Weather and wildlife in March

On a sunny day in early March, a friend and I went to Eagle Beach, despite windy conditions and a forecast of thirty-to-forty mph gusts. The weathermen had it right. The north wind was roiling up sizable whitecaps on Lynn Canal. The beach was covered with snow, untouched by the recent low tides, and obscured by billows of drifting snow. Instead of heading north on the beach, as I usually do, we cleverly decided to turn our backs to the wind and, hoods up, we walked down the beach and tide flats toward Eagle River.

Across the canal, the snowy Chilkats gleamed in the bright sun. A gang of gulls and crows concentrated at the distant edge of the tideflats, near the water’s edge. Perhaps surprisingly, given the stiff gusts of wind, a couple of groups of gulls were swooping over certain places in the estuary, as if there might be some prey stirred up by the churning waters.

But that was all the wildlife sign we saw, until we’d post-holed over the big meadow to the forest edge. My companion heard pine siskins and we then saw them, working over the cone crops in some tall spruces. There were squirrel tracks and a chattering squirrel. A vole had traipsed across a small open area, leaving footprints and tail-drag.

Best of all: lying on the snow near a big spruce, we found dozens of clipped spruce branches, mostly branch-ends with two or three twigs, all the needle tips neatly nipped off. That porcupine had spent a long time in this spot, clipping all those branches and needles, leaving greenish urine stains here and there, and packing down a well-used trail back and forth across our path. It left some fresh porcupine tooth-work on the base of a nearby hemlock, too.

A bit farther on, we noticed several trees patched with old scars of sapsucker foraging. Material had oozed around the edges of each bird-pecked opening and congealed there, making a rough surface over every opening. The scars on each tree were conspicuously concentrated in dense patches, just above our eye-level, not lower, not higher. Perhaps once a feeding site was started, the flow of sap was greater or at least more accessible there, rather than in a new place. But why did the birds choose those particular trees and those specific parts of the trunks to start feeding?

Returning to the car, it was more post-holing through snow drifts, almost knee-deep. Well-buffeted by those gusty winds, I staggered along, ready for the hot tea that was awaiting us in a handy thermos. Not a long walk today, but a productive one.

The next day was bright and clear again, and very windy, at least in open areas. Four friends met near the visitor center and looked for a packed-down trail along the east edge of the lake. No luck; blowing snow had drifted well over that. So we opted to go toward Nugget Falls on a narrow, packed trail over the flats where the terns usually nest. But that, too, meant post-holing through knee-deep drifts. So we cut over to the usual beach trail and then to the main trail, where we noticed wind-blown alder seeds all over the snow.

Arriving at the base of the falls, sharp-eyed observers spotted two mountain goats on the far side of the creek. One perched on a little rock outcrop and one stood at the edge of a brush thicket. Neither one was moving much, so I had a hard time picking them out. Those two were the first of the year, for me.

Photo by Kerry Howard

As we approach the vernal equinox, day-length is rapidly increasing; the daily rate of change is greatest near the equinoxes (and slowest near the solstices). Humans and otherorganisms notice the lengthening days—eagle start tending their nests, magpies start leaving for the Interior, buffleheads begin to be seen in pairs, and there’s an occasional song of wren or song sparrow. Red squirrels in my neighborhood have been doing a lot of vigorous chasing lately, and food is not the principal focus. Although these squirrels are strongly territorial for much of the year, when females start coming into oestrus, territory borders are commonly crossed in the search for mates. Both sexes often mate with several other individuals, and so litters may have several fathers. Roughly five or six weeks after mating, litters of up to seven young ones appear in the females’ nests.

Although some of the felt-leaf willows have fat buds, other plants lag behind. You can be sure that they have noticed the longer days, but other factors, such as soil temperature, are not yet right for gearing up in ways visible to us. As the longer days gradually warm the soil, more and more plants will show signs of activity, some of them waiting to flower until well after the summer solstice when days are shortening again.

Felt-leaf willow buds. Photo by Kerry Howard

Seasonal transitions are always fun, as we notice each new sign of activity. After a slow start in late winter, the signs speed up through the spring and into the summer. Although skiers may revel in the persistent snow and longer days, others eagerly await the beginnings of green-up and the first flowers.

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Weather and wildlife in March

On a sunny day in early March, a friend and I went to Eagle Beach, despite windy conditions and a forecast of thirty-to-forty mph gusts. The weathermen had it right. The north wind was roiling up sizable whitecaps on Lynn Canal. The beach was covered with snow, untouched by the recent low tides, and obscured by billows of drifting snow. Instead of heading north on the beach, as I usually do, we cleverly decided to turn our backs to the wind and, hoods up, we walked down the beach and tide flats toward Eagle River.

Across the canal, the snowy Chilkats gleamed in the bright sun. A gang of gulls and crows concentrated at the distant edge of the tideflats, near the water’s edge. Perhaps surprisingly, given the stiff gusts of wind, a couple of groups of gulls were swooping over certain places in the estuary, as if there might be some prey stirred up by the churning waters.

But that was all the wildlife sign we saw, until we’d post-holed over the big meadow to the forest edge. My companion heard pine siskins and we then saw them, working over the cone crops in some tall spruces. There were squirrel tracks and a chattering squirrel. A vole had traipsed across a small open area, leaving footprints and tail-drag.

Best of all: lying on the snow near a big spruce, we found dozens of clipped spruce branches, mostly branch-ends with two or three twigs, all the needle tips neatly nipped off. That porcupine had spent a long time in this spot, clipping all those branches and needles, leaving greenish urine stains here and there, and packing down a well-used trail back and forth across our path. It left some fresh porcupine tooth-work on the base of a nearby hemlock, too.

A bit farther on, we noticed several trees patched with old scars of sapsucker foraging. Material had oozed around the edges of each bird-pecked opening and congealed there, making a rough surface over every opening. The scars on each tree were conspicuously concentrated in dense patches, just above our eye-level, not lower, not higher. Perhaps once a feeding site was started, the flow of sap was greater or at least more accessible there, rather than in a new place. But why did the birds choose those particular trees and those specific parts of the trunks to start feeding?

Returning to the car, it was more post-holing through snow drifts, almost knee-deep. Well-buffeted by those gusty winds, I staggered along, ready for the hot tea that was awaiting us in a handy thermos. Not a long walk today, but a productive one.

The next day was bright and clear again, and very windy, at least in open areas. Four friends met near the visitor center and looked for a packed-down trail along the east edge of the lake. No luck; blowing snow had drifted well over that. So we opted to go toward Nugget Falls on a narrow, packed trail over the flats where the terns usually nest. But that, too, meant post-holing through knee-deep drifts. So we cut over to the usual beach trail and then to the main trail, where we noticed wind-blown alder seeds all over the snow.

Arriving at the base of the falls, sharp-eyed observers spotted two mountain goats on the far side of the creek. One perched on a little rock outcrop and one stood at the edge of a brush thicket. Neither one was moving much, so I had a hard time picking them out. Those two were the first of the year, for me.

Photo by Kerry Howard

As we approach the vernal equinox, day-length is rapidly increasing; the daily rate of change is greatest near the equinoxes (and slowest near the solstices). Humans and otherorganisms notice the lengthening days—eagle start tending their nests, magpies start leaving for the Interior, buffleheads begin to be seen in pairs, and there’s an occasional song of wren or song sparrow. Red squirrels in my neighborhood have been doing a lot of vigorous chasing lately, and food is not the principal focus. Although these squirrels are strongly territorial for much of the year, when females start coming into oestrus, territory borders are commonly crossed in the search for mates. Both sexes often mate with several other individuals, and so litters may have several fathers. Roughly five or six weeks after mating, litters of up to seven young ones appear in the females’ nests.

Although some of the felt-leaf willows have fat buds, other plants lag behind. You can be sure that they have noticed the longer days, but other factors, such as soil temperature, are not yet right for gearing up in ways visible to us. As the longer days gradually warm the soil, more and more plants will show signs of activity, some of them waiting to flower until well after the summer solstice when days are shortening again.

Felt-leaf willow buds. Photo by Kerry Howard

Seasonal transitions are always fun, as we notice each new sign of activity. After a slow start in late winter, the signs speed up through the spring and into the summer. Although skiers may revel in the persistent snow and longer days, others eagerly await the beginnings of green-up and the first flowers.

Winter in Juneau

Winter is an odd time of year here. Sometimes it rains, seemingly forever; sometimes a low, gray cloud parks itself over us for days; sometimes it’s absurdly warm but at other times it’s quite cold and the little bit of wet snow on the ground turnsrock-hard. Even expert forecasters don’t always get it right. When we’re lucky, there’s a good fall of deep, soft snow that makes skiers smile.

One such good snowfall at the end of February sent me and a couple of friends out on snowshoes, plonking around the big meadow near the Eagle Valley Center. That meadow often offers a fine winter record of animal activity on the snow, but on this day we didn’t even see the usual squirrel and porcupine tracks. However, we did see three long shrew trails, way out in the open. The deep snow had a very light crust on top, just enough to support a shrew without much body drag. This was long-distance travel, over many meters—looking for what? Near the far end of the meadow, we spotted the tracks of a medium-size canid that had poked around under some conifer branches and gone off in another direction. Nowhere on our tour had we seen any doggy tracks associated with the quite fresh human boot tracks, so we cheerfully decided that a coyote had been there(maybe).

Photo by Kerry Howard

Bird observation in winter is just as variable as the weather. Sometimes we see quite a few loons, of two different species, but no luck (for me, anyway) this year. Snow buntings and Lapland longspurs show up on the wide, grassy meadows sometimes. Magpies arrive from the Interior, but this year I haven’t seen as many as usual. Pine grosbeaks come too, but I’ve seen none at all, so far. Nor have I seen the occasional slate-colored form of the junco, which comes from the Interior. And where are the siskins and the crossbills??

Favorite occasional winter arrivals are small flocks of the elegant Bohemian waxwings, which sometimes can be seen foraging on mountain ash fruits. They get part of their name from little red blobs of ‘wax’ on the tips of their secondary wing feathers; the red blobs are bigger on older birds and (along with other features) may influence mating success. They are obviously not strictly Bohemian at all, being distributed over both North America and Eurasia, nesting in boreal forest regions and moving somewhat south (including to Bohemia) for the winter. They feed largely on sugary fruits, with additions from insects especially in the breeding season, and sometimes buds, flowers, snails, or other oddments. There has been little intensive research into their ecology.

Photo by Kerry Howard

Unlike the ever-changing winter weather and the often-unpredictable winter bird populations, trees stand there all year round. But they do their own kinds of changing.

The leaves of deciduous trees avoid winter problems by dropping off the trees. But conifer needles face cold temperatures, sometimes wind, and lethal water shortages if the ground freezes.  When the ground is thoroughly frozen, the needles receive no water and cannot conduct photosynthesis; then too much sunlight can be deadly, leading to the accumulation of free-radicals and other damaging particles. Needles have some built-in features that provide some protection, such as a waxy cuticle and a small surface area that conserve water and resin content that is resistant to cold. In addition, they may increase photo-protective carotenoids, and they have a lower metabolism at low temperatures and an ability to continue photosynthesis at a reduced level.

If, despite that first line of defense, ice crystals form in the cells, they can damage critical organelles inside the cell: the nucleus with genetic instructions, the mitochondria that control metabolism, the chloroplasts that house chlorophyll that captures light to initiate photosynthesis, and other miniscule particles that carry out normal procedures. The crystals also can ruin the cell membrane, exposing those organelles to damage and destroying the cells. 

Activated by short day-length and cold temperatures, there’s a second line of defense at the cellular level: cells make some changes to reduce that potential damage. Cell membranes become more pliable, as saturated fatty acids are replaced by un-saturated fatty acids, which freeze at lower temperatures. Some cellular water is moved out of the cell to the interstitial space between cells where, if it freezes, the crystals cause less damage. Furthermore, as interstitial water freezes, it releases a tiny amount of heat, which may help keep the cellular fluids from freezing. Inside the cells, starches are converted to sugars, lowering the freezing point. Lipid concentrations may increase too, and there can be some particular proteins that resist freezing.

Come spring, with warming temperatures and longer days, if the cells remained undamaged, those cellular changes are reversed, restoring the cells to normal conditions. Metabolic rates rise to normal and photosynthesis is again conducted at the usual rates. That’s an impressive array of seasonal adjustment in a seemingly simple thing like a conifer needle.

November

A good snowfall in early November drew us out to enjoy the brightened landscape and see what we could see. Before we got very far, we crossed the trail of a very small porcupine that had travelled for many yards as if it had a known destination despite its presumed lack of experience.

Our route of choice for this first wintry walk was the beach on the west side of Mendenhall Lake., which is walkable when the water level is low. Snow clung decoratively to alder twigs and cones (and built up huge cakes under my cleats). At the upper edge of the beach, we found two big ice-boulders, presumably rounded remnants of ice bergs cast up by the jokulhlaup a couple of weeks ago.

The creeks that come down to the west side of the lake were still open and flowing, although crossing them was easy. At one creek edge, a little plaza of ice had made a dining table for mink: There were scuffle marks, a few blood stains, and lots of mink tracks. Some small fish had made that mink happy.

Then the weather changed, temperatures rose, and the rains came, destroying the lovely snow. Fog settled down over the valleys and the channel, turning the visual world into shades of gray. From the east side of Mendenhall Lake, we could see lots of recent icebergs parked partway down the lake. The blue reflections from the denser ice were the only bright spots of color visible on the landscape. An eagle hunched down, just resting, on a high cliff not far from Nugget Falls. A great blue heron stood motionless in the shallows at the edge of the lake, presumably hoping a little fish would wander by. A gray bird on a gray lakeshore with a gray and white backdrop.

Photo by Katherine Hocker

On my home pond, the ice cover thinned but still supported several mallards that gobble up seeds that fall from the overhead feeder. They often rest in open water just below the dam—maybe watching that feeder for signs that the little birds are shaking out some seeds. Then they slide over the dam and hustle out to the place where seeds fall. When that is cleaned up, they march up and down the pond, to the open water at the inlet and back to the fallen-seed place. As the inflow of the stream slowly melts a channel through the ice, the ducks swim along the edges of the channel, nibbling at the edge of the ice (perhaps some edible bits are there??).

Beavers in the Dredge Lake area had been quiet, but their activity resumed with the warmer weather. A Beaver Patrol trail-cam captured an adult beaver hauling branches out to its winter cache, taking time to nibble a twig, while an observant youngster watched closely. A half-culvert that had been ignored for many weeks was suddenly packed full of brush and weeds. Almost as soon as the Beaver Patrol removed all that stuff, by the next day the beavers had crammed the culvert full again. Usually, by mid-November, beaver activity has shut down for the winter, but not this year.

The Beaver Patrol team had a treat at the Holding Pond one day; a dipper was foraging by the outflow and did not want to leave; eventually it moved across the pond to a small inflow area and foraged in the shallows. I had not seen a dipper here for a long time, although in some previous winters I could find them here fairly frequently, when the water was at least partly ice-free.

A few days later, the skies were blue, and all that sunshine required a walk that took advantage of it, so we went to Eagle Beach State Rec Area. The brilliant sun was so low in the sky that shadows were extra-long—a small hill across the broad river cast a long shadow over the wide river and across the big meadow near the parking lot. The river had done more serious erosion of the bank by the big meadow. All the gulls were parked out on the farthest edges of the sand flats, at the water’s edge. No importunate ravens came to our picnic lunch on the beach, but the frost patterns were gorgeous. And a touch of sun-warming was welcome on a frosty day.

Walking out on the tide flats, we found lots of goose tracks and eventually saw a dozen geese resting on a distant sand bar. A big muddy channel was littered with thousands of horse clam shells; there are probably some live ones buried in that mud somewhere. In a very small muddy channel, mixed with some goose prints, there were recent tiny tracks of a shorebird (with three front toes and no hind toe), but the track-maker was not to be seen.

Four wintery walks

The thermometer at my house read eleven degrees (F) after a clear, starry night; the sky looked clear, although the sun wasn’t really up yet. Juneau had recently enjoyed about six feet of lovely snow, but many of the trails had not yet been used much. In search of a well-packed trail, a friend and I headed for the Boy Scout beach trail.

All went smoothly until we reached the junction where the trail splits three ways, and none of the splits looked good. We chose to go right out onto the goose meadow and immediately found ourselves breaking trail and post-holing through deep, crusty wind-blown drifts. Even following in the footprints of my companion, I (weighing forty pounds more) plunged and lunged, knee-deep and more. However, a hundred yards or so farther on, walking became a pleasure again, because the low vegetation was almost clear of snow, thanks to some recent super-high tides that left a few scattered cakes of frozen foam and to the wind.

Post-holing again out to the beach by the iconic cottonwood tree, we decided not to face the stiff, cold north wind that was churning up waters out in Lynn Canal. So, instead of coming back on the big, exposed beach, we turned toward the camp buildings, found a log, and had a little picnic in the sun. As soon as we got out our thermoses and lunch bags, two importunate ravens landed on the beach right in front of us—they knew the drill! Of course, we obliged them, tossing out bits of sandwich that they promptly snapped up. But they eyed a fragment of a sugar-snap pea with great suspicion and avoided going close to it—no veggies for them! One of them chose to sit next to us on the log for a while.

On this day in mid-December, the morning sun barely cleared the horizon. On the upper beach, I noticed that every isolated pebble cast a shadow much longer than itself, making a grid of conspicuous black stripes that called attention to each pebble.

The Chilkats across the canal were spectacular: the low morning sun made sharp contrasts between the sun-bright south-facing slopes and the intensely blue-shadowed north slopes. Behind us, the trees on the hillsides were individually defined by the snow they carried and on the peaks the snow delineated the minor topographical features very nicely.

Few critters were visible on this walk. A seal cruised by, just offshore, and gulls fossicked about in the tidal wrack. A wren zipped rapidly from trailside to shelter under some roots; they are so tiny, I wonder how they stay warm on frigid winter days. No midges or spiders crept on the snow surface.  But there were tracks of mink along the river, red squirrels in the woods, ermine and vole at the edge of the meadow; one or two small birds (who?) had hopped and run in the beach rye lining the meadow trail. A low-flying raven (?) left the mark of one wing-tip in the loose surface snow.

The next day was mostly sunny and, again, very cold (seven degrees at my house in the morning). I opted for snowdrift-free walk on the dike trail. A few tracks of squirrels and maybe an ermine were the only natural history notes of the morning until I had almost finished the walk. And there in the stand of willows was a female pine grosbeak, busily nibbling buds. I frequently see these grosbeak in fall and winter, as they forage on high-bush cranberry, carefully extracting the seed and dropping the red fruit pulp—the opposite treatment from that of bohemian waxwings, who eat the fruit and excrete the seed.

A couple of days later, the cold remained (just six degrees here). I had an idea to try some of the lower meadows along the Eaglecrest Road, but roadside parking was hard to find and the thought of plowing through deep snow, even on snowshoes, was daunting. So, on up the road to the Lower Loop, nicely groomed and unoccupied. The sun couldn’t make it up over the peaks, but ‘shoeing was easy.

There was not a live critter in sight but there were plenty of signs of life. A porcupine was into long-distance travel, heading straight across the meadow, not stopping to forage. Ermine had cruised all over the meadows in circuitous routes, looking for a juicy morsel. Snowshoe hare tracks were abundant, mostly under sheltering conifer branches or going from one shelter to another. Grouse or ptarmigan had been active, inspecting salmonberry and blueberry bushes for tasty buds and sometimes staying long enough to trample the snow flat. Except for a few squirrel marks, the smaller folk had left no signs on the surfacebut were no doubt active below.

A day or two later, it was still very cold. A group of friends strolled the dike trail, enjoying the bright sunshine as the sun crept over the peaks. A dusting of fluffy snow lay atop a snow crust. Several voles (I think) had made sorties out into the grassy areas, circling back to the trees or to holes under grassy tussocks; we noted at least seven of these trackways, well separated from each other. Looking through the chain-link fence and across a ditch, we saw tracks on a big snow drift that looked like Two-toes—but how could a deer walk up that crusty snow on those thin legs, without punching through, when humans (on our side of the fence) generally ended up post-holing?

February scrapbook

Winter finally arrived sometime in early February, with good snow on the ground and very cool temperatures. I’ve lived here for three decades, so I’m quite well acquainted with Juneau’s local microclimates—it’s often warmer, wetter, and windier downtown than it is in the upper Valley where I live. But I recently saw what seemed to be an extreme case: as I drove Out the Road one morning, I left my house at a temperature of minus six degrees (F), then the car thermometer registered plus thirteen, dropped quickly to minus two, and rose again to plus fourteen degrees. That’s a twenty-degree span in fewer than twenty minutes. Extraordinary.

Along the way, I passed a place where a thin blanket of white mist lay over an estuary and shallow inlet. We often see this phenomenon in cold weather and sometimes call it ‘sea smoke’ or ‘steam’. But it’s not steam…steam is hot water vapor, and it’s not really smoke, either…not full of organic particles and carbon dioxide. Whatever the right name is, the cause is well-known. Liquid fresh water cannot be colder than thirty-two degrees (or it would become ice). So the surface of the estuary was warmer than the frigid air and water was evaporating. When that rising water vapor encountered the cold air, which holds less water than warm air does, it condensed into small droplets that hung over the water surface in thin mist.

I met a friend at the Point Bridget trailhead and we set off to see what we could find. The best find was the trail of an otter, bounding and sliding over flat ground and out onto the frozen beaver pond. Even on the flat, this otter was sliding as much as eight feet before gathering itself for another bound and slide. Wouldn’t that be fun to do! Blowing snow had drifted into some other tracks, but we found those of porcupine, moose, and a deer or small moose; red squirrels had made new highways under some of the trees.

A stiff breeze was churning Lynn Canal into a froth and big waves were roaring onto the beach where we look out at Lion’s Head. By the time we got there, it was afternoon and the wind was increasing, as it often does then. So the beach log where we often perch for lunch was not very hospitable. Even behind the beach berm, the wind was making the emergent tall grasses lie almost flat on the snow. So we found a windbreak in a sunny spot for a comfortable lunch.

Home again, with temperatures a relatively balmy plus sixteen degrees. The birds were active on the feeders, among them ‘my’ pair of red-breasted nuthatches. They brought two youngsters to the feeders one day last summer but they have apparently stayed on their territory for the winter. Each pair is socially monogamous; there apparently have been no studies of extra-pair matings (which are common in many other birds). Nuthatches defend their territories from other nuthatches; the male is especially vigorous in defense when the pair is excavating a nest in a dead tree. They also defend the nest cavity from red squirrels, which are potential predators of eggs and chicks.

Nuthatches have the odd habit of putting sticky conifer resin around the opening of the nest cavity. It is thought that this helps deter predators. One study found that more resin was placed around the nest entrance right after a face-off with a squirrel. Rarely, however, this tactic backfires, and one parent gets inextricably stuck in the resin and dies.

After the nest is built, females incubate five to eight eggs and the male brings her food. Incubation takes about twelve days and chicks stay in the nest for almost three weeks. Sometimes the male joins the female in the nest during incubation and brooding very small chicks. After the chicks fledge, the parents feed them for another two weeks and then the youngsters sometimes stay with the parents for many weeks, or they may become independent and disperse. Most nuthatches probably live only a few years; the maximum known lifespan is just over seven years.

Nuthatches forage by walking up and down and around tree trunks and big branches, especially in winter, presumably because dormant arthropods lurk in the crevices. They can walk head-first down a tree trunk and even walk upside down underneath a branch. They have a very short tail, not usable for bracing again the wood as woodpeckers and creepers do. Having a relatively long hind toe helps them scamper down and sideways. Outside of the winter season, they also forage on twigs and leaves, even on the ground sometimes, and occasionally catch insects out of the air.

Photo by Gwen Baluss

Captured food is often cached in holes and crevices, sometimes covered with bits of lichen or bark. A big item is wedged into a crack and then hacked into smaller bits (unlike chickadees, which hold such items in their feet). In fact, their English name may have originally been nut-hacker. At a seed feeder, nuthatches can be very choosy, carefully selecting the largest and heaviest items.

Little appears to be known about how they manage in extremely cold weather. They do join mixed-species foraging flocks in winter, along with chickadees, kinglets, and other small birds. Presumably their insulation is quite good, but they don’t seem to roost communally or have elevated metabolic rates then (as some other birds do). More questions to be answered!

Strange winter

December was so warm that beavers stayed active, collecting branches for their winter caches and dam repairs, leaving trails in a thin snow cover. The snow recorded the passage of an otter, sliding over a sand bar in Eagle River. That thin layer of snow also collected a tremendous number of male spruce cones, raising the question of why the trees retained those cones so long after the pollen was shed.

January was more wintery, with a good snowfall and nice cold temperatures. Ptarmigan had come down to the Treadwell Ditch, wandering widely and seldom stopping, apparently not finding much to eat.

On the lower ski loop at Eaglecrest, wildlife had been very active. Porcupines, large and small, had wandered far and wide, leaving their broad furrows and baby-size footprints. As we perched on a log for lunch, a flock of chickadees and golden-crowned kinglets conversed and foraged in a nearby hemlock.

There were lots of deer tracks, of different sizes. The deer trails often followed the edge of the woods, and the lower branches there held only fragments of the dangling lichen Alectoria, suggesting that the deer had been eating one of their good winter foods. Bunchberry plants had been grazed from the bases of trees, leaving stem stubs where deer noses had cleared the snow.

Shrews had left their tiny furrows on top of the snow, leading from one dime-sized hole to another, where a shrew had come to the surface and gone back down under the white blanket. Why do they come out in the open, sometimes travelling many yards before diving back down? That’s a long way to go for the occasional spider crawling slowly on the surface…

Driving out the road, we noticed many small groups of varied thrushes picking small items from the roadside. What are they getting? Grit? Blown seeds? Salt? A subsequent stroll on the Boy Scout beach discovered numerous tiny pinkish shrimp washed up (why?) by a moderately high tide. Ravens attracted by our lunch group lined up on a log came in to scrounge our offerings and then nibbled some of the shrimp.

The long, deep cold in January kept the snow beautifully, brightening the landscape. At my house the temperatures didn’t rise above freezing for many days, dropping to single digits at night. Mrs Nuthatch came to the peanut butter feeder long before there was decent daylight. Mink had been active in several places. One explored the shores of Norton Lake in the Mendenhall Glacier Rec Area, not stopping and clearly going Someplace. Another mink, at Eagle Beach, had made tunnels in deep snow, periodically popping up to the surface but diving right back down. ?Searching?

The prolonged deep freeze let me hope that the ice on the ponds in the MGRA would be sound enough to walk on (with snowshoes, to distribute the weight). However, the ice on Glacier Lake was chancey: there were a few spots of open water and some mushy places. So we crept around the edges to see what we could see. An otter had better travelling over the ice, leaving its trail of prints and a slide between spots where it had dug down through the slushy snow. Was it thinking about getting through the ice to look for fish?

Then warmer weather came back, with rains that ruined the lovely snow. At my house, a raven has come to expect occasional tidbits on my deck railing. One morning I put out some pieces of pie crust. In it came, as if it had been waiting, and grabbed the larger chunks. Then, with the bill crammed, it tried to collect the smaller bits. No luck. So it figured out that it had to drop the big ones, eat the small ones, and then pick up the big ones to carry away.

Down on the surface of my pond, I noticed a female mallard, grubbing for spilled seed in the slush under the suspended feeder. She dug and dug, sometimes burying her whole head, for more than ten minutes. Then she walked to open water downstream, leaving her wide trail in the slush. Late in the afternoon, she came back and did it all over again. I bet this duck is one that hung out here in the summer and remembered this food source.

Winter wanderings

There aren’t many activities I enjoy more than simply prowling around the forest and meadows, looking for signs of animal action. Sometimes I go solo; when I’m lucky, I have a companion or two. All this recent sunshine has enticed me out several times; it’s a shame to waste a day of sun in Juneau by staying indoors! So here are some observations (and questions) from some little explorations in the last few weeks.

–Cropley Lake: a ptarmigan had landed, sinking down a few inches in the soft snow. But for some reason, it took flight immediately, leaving a few running foot prints and two sets of wing prints, the second one very faint.

–Mendenhall Lake: ptarmigan often come down from the alpine zone in winter and forage in the shrubby flats near the lake. Sometimes I’m lucky and actually see the birds, but this time I only found a trackway where the ptarmigan had run, with long strides, from one thicket to another. There it had nibbled on willow buds, leaving barren stems.

–Crow Point near the Boy Scout camp: a porcupine had trekked all the way across the wide meadow where the geese commonly graze, from the hillside out to the spruce groves above the beach. In one of the groves we noted a cluster of young spruces with dead tops. Closer inspection revealed that the tops of the trunks and some of the upper branches had been de-barked. But this had not happened all at once: some gnawings were recent and the twigs were not long dead, but others were gray from long exposure. Thus, it seemed that porcupines had foraged here repeatedly, and I have to wonder what made that particular cluster of trees so attractive.

The beach itself was covered with bird tracks: gulls, crows, and something smaller, whose tracks were very indistinct. I was interested to note that a vole or mouse had ventured well out onto the sand; what was it after?

–Low elevation muskegs off the Dan Moller Trail: This little exploration was quite productive. We found a place where a hare had run back and forth, stopping long enough to eliminate (colorful!) waste products and nibble the buds from the tip of a spruce branchlet that had been cut from a low-hanging branch several feet away. A perambulating deer had cropped the very tips of some blueberry bushes, taking just the tenderest bits and buds.

That red isn’t blood… it’s hare urine! Photo by Katherine Hocker

The snow was so deep that most small mammals could just burrow around under the white blanket, safe from aerial predators at least. The only small mammal tracks we saw were in the bottom of a tiny gully where the snow was thin. The mouse had run across the ice in one direction, but then walked back.

A surprising find was a dead Steller’s jay, lying toes-up under a tree. It was emaciated, with no fat deposits, so the keel on the breastbone was very prominent. Later examination revealed a digestive tract empty of all but little stones. With all the bird feeders in most human neighborhoods, it seemed strange that this bird would starve.

New Year’s Day 2012

Snow was falling, snow on snow, but—unlike the song—this midwinter day was not bleak at all. With two friends, one two-footed and one four-footed, I set out to explore the forest and small muskegs near the Auke Bay school. This was not our original destination, but we got part way out the road, watched a truck slither and spin out over both lanes in the unplowed slush, and decided we’d find a place closer to town. I’d never been in the area behind the school before, so everything was new to me.

No birds seemed to be active there, but we soon found the trail of a short-tailed weasel, also known as ermine, particularly in winter when the fur is white. It had popped out of a hole roughly the size of a fifty-cent piece, looped over the snow for a few feet, and then dived into the snow again. Both of these snow-holes led to open spaces under shrubs bent under the weight of snow, where mice or voles or shrews might provide a snack. The long, narrow bodies of the weasels allow them to follow their prey into small tunnels.

On the surface of the snow, we could easily see their footprints, with the rear feet landing where the front feet had been, as it took off in the next leap. Each leap covered about a foot of distance. They have such short legs that the fastest way to get around is bending the long, sinuous body to extend the stride.

Short-tailed weasels are ferocious predators, dining on mice and other small mammals by preference, but sometimes eating birds, insects, worms, and even young snowshoe hares. Males weigh up to about seven ounces, but females are considerably smaller. They have high metabolic rates and have to eat a lot every day; females with litters may kill four mice a day.

A bit farther on, we found the trail of a bigger relative of the weasel. This path led hither and yon through shrub thickets, briefly into a tiny rivulet, along a log, under some low-hanging hemlock branches, and into still more thickets. Although we occasionally lost the trail for a little way, we eventually followed it for several hundred yards. We decided the trail-maker was probably a pine marten, partly because the footprints seemed a bit too big and furry for a mink, and partly because no sensible, hungry mink should be so far from the delicacies along the shore.

Trudging through the brush can be easier in winter than in summer. Snow presses down many of the blueberry and menziesia branches, and the two humans on snowshoes could stomp over the bent branches. Our canine companion was less fortunate; her snowshoe-less feet sometimes plunged through the brush piles, to the full length of all four legs, leaving her to wallow her way out.

Even though our broad feet helped us through and over the bushes, we still emerged with our knit caps full of lichens and twigs. And every so often a snow-laden arch of branches would give way, depositing us unceremoniously into a hole. We think this is fun, apparently, because we keep doing it.

Along the way, we noticed an area with a spectacular display of beard lichen festooned on almost every branch. Some of the strands were easily over six feet long. We wondered how it is that there are localized ‘hot spots’ for this lichen. Environmental conditions for good growth, including light and lack of aerial pollutants, must be part of the explanation. But it seems likely that dispersal patterns also contribute to the patchiness of strong lichen colonies: Spores and fragments of lichens are carried on the wind, so the direction, speed, and timing of winds would probably deposit them in semi-predictable patterns. Here’s a complex research problem awaiting a clever young scientist.

Stories in the snow

I love to go a-wandering along a snowy trail, looking for signs left by others who’ve been out on their business of living. A recent prolonged cold spell had kept the snow soft, preserving evidence of a very busy wildlife community along a local creek.

Mink tracks rambled along the creek-side, dipping down to the stream and curving up into the forest. The footprints were bigger than those of a second mink that traveled part of the same route, so my naturalist friend and I guessed that the first mink was a male. His trackway led a long way upstream on one side of the creek and seemed to circle back down on the other side—at least the footprints were the same size there. This might have been a male patrolling his territory.

Everywhere, we found the delicate, stitchery trackways of small rodents. According to the books at hand, mice are likely to drag their long tails, flipping them to the side as a counter-balance during sharp turns, but voles don’t usually show tail-drag marks. If that’s right, we had both mice and voles, especially on one side of the creek. The tiny trackways of shrews were less numerous.

Snowshoe hares had been busy, especially on the other side of the creek. Trackways led up to the streambank, then away, then back to creekside, then away. It was as if the hares wanted to cross the fragile ice but, lacking the nerve to do so, just dithered along the bank.

A bird had hopped about extensively in and out of some brushy areas. The tracks seemed too small to be those of a junco. Then we found wing-prints where the bird had flitted a short distance to a new site, and the length of the wing was clearly too long to belong to a junco. My guess was possibly a varied thrush, some of which overwinter here.

The only actual bird we saw was a brown creeper, hitching its way up a tree trunk and flying down to go up the next tree—their typical foraging pattern as they search for tiny bugs in the bark. According to the literature, creepers commonly concentrate their efforts on trees with ridged bark, the deeper the ridges the better; this kind of bark harbors more insects than smoother bark.

A few deer tracks, both large and small, appeared as we walked along. But there was much less deer traffic here than, say, in Gastineau Meadows, where peripatetic deer had cruised all over the place.

My friend called to me: Come look at this! I saw a shallow groove in the snow on the streambank and, without thinking, said: Oh, a shrew trail. Look again, said my friend. Ah—there’s a faint yellow stain at the bottom of the groove. And here, where I had casually supposed my ’shrew’ had dived under the snow, was—not a burrow at all, but just a deep dimple. My friend, who is smarter than I am, said: I think a bird, maybe a kingfisher, perched on that branch near the edge of the stream and projectile-defecated a jet of hot poop, melting the groove in the snow. So we said: Well, if that’s so, then in the dimple at the end of groove there should be a little wad of solid waste. And yes, indeed there was! Good detective work, friend!

A final little treasure on this walk was a dead red alder that sported a beautiful array of conks (or shelf-fungi). The living conks all had a slightly soft pile of white stuff at their lower edges. This stuff had occasionally smeared sideways over the bark, showing that it had been soft when the temperatures were above freezing. What is this stuff?

Phellinus conks. Photo by Katherine Hocker

I took a sample to a local forest pathologist, who put it under his microscope. He said that the white material was certainly fungal mycelium (the technical word for the mass of filaments that grow through the wood before producing the spore-bearing conk). However, without DNA work, there’s no way to know if it belongs to a parasitic fungus growing on the conk or to the conk species itself, because this kind of conk (of the genus Phellinus) often grows some of its own filaments right down through the conk itself. So we ended our walk with one more mystery.