Cold hard hit ahead for quail, shad, songbirds
Wildlife springs back but winter's harsh reality will be inescapable in coming days
Northeast Oklahoma could be in for one of its longest cold spells on record, complete with freezing rain and sleet on the front and an a good dose of snow in the middle, and it could be a tough period for some wildlife species.
State climatologist Gary McManus said Tulsa’s longest period with a temperature consistently below 32 degrees was a 13-day period in December 1983.
“That was a cold and miserable December all the way through,” he said.
The closest to that in recent years was six days in the winter of 1996 and five days in December 2013, he said.
It’s not a given that we’ll see a longest-spell, but we could easily hit 10 or 12 days—more depending on the depth of the snow that is forecast.
It’s not much fun for those of us busting our bumpers at the crossroads and cracking our keisters on the sidewalks, but it’s a really tough go for critters near the bottom of the food chain.
Quail will die, songbirds will die, threadfin shad will die, but the good news is these species are prolific and designed to bounce back—even if it might take a little time in specific locations that might get hit harder.
Songbirds get some help from people who feed them and their shelter needs are less complicated than critters like quail, but it can still be tough on birds like American robins and mourning doves.
Both of these common backyard species are “year-round” residents. Some that are here now might indeed be year-round residents, and this weather is hitting them with a shock. Others might have ended their fall migration here—and be wishing they’d continued on at this point. Robins have been finding scratch under my feeders of late. Usually they only visit the birdbaths and look for beetles and worms in my yard.
Attendance at my backyard feeders had more than tripled in recent days.
Shad die-offs are normal, some worse than others
Extra feed won’t help small fishes, however.
Josh Johnston, northeast region fisheries supervisor with the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation emphasized that resilience angle for fish species but called the situation for threadfin shad and the brand new Florida-strain bass stocked at Grand Lake just last spring, “worrisome.”
Aside from the ice and snow that has many of us feeling a little down in the mouth this lengthy period of sub-freezing temperatures and lows still to come with wind-chill factors in the sub-zero category surely will push water temperatures in area lakes into the 30s, he said.
Remember February 2011? That’s when Oklahoma shattered all-time record lows Nowata hit -31on February 10 and other sites around the state well below -20. But even then Oklahoma shot back up above 32 degrees in short order.
Johnston recalled the population of threadfin shad still was skinny going into the Feb. 2013 Bassmaster Classic on Grand Lake O’ The Cherokees (a weekend was not exactly toasty).
Some shad die-off is expected every winter. It’s normal at this latitude, but an unusual string of cold creates challenges. Biologists supplemented Eucha and Grand Lake with threadfin after that 2011, and they mixed threadfin from both lakes to help with genetics, he said.
Bass will gorge on dying shad in days and weeks to come, but if the population takes a big hit they will turn to other forage, like gizzard shad, bluegills and buffalo.
Any angler will tell you most larger lakes have (or had) plenty of threadfin to spare going into this winter after very little die-off last year. Threadfin thrive until the water temperature drops down to about 50 degrees, below that they start to have issues, much below that and they can die en masse. Gizzard shad are a little larger and tougher than threadfins, he said.
This stretch couldn’t have come at a worse time for Florida-strain bass stocked last spring at Grand Lake. The idea was for the larger bass to survive and spawn with native largemouths to create a more hardy species of hybrids in the lake. How those adult Florida stockers, even if they are larger fish, will fare during a period of unusual cold is an unknown, he said.
Genetics studies done over time will tell, he said.
Quail just need shelter and food
For terrestrial game, thoughts in weather like this turn to quail. Ice can cover their food sources and if we get the depth of snow currently forecast for this weekend that will make it that much harder for them to survive.
Wildlife Department Quail Coordintor Tell Judkins said times like this are when good habitat makes all the difference.
The kind of weather we had the past few days with freezing drizzle creates a visual anyone can observe that Judkins calls “an ice shadow.”
Look at the north side of anything, your car, a fence post, a tree, or even tall grasses and you can see the ice built up on that one side, while the other might be relatively ice-free. Quail head to the lee side of things, if they have things for protection.
Judkins said the icy side of a plum thicket checked with a laser thermometer might show 12 or 13 degrees while the south side might be 10 or 12 degrees warmer—and a lot less icy.
Not only is the one side colder but it’s iced up, while the area under the thicket and to the south is warmer and is where the birds can scratch for food.
Judkins is pretty good at housing analogies when it comes to quail.
“Just like you or me, if we’re living in an outhouse we’re not doing very well, but if we have the fancy home with a fireplace and pantry full of food we should be good to go,” he said.
(I truly appreciate his idea of the basics of a “fancy home”)
In weather like this quail can hunker down and use numerous kinds of seeds, grains and berries to get by, including ragweed, croton, sunflower, Osage orange and dogwood and even some acorns (if any are left). For protection they need plum and raspberry thickets—or a good old thick fencerow or shrub-heavy draw like the good old days, if such a thing exists anymore.
The quail will likely take a hit, but will persist, he said. The survival rate for quail from October to April is only about 30 percent in a good year, he said.
“They are at their lowest numbers this time of year and those that have made it this far will make it OK if they have habitat for protection,” he said.
