll make it till spring.
I currently live in the gulf, I lived most of my life in England, I used to dread winter, but now I look forward to it as we get a lot of migratory birds coming through, roughly 500 species. Now it’s the opposite, I dread the summer as it gets to 50*C, and there is a significant decrease in nature obvs that I could spot, (that’s if I’m brave enough to venture out in that heat 
).
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What I do in winter is focus on lichens. I might try mosses in winter, but not this winter. I have been learning lichens by studying morphological differences between pictures on iNaturalist and descriptions from Consortium of North American Lichen Herbaria (at least what I can deciper). I set up a bookmark with an iNaturalist link to the lichens of Ontario and filtered by the two top identifiers. By filtering it by the two top identifiers, I am assured of a high probability these observations have been correctly identified.
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Like, tidying up my iNat lair?
SHHHHHH!
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I think I might try evolving quickly into a hibernating mammal this winter.
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Ha, if only that were a real option.
Hmm… I do remember once reading somewhere about a study of how in the past, peasant farming families (the French Alps were used) went into a winter ‘torpor’ to lower their metabolism and… well, survive.
The family would basically eat far less and sleep as much as possible, huddled together (with livestock too) to conserve heat and fuel. They would take turns stoking the fire. Apparently, among the very poor, this action (or inaction, if you prefer) was an economic necessity.
I’ve often wondered how our ancestors from the Ice Age dealt with winter. Could there be more to this?
Just a second… here you go. Not the source I was thinking about, but it explains the basics. I suppose I could have dug up that study with more effort, and maybe I will.
Come April.
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I’m already sleeping longer, especially on gray days. Now, if I just didn’t have this compulsion to get outside on sunny days, or to make iNat IDs, or to eat more than I should, or to visit friends…
We did one event last year Nature in Winter
Below are the sequence of invitation posters
I am unsure of this year, need some support
Also am still to figure a “theme”
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Beautiful! Love the last one especially.
Thank you
That was a typical winter sunset n the Himalaya :-)
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I’m noticing that the Carolina Wrens are still singing. Since they are nonmigratory, I suppose they might maintain territories year-round.
Theirs is one of my favorite bird songs. I call them “jubilee birds,” because to me their song sounds like “jubilee-jubilee-jubilee.”
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There are still wonders to discover even in a cold winter. Different insects spend the winter in different forms, with different strategies. Some species even only comes out as an adult during the coldest days in a year! For example, I found some adult moths at a cold winter night when it’s only -2°C, they are called wintermoths.
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But -2 isn’t really a cold night, now all winter moths are dead.
Depends! Texas, yes. Finland, no.
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Well, I’m not talking about places like Yakutsk (pic below), but -2 is just too mild, I don’t think Texas has any problems with winter at all, there always should be something to observe, the site shows straight July temperatures for Austin right now.
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Which scale ? In Celsius that isn’t bad in Texas either. In Fahrenheit yeah, COLD.
Haha, I live in the southern hemisphere.
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I live in Hong Kong, where very occasionally there will be a hot day in the middle of winter, with butterflies about. I had two wasp lifers just yesterday.
To say nothing of the year-round warm humid conditions in Singapore…
But yes, for example wildlife night walks can be enjoyable in the summer and more or less pointless in the winter. Not much that can be done about that, I suppose, unless you are prepared to spend some money on a holiday to a warmer clime…
Best of luck anyway!
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Not sure exactly how severe your winter is, but you can sift leaf litter for overwintering larvae - hoverflies in particular. A little bit of digging here and there at the base of trees and beside water will occasionally get you some larvae and also centipedes/millipedes and springtails. Documenting and even rearing larvae at home is really useful science as a lot of insects spend the winter in the larval form, and many of these larvae are poorly known or completely unknown - even species that are common as adults.
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