Rhode Island seems to finally be thawed out and spring may be here to stay.

During the thaw, however, some Rhode Islanders saw some unusual sights in the melting ice and snow.

This past winter has been one of survival of the fittest to see which animals could take the extraordinary conditions.

Jody King, who has worked as a quahogger for more than 20 years, was off Barrington Beach abouta month ago when he thought he saw a duck struggling in the ice. Hoping to help, he approached to find five or six ducks frozen and lifeless in the ice. Originally, he believed the ducks were just brown patches in the ice. When he took a second look he noticed there were hundreds of these brown patches lining the ice.

“In 20 years I have never seen them frozen so far off the shore,” King said.

He said he would guess that with such a long winter they were unable to get food under the ice and snow.

He said, “Eventually, they just starved. They looked asleep. These were ducks that had fallen asleep and then just never woke up again.”

King has also seen several young fawns of 25 to 30 pounds dead in the woods.

In a recent press release from the Department of Environmental Management, it was reported that throughout Rhode Island there have also been numerous cases of Canada geese “mortality events.”

After testing, DEM confirmed that these events are due to starvation where snow and ice prohibited the animals from feeding regularly.

David Gregg, director of the Rhode Island Natural History Survey at the University of Rhode Island, said he was happy to see a long and snowy winter because it will help to keep the balance of Rhode Island’s ecosystem.

He said the animals have adapted over time to our climate and we’ve actually had very mild winters in previous years than what is “normal” for the state. If we were to continue to have mild winters then our climate and animal patterns would begin to shift. He called it the normal “give and take” of nature.

“Winter is supposed to be tough, it’s a way to weed out the weak if they aren’t adapting well. Scavengers depend on winter kills to make it through the winter. The same happens in the heat.”

He said it is too early to see exactly how the winter affected Rhode Island’s wildlife because “the wildlife hasn’t really poked its nose out yet.”

He did mention that this is a good chance for researchers to document and study the effect of prolonged winters on wildlife populations this spring and whether or not there was any significant change.

Tom Mather, director of URI’s Tick Encounter Resource Center, has been watching the tick population and said it seems to be unaffected overall. However, they aren’t as active as they normally would be this time of the year.

“The snow has kept ticks sleepy,” he said. “It may take a bit longer for them to really get going.”

He said that after the last notably snowy winter in 2006 there was an increase in the tick population, but he isn’t sure there will be one this year.

“There is always a concern when it comes to ticks in Rhode Island,” Mather said. “Over the past three years we have seen a steady increase and record numbers of ticks.”

Because of this, he doesn’t think there will be any significant growth due to the snow. Rather, he says the humidity of June will really decide what happens to the tick population. Ticks are “susceptible to dry conditions” and without the proper humidity can die.

“June is more important in predictions than this past winter,” Mather said.

With the unexpected winter, record-breaking snowfall and prolonged cold weather, when it comes to spring and what we are in store for, it is mostly a waiting game, especially when it comes to what sort of weather we can be expecting.

The head hydrologist of the Northeast River Forecast Center, David Vallee, said because of Rhode Island’s and all of New England’s position in the Northeast weather is extremely unpredictable.

“The limited predictability means we can’t say anything with certainty past two weeks,” he said.

The Northeast is a challenging region in terms of weather, Vallee explained, due to its latitudinal location and dependence on other weather systems to determine its own.

“We have to pay attention downstream towards Canada and Greenland for blockages, but we also have to look to the Pacific Tropics to see how storm tracks are going to evolve before they get to our area.”

One thing Vallee could say for certain is that currently we are seeing less moisture than we would normally. This seems surprising due to all the snow the state has experienced, but Vallee said because we experienced light, dry and fluffy snow there was lower water content than we would normally see.

“People said we had a horrible winter,” Vallee said, “but we really just had five weeks of a ridiculous winter. I was playing golf the day after Christmas it was so warm, but then that second week of January we entered into a new system.”

The winter has seemed both long and cold, but Vallee said this is best so that snow has been able to thaw and melt slowly and we have seen very little flooding as a result.

The snow has melted for the most part, and the temperature is slowly going up, but we haven’t really seen what this year’s spring is bringing with it yet.