![]() Copyright © 2012 by David George Haskell. When I ported my fully completed game from Kongregate to Steam, some achievements didnt update properly. This piece was adapted with permission from The Forest Unseen: A Year’s Watch in Nature, published by Viking, an imprint of Penguin Publishing Group, a division of Penguin Random House, LLC. Yet, I weigh ten thousand times more than a chickadee surely these birds should be extinguished in seconds. My body is failing after just a minute in this winter chill. Something behind my conscious mind is trapped and alarmed. The wind gusts hard and the burning sensation in my skin surges. Farther north, Carolina chickadees are replaced by a closely related species, the black-capped chickadee, which is ten percent larger again.īergmann’s rule seems remote as I stand naked in the forest. Tennessee birds have tipped the balance between surface area and body volume to match the colder winters here. Carolina chickadees in Tennessee live towards the northern end of the species’ range, and they are ten to twenty percent larger than individuals from the southern limit of the range in Florida. This is known as Bergmann’s rule, after the nineteenth-century anatomist who first described the relationship. When an animal species exists over a large area, the individuals in the north are usually larger than those in the south. The relationship between the size of animals and the rate of heat loss has produced geographic trends in body sizes. Small animals cool rapidly because they have proportionally much more body surface than body volume. Small animals should be less able to cope with the cold than their larger cousins. The contrast on this cold day between the chickadees’ liveliness and my physiological incompetence seems to defy nature’s rules. They rest no more than a second on any surface, then shoot away. The birds dance through the trees like sparks from a fire, careening through twigs. The heat streaming out of my body scorches my skin.Ī chorus of Carolina chickadees provides the accompaniment to this absurd striptease. Then the wind blasts away the illusion and my head is fogged with pain. The first two seconds of the experiment are surprisingly refreshing, a pleasant coolness after the stuffy clothes. Quickly, I strip off my insulated overalls, shirt, T-shirt, and trousers. On a whim, I throw my gloves and hat onto the frozen ground. I want to experience the cold as the forest’s animals do, without the protection of clothes. Today’s cold will take the forest’s life to its physiological limits. Typical southern winters cycle between thaws and mild freezes, with deep chills arriving for a few days each year. In these southern forests such cold is unusual. Not counting the wind chill, it is twenty degrees below freezing. A polar wind rips across the mountainside, streaming through my scarf, pushing an ache into my jaw.
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