In early January, the ice on the ponds in the Dredge Lake area was good and solid, although there were isolated spots of open water where upwellings slowed the formation of ice. I traipsed around some of the trails and ponds, finding tracks of shrews, hares and a mouse. Otters had slid over a beaver dam and then up a frozen slough, no doubt hoping to find a fish or two.
One day in mid-January, a friend and I explored a frozen pond, walking on snowshoes to spread out our weight, in case of a spot of weak ice. A little snow was falling, so it was a beautiful walk.
Beavers had made a small food cache near their lodge, including some hemlock branches. There were lots of spider webs and long, trailing silk threads used by airborne spiders. We wondered if any critters, in addition to some spiders, eat that silk to recycle the protein.
[Birds, shrews transform in hibernation]
Around the bases of several trees at the edge of the pond, we noted the tracks of a small bird, probably a junco. It had apparently inspected each tree base quite closely, possibly picking insects from the spider webs that curtaining the gaps between the upper roots or searching for stray seeds.
A vole had crept out of one bank of a frozen rivulet, crossed he ice and scuttled back to where it came from. My companion had observed such behavior in other places when the animal was seen to be a red-backed vole, so we assigned that perpetrator to those tracks. Deer tracks crisscrossed the pond ice, and deer had been feeding on the witches’ hair lichens that grew on small trees at the pond edge. My sharp-eared companion heard a brown creeper, which we soon saw as it hitched its way up a spruce trunk.
Many of the alders in this area had neither cones from last summer nor any male catkins for next spring. This was unlike other alder stands we’d seen, so we wondered why this stand was evidently reproducing very poorly. Perhaps the high level of water in the pond was too much for them.
[Flu cases in Alaska are way up]
We also noticed that here and in some other places the alders had retained many of their dried and shriveled leaves, instead of letting them drop to the ground. Blueberry shrubs sometimes do this too. In other regions, oaks, beeches and other trees also retain many of their dead leaves throughout the winter. The term for retention of withered old flowers or leaves is “marcescence.” Marcescent leaves have attracted a good deal of speculation about why these plants do this, such as deterring deer and moose browsing, trapping snow for release of moisture in spring, or delaying decomposition until spring, when nutrients are most needed for growth. However, apparently very little investigation has explored those ideas. In some cases, particularly when marcescence is occasional and not regular, the retention of dead leaves may just happen incidentally because the weather suddenly changed in a way that prevented the usual mechanism of leaf-drop (formation of the cut-off or abscission layer at the base of the leaf).
A few days later, along the Auke Lake Trail, (and later in other places) we noticed that many of the blueberry bushes had small galls on the twigs, often at the bases of marcescent leaves. The galls are really quite small, and I have to wonder how many times I have walked past them without noticing. They do seem to be more conspicuous against a snowy background. Some blueberry galls are made by midges or wasps, but these did not fit the descriptions of such galls, so the makers of these galls remain to be determined.
Toward the end of January, I went with a friend on the Point Bridget Trail. Near the trailhead, we found a place where a weasel (I think) had fossicked about in the mud at the bottom of a hole in the snow, and come up to leave a string of its small, muddy footprints on the snow, before diving back down under the deep snow in a new spot. Somewhat to my surprise, the lower branch of the trail, along the edge of the big beaver meadow, was quite passable, provided one didn’t mind a couple of inches of water here and there. A moose had used the trail too, taking advantage of a deeply trenched part of the path — and a small wooden bridge — to avoid some of the post-holing that was required in the rest of the meadow. The bible-camp horses had left ample evidence of time spent on this side of Cowee Creek, on the beach fringe as well as in sheltered places under the conifers. Pawing away the snow and stirring the long, dead grasses, they also had clearly been looking for precocious green shoots under the snow, and had found a few.
[Wild Shots: Photos of Mother Nature in Alaska]
As we left the area near the cabin, my companion spotted an owl, probably a short-eared owl, as it swooped down to some bare ground next to a tidal slough (the tide was out). It was probably trying to catch an unwary rodent, but we could not be sure it was successful. It soon flew up into the nearby trees, changed perches and eventually took off across the wide meadows, screened from clear view by tall spruces.
A day or two later, when Plan A for a beach walk was foiled by ferocious north winds on Lynn Canal, another friend and I eventually found a sheltered beach near Amalga Harbor. Moving slowly and quietly, we managed to share the beach with a trio of common mergansers that paddled slowly along the tide line. Then they all hauled out and snuggled up in a close-packed row to sun themselves.
I have learned a new word for verbal bric a brac like that found in this essay: bricolage. ‘Tis a very useful word for assortments of diverse things brought together in some more or less unifying way. There may be more bricolages here in the future.
• Mary F. Willson is a retired professor of ecology. “On The Trails” is a weekly column that appears every Friday. Her essays can be found online at onthetrailsjuneau.wordpress.com.
