East Pole Journal V. II, Ep. 13: Thirsty birds, daylight savings, equinox

Room for a few more. I've seen
three on that icicle.

The sun rose over the highest point on the North Ridge this morning, lighting up the yard

and starting the melting process on the chickadee watering icicles. They’ve been going at it for about a week now and I’ve seen as many as three at a time on the longest one. I watched a redpoll try it but he couldn’t get a grip and slid down it until he gave up and flew away. Entertaining stuff for sure. I find myself often having stopped what I was doing and staring at the bird shenanigans. Three pine grosbeaks, a male and two females, have showed up almost every day over the past two weeks.

I have a new reason to gripe about daylight savings time also. To begin with the old gripe involves the political change of time zone in Alaska to bring us within only one hour of the West Coast. It used to be two. Then you pile another hour on for daylight savings and now our solar noon is around 2 p.m. two hours late. Of course you can sleep in until 10 and wake up knowing it’s really 8. That never had much of an effect on me except the irritation. But this year something changed. I have read about being in tune with nature and how seasons and climate affect wildlife behavior. Last Sunday I noticed a difference. For one, I slept later than usual. When I did get up it was darker than I had been used to. A gray sky dimmed everything anyway, but this was different. Things I could easily see at this time the previous day, I needed a flashlight to see Sunday morning. All day I felt a little bit off, like lethargic. The temperature’s been down near zero mornings for the past couple of weeks. As a result I have found things to do indoors until it warmed up around noon and I felt better about going outdoors and working on the wood pile. Not so, Sunday. I kept finding lame excuses for not going out to work,

What are you looking at?

little chores I had been neglecting, small indoor projects or just flopping on the bed with my eyes closed. Finally around 4, I went out to get wood and water, and forced myself to split at least one sled load of wood for next year. That lasted a whole hour until dinner time and that was the whole effort for the day. It only dawned on me a couple of days later that I had been so in tune with the sunlight that the hour change had disrupted my rhythm and threw me off for a day. Monday was a disrupted day anyway with a 150-mile journey to Wasilla and by Tuesday I had adjusted.  I still don’t like the loss of light in the morning though.

As I’ve said in other posts, there’s a story about a Native American chief who said about daylight savings: “Only the white man would cut off the end of a blanket, sew it onto the other end and think he had a longer blanket.”

And then there’s the equinox coming up this weekend. It crossed my mind for no particular reason that is my 155^th equinox, 115^th in Alaska.

 

East Pole Journal