Arctic Light

(People on FB have already seen some of these pictures, but there are more here.)

A pine marten (American marten) climbed all over the house yesterday in pursuit of our insulation squirrels. I haven't posted about the Squirrel Problem but it's been going on since last summer, when squirrels started stealing insulation one squirrel-sized chunk at a time, and have literally emptied some parts of our walls, the little jerks.

Anyway, yesterday Orion said, "There's something jumping around in the yard!"

I ran over and looked. Martens are basically large ferrets, and for a while we just watched it bounding around in the snow. I ran to get my camera eventually, but only got one picture because it was just so fast-moving and usually appeared in a bounce in between vanishing into the snow.



We also watched it climb a tree - straight up the bark - and then it was just hanging around on the tree, occasionally swishing its tail around excitedly like cats do.

But THEN it climbed up on the house and got right in the window and I got some great pictures.





I can't get over the giant feet; they're like big mittens, so oversized compared to the rest of it!









It zipped around on the deck a lot but moved way too fast for me to get any pictures of it (I'd usually have the camera pointed at where it was half a second ago) except when it got interested in the second level of the deck, probably because of squirrels, and stood up on its back legs. Orion calls this picture "nanobear."



It zipped up the ladder at supersonic speed and I lost sight of it.



I heard some rustling up there for a while afterwards, but never was quite sure where it went after that, or when it left.

I wish it good hunting.

I happened to look out the north-facing window right around midnight and noticed the sky was being dramatic.



Fairbanks is quite far north - we are at 64.84N, which is very close to the Arctic Circle and, though of course the climate is different, slightly farther north than Reykjavik. We're currently in the transitional phase when we no longer have a true night - this is as dark as it gets - but the sun still rises and sets and it does get more-or-less dark(ish); however, you can follow the sun around the sky by tracking the brighter spot behind the northern hill where it sinks in the northwest, until it comes up in the northeast.

( Further pictures taken at various compass points around the dimming sky )

( Also earlier today a moose ran past the window; no pictures, alas )

So I'm reading this book on megafaunal extinctions, as you do - interesting book, I'll probably do a book report when I'm done - but I have just discovered the fact that prehistoric Cuba had a megafaunal owl that was about 3-4 ft high and too heavy to fly, so it had long legs for running after prey.

I just.....



Imagine you're minding your own business and that goes sprinting past.

I mean, we might be wrong about what we were looking at. But ... I think I saw a spider mimicking another insect to attract insects to its web, in very much the same way that some octopi and cuttlefish can make themselves look like other kinds of sea life by shaping their bodies in certain ways.

We were down at a little seasonal pond on our dog walking trail near dusk, and I saw the weirdest bug and could not figure out what it was (though mainly the problem was just not being able to get close enough). But what really threw me was that it looked like a water strider of some kind, but its reflection was way down in the water, a few inches below the actual insect on the surface of the water. Like it was hovering above the water somehow. I just couldn't figure out how on earth it was doing that.

And then Orion goes "It's a spider!"

It was a spider on a web, perfectly motionless, with most of its legs bunched up and two or three of its legs stretched all the way out to the side in a very unspiderlike way, producing exactly the profile above the water of a water-strider-shaped body (minus the actual spread-out legs that a real water strider would have; I just thought they were so fine as to be invisible from my angle). It was good enough to fool me!

It turned out Orion was standing on one of its web lines, and when he stepped off (carefully) the spider pulled in its legs and reverted to a perfectly normal (HUGE) spider and scurried to a stick to avoid falling in the water.

Have you ever heard of anything like that?? I mean, it's possible that we had just tweaked the web and it froze in whatever weird position it was in, but it looked so exactly water-strider-like in its reflection, and its legs were stretched out in such a weird way that it's hard for me to believe it was a total coincidence.

I was reading a really interesting article this morning about wolf pack dynamics. (It's a PDF, available here.) Interesting because wolf packs are popularly known as the gold standard for dominance hierarchy (the alpha-beta-omega dominance structure) and in fact, this seems to be not how they work at all. According to the author of the above article, most of the research on wolves has been on captive packs, where unrelated wolves are put together by zookeepers and forced to work out a hierarchy among themselves, since none of them can leave. This is not something they typically do when left to their own devices. In nature, wolf packs are usually families: the parents plus their pups, with the pups naturally deferring to Mom and Dad. Grown kids leave, go off, find mates and start their own families. Larger packs are made up of the parents plus grown "children" and their "spouses" (my terminology, not the author's) who stick around for a while, and sometimes when one of the original parents dies, the remaining wolf may take a new, unrelated mate, who sometimes will later form a family with one of their stepkids.

True dominance struggles are extremely rare, just like they are in families -- how often do you want to challenge your parents and take over control/ownership of the house, after all? You just leave. As (wild) wolf kids do, too, when they start feeling that way. The classic "alpha wolves are the only breeding wolves in the pack" thing makes perfect sense when you look upon it as a family with Mom, Dad and the kids. Wolves in zoos are attempting to replicate this in the only way they know how.

The author also talks about submissive displays, i.e. wolves flattening themselves and fawning on older family members, or rolling over for them. Female wolves typically submit to their mates in this way, and young pack members to older pack members. Sometimes this results in the other wolf giving them food; sometimes, the author suggests, it's simply a family-harmony bonding thing. He doesn't go ahead and analogize to human family dynamics in any way, but it made me think of the similarities with us, and the fact that, while we tend to think of "submission" (in a public setting) as a very loaded act, something with a coercive element to it, families do it naturally and don't usually think of it that way. Or the way that domestic dogs act towards us ... when my dog gives me a typical "submission display" greeting (wagging his tail, rubbing on my leg, rolling over) he is clearly happy, and so am I. It never feels like something I'm forcing him to do. It just feels like love. And ditto for kids wiggling on their parents, or humans hugging and cuddling with their spouses: it feels like love to us, and I can't imagine why it doesn't feel that way for wolves too -- not something they do because they have to or the other wolf will hurt them, but something they do because it makes them and the other wolf feel good, and reinforces that they care about each other.