I try to get out for a walk every day, whatever the weather, although the weather may determine the length and location of the outing. How much I see of natural history interest varies greatly, depending on many factors, including a perceived need to watch the footing in sloppy mud or on slippery ice or wet rocks, sometimes a wish to be a bit sociable, or even do some serious (or not-so-serious) thinking. But most of the time, I like to keep my eyes and ears open to what is around me. So here are some bits and pieces from December.
As a cold snap settled in, Mendenhall Lake grumbled and growled and muttered in a long-winded soliloquy—the ice, talking to itself as the water froze and expanded. Smaller ponds were less loquacious but still murmured and popped at a lower decibel level. Meanwhile, overhead, large flocks of pine siskins flitted from spruce to spruce, sometimes swooping high over the canopy before disappearing in the crown of another cone-laden spruce.
In between short periods of deep cold, however, we had spells of surprisingly warm temperatures, turning our little bit of snow to slush and sending meltwater down over the existing ice on streams and ponds. Open water formed at inlets and outlets of ponds and along the fringes of Mendenhall Lake. A reliable observer reported seeing a beaver swimming in Mendenhall River in late December, when local beavers are normally snug in their lodges, sleeping or nibbling from their winter cache of twigs. That beaver was not the only one escaping cabin fever: in several locations, I saw very recent tree-cutting and branch-gnawing that had not been there a few days earlier.
On the ground near Moose Lake I found several small wind-broken cottonwood branches, with the upper sides nicely de-barked. Some lucky gnawer had capitalized on this bonanza. But who was it? Not a beaver, although beavers had debarked a cottonwood tree trunk near the lake, leaving the marks of wide incisor teeth. Not a porcupine—the tooth marks were too small. But the marks were too big for a mouse. My best guess was probably a snowshoe hare; hares are generally fairly numerous in the area and the incisor marks were similar in size to the teeth in a hare skull in my collection.
Along the Treadwell Ditch are many trees, usually hemlocks, that show the marks of porcupine gnawing—tooth-marked, barkless patches, low on the trunk. This is a common sight around here, of course. I was particularly interested to find at least two trees that seemed to have been completely girdled sometime in the past. The bark had been removed all the way around the tree, which would interrupt the flow of water and nutrients between roots and crown, starving the roots of food and the crown of water. Yet these trees sported full crowns of needles and looked healthy. How could that be? The porcupines had removed all the outer bark and eaten most of the nutritious inner bark, but a meager, sketchy, brown network of inner bark was still visible. Could it be that enough strands of inner bark remained to connect the roots and the crowns? Hard to believe that would be enough to support a good-sized tree!
There are other little mysteries about porcupines and hemlocks. Some trees have obviously been visited repeatedly, in different years. Old chewings have partially healed, but new ones are there too. Are these trees particularly tasty? Also, I get an impression (untested, so far) that porcupine gnawing is more common on the uphill side of a hemlock trunk. Is that really so, and if so, why?
A special pleasure was seeing two humpback whales spouting as they cruised near Lena Point. They may have been late-departers for winter in Hawaii or they may have been among the few that overwinter here, feeding on herring (and any other luckless little forage fishes). Not on this day, but sometimes one can see a few sea lions swimming near the corners of a foraging whale’s mouth, trying to catch the fish that slipped away from the whale. The herring equivalent of ‘out of the frying pan, into the fire’!
On the Trails in Juneau 