There is a time when leaves are fallin’
The woods are gray the paths are old
The snow will come when geese are callin’
You need a fire against the cold
-The Dillards
As September and October reach Michigan, there is more food and resources in the forest than any other time of year. There’s fruits, nuts, roots, farm crops, and hunter’s baits. This creates a surplus, as the amount of life the land can support year around can’t use what’s available to them in the fall while it remains.
I’ll use a few analogies. For most of human history many have worshipped the sun, and no wonder given its role in sustaining life. Imagine if the sun were a king going off to battle in a distant land. Before he leaves, he provides his subjects with a great feast and then leaves with his armies. This feast is the fall harvest, and his armies are those who migrate south for the winter.
One might also consider the sun to be grandparents, wintering in Florida. Before they leave, they hold a Christmas party early and give gifts to their family. The children and older grandchildren will likely ask for money, so they can spend it later.
Humans are experts at saving value for later. With the neolithic revolution, humans settled in one place and grew their own food creating a surplus every harvest season which had to be stored for year around consumption. In fact, they grew enough food that not everyone had to farm. A small percentage of the community specialized in leadership, religion, fighting, and construction. As these people created value other than agricultural products, they started storing value in the form of currency making trade easier.
Eventually, people started storing money with others and even lending and borrowing money to further smooth consumption. This practice evolved into modern day banking, an institution rapidly being replaced itself by computer networks, online payments, and cryptocurrency. But wild animals don’t have this ability. They cannot store value indefinitely or borrow value against the future. Nonetheless, they do their best with what they can do.
Let’s consider how some of the animals store away the plenty of fall, starting with the animals that literally store away food. During November, I would drive up to my bird feeder and see a chickadee sitting at the top of a bag of my chickens’ scratch feed. Apparently, he was tired of the bird feed, and he’d dive down into the bag of chicken feed, grab a mouthful, and fly back out. Chickadees are ubiquitous in forested areas, much like sparrows in agricultural lands. Though chickadees are even smaller than sparrows. They make a sound like their name: Chick—a—dee-dee-dee. I used to marvel at how much a small bird could eat out of my bird feeder. But they aren’t eating all the food immediately, but are stashing it way. Apparently, the parts of their brain that stores the locations of these stashes, the hippocampus, grows by a third in the fall as it records these hideaways.
The squirrel is one of the chickadee’s chief competitors, and they are also the reason I store my bird feed indoors. Grey squirrels are most common is forested areas, though they commonly appear black. These squirrels are smaller than the more commonly known fox squirrels who live in more nutrient rich transitions, urban parks, and farm fields. There is also the even smaller red squirrel, which is called a pine squirrel in forested areas. These squirrels are one of the few animals that thrive in jack pine plantations surviving off of pine nuts. These pine squirrels are very fiesty, and are known to chase off their larger cousins and chatter angrily at humans. This is thought to be because they keep a single stash of nuts, which they must defend else perish in the winter. Conversely, other squirrel species store nuts in many places so they don’t feel the need to defend each place as aggressively.
Many animals don’t store food, but store up fat on their body. Most animals will attempt eat and store up fat when food is plentiful, an instinct that has not served modern humans well. However, raccoons and bears build up significant fat reserves as part of their annual biology. Raccoons feed mostly around the water, and most water will freeze in the winter depending on the temperature and the currents. Therefore, they feed heavily in the fall storing up fat for the winter when they will den and remain relatively dormant. As I discussed in my post “America’s Bear” black bear will gain a third in weight during the fall, gorging themselves on outstanding quantities of nuts, fruits, and hunters’ baits. They prepare to den for 5-6 months, when they will not feed, urinate, or deficate, and will move little or not at all outside their den.
Still other animals don’t store many calories at all, inside our outside of their body. Instead, they use the available calories of fall to prepare in other ways. One of the most common approaches is migration. Many birds migrate from Michigan in the fall of the year to warmer regions where winter food is more plentiful. Kirtland warblers migrate from the jack pine forests of Michigan to the Bahamas, an excellent choice in my opinion. American woodcock migrate from Michigan’s swamps and aspen thickets to the swamps of Louisiana and the greater Gulf region. Countless species of ducks and geese are common sights in the fall sky as they migrate south. These birds use the bountiful food available at their starting points and along the way to fuel their journey.
Finally, many animals use fall to strengthen their bodies to survive at home in Michigan. These animals are able to make a living during the hardest times of year, largely because they are capable of digesting the woody parts of trees. These animals include cottontail rabbits, snowshoe hares, ruffed grouse, and white-tailed deer. While these animals store up some fat on their bodies, they are usually quite lean. Instead they will build muscle and size while they await winter. Rabbits inhabit boundary areas and yards and farmland while hares inhabit deep northern forests. During the winter, they will both eat through the bark of young trees consuming the cambium layer underneath. Grouse will feed heavily on fruits and nuts throughout the fall strengthening their wings and growing out their final warm feathers. During the winter, they will sleep under the snow and then fly up into trees feeding on buds on the tips of branches.
About mid-September, the deer and their tracks seem to all but dissapear from the forests, particularly in years with a good acorn crop. About this time, the white oak acorns, the variety with less unpallatable tanins, start to fall. The deer have little reason to move often bedding within close proximity of these trees and feeding when convenient. About mid-October, the white oak acorns have been consumed or start to sprout. Deer again become more evident leaving tracks when they search for food and even appearing in yards and roadside ditches chewing the last remaing forbes and grasses. Their mating season also begins, with bucks moving large distances, burning calories, and locating does. Deer will start to browse, which means eating the newly grown twigs at the end of branches which grew during the summer. Soon hunters enter the woods in large numbers, along with (usually illegal) bait piles which they will deposit in large quantities ranging from bags to pickup loads. The deer will get bumped around by these hunters for a while but, since they can smell everywhere they go, they will soon learn to hide where the hunters aren’t and feed on their baits under the cover of darkness. But with the end of November, hunters and their baits start to dissapear and the deer will begin to move much more and browse heavily in their last preparations for winter until the snow deepens enough to impede their movements.
Then there is the changes to the plant world, which are indeed the changes in vegetation the animals respond to. Much as a dress being ripped from the body of a cornered woman before a brutal act, the land is violently laid bare in the same order that she was covered a few short months before. The meadows, yards, and ditches brown as the vegetation withers away. Then the shaded forest plants and brachen ferns die and collapse under fall winds and cold rains. Next the leaves start to change color and die, starting with the birch and aspen and maples and proceeding to the oaks. Within weeks, the leaves fall and the true colors of the forest are again laid bare to view, those dreary browns and greys. Finally, the snows and ice cover her with waive after waive.
While Michigan is no stranger to November snows, with the sustained freezing temperatures of late November and December 2025, it was as if January came a month early. The harvest was also a good one, at least in my area the acorn crop was large this year. But this winter will be its equal. The time of work is over. The time to gather is finished. The dance of death and survival has just begun.