I've been cold in the Ozarks plenty of times, sitting in a deer stand with my toes gone numb by 7 a.m., and I always figured that was real cold. Then you think about the Rockies in the dead of winter, where the wind coming off those peaks will strip the heat right out of anything standing in it, and you realize a Missouri morning in November is practically mild. Some animals up there don't just survive that. They've got it figured out.

Animals Around The Globe put together a list of eleven of them, and I'll admit I read the whole thing twice. That's the kind of nature story I like better than the flashy ones, the question of how a creature makes it through a season that would kill most of us in a night.

I'm not going to run down the whole list for you, because I'd rather you go read their write-ups yourself. But the piece covers the range you'd expect and a few you probably wouldn't guess, the big well-armored ones and the small quiet ones alike. That's usually how these survival stories go. Everybody thinks of the big animals first, and it's the little overlooked ones that turn out to be the toughest customers in the bunch.

What gets me about any list like this is that none of these animals asked for help. No heater, no heated socks, no thermos of coffee. They were built for it or they learned it, and the ones that couldn't hack it aren't in the list because they aren't around anymore.

Go read the full piece over at Animals Around The Globe if you get a chance. It's a good reminder that while I'm planning my fall run through the Ozarks and worrying about whether the heater core in an old land yacht can keep up, there's something up on a rock slide at high elevation that didn't pack a single thing and will do just fine.