Rodent Preparations for Winter

     In autumn, some species of rodents in southeastern Pennsylvania, as throughout the northern temperate areas on Earth, annually make preparations for the coming winter.  They all developed the habit of doing that because food is hard to get when locked away in snow and ice.
     Squirrels, including the abundant and omnipresent gray squirrels, for example, eastern chipmunks and deer mice store seeds and nuts to eat in winter.  Gray squirrels stash nuts mostly, including those from black walnut, hickory, beech and oak trees, in tree cavities and in the ground in woodlands and older suburban areas with their many maturing trees.  The squirrels dig little, shallow holes in the soil with their front feet, push a nut into each one with their noses, then bury those nuts with their front feet again, tamping the soil down with noses and feet for good measure.  In winter, the squirrels sniff out the food they buried in the soil, even when it's under snow.  But some of those nuts and seeds don't get eaten, perhaps sprouting into new vegetation. 
     Chipmunks store seeds and nuts in underground burrows they dig out themselves.  They make many scurried forays over woodland floors and lawns, pick up the foods in their mouths and store them in their two cheek pouches.  When their pouches are full, the chippies race home and empty those grocery containers into a storage room in their burrows.  Then out they go for more edibles, risking their lives in doing so because of weasels, foxes, hawks and other predators.  Surviving chipmunks sleep in their dens in winter, waking every few days to eat from their stores.
     Deer mice winter in old squirrel and bird nests, under logs, in brush piles, crevices among rocks and in and under buildings.  They stash many seeds in those sheltering places for winter use.  Being active all winter, they probably feed from their stores when the weather is too snowy or cold for them to want to venture out, and when food is buried by snowfalls.
     Wood chucks and meadow jumping mice hibernate through winter, in burrows in the ground from early November to mid-February with regards to the chucks and March for the mice.  In fall, the chucks and mice put on fat their bodies use in the coming winter.  Chucks consume green plants while the jumping mice ingest seeds and berries.
     Beavers are large, aquatic rodents that eat green plants and the bark of twigs and branches.  In fall, beavers stick limbs they gnawed off trees into the mud at the bottom of the ponds they created with their dams.  They got the branches from trees they gnawed off with their sharp, strong teeth.   
     In winter, when ice covers their ponds, beavers leave their lodges through under water entrances to bring back limbs from their stores to those lodges.  There they consume the bark of those branches.
     Beavers also store fat in their tails.  That fat helps sustain them through winter.
     These rodents' preparations for winter make the outdoors in fall the more interesting.  And the rodents survive winter because of those laid away stores of food, or the fat they stored on their bodies in autumn, depending on the species.