What do little ground-feeding birds do when snow blankets the ground? They have a hard time finding food. Some die, but the majority can make do in the right kind of wild garden.
Big ground-feeding birds, like the wild turkey, can survive winters further north because they can scratch through deeper snow.
But little ground-feeders, like white-throated sparrows, field sparrows, song sparrows and hermit thrushes, head South where they can find freedom from snow. They're what ornithologists call short-distance migrants.
Other ground-feeding birds, such as brown thrashers and towhees, are year-round residents in the South, but they're more common in winter.
That's because their northern relatives come South to bunk in with them for the winter. They all hunt the treasure trove of worms, insects and seeds served up in the leaf litter.
When we do get snow, it's a real hardship for small ground feeders.
We had about two inches of snow on Feb. 4. I watched these birds to see where and how they managed to find food.
Any bare place, no matter how small, was prime real estate. A high-demand spot was in the lee of a wood pile where the ground was bare.
The leaves here were all raked and churned by the birds. A forlorn hermit thrush huddles on the ground in this bare spot, his feathers all fluffed out. The hermit thrush is not a scratcher. He waited for the ground to thaw before he could look for worms and insects.
Beneath fallen logs and slanting tree trunks were good, snow- free feeding spots. A towhee and a white-throated sparrow were busy scratching up a spot under a tree limb which had fallen and was propped up on a stump.
Other choice and almost bare spots were under the cedars and other evergreens where the dense branches had prevented some of the snow from reaching the ground.
The blue jays and brown thrashers are bigger and stronger than the towhees and sparrows. They penetrate the snow layer and expose little patches of leaves. Then the little birds come in behind them.
The blue jay found a water oak acorn. He flew up to an overhanging branch, chopped the acorn to pieces, and greedily gulped the orange fragments.
The birds ignored the smooth, snow-covered lawn. They seemed to know it was a hopeless feeding area offering no leaves to turn.
Likewise, they seemed to know the snow-covered driveway was a wasteland. By their behavior, the birds said they prefer unraked and untidy places where leaves can be turned to find bare soil.
Out beyond the lawn is a zone of dead zinnias, sunflowers and other annual flowers and weeds. There the cardinals and other seed-eating birds were busily clinging to old flower heads and picking away. It's a good thing for them we hadn't cleaned up this wild place.
Of course, the birds like sunflowers and millet seeds people put out in bird feeders, but with enough food in a wild garden, they can get along without bird welfare.
But for an insect-eating bird like the hermit thrush, there is no bird welfare.
By noon many little islands of brown leaves were showing through the snow, and by 3 p.m. the snow was thawing. The hermit thrush caught a large earthworm. The birds had survived another snow.
If you want to do less work while also helping the birds, let some garden cleanup jobs go undone. Leave those old zinnias, let those dead leaves lie under the thickets, and don't cut and haul away the fallen branches.
Your wild neighbors will know what to do with them.
