What to look for in nature in West Virginia this December

When is the Christmas Bird Count in West Virginia, and how can you join?

• Last season's counts, as a guide to this one

  Most counts fall on the weekends of mid to late December; a few go out in early January · About two dozen circles statewide, plus counts shared with Ohio, Pennsylvania and Maryland

  The Brooks Bird Club, the state's oldest birding organization, keeps the statewide schedule. Last season the Pocahontas County and Moorefield counts opened on Sunday, December 14; Charleston, Morgantown, Parkersburg, Oak Hill and the Pipestem area all counted on Saturday, December 20; Canaan, Charles Town, Ona and Raleigh County went out the next day; and Hampshire County, Point Pleasant and Wheeling followed on December 27. Huntington and Lewisburg counted on January 3, and Elkins closed the season on January 5. Counts tend to keep the same weekend each year, but the 2026–27 schedule was not posted in early October; check the club's list in November and write to the compiler before you go.

• What count teams find

  Count day, dawn to dusk (and owlers before dawn) · River bottoms, reservoirs, farm country and town feeders

  Winter flocks here are built around year-round residents: Carolina chickadees, tufted titmice, white-breasted nuthatches, downy and red-bellied woodpeckers and northern cardinals, joined by the juncos, white-throated sparrows and golden-crowned kinglets that come down from the north. The WVDNR's winter wildlife checklist adds bald eagles, red-tailed hawks, robins, mourning doves and three owls to the list of birds you can count on in the cold months. Open water draws ducks and geese to the Ohio, Kanawha and Potomac and to the larger lakes.

• Counting from home

  All winter; Project FeederWatch runs through April 30 · Your yard

  If no count day fits, the Cornell Lab and Birds Canada's FeederWatch survey asks you to watch your feeders on two days in a row of your choosing, repeated whenever you can through April. By December the winter regulars have settled in, which makes it an easy month to begin.

Which owls can you hear in West Virginia in December?

• Great horned owls start the year's nesting

  Hooting builds through December; eggs usually come between late January and March · Farm woodlots, river bottoms and suburban edges statewide

  The great horned owl is one of the first birds of the year to nest, and in December mated pairs hoot back and forth at dusk to claim their territory, the male's voice a little deeper than the female's. They do not build their own nests: as the Virginia Department of Wildlife Resources notes, they usually take over an old hawk nest, and most are sitting on eggs by late winter. Listen just after sunset, a little past five o'clock this month, for a soft, rhythmic run of five or so deep hoots.

• Barred owls in the hollows

  Any month; most vocal on still nights · Wooded stream valleys, swamps and big bottomland forest

  The barred owl's call is the one people imitate: a rolling eight-note phrase that sounds like a question about who is doing the cooking. Pairs often break into a raucous duet of cackles and caterwauls. Barred owls hunt along creeks in the big hardwood hollows of the Kanawha, Little Kanawha and Guyandotte valleys and also call in daylight on gray winter days.

• Eastern screech owls in the backyard

  All year; easiest to hear on calm December nights · Old trees in towns, parks, orchards and woodland edges

  The eastern screech owl is only about the size of a robin and lives closer to people than most of us realize, often in a hollow limb or a wood-duck box. Its usual call is not a screech but a descending whinny and a long, level trill. The Three Rivers Avian Center, a raptor rehabilitation center in Summers County, brings live native owls, screech owls among them, to school and park programs around the state.

Where do West Virginia's bats, bears and groundhogs spend the winter?

• Virginia big-eared bats in Pendleton County caves

  Hibernation from late fall to spring · A handful of limestone caves in the Potomac Highlands, above all Hellhole in Pendleton County

  West Virginia holds more Virginia big-eared bats than any other state. This federally endangered bat has ears more than an inch long and two lumps on its nose, and most of the world's population hibernates in just three caves. According to the WVDNR fact sheet on the species, these bats wake more easily than most when people enter a cave, and every arousal burns fat they cannot replace until spring; repeated disturbance can starve them. In the DNR's winter 2016–17 survey, biologists counted 15,354 of them, the most on record, with more than 13,000 in Hellhole alone.

• The cave bats that are still in trouble

  All winter · Caves and old mines statewide

  White-nose syndrome, named for the fungus that grows on the muzzles of sleeping bats, reached West Virginia caves in 2009. Infected bats burn through their fat too early and starve, and at some sites more than nine in ten died. Little brown, northern long-eared, Indiana and tricolored bats were hit hardest, while the Virginia big-eared bat has so far shown no sign of the disease.

• Black bears in their dens

  Most denned by December; cubs born in January · Rock crevices, hollow trees, dug-out holes and brush piles, mostly in the mountains

  WVU Extension says the state's bears go into their dens from mid-November and come out from mid-March. Dens are not always caves: the DNR's bear project leader has described females digging out a hole in a hillside or curling up in the root mass of a fallen tree. Mothers give birth during the January denning period, and in March DNR crews visit some dens to weigh and measure the cubs.

• Groundhogs, the true hibernators

  Underground from late fall until about February · Burrows along field edges, fencerows and roadsides

  Groundhogs are among the few animals that truly hibernate. In the WVDNR's description, a sleeping groundhog's body temperature falls to a few degrees above freezing and its heartbeat and breathing almost stop. The state's own weather groundhog, French Creek Freddie, sleeps through December at the West Virginia Wildlife Center in Upshur County, where the outdoor trail stays open daily through the winter.

What lives in West Virginia's snowy high country in winter?

• Snowshoe hares in white

  White coats from about late fall to spring · Dense spruce, rhododendron and young forest in the highest parts of Tucker, Randolph, Pocahontas and Greenbrier counties

  West Virginia is the southern tip of the snowshoe hare's range. The hares live in thick, low cover rather than burrows and change from brown to white for the winter. Because snow here comes and goes, a white hare on bare brown ground is easy for a hawk or bobcat to spot, and researchers are studying how well the state's hares keep their timing as winters shift. The WVDNR has been running a four-year study of where they live and how many there are, using trail cameras and droppings. You will rarely see one, but after a fresh snow their big hind-foot prints, in sets of four, are easy to find along the edges of spruce thickets.

• Ruffed grouse at night

  All winter · Young forest, laurel and rhododendron thickets and conifers on the mountains

  Farther north, grouse dive into deep, soft snow and roost under it, where it is much warmer than the open air. A study of grouse night roosts in the central Appalachians found that the snow here is rarely deep or fluffy enough for that, so grouse sleep on the ground or tuck into evergreens, brush piles and leaf litter instead. Young, brushy forest, which grouse need, has grown scarce here, and their numbers have fallen sharply since the late 1980s.

• Red spruce coming back

  Evergreen all year · Cheat Mountain, Canaan Valley, Spruce Knob, the Allegheny Front and Cranesville Swamp

  Logging and the fires that followed it in the late 1800s and early 1900s cleared nearly all of the state's red spruce. The Nature Conservancy says about 55,000 acres remain of an original forest of nearly a million, and that some 240 rare plants and animals depend on what is left, including the Cheat Mountain salamander and the West Virginia northern flying squirrel. Through the Central Appalachian Spruce Restoration Initiative, the conservancy and its partners now plant more than 100,000 trees a year, on places like the old strip-mined Mower Tract on Cheat Mountain.

Which evergreens stand out in West Virginia's winter woods?

• Great rhododendron, the leaf thermometer

  Every cold morning, December through February · Stream banks and shady north slopes all over the mountains; state parks such as Audra, Watoga, Holly River, Blackwater Falls and Pipestem

  West Virginia's schoolchildren voted the great rhododendron (Rhododendron maximum) the state flower, and the Legislature made it official in 1903. In winter its long, leathery leaves move with the temperature. Research led by Virginia Tech's Erik Nilsen found that they begin to curl at about 32 °F to 28 °F, and that by about 21 °F most are rolled tight; they also droop so they hang nearly straight down. The leading explanations are that curled, hanging leaves are shielded from bright winter sun while frozen, and that rolling slows how fast a leaf thaws after a hard freeze.

• Hemlocks and the white wool

  Wool masses show from late fall through spring · Cool ravines, stream banks and north slopes statewide; hemlocks are about 1 percent of the state's forest overall but more in some counties

  Flip up a low hemlock bough and check where each needle meets the twig. Tiny white tufts, about an eighth of an inch across, mean hemlock woolly adelgid, an aphid-like insect from Asia. The West Virginia Department of Agriculture first found it here in 1992, in Grant, Pendleton, Hardy and Hampshire counties, and it has since spread to all but Brooke and Hancock. The insect's winter generation is active from about October to June, which is why the white wool is easiest to see now. The state has treated high-value hemlocks in parks and forests and released beetles that prey on the insect.

• Mistletoe in the treetops

  Easiest to see from late fall through winter · High in hardwoods such as maples, oaks and elms, especially along streams and in valleys

  American mistletoe grows in every one of the state's 55 counties. It is a semi-parasite that sinks rootlike strands into a branch for water and minerals while making its own food in its green leaves, and birds that eat its white berries spread its seeds from tree to tree. In summer the leaves hide it; in December the round green clumps stand out in bare crowns, often visible from the road. All of it is poisonous if eaten.

• Cut your own tree in the Monongahela

  Permits went on sale around December 1 last year · Greenbrier, Marlinton–White Sulphur and Gauley ranger districts only

  The Monongahela National Forest sells one Christmas tree permit per household (sold on Recreation.gov or at a district office), and each one is good only on the district it names. Last season's rules allowed a single pine or spruce up to 12 feet tall and 4 inches thick at chest height, cut from a crowded clump at least 100 feet from a road; hemlocks, hardwoods, wilderness and campgrounds were off limits. Fourth graders with the federal Every Kid Outdoors pass got a free one. Check this year's terms when sales open, and wear orange, since deer seasons are still on.

How much snow does December bring in West Virginia, and what could El Niño do this winter?

When is the earliest sunset in West Virginia?

What can you see in West Virginia's night sky in December 2026?

• The Geminids

  Best from mid-evening on Sunday, December 13, until dawn on Monday, December 14 · The whole sky; the radiant, near the bright stars Castor and Pollux, rises in the east-northeast at dusk

  The International Meteor Organization rates the Geminids at a zenithal hourly rate of about 150, a theoretical number for an ideal sky with the radiant straight up; under real rural skies, several dozen an hour is a good result. The crescent moon sets in mid-evening, and after that the sky stays dark while rates build with the climbing radiant, peaking near 2 a.m. Geminids are slower than most meteors and often yellowish.

• Venus at dawn, Saturn at dusk

  All month · Venus low in the southeast before sunrise; Saturn in the south and southwest after dark

  Venus blazes before sunrise all month, outshining everything but the moon, and its angle from the sun keeps widening until January 3. Before sunup on the 4th and 5th, the old crescent moon and Spica keep it company. In the early evening only one planet shines: ringed Saturn, sinking toward the southwestern hills a little sooner each night. Jupiter rises by mid to late evening by the end of December, and reddish Mars climbs in the morning sky. On solstice evening the waxing moon slides past the Pleiades star cluster.

• The Cold Moon, the closest full moon of 2026

  Full at 8:28 p.m. EST on Wednesday, December 23; nearly as full on Christmas Eve · Rising in the east-northeast around sunset

  The moon reaches perigee, its nearest point for the month, about seven hours after it turns full, so this is the closest, largest-looking and brightest full moon of 2026; EarthSky gives its distance as about 356,740 km. It rides higher in the sky than any other full moon, because a winter full moon sits where the summer sun does. The Ursid meteor shower peaks the night before, December 22, but the nearly full moon will wash most of its few meteors out. Follow the phases night by night on the moon calendar.

What can West Virginia families do outdoors in December?

Safety notes for December in West Virginia