Birds Coping With Snow

     For a couple of hours in the sunny, warm afternoon of March 17, 2017, I took a drive in the snow-covered farmland around New Holland, Pennsylvania to see how birds were coping with over a foot of snow that fell a few days before.  Cropland around New Holland today is harvested to the ground in autumn and has few trees and even less hedgerows that would shelter wildlife.  Fields, and meadows with small waterways in them, are bleak habitats for wildlife in winter. 
     On my drive through the countryside I saw some of the bird life there was seemingly unaffected by the heavy snow.  I saw mallard ducks and Canada geese in the slow-moving parts of streams where they shovel up water plants to eat, and a great blue heron stalking fish in one of them.  Seed and invertebrate-eating song sparrows were abundant in thin thickets along pasture waterways as they always are in winter.  And I saw eight Wilson's snipe in the shallows along the edges of brooks and streams in meadows where they are all winter.  There they poke their long beaks in mud under running water to pull out aquatic invertebrates.
     But I also noticed that some species of birds changed their daily habits for the time deep snow is on the ground.  They have to get food in niches different than what they are used to.  Adaptable and wintering, or migrating, horned larks, American robins and American crows, and migrating purple grackles and red-winged blackbirds, were on plowed and dry country roads, I guess looking for tidbits blown out there by the wind.  These kinds of birds also frequented roadside shoulders where snow plows ripped up soil, exposing it and patches of vegetation that might have invertebrates and seeds in them.  Plowed roadways and roadsides get larger as the snow melts and trickles away, offering more and more food for these birds and other kinds.  These bird species, and other types, also eat berries, and go to bird feeders to consume grain.       
     Road apples, also known as horse droppings, are abundant on some rural roads used by horses and buggies, or wagons.  Road apples are loaded with corn that was chewed to bits by the horses, but not completely digested, offering nutrition to congregations of horned larks, house sparrows, crows, pigeons, doves and other kinds of farmland birds.
     Although I didn't see any manure strips in the fields the day of my trip in farmland, those lines of farmland animals' droppings spread over snow-covered fields by manure spreaders to enrich the soil are also loaded with bits of chewed, undigested corn.  The birds listed at road apples, plus mallard ducks, Canada geese and migrating tundra swans and snow geese all root out corn from the manure.  Those manure strips are blessings to many kinds of field birds after a heavy snowfall buries seeds and grain that lay on the ground after the fall harvests.  
     Snowmobiles racing across snow-covered fields tear up the snow and, in places, the ground beneath, exposing invertebrates and seeds to field birds.  Flocks of horned larks, snow buntings during some winters, crows, rock pigeons, mourning doves, and individual or paired killdeer plovers search for that food in snowmobile tracks in the soil of fields. 
     Incidentally, although I barely saw any killdeer all winter before this deep snow, they were almost everywhere as individuals and pairs in farmland around New Holland the day of my trip.  They were mostly along country roads, and on the edges of small, running waterways where they, snipe and song sparrows watched for invertebrates to eat.  As my car approached each of them on the rural roads, the killdeer daintily lifted up and lightly drifted away, on swept-back wings, low over snow-covered fields.     
     Wind pushing snow across fields and pastures bares the ground in some places and piles it in other spots.  Those exposed soil areas get larger as rain falls and washes away snow and the heat of the sun melts it.  And as the bare ground places get ever bigger, the birds spread out again to look for food.
At this time of year, with the sun "high" and hot in the sky, the snow is quickly melting away.  But it was interesting to see how some species of farmland birds coped with deep snow on local fields and meadows for a few days.  I think they do quite well.