Winter is coming. In a hard freeze, your local wild birds can still find food. What they can't find is water that isn't frozen - and that can mean the difference between making it through winter, or not. When temperatures drop, the puddles, creeks and birdbaths birds rely on lock up. Birds can eat snow, but melting it inside their bodies burns energy they can't spare in the cold. They still need to drink, and they need clean feathers to stay warm. A birdbath heater fixes it, and now's the time to set one up, before you're chipping ice out of a frozen basin. Get a heated bath with a thermostat or a drop-in de-icer, and plug it into a GFCI outlet. Never add antifreeze, glycerin or salt to keep the water open. Antifreeze is poison, and glycerin mats feathers so they can't hold heat. One catch: on the coldest days, birds will soak themselves in a heated bath and fly off with their feathers freezing. People have found cardinals too iced up to fly. When it's bitterly cold, lay a few sticks or a grate across the top so birds can drink but can't bathe. Keep it clean, and keep it full.

Every year, viral social media posts tell us to bleach pumpkins to preserve them. And every year, I post: please don't do that. Pumpkins are food. Wild animals will nibble a jack-o'-lantern, so bleach, paint and plastic decorations turn a pumpkin into contaminated food. Wildlife agencies recommend keeping pumpkins free of chemical preservatives. You can preserve your pumpkins longer by keeping them cool and bringing them inside between displays. It's also reasonable to accept that pumpkins are perishable and they will rot over time. As they should. When your jack-o-lantern is done, remove candles, wax and decorations. Compost an untreated pumpkin or use an approved municipal drop-off. Don't dump piles of pumpkins in parks or preserves; even organic waste is litter when it concentrates food, spreads non-native seeds and attracts animals to roads and people. Painted or treated pumpkins belong in the trash unless local guidance says otherwise. Further reading on this: U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service pumpkin guidance; Illinois Extension pumpkin disposal guidance.

In one study, most chickadees without a bird feeder present didn’t make it to spring. Most with one did. A Wisconsin study followed hundreds of marked chickadees over three winters. 69% of the birds with feeders readily available survived. Only 37% survived without. A chickadee lives on the edge in winter. Every day, it eats about 10% of its body weight, then burns all of it shivering through the night. Every morning, it starts near empty. About half of what it eats in winter is insects: eggs and pupae tucked into bark and twigs, waiting out the cold. Those insects come from native trees. An oak feeds hundreds of kinds of caterpillars. A Bradford pear or a crape myrtle feeds almost none. Now picture the average subdivision. Lawn, a Bradford pear out front, a row of boxwoods. A chickadee working that yard in January is picking through a nearly empty pantry. Don't beat yourself up. Most of us didn’t choose those plants. The builder did. Here's what you can do: Stock a feeder with black oil sunflower or put up a plain suet feeder. Plant one native tree. Fall is the best time to do it. Oaks are the gold standard, with native cherries and willows close behind. The National Wildlife Federation’s Native Plant Finder shows which plants feed the most caterpillars where you live. And leave the leaves under it. A lot of moths spend the winter as pupae in leaf litter, and those make next spring’s caterpillars. You don’t need a perfect yard. Researchers point out that a neighborhood where lots of people plant some natives does more than one person going all-native. Just do what you can, the chickadees will appreciate it.