The Beaver Cam
I recently pulled the SD card from the trail camera that I have looking out over the beaver lodge. It had 747 images on it.
741 of the images were of ducks. Sometimes in pairs, sometimes solo, sometimes the ducks had a large party and ignored all social distancing. I have ducks swimming, ducks scratching an itch (like above), ducks taking off in flight, and ducks preening for the camera.
There are four images that contain at least one duck and one beaver. The beavers are quite active, but have not been overwhelmed by the urge to cut down any trees. They seem to continue to eat on the supply they cut down late last summer and early autumn.
There are only two images of a beaver without the photobombing ducks. Personally, I think the Beaver Cam has gone to the beavers’ heads. Now they just slap their tail in order to get attention. Once you start to ignore their swimming about, the aggrieved beaver fires off a tail slap. Who knew beavers to be such prima donnas?
The big male seems to have grown quite a bit since he last showed himself. The female remains in shape; she’s quite svelte in appearance. There is at least one kit, that I have seen. There certainly could be two, but only one has shown itself at a time.
Fairbanks Roundup
Lots of sun, no sign of ice, but plenty of beaver sign
Summer. The residents of Interior Alaska live for Alaskan summers. The difference from winter to summer is extreme.
Aurora Forecast; Map credit Climatologist Brian Brettschneider
The Aurora viewing season officially came to an end on Sunday. We have too much daylight, and will not have a chance to see the Northern Lights for 91 days.
Credit: National Weather Service – Fairbanks
On May 15th, Fairbanks went into our summer period of civil twilight. We have enough natural light to partake in outdoor activities 24/7.
May 18th is the average date for the final freeze of the spring months in Fairbanks.
From May 29th, until July 14th, the sun will set after midnight.
The Summer Solstice, Fairbanks’ favorite day, is on June 20th.
Night in Fairbanks will turn dark again on September 4th. A sad day indeed.
Rest in Peace, Senior
Larry Ball Sr; Induction into the Knoxville Raceway Hall of Fame; Photo credit: The Curator
Larry Ball Sr, the father of a good friend of mine, passed away from Covid-19 complications over the weekend.
I spent several months in Iowa in 2007-08, and was lucky enough to get to know Senior, or LBS, as he was known to many of us. I worked, i.e. volunteered, as a glorified bouncer on the Second Floor of the National Sprint Car Hall of Fame during races. LBS and his family had a suite above, and I would wander up to see them at some point during every race, and Senior was always a most gracious host. In 2008, LBS was inducted into the Knoxville Raceway Hall of Fame, as the successful car owner of Ball Racing.
Photo credit: Ball Racing, Inc; Jeff Tuttle in #3, 1994
The last time I saw LBS in Des Moines, he and Saint Donna, his wife, put me up for a night as I spent some time in DSM. Senior kept me up half the night arguing a point that was desperately important to him. The best part of that conversation, was that we were debating something that we were in total agreement on. To this day, I’m not sure if he was hammering the point home because I wasn’t a convincing accomplice, or because he expected me to come up with a plan of attack, because he had already done the hard part by detailing the problem. It’s a night that I look back on fondly.
LBS was a frequent visitor here between The Circles. I remember hearing from him one February, because my posts had been very infrequent, and he wanted to know what was up. When I told him it was February in Fairbanks, and there wasn’t much going on to write about, he was unconvinced and told me to try harder.
Over the course of the years, I’ve done a fair amount of traveling, and the great surprise and reward of travel is not the locations, but the people I have met by chance. A random hockey game in Fairbanks brought Des Moines back into my orbit, which in turn, brought me into the orbit of Larry Ball, Sr. What a rewarding hockey game that turned out to be.
Rest in peace, Larry. You will be missed by many, and East Des Moines will never be the same.
Water Scooper
Film Friday:
Incoming
Liftoff
Heading back to the fire
Last summer, back in the days when I was volunteering to self-isolate, I was out at a lake cabin and happened to see a wildfire gets its start from lightning.
The following day, a pair of water scoopers showed up at the lake. They would fly overhead, bank around the lake, skim across the top of the lake, picking up their load of water, then take off again to fly back to the fire. The two aircraft made the roundtrip from fire to lake to fire, all day long.
Camera: Leica M3; Lens: Leitz 135mm; Film: Fujichrome, 35mm, Velvia100
Greenup Day
Photo taken Monday morning, May 11, 2020
People from Outside are often amazed at how short the “transition” seasons are in Interior Alaska. Often, spring and autumn seem like they are only days long.
Spring is especially quick to show itself in Fairbanks. Our trees literally go from brown twigs to green leaves in a matter of hours. On Sunday morning, the hillsides were a drab gray and brown, by afternoon, they were a vibrant green.
A pollen scientist by the name of Jim Anderson, working for the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska – Fairbanks, starting logging the official Greenup Day in 1974. He continued to do so until his death in 2007. Ted Fathauer, a meteorologist for the National Weather Service in Fairbanks, independently did the same thing from his place on Chena Ridge. Fathauer died in 2013.*
Current meteorologist, Rick Thoman, has taken up the green lantern, and called Mother’s Day as the official Greenup Day of 2020.
When I say that there is nothing gradual about the leaves coming out in Alaska’s Interior, I’m not kidding. It is a sudden burst of green that immediately overtakes the land. It doesn’t come in the form of a wave, it just comes, all at once. Our days are over 18 hours long now, and the amount of visible light is closing in on 22 hours. That’s a lot of photosynthesis power.
*Dermot Cole: Reporting from Alaska
Eighty
Alaska saw its first 80F degree day on Saturday, as Ketchikan hit the mark. Juneau hit 76F degrees, which was a record high for the date, and Fairbanks saw 70F degrees for the first time on Saturday.
The warm air mass brought 80F degrees into Alaska’s Interior on Sunday, which made for the years’s first 80 degree day for Fairbanks. This is four weeks earlier than the average first 80 degree day. It is the second earliest on record.
Sitka and Yakutat also saw high temps on Mother’s Day.
90F degrees is not in the forecast for Monday.
Utqiagvik Sea Ice Cam
The sun rose over the village of Utqiagvik at 2:46 am ADT on Sunday, it will set in 85 days. The village also set a record high temp of 36F.
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