Do you ever wonder how traditions began? On a cold, dark night, long, long ago…
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Author Archives: kwinker
Knobhead’s Long Journey
It was 1985, and I was cutting another net lane to catch Wood Thrushes as part of my Master’s thesis research in southern Veracruz, Mexico. Steve Stucker was there with me, and our machetes were flashing as we cut rainforest vegetation to create a 12-meter lane about 1.5 meters wide where we would put a mist net.
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Bust a Move, Snowshoe Man
We generally see snow from late October through early April, but with an average annual precipitation of just 11 inches of water, we usually don’t see really deep snow. This year, however, we’ve been getting a lot of snow. It’s the third-highest snowfall ever recorded this far into the winter, and this past week it really piled up. With the long weekend, we’ve been getting out and enjoying it. Blowing it, shoveling it, walking in it, snowshoeing in it.
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A Brief History of Fire in Our Forest
The true-to-title version: I found a fire-scarred birch on the hill above our house and cored it to see how long it’s been since the last forest fire here. It was surprisingly long ago.
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Lots
Heavy forest fires in Interior Alaska some years back burned down a lot of trees. But these fires also changed human behavior, and not necessarily for the better. Who would want a home in the woods if your house might burn down? The woods still saw new homes going up, but in many cases trees were being removed with excessive exuberance. Instead of the standard 30-foot clearing around a home to serve as a fire buffer, 60-foot buffers were often created, or whole lots were being cleared. Forest one day, stumps the next. It was ugly.
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