10 surprising ways Canadian animals handle cold weather

Love it or hate it: baby, it’s cold outside. But Nature don’t care! Here are ten critters that handle the inconveniences of winter like a boss, thanks to physical adaptations, survival strategies, and good old instinct.

Sure, Arctic foxes have thick coats and bushy tails. But they also have that compact body shape. They’re short and squat all over, with stumpy legs, stubby muzzles, and small ears. Less surface area exposed to cold air means less heat loss. Win.

Just call him Mr. Freeze: this tablespoon-sized amphibian waits out the winter by freezing solid underneath the leaf litter and snow. Wood frogs stop breathing and their hearts stop beating, but thanks to incredibly high glucose levels in their bodies, ice crystals can’t form in their cells, and the frogs can safely thaw in the spring.

These flies—they look like house flies but are larger and clumsier—avoid the cold weather by moving indoors. If you’re finding slow-moving flies inside on unusually warm winter days, they’re probably overwintering cluster flies that snuck in through cracks around windows and doors during the fall, and were roused by the mild temperatures.

All summer, Canada’s national birds (a.k.a., grey jays or whisky jacks) are hiding caches of food in trees. This ensures a bountiful larder when winter rolls around. They use their saliva to glue provisions together, then stuff the delicious, slimy blobs of berries, seeds, and insects into tree branch forks or under bark.

A thick blanket of snow doesn’t stop these guys from getting at that sweet, sweet lichen, their primary food source during the cold months. Using their broad feet, they dig deep to unearth the buried food. Lichen is indigestible for most large mammals, but the caribou’s specialized gut allows them to get nutrition from it.

Along with putting on a thicker, winter-ready coat—the hairs have hollow centres, which makes them more insulating—deer travel up to 90 km to large, communal “yards” protected by trees. Because of the tree cover, the snow isn’t as deep. It’s easier for the deer to move around, and they have a sheltered place to bed down.

Grizzlies pile on the weight to prep for their long, cold hibernation. They can gain 20 pounds each week by scarfing 30,000 calories per day—that’s about 105 slices of pizza. That’s also a recipe for morbid obesity, but the bears never seem to get any long-term health problems. (This is why some scientists believe bears hold the key to treating human obesity-related illness.)

Would you spend the cold season under the lake ice if you geared up with an awesome waterproof jacket and webbed feet? Probably not, but beavers are into it. They’re active all winter—no hibernating here—though their lodges do include a warm and cozy chamber where they can dry off.

These wee food-caching birds need to eat constantly during the day to replenish the calories they burn shivering at night. How do they remember where they stored all their winter snacks? Research shows that in the fall, a chickadee’s hippocampus—the part of the brain responsible for spatial recollection—actually grows new neurons.

Like other cold-blooded creatures, garter snakes spend their winters in brumation, a hibernation-like state. (They’re mostly inactive, only stirring every so often to drink water.) Groups of snakes—at least a dozen, but sometimes thousands—hide in burrows or “hibernacula” below the frost line, hunkering down together in a big slithery pile.