A vocabulary of landscape — a landscape of words
1469 entries
hibernaculum
A hibernaculum is the place an animal spends the winter in a dormant state. For a bat it is a cave or a mine with stable temperature and humidity; for snakes it is a rock crevice or a burrow below the frost line, often shared by hundreds of individuals and sometimes by several species; for a butterfly it might be a crack in bark. The requirement is the same in every case: cold enough to stay dormant, not cold enough to freeze.
Etymology
The word is Latin for winter quarters, and it was the ordinary Roman military term for the camp an army built to sit out the campaigning season. Biologists took the soldiers’ word directly.
Notes
Hibernacula are traditional and used for generations, so the same crevice can hold snakes for a century, and losing one takes out a whole local population regardless of how good the surrounding country is. Bats returning to a hibernaculum will navigate to it from many miles away. Because they are so concentrated, hibernacula are where winter counts are made and where disturbance does the most harm.