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Outdoors with Coggin Heeringa: Stamping your feet to Baroque music helps conquer cold

An American Kestrel (Photo: Mia McPherson Photography)

Does stamping feet actually help humans (or birds) warm up their feet?

I have always loved Vivaldi’s "The Four Seasons," but I have been even more impressed since learning that the cycle was based on sonnets written by the Red Priest himself. Or not. Nobody knows for certain. But the music itself is poetry.

Like the final movement of Vivaldi's sonnet "Winter," we, too, can imagine “shivering, cold and trembling in the icy snow.”

And then a solo violin evokes “the severe blast of the horrible wind.”

And we almost feel “constant stamping our feet and our teeth chattering in the cold."

Does stamping feet actually help humans warm up their feet? According to the Internet: “stamping is way to generate heat that may cancel out the need to shiver. It's not a total gain, though, because exercise also increases blood flow to the skin, so some body heat escapes.”

So how about our winter birds? They shiver, but their teeth don’t chatter, because they don’t have teeth. Also, birds lack feathers on their feet, but stamping doesn’t work for them. Understand that birds have an unusual circulatory system that warms their blood, but if their feet get cold, birds will stand on one leg, and tuck the other into their feathers. Once that leg is warm, they switch. Some little birds just crouch so their down feathers act as a blanket.

So taking my lesson from the birds, I will be wearing my down jacket this winter... and thick socks, too. If constantly stamping feet helps warm human feet, perhaps an ear worm from Vivaldi's "The Seasons" can give me the rhythm.