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Boulder Backyard: Food Strategies For Winter

Boulder Backyard has visitors of all types. The incoming winter brings a party of animals to the back yard. Keeping water, food, and shelter in the back yard makes for a welcoming animal environment for these local fauna.

Boulder Backyard: Fattening For Winter

Do I have a favorite in our Boulder Backyard? Definitely. ALL of them! Whether it is a blue jay in a flock of starlings or a pair of squirrels, it makes a better show than much of what I find on TV.

Boulder Backyard

Cotton Tails are ubiquitous. They are everywhere!   pic Lenny Lensworth Frieling

Boulder Backyard famous beakless flicker

The Famous Boulder Beakless Flicker                        pic Lenny Lensworth Frieling

While Not An Unusual Beast, The Squirrel Is Hysterical!  pic Lenny Lensworth Frieling

As winter approaches, animals like squirrels, flickers, and rabbits shift into survival mode, using distinct strategies to ensure they’re prepared for the colder months ahead.

Squirrels

are perhaps the most common and amusing winter-preparers. They are known for their relentless gathering and burying of nuts, seeds, and acorns. This caching behavior—often called scatter hoarding—helps them create food reserves to draw from when food is scarce. Squirrels have an uncanny ability to remember the locations of many of their buried treasures, although some of these caches are inevitably forgotten, contributing to forest regeneration.

Western Flickers

a type of woodpecker, have a different approach. As autumn deepens, they consume more insects, fruits, and seeds to build up fat reserves. In winter, as insects become harder to find, they adapt by eating more berries and seeds. They can also be found frequenting backyard feeders, where they’re particularly fond of suet. We see them foraging for bugs in tree bark quite often.

Rabbits

prepare for winter in more subtle ways, as they don’t cache food like squirrels or store fat reserves to the same extent as flickers. Instead, rabbits rely on their natural habitat to provide enough sustenance. They’ll spend autumn foraging on nutrient-dense foods like grasses, clover, and even tree bark. As winter hits, rabbits often shift to eating twigs, buds, and any green vegetation they can find under the snow. Their burrows provide a relatively warm refuge where they can wait out particularly harsh weather, conserving energy by limiting their activity.

Each of these animals has evolved its own techniques to navigate the scarcity of winter. Their adaptations highlight the unique strategies found in nature to thrive, even when conditions seem most challenging.

Lenny Lensworth Frieling

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