Pennsylvania Game News - December 2011 - 24

reluctantly shut the light off. Daylight couldn’t come a moment too soon. When it did, the wind hadn’t let up a bit and the fog seemed even thicker. And it lasted all day. I had never before seen conditions like that where the wind howled but the fog stayed thick and murky. But I’ve seen it many times since — all on top of that mountain. The only place I’ve ever been privileged to observe the phenomenon of snow fleas was on that ridge. One morning in deer season it was snow covered but under the spell of a warm front that had the temperature in the upper 30s. I sat with my back to a tree and noticed a dark spot, about three or four feet in diameter, on the surface of the snow, ten yards in front of me. I assumed it was dirt washing off the trees. Ten minutes later I could have sworn that dirt spot had moved. Twenty minutes later, I was sure it had moved. Curiosity got the best of me and I went down for a look. A closer inspection revealed thousands of tiny bugs, jumping all over the place. Then I noticed there were several other black spots in the area. I went home and looked it up and found out that they were snow fleas or springtails (officially, wingless scorpion flies — Hypogastrura harveyi and H. nivicola). It’s assumed that they swarm on snow when the weather warms slightly to eat the algae that grow on the snow’s surface. I’ve seen that phenomenon only several times in my life and in every instance it was on top of that mountain.
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One other day, Dad and I were on top and it was again foggy but with an on-andoff gusty wind. It was cold, though, (20 degrees) and with a foot of snow covered by a thick crust of ice. The ice was thick enough that you could stay on top of it if you walked lightly, but that was treacherous. So we stomped our feet with each step to break through the stuff just to get some footing. That made for noisy walking, but was the only way to safely walk through it. The ice coating that was on the snow was also on the tree limbs, and each gust of wind brought a shower of ice and an occasional branch crashing to the ground. Sometimes some pretty big limbs and branches came down. It really wasn’t a safe day to be out, but it was one of only two days I had to hunt, and I wasn’t going to miss it for a little bad weather. The constant rain of ice and limbs had the deer on edge, though, and on the move. They would come bursting through the fog and bunch up, eyes wide with fear, and then go shooting off in another direction. I don’t know how they got through that crust without breaking legs. I was up there one other time after a fog had frozen to the trees and put a thick coating on everything. Again, in the valley it was just rain but up near my stand, everything was crystalline. This was in doe season, and as I climbed the side of the hill to my stand in the dark, the ice-coated leaves would break chunks free that would cascade down the mountain in a noisy landslide. It was definitely not a day for still-hunting, but I figured that anything moving through my area would be easy to detect from the noisy going. It was about 20 minutes after daylight
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Pennsylvania Game News - December 2011

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