Hours have passed; it is now dark dark and the wolverine (see previous post) has moved on. Rodents in the area are still not safe as a Boreal Owl (Aegolius funereus) sits in a dead spruce tree – death from above.
The Boreal Owl, which generally remains in the north throughout winter, is cute and would be a fine subject for a future post.
Click on image for full-size view.
Silent Night
I do not know if you have ever heard the term “roaring silence.” Roaring silence is encountered only when it is extremely quiet; no cars, no airplanes, none of the typical man made sounds. You can hear the stillness and it is quite loud. It’s the sound of the planet, or the universe. I am not sure what causes it. It is becoming ever harder to experience.
The wolverine is one of those species which inhabit the roaring silence; they require large quiet spaces to survive. More about the animal after the newspaper article.
Click on image for full-size view.
Wolverine
http://www.nytimes.com/2012/03/18/magazine/is-silence-going-extinct.html?_r=1&ref=global-home
Is Silence Going Extinct?
Peter van Agtmael/Magnum, for The New York Times
From the New York Times; March 15, 2012
By KIM TINGLEY
March 15, 2012
Setting off in the predawn gloaming of central Alaska, we were the sounds of swishing snow pants, crunching boots and cold puffs of breath. As sunrise gradually lightened the late November sky, we took visible shape: a single-file parade on a narrow white trail traveling west, deeper into Denali National Park and Preserve. It was three degrees and so still that when we pulled up to rest, I heard no wind, no sibilant leaves, just a barely perceptible ringing in my ears. Tundra swans, kestrels and warblers had all flown south. Grizzlies were asleep in their dens. We tramped over frozen streams and paused to discover water still trickling faintly in hollows below. To the north, a morning blast of pink and orange brightened snow-shrouded Mount Healy at the edge of the Alaska Range; to the south — where the sun is always rising or setting during winter at a latitude just three degrees shy of the Arctic Circle — an alpine ridge remained covered in shadow and alder.
We saw a beaver hut on a frozen pond and moose tracks in snow. Ice frosted the nettles of black spruce and the beard of our leader, Davyd Betchkal, the park’s physical-science technician. Betchkal’s beard recalled that of his hero, the naturalist Henry David Thoreau, at the start of the Civil War. Otherwise he was a 25-year-old Wisconsinite wearing a lime green hat knit by his mother. He and I shouldered backpacks each weighted with 30 pounds of recording equipment. Far up ahead, a park ranger on skis towed more gear by sled.
Our destination was a ridge above Hines Creek, where Betchkal planned to assemble a station to collect a month’s worth of continuous acoustic data documenting an intangible, invisible and — increasingly — endangered resource: natural sound. Our mission was not only to trap the ephemeral but also to experience it ourselves, which at the moment was impossible for three reasons: 1) the chafing of our nylon outfits; 2) the chunking of our military-issue Bunny Boots on ice; and 3) planes.
“If you’re on foot and you choose to focus on the natural quality of the landscape, you’re completely immersed in nature; nothing else exists,” Betchkal said to the back of my head, letting me set the pace as we traipsed steadily uphill. “Then a jet will go over, and it kind of breaks that flow of consciousness, that ecstatic moment.” Meditating on our surroundings, I became a little curious how much farther we had to go. “Don’t think about that — that’s my answer,” Betchkal called ahead cheerfully. “Another answer is that I don’t know.”
An undeveloped swath of land nearly the size of Vermont, Denali should be a haven for natural sound. Enormous stretches of wild country abut the park in every direction save east, where Route 3 connects Fairbanks to Anchorage. One dead end and mostly unpaved road penetrates the park itself. Yet since 2006, when scientists at Denali began a decade-long effort to collect a month’s worth of acoustic data from more than 60 sites across the park — including a 14,000-foot-high spot on Mount McKinley — Betchkal and his colleagues have recorded only 36 complete days in which the sounds of an internal combustion engine of some sort were absent. Planes are the most common source. Once, in the course of 24 hours, a single recording station captured the buzzing of 78 low-altitude props — the kind used for sightseeing tours; other areas have logged daily averages as high as one sky- or street-traffic sound every 17 minutes. The loudest stretch of the year is summer, when hundreds of thousands of tourists flock to Denali, embarking on helicopter or fixed-wing rides. Snowmobiles are popular with locals, and noise from the highway, the park road and daily passenger trains can travel for miles. That sort of human din, studies are beginning to suggest, is imperiling habitat — in Denali as well as wilderness areas around the world — as surely as a bulldozer or oil spill. But scientists have so little information about what landscapes should sound like without human interference that trying to correct the problem would be like a surgeon’s wielding a scalpel without knowing the parts of the body, let alone his patient’s symptoms. To restore ecosystems to acoustic health, researchers must determine, to the last raindrop, what compositions nature would play without us.
For more than 40 years, scientists have used radio telescopes to probe starry regions trillions of miles away for sounds of alien life. But only in the past five years or so have they been able to reliably record monthslong stretches of audio in the wildernesses of Earth. Last March, a group of ecologists and engineers taking advantage of advances in collecting, storing and analyzing vast quantities of digital data declared a new field of science: soundscape ecology. Other disciplines have long observed how various sounds affect people and individual animal species, but no one, they argued in the journal Bioscience, has yet studied the interconnected sounds of whole ecosystems. Soundscapes — composed of biological utterances like birdcalls, geophysical commotions like wind and running water and anthropogenic noises like motors — are “an acoustic reflection of the patterns and processes of the landscape,” the paper’s lead author, Bryan Pijanowski, an ecologist at Purdue University, told me. “And if we can take sound samples and develop appropriate metrics, we might be able to say, ‘Hey, this is a healthy landscape and this is an unhealthy landscape.’ ”
Indeed, though soundscape ecology has hardly begun, natural soundscapes already face a crisis. Humans have irrevocably altered the acoustics of the entire globe — and our racket continues to spread. Missing or altered voices in a soundscape tend to indicate broader environmental problems. For instance, at least one invasive species, the red-billed leiothrix of East Asia, appears to use its clamorous chatter to drown out the native European blackbird in Northern Italy. Noise can mask mating calls, cause stress and prevent animals from hearing alarms, the stirrings of prey and other useful survival cues. And as climate change prompts a shift in creatures’ migration schedules, circadian rhythms and preferred habitats — reshuffling the where and when of their calls — soundscapes are altered, too. Soundscape ecologists hope they can save some ecosystems, but they also realize they will bear witness to many finales. “There may be some very unique soundscapes around the world that — just through normal human activities — would be lost forever,” Pijanowski says — unless he and colleagues can record them before they disappear. An even more critical task, he thinks, is alerting people to the way “soundscapes provide us with a sense of place” and an emotional bond with the natural world that is unraveling. As children, our grandparents could hope to swim in a lake or lie in a meadow for whole afternoons without hearing a motorboat, car or plane; today the engineless hour is all but extinct, and we’ve grown accustomed to constant, mild auditory intrusions. “Humans are becoming an increasingly more urban species, and so we’re surrounding ourselves with concrete and buildings” and “the low hum of the urban landscape,” Pijanowski says. “We’re kind of severing the acoustic link that humans have with nature.”
In Denali, silence and solitude define the winter. Fall, Betchkal says, is the departure of the sandhill cranes — an urgent, lonely trilling of flocks taking flight. Spring returns with wood frogs, the park’s only amphibian. “They’re a riotous little chorus of fellows,” Betchkal told me the day before our expedition, as I watched him assemble and test, in an empty library across from his office building, the station he planned to deploy. Outfitted in a flannel shirt and jeans, he could have been a woodsman readying his traps if not for the headphones he wore. “It’s like a really organic, biological sounding rasping, but it’s really nice, like krrrup, krrrup,” he continued, pausing amid a tangle of wire to roll his R’s. In high school, Betchkal’s band teacher told him that before he could play a note on his trumpet, in order to appreciate how the instrument produced the syllable, he needed to articulate the sound himself. Betchkal thinks the same is true of wildlife sounds: “To understand what they’re all about, you have to make them,” he said. “You’ve got to. People think it’s goofy, but it isn’t. It’s studying.”
Sounds are remarkably difficult to describe without onomatopoeia. Defining the resource he wants to protect — in words and numbers, to scientists and policy makers — is a fundamental challenge for Betchkal and other soundscape researchers. Betchkal, though, is well suited to his role. As a boy, he went camping in Wisconsin’s Devil’s Lake State Park with his father, an amateur ornithologist who taught him the pleasures of lying in a sleeping bag listening to birdcalls. At the University of Wisconsin, Madison, he majored in biochemistry and botany while running soundboards for indie bands at the King Club downtown. For Betchkal, whose office bookshelf holds titles as various as “An Introduction to the Psychology of Hearing,” “Statistical Treatment of Experimental Data” and “Glacier Travel and Crevasse Rescue,” perhaps the greatest appeal of soundscape ecology is the way it intersects other fields of study. “It’s almost like going back to old-school naturalism,” Betchkal said, “where you paid attention to anything and everything that was fascinating. That’s totally what I’m into — interdisciplinary science.”
Surprisingly, soundscape ecology, with its focus on the natural, got its start in the streets. An M.I.T. city planner first applied the word “soundscape” to habitat analysis in 1969 for a study he did on the “informativeness” and “delightfulness” of various sonic environments around Boston. Pushing volunteers about in wheelchairs, first blindfolded, then ear-muffled, then without sensory checks, he discovered that the sounds of seaports and civic centers were just as important as their appearance in influencing how much people enjoyed being there. This was a novel notion, even though objections to undesirable sounds date back to the invention of neighbors. In his influential 1977 work, “The Tuning of the World,” the Canadian composer R. Murray Schafer charts man’s relationship with noise. As long ago as 3000 B.C., he notes, the Epic of Gilgamesh discussed “the uproar of mankind,” which aggravated the god Enlil. “Sleep is no longer possible,” he complains to the other gods. In the second century A.D., wagon traffic “sufficient to wake the dead” ruined the Roman poet Juvenal’s ability to rest between Satires. Many English towns were sequestering their blacksmiths by the 13th century, and Bern, Switzerland, passed its first law “against singing and shouting in streets or houses on festival days” in 1628. Over the next 300 years, it also legislated against “barking dogs,” “singing at Christmas and New Year’s parties,” “carpet-beating” and “noisy children.” In 1972, the U.S. Environmental Protection Agency declared noise a pollutant.
Only recently, however, have governments from Japan to the European Union begun to recognize natural sounds as a resource requiring protection. When Woodrow Wilson created the National Park Service in 1916, it was to “conserve the scenery”; not until 2000 did a Park Service director issue systemwide instructions for addressing “soundscape preservation.” In 1986, a midair plane crash above the Grand Canyon National Park — where sightseeing tours had operated virtually unchecked for almost 70 years — prompted Congress to pass the National Parks Overflights Act, requiring the Park Service to work with the Federal Aviation Administration in remedying the “significant adverse effect on the natural quiet” that aircraft there appeared to be having. The act also called for studying the impacts of overflight noise on other parks.
Initial research returned alarming results. In Yosemite, planes were heard 30 to 60 percent of the day. In the Haleakala volcano crater in Maui, 8 to 10 helicopters passed overhead per hour. What’s more, other experiments showed, much as the M.I.T. study did, that noise affected the way visitors saw landscapes: when volunteers viewed photos of natural vistas while listening to helicopters on tape, they rated the scenes less picturesque than they did under quieter conditions. By 2000, the National Park Service had staffed a division to gather data on park soundscapes nationwide and create, with the F.A.A., air-tour management plans at 100-plus locations. More than a decade since — partly because of disagreements between aviation and conservation interests — no such plan is in place, though many parks have begun looking for ways to trim other noise, turning off idling shuttle buses, curbing car traffic and investing in less uproarious maintenance tools. Grand Canyon managers, after nearly 25 years of laboring, last year proposed amendments to the timing and routes of sightseeing flights that would make the park somewhat more serene.
When Denali fielded its first sound station in April 2001, far earlier than nearly every other park in the country, the primary concern was determining the level of annoyance caused by planes and snowmobiles. But scientists were about to realize the damage society’s widening sonic footprint could do to natural ecosystems. In 2003, a Dutch team studying a common songbird, the great tit, reported in Nature that males of the species shifted their calls to a higher frequency in cities, where low-frequency human noise masked their normal song range. Further proof that urban sounds cause wild creatures to adjust their vocal styles quickly followed. Nightingales sing louder in louder environments. Robins — usually diurnal singers — switch to nighttime in areas that are chaotic by day. Subjected to constant mechanical whirring, certain primates, bats, whales, squirrels and frogs all change their cries. Many other animals, it seems, lack the physical equipment to adapt, and perish or move away. Not only are individuals editing their tunes in real time — as the great tits did — but natural selection is also rewarding louder, higher-frequency singers, redirecting the course of evolution.
Species can fight for airtime in a limited bandwidth by changing their volume or frequency, or by rescheduling the timing of their calls. But there’s no way animals can alter their ability to listen — for their very survival — if human noise conceals, for example, the twig-snap of a prowler or the skittering of prey. In the United States, where more than 80 percent of land is within two-thirds of a mile of a road, the listening area available to most creatures is rapidly shrinking. Beyond hunting and hiding, even invertebrates use the gabbing of unwitting cohabitants for navigation. Sightless, earless and adrift in the open ocean, coral larvae seek to settle on tropical reefs by swimming toward the throbs of muttering fish and snapping-shrimp claws. Eurasian reed warblers en route to southern Africa at night flutter blind over pine forests, sand dunes and the Baltic Sea until, hundreds of feet below, the cheeping of other warblers signals the presence of sustaining wetlands. If those aural cues disappear, the species that heed them may be floating and flying without a compass.
Explosive human sounds can have catastrophic impacts, especially underwater, where they travel faster and farther than they do in the air. Porpoises and whales have beached themselves fleeing the high-pitched shrieks of U.S. Navy sonar, researchers believe; they also blame the low-frequency booms ships use to search for oil and gas for fatally ripping through the organs that cephalopods like squid use to detect vibrations. Fewer studies have examined the health impacts of more mundane, chronic noises on terrestrial species, but proof is emerging that the droning of freeway traffic and the 24/7 rumbling of natural-gas-pipeline compressors directly harm the ability of birds nesting nearby to reproduce. Jesse Barber, a biologist at Boise State University who is the co-author of two recent papers about the impacts of noise on land-dwelling animals, writes that “it is clear that the acoustical environment is not a collection of private conversations between signaler and receiver” but a network of broadcasts reaching both intended and invisible listeners. Like pulling Jenga blocks from a teetering tower, removing sounds from soundscapes — or adding them — he warns, “could have volatile and unpredictable consequences.”
In the library across from his office building, Betchkal crawled among cables, politely probing each instrument with a voltmeter like a plaid-clad doctor with a stethoscope. The park has been able to take continuous recordings since only 2010 (previous setups recorded five seconds of audio every five minutes), and the scale and quality of its efforts in the wilderness are among the most advanced in the world. Though each station costs about $12,000, glitches are common: the instruments still aren’t designed to work together, or in outdoor conditions. Wind has toppled them; rivers have flooded them; grizzlies have mangled microphones. Betchkal fiddled much of the morning before he felt satisfied that the station was running properly and began to break it down, packing it methodically away and carrying it to his office. Pulling a checklist from his desk, he started filling bags with tools he might need the next day: blue crystal desiccants in vials to keep the air in the equipment boxes dry, wire strippers, extra cable. He’d never set up a station in November and December before. Part of the point was to add to baseline measurements of the park’s overall soundscape — another was to measure just how quiet the winter could be and preserve that sensation for posterity. “I suspect that it gets down below the threshold of human hearing,” Betchkal said, adding duck seal, Gaffer’s tape and an Exacto knife to the bag. “Below zero decibels.” If he did manage to capture a stretch of quiet that extreme, I wondered, what would it reveal?
“Openness!” Betchkal exclaimed. He paused to chase his thought. “Quiet is related to openness in the sense that the quieter it gets — as your listening area increases — your ability to hear reflections from farther away increases. The implication of that is that you get an immense sense of openness, of the landscape reflecting back to you, right? You can go out there, and you stand on a mountaintop, and it’s so quiet that you get this sense of space that’s unbelievable. The reflections are coming to you from afar. All of a sudden your perception is being affected by a larger area. Which is different from when you’re in your car. Why, when you’re in your car, do you feel like you are your car? It’s ’cause the car envelops you, it wraps you up in that sound of itself. Sound has everything to do with place. What is beautiful about this place? What is interesting or iconic about Alaska? Anyway,” he bowed apologetically at the waist, “that’s a lot of words. What I’m really measuring is the potential — the potential to hear natural sounds. If you’re choosing to listen, what are you actually going to hear?”
Around noon, nearing Hines Creek, we halted on the trail. The afternoon was windless. We were warm from walking but rapidly started to freeze; feeling left our fingers and noses first. Betchkal pointed off the path to the south, across a field of tangled willows, to a steep, snowy ridge, atop which he wanted to put the station. We shook up chemical hand warmers so they’d be hot when we reached the summit and charged into the thicket after Jeff Duckett, the ranger. Branches crashed against jackets and backpacks. We tripped on roots and fell. The sled proved too awkward to carry, and after retrieving two solar panels and a box of gear, Duckett and Betchkal abandoned it. At the foot of the hill, we began switchbacking upward through knee-high snow drifts. A Piper Cub skirted low over our heads, the roar of the engine momentarily blotting out the sounds of our breathing. Reaching the top, we dumped the audio equipment and threw on extra jackets. Betchkal got to work quickly, arranging tripods and running Arctic cable designed not to snap in subzero weather. Below, miles of black spruce spanned the valley separating us from Mount Healy.
Ostensibly, Betchkal’s stations capture exactly what we would hear if we could stand invisibly in the wilderness for a month. The recordings can reveal the sonic relationships that play out in our absence — and help us to modify our acoustic footprint. But our understanding of sound will always be limited by our perception of it. We will never experience the ultrasonic cries of insects, lizards or bats without distorting them. Decibels are self-deception. Bell Telephone Laboratories conjured them to measure loudness in the 1920s (the “bel” honors the company’s eponymous founder), but they represent volume as our ears register it, and the louder a sound is, the less of it we actually take in.
Hearing arguably fixes us in time, space and our own bodies more than the other senses do. Our vitals are audible: sighing lungs, a pounding pulse, a burbling gut. John Cage, the composer, once tried to observe complete silence in a soundproof room, but he still heard distinct noises — made, it turned out, by the nerves and blood of his own body. “Until I die,” he concluded, “there will be sounds.” We can shut our eyes at will, but not our ears, and what we hear is penetrating and physical — a wave entering our head. Even the deaf perceive internal jangling and external sonic feedback. The tactile nature of sound — the way it bounces back to us from other surfaces — helps us locate ourselves in relation to our surroundings and to know what’s behind us or around a corner. Fast asleep, our heartbeats quicken at a loud noise. In the womb, before we are aware, we hear the cacophonous exertions of our mother’s body. Returning from a field trip to the Potomac River refuge in Northern Virginia last year, a fourth grader wrote — in a passage that eventually reached a biologist in Soldotna, Alaska — that “the best thing about this place is that it has such nice noises you don’t feel alone when you are alone.”
In a series of gloveless maneuvers, Betchkal screwed together a weather station that would measure temperature, wind speed and direction, plus humidity. He arranged the solar panels, connected them to a box of batteries and sent power to the instruments: a sound level meter that continuously logs decibels at specific frequencies and an audio recorder. The meter powered on. The recorder did not. “Come on, you little stinker!” Betchkal said. Thinking it might be frozen, he slipped the device under his long johns, yelping when it met his thigh.
The next day, Betchkal showed me on his computer how he uses a program called Splat to analyze the data he gets. “Like in farming,” he said, “you’ve made the harvest, and now we’re going to take that raw thing and cook it or refine it down into something that can be used for different products.” Splat takes the data from the sound-level meter and arranges it on a spectrogram: a blue field of time on which sounds appear as orange shapes, their height representing their frequency, their brightness showing loudness, their length duration. Scrolling through the month, Betchkal labels many sounds by sight. Once he’s done tagging, the data can take on meaning, morphing into a graph of the circadian rhythms of wood-frog calls, say, or a park map of helicopter audibility.
Betchkal also listens to a subsample of the recordings. “I love this clip,” he said, pressing play on his computer. We heard a snuffling at the microphone and, nearby, the bellowing of babies that were actually bear cubs. “Part of my job is to go around and document these rare sounds,” he said, “to better understand the resource that needs to be protected — are there really important sounds out there that are disappearing?” He clicked again, and the tinny gurgle of an ice cave filled the speakers. “There’s thousands of little bubbles,” he said in narration. “I imagine like a big cave, and each room of the cave probably has different ways of reflecting sound. We can share sounds with people who might not be able to walk up to that ice cave and go hang around inside of it. Maybe even better, it excites them enough that they’re like, All right, let’s go on a hike! We’re going to check out an ice cave! Or whatever.”
Listening to Betchkal’s recordings of people passing his stations in the course of their travels can be unexpectedly elegiac. Tents flap, camp stoves hiss, people laugh, sniffle, adjust their packs. Once, trolling through audio from a mountain site, Betchkal happened upon a two-man concert, climbers duetting on guitar and mandolin. Another time, he discovered a rocky summer avalanche, an escalating rumble so deep it shook his desk.
On the ridge top, Betchkal’s body heat and hand warmers failed to revive the recorder. After more than an hour of troubleshooting, a spare pair of AA batteries succeeded in getting the device to work — but that meant, unlike the rest of the solar-powered equipment, it would run for only about a week. “It’s disappointing to me — really disappointing,” Betchkal said. “But that can happen — that does happen. If things go wrong, I’ll come back, and I can fix them.” He wrestled the instrument case closed and sealed it against the snow and wind of the coming month. The weather had begun to seep through our Polartec defenses, numbing our joints; water and pen ink were solids; cheese sticks gonged against canteens. “One last thing we need to do,” Betchkal said, shaking off defeat. “I know everyone’s probably cold and tired, but we’re going to listen. Get comfortable, be sure you’re not needing to fidget with stuff — ” A zipper zipped. Two magpies chirped. I lifted my arms from my sides to shush my sleeves and closed my eyes.
Night fell as we retraced our steps along the trail. The sky turned from lavender to indigo while the snow on the ground and the mountains glowed even when the last of the sun was gone. We headed for Jupiter, hanging low above the trees, and as we walked, I pictured the station back on the ridge, wrapped in the same darkness. When Betchkal harvests the audio, he will find us repacking our packs, exclaiming over our frozen apparatuses and sliding down the hillside into the willow field below. He will also, for three minutes, witness us still our movements and attune our ears to one of the quietest places left on Earth. In that window, I could hear the vastness of the valley — no sound marks materialized, like buoys bobbing on an empty ocean, to segment the sense of infinity. The landscape enveloped me, as Betchkal said it would, and I felt I was the landscape, where mountains and glaciers rose and shifted eons before the first heartbeats came to life.
“Standing in that place right there,” Betchkal told me later, “I had a complete sense that I was standing in that place right there and not drawn or distracted from it at all.” I felt located, too, but I could also imagine that if I hollered, my voice might not ever bounce back — that where I was, precisely, was a ridge top in a wide wilderness on a spinning rock in outer space. Ahead of me on the trail, as we neared our destination, Betchkal’s figure blurred in the darkness. The trees around us disappeared. There were, at last, only our footsteps. Then, barely audible, an inevitable airborne murmur — a sign from the civilized world.
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The wolverine resembles a small bear. The animals frequent remote boreal forests, taiga, and tundra in the northern latitudes.
The wolverine, Gulo gulo (Gulo is Latin for “glutton”), also referred to as glutton, is the largest land-dwelling species of the family Mustelidae (weasels). It is a stocky and muscular carnivore, closely resembling a small bear. The species has a reputation for ferocity and strength out of proportion to its size, with the documented ability to kill prey many times its size. With short legs, broad and rounded head, and small eyes with short rounded ears, it resembles a bear more than other mustelids.Though its legs are short, its large five-toed paws and plantigrade posture facilitate movement through deep snow.
Wolverines are solitary, requiring much room to roam. Individual wolverines may travel 15 miles (24 kilometers) in a day in search of food. Because of their habitat requirements, the animals are found primarily in remote reaches of the Northern boreal forests and subarctic and alpine tundra of the Northern hemisphere, with the greatest numbers in northern Canada, the U.S. state of Alaska, the Nordic countries of Europe, and throughout western Russia and Siberia. Their populations have experienced a steady decline since the 19th century in the face of trapping, range reduction and habitat fragmentation, such that they are essentially absent in the southern end of their European range. It is, however, estimated that large populations remain in North America and northern Asia.
Recently compiled genetic evidence suggests that most of North America’s wolverines are descended from a single source, likely originating from Beringia (the area of the Ice Age land bridge between present day Alaska and Siberia) during the last glaciation and rapidly expanding thereafter, though there is considerable uncertainty to this conclusion due to the difficulty of collecting samples in the extremely depleted southern extent of the range.
The adult wolverine is about the size of a medium dog, with a length usually ranging from 26–42 in., a tail of 6.7–10 in., and a weight of 20–55 lbs, though exceptionally large males can weigh up to 71 lbs The males are as much as 30% larger than the females and can be twice the female’s weight. Shoulder height is reported from 12 to 18 in. It is the largest of terrestrial mustelids; only the marine-dwelling sea otter and giant otter of the Amazon basin are larger.
Wolverines have thick, dark, oily, fur which is highly hydrophobic, making it resistant to frost. This has led to its traditional popularity among hunters and trappers as a lining in jackets and parkas in Arctic conditions. A light silvery facial mask is distinct in some individuals, and a pale buff stripe runs laterally from the shoulders along the side and crossing the rump just above a 9.8–14 in. bushy tail. Some individuals display prominent white hair patches on the throat or chest.
Like many other mustelids, it has potent anal scent glands used for marking territory and sexual signaling. The pungent odor has given rise to the nicknames “skunk bear” and “nasty cat.” Wolverines, like other mustelids, possess a special upper molar in the back of the mouth that is rotated 90 degrees, towards the inside of the mouth. This special characteristic allows wolverines to tear off meat from prey or carrion that has been frozen solid.
Wolverines eat a bit of vegetarian fare, like plants and berries, in the summer season, but this does not make up a major part of their diet. —they are tenacious predators with a taste for meat. Prey mainly consists of small to large-sized mammals and the wolverine has been recorded killing prey such as adult deer that are many times larger than itself. Prey species include porcupine, squirrel, beaver, marmot, rabbit, vole, mice, shrew, lemming, caribou, roe deer, white-tailed deer, mule deer, sheep, moose, and elk. Smaller predators are occasionally preyed on, including martens, mink, foxes, canada lynx, weasels, Eurasian lynx, and coyote and wolf pups. Wolverines often pursue live prey that is relatively easy to obtain, including animals caught in traps, newborn mammals and deer (including adult moose and elk) when they’re weakened by winter or immobilized by heavy snow. The diet is sometimes supplemented by bird’s eggs, birds (especially geese), roots, seeds, insect larvae and berries. A majority of the wolverine’s sustenance is derived from carrion, which they depend on almost exclusively in winter and early spring. Wolverines may find carrion themselves, feed on it after the predator is done feeding (especially wolf packs) or simply take it from another predator. Whether eating live prey or carrion, the wolverine’s feeding style appears voracious, leading to the nickname of “glutton” (also the basis of the scientific name). However, this feeding style is believed to be an adaptation to food that is scarcely encountered, especially in the winter.[14]Wolverines easily dispatch smaller prey, such as rabbits and rodents, but may even attack animals many times their size, such as caribou, if the prey appears to be weak or injured. These opportunistic eaters also feed on carrion—the corpses of larger mammals, such as elk, deer, and caribou. Such finds sustain them in winter when other prey may be thinner on the ground, though they have also been known to dig into burrows and eat hibernating mammals.
Males scent-mark their territories, but they share them with several females and are believed to be polygamous. Females den in the snow or under similar cover to give birth to two or three young each late winter or early spring. Kits sometimes live with their mother until they reach their own reproductive age—about two years old.
Wolverines inhabiting the Old World (specifically, Fennoscandia) are more active hunters than their North American cousins. This may be because competing predator populations in Eurasia are not as dense, making it more practical for the wolverine to hunt for itself than to wait for another animal to make a kill and then try to snatch it. They often feed on carrion left by wolves, so changes in the population of wolves may affect the population of wolverines.
The world’s total wolverine population is unknown. The animal exhibits a low population density and requires a very large home range. The range of a male wolverine can be more than 240 sq mi., encompassing the ranges of several females which have smaller home ranges of roughly 50–100 sq mi. Adult wolverines try for the most part to keep non-overlapping ranges with adults of the same sex. Radio tracking suggests an animal can range hundreds of miles in a few months.
Female wolverines burrow into snow in February to create a den, which is used until weaning in mid-May. Areas inhabited non-seasonally by wolverines are thus restricted to zones with late-spring snowmelts. This fact has led to concern that global warming will shrink the ranges of wolverine populations.
The PBS series Nature released a documentary, “Wolverine: Chasing the Phantom” as episode #166 on 14 November 2010. This 53-minute documentary focuses on the efforts of a number of naturalists in the United States to track wolverines, collect genetic data, and learn more about wolverine populations, individual behavior and social behavior. It also tracks the raising of two male wolverines in captivity at an Alaska nature reserve from birth to maturity, and profiles the naturalists making these efforts.
For more information concerning the wolverine and conservation efforts visit the Wolverine Foundation
A view of Mount Susitna as viewed, looking to the northwest west, from Kincaid Park in Anchorage, Alaska.
This is a great spot for aircraft aficionados. The airport is just to the north and you will see 747s, World War II-era DC-3s, Cessnas, and just about anything else you can think of passing in front of the mountain on approach to the runway.
As usual, this image is available at my Zazzle store.
Click on image for full-size view.
Mount Susitna
Mount Susitna is 4,396 feet high. It is located on the west bank of the lower Susitna River, about 33 miles northwest of Anchorage, Alaska. The mountain, a prominent landmark in the Anchorage area, can be seen across the Knik Arm of the Cook Inlet from most of the city.
Often called The Sleeping Lady for its resemblance to a recumbent woman, the name “susitna” is sometimes said to derive from a Dena’ina legend, in which a woman named Susitna belonging to a race of giants vows to sleep until her beloved comes back from battle, but no such legend actually exists. The mountain’s Dena’ina name is Dghelishla, meaning “Little Mountain”; in English it was simply named for the Susitna River which means Sandy River.
Mt Susitna is a roche moutonnée, a landform created when a glacier flows over a resistant, topographically high, bedrock body, creating a smooth-sided and teardrop shaped feature aligned with the direction of ice flow.
The Anchorage bowl topography has been influenced by 5-7 glaciations. Over several thousand years, thick ice sheets from the Talkeetna, Chugach and Alaska Ranges flowed down Cook Inlet. The five well documented glaciations from oldest to most recent were the Mt Susitna, Caribou Hills, Eklutna, Knik and Naptowne. The earliest glaciation in the Anchorage area is known as the Mount Susitna for the erratics and other glacial features found on the top of the mountain. This is the time period when it obtained its characteristic streamlined shape. It is dated to the late Pliocene to the early Pleistocene (2-6 million years ago).
Kincaid Park encompasses over 1500 acres of land in the Western part of Anchorage. The park is bounded on the south by Turnagain Arm, on the west by Knik Arm, and on the north by Ted Stevens Anchorage International Airport. Noted for Nordic skiing trails, in snowless months the park is frequented by runners, bikers, hikers, archers, dog-trainers, motocross users, disc golfers, soccer teams, and rollerskiers. Other winter activities include snowshoeing, sledding and biathlon. The park was created in 1968 and in 1978 expanded to include the location of a Nike missile site.
The park is mostly forested, with birch, cottonwood, and spruce. Wildlife includes moose, lynx, bear, fox, eagles, porcupines, owls, and many others.
Little Campbell Lake offers ice-fishing in winter, boating and fishing in the summer.
The Tony Knowles Coastal Trail connects Kincaid Park to downtown Anchorage and provides excellent biking or skiing.
Here’s a cute, little-known animal; the Red Panda, also known as the Lesser Panda.
Like many species it is under pressure from humans. Someday the Earth may be a lonely, impoverished planet to live on.
Ailurus fulgens
The red panda (Ailurus fulgens, or shining-cat), which resembles a raccoon, live in the cool temperate bamboo forests in Sichuan and Yunnan Provinces in China, in the Himalayas, and in Myanmar. Locations with the highest density of red pandas include an area in the Himalayas that has been proposed as having been a refuge for a variety of endemic species in the Pleistocene.
Red pandas were once thought to be closely related to the giant panda, but genetics has shown they are more closely allied with the raccoon and weasel families. The animal is now considered a living fossil and only distantly related to the Giant Panda (Ailuropoda melanoleuca) , with which they share part of their range. Their common ancestor can be traced back to the Early Tertiary Period tens of millions of years ago, with a wide distribution across Eurasia.
In 2004, a tooth from a red panda species never before recorded in North America was discovered at the Gray Fossil Site in Tennessee. The tooth dates from 4.5–7 million years ago. In August 2010, archaeologists uncovered red panda fossil remains in Washington County in the US state of Tennessee. Although none are known to exist in the wild in North America today, it is believed the red panda thrived in the mountains of eastern Tennessee approximately 4.5 million years ago.
Slightly larger than a domestic cat, it has reddish-brown fur, a long, shaggy tail, and a waddling gait due to its short front legs. The average lifespan is 8–10 years, but individuals have been known to reach 15 years. They weigh between seven and 14 pounds. Their red-and-white markings blend in with the red mosses and white lichens that grow on the trees in which they live. Their soft, dense fur covers their entire body—even the soles of their feet.
Secretive and gentle creatures, adults are solitary except during mating season. They are generally quiet except for some twittering, tweeting, and whistling communication sounds. They have been reported to be both nocturnal and crepuscular, sleeping on tree branches or in tree hollows during the day and increasing their activity in the late afternoon and early evening hours. They sleep stretched out on a branch with legs dangling when it is hot, and curled up with its tail over the face when it is cold. They are very heat sensitive, with an optimal “well-being” temperature between 63 and 77 °F, and cannot tolerate temperatures over 77 °F.
Shortly after waking, red pandas clean their fur like a cat, licking their front paws and then rubbing their back, stomach and sides. They also rub their back and belly along the sides of trees or rocks. Then they patrol their territory, marking it with urine and a weak musk-smelling secretion from their anal gland. They search for food running along the ground or through the trees. Red pandas may alternately either use their forepaws to bring food to their mouth or place food directly into the mouth.
Like the Giant Panda, they cannot digest cellulose, so they must consume a large volume of bamboo to survive. Their diet consists of about two-thirds bamboo, but they also eat mushrooms, roots, acorns, lichen, and grasses. Occasionally, they supplement their diet with fish and insects. They do little more than eat and sleep due to their low-calorie diet. Their broad teeth and strong jaws allow them to chew bamboo’s tough leaves and stalks. The animals share another characteristic with the giant panda, they have a small, bony projection on their wrists, a “false thumb,’ that helps them grip bamboo stalks.
Reproduction: After a gestation of about 134 days, litters of one to four young are born. Young stay in the nest for about 90 days, remain close to their mother until the next mating season begins, and reach adult size at about 12 months. Adult red pandas lead solitary lives.
Conservation: Red pandas are listed as vulnerable on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species because of habitat loss. Worldwide population estimates range from fewer than 2,500 individuals to between 16,000 and 20,000 individuals. Although red pandas are protected by national laws in their range countries, their numbers in the wild continue to decline mainly due to habitat loss and fragmentation, poaching, and inbreeding depression.
Predators of the red panda include the snow leopard, martens (Mustelidae), and humans. If they feel threatened or sense danger, they may try to escape by climbing a rock column or tree. If they can no longer flee, they stand on their hind legs to make themselves appear larger and use the sharp claws on their front paws to defend themselves.
The primary threats to red pandas are direct harvest from the wild, live or dead, competition with domestic livestock resulting in habitat degradation, and deforestation resulting in habitat loss or fragmentation. The relative importance of these factors is different in each region, and is not well understood.For instance, in India the biggest threat seems to be habitat loss followed by poaching, while in China the biggest threat seems to be hunting and poaching. A 40% decrease in red panda populations has been reported in China over the last 50 years, and populations in western Himalayan areas are considered to be lower.
Deforestation can inhibit the spread of red pandas and exacerbate the natural population subdivision by topography and ecology, leading to severe fragmentation of the remaining wild population. Fewer than 40 animals in 4 separate groups share resources with humans in Nepal’s Langtang National Park, where only 6% of 660 sq mi is preferred red panda habitat. Although direct competition for food with domestic livestock is not significant, livestock can depress bamboo growth by trampling.
Small groups of animals with little opportunity for exchange between them face the risk of inbreeding, decreased genetic diversity, and even extinction. In addition, clearcutting for firewood or agriculture, including hillside terracing, removes old trees that provide maternal dens and decreases the ability of some species of bamboo to regenerate.
In Southwest China, red pandas are hunted for their fur, especially for the highly valued bushy tails from which hats are produced. In these areas, the fur is often used for local cultural ceremonies, and in weddings the bridegroom traditionally carries the hide. The “good-luck charm” red panda-tail hats are also used by local newlyweds.
Because the red panda is considered a very attractive animal, and is not much larger than a house cat, it would seem to be ideal for a pet. Despite this, and despite reports that Indira Gandhi kept red pandas as pets when she was a child, there does not seem to have ever been widespread adoption of these animals as pets. Due to its listing in CITES Appendix I, obtaining a red panda as a pet would now be quite difficult. Interestingly, due to the red panda’s high levels of captive breeding and recent successful efforts of domestication by selective breeding of the red fox, domestication could be possible. However, because of their low tolerances for high temperature areas, the red panda if ever domesticated may not be suitable as pets in some areas or special care would be needed to keep them happy. Though there is growing interest in the general public of the availability of this animal as a pet, there does not appear to be any person or group attempting to domestic the red panda through any process including selective breeding. Domestication may also be a viable method of successful conservation though it should not be the only form.
We had record-breaking snowfall in South Central alaska this last winter. Most of it has now melted though quite a bit remains on the mountains.
I thought this was a nice view for a spring day. Looking east towards the Chugach mountains from Anchorage.
New grass is coming up and leaf buds are beginning to open up as you can see on the willows here.
Click on image for full-size view.
Spring 2012
Every year the Goldpanners baseball team of Fairbanks, Alaska plays in the Midnight Sun Baseball Game. The game begins at midnight on the summer solstice, lit only by the sun. Fairbanks is only 160 miles south of the Arctic Circle, the sun is just beginning to set in the north as the game gets under way and, at its conclusion some three hours later, the sun begins to rise again – also in the north.
Baseball is not the only sport that could be played on the solstice. And, the idea of riding a moose is not new. See you at the polo grounds.
Click on image for full-size view.
Midnight Sun Polo
In northern Europe and Asia moose were used to carry riders and loads across inhospitable terrain. As a mount the moose has no equal in crossing bogs and windfalls, slipping through thickets, climbing over rocks, and swimming swiftly across broad, dangerous rivers. In the dense coniferous forests and bogs that cover much of northern Europe and Asia, a rider on horseback cannot outrun a rider on a moose-as Russian general Yermak Timofeyich found out when he began the conquest of Siberia on behalf of Czar Ivan the Terrible in the sixteenth century. To gain the upper hand over the Siberian moose riders, General Timofeitsch banned moose husbandry, killed off domesticated moose, and systematically hunted down moose riders to flay, impale, or mutilate them publicly as examples to others. It is likely that moose husbandry in the northern forests was just frequent enough to be a nuisance, since as we now know moose-for all their advantages as beasts of burden- are difficult to keep in captivity. Had trained moose been common and easy wards, the tough, adventuresome Cossacks would surely have changed mounts and pursued the moose riders on equal terms.
In Europe moose were also used to pull sleighs great distances across frozen wastes. One drawback to using moose in this way is that horses unacquainted with moose shy wildly and become uncontrollable when confronted by these strange-looking creatures. In the seventeenth century, the city council of the Estonian town of Dorpat (Tartu) forbade domesticated moose on its streets. One can only imagine what havoc horses out of control, hitched to a coach or wagon, could wreak in the town’s narrow streets after suddenly coming face to face with a moose innocently pulling a sleigh into town.
King Karl XI of Sweden considered mounting a cavalry regiment on moose, probably to take advantage of the terror they would strike into the hearts of enemy horses. No canon and musket fire, no lances and sabers would be needed to disperse the enemy’s cavalry charge. The mere appearance of moose on the battleground would put the enemy’s cavalry into heedless flight. Alas, the king’s grand plan came to naught, and experiments in domesticating moose in this century make it evident why. Moose could never prosper as cavalry mounts because of their catastrophic susceptibility to livestock diseases, and because of the great difficulties in feeding moose properly.
As early as 1869, the Russian zoologist and explorer Alexander von Middendorff wrote to the Tsar’s Government:“
“Even the civilized Europe these days has failed to domesticate the moose, the animal that doubtlessly can be of great utility. Our government ought to apply all possible efforts toward the domestication of this animal. This is doable. The reward would be great, and so would be the glory.”
After the seventeenth century, moose husbandry became a forgotten art for nearly four hundred years. In Sweden there was a debate in the late 18th century about the national value of using the moose as a domestic animal. Among other things, the moose was proposed to be used in postal distribution, and there was a suggestion to develop a moose-mounted cavalry. Such proposals remained unimplemented, mainly because the extensive hunting for moose nearly drove it to extinction and because of aggressiveness during the rutting period.
The idea of the moose domestication did not get much traction in Czarist Russia. However, it reappeared in the 1930s’ Soviet Union; it was suggested at the time that moose cavalry could be efficiently used even in the deep snow. In 1934, the Soviet Government’s Nature Reserve Committee ordered creation of moose reserves (zapovedniks) and moose breeding centers. Experimental work, initiated by Petr Alexandrovich Manteufel, took place at a number of locations: in Yakutia, at the Serpukhov Experimental Game Farm, and in the Buzuluksy Bor Nature Reserve in the Orenburg Region.
Russian scientists tackled the issue of moose husbandry systematically-and were successful. They discovered that moose could be trained to give milk, carry loads or riders, pull sleds and logs, go to pasture, and return willingly to stables. However, the work was not finished in time for the World War II, and when the war came, the entire idea of cavalry as a combat force was swept away.
After the war, the idea of domesticating the moose was pursued again, with the focus on agricultural use. It was thought that the moose, whose very name means twig eater in an Algonquian language, could provide an ideal way of improving the utilization of the biomass production potential of the taiga of northern and eastern Russia, which are not particularly suitable for either food crop planting or conventional animal husbandry. If the moose could be farmed, they could be provided with feed practically for free, utilizing the by-products of timber harvesting: tree branches and bark.
To study the behavior of the moose, each animal at Kostroma Moose Farm is equipped with a radio transmitter.
The first experimental moose farm, led by Yevgeny Knorre, was launched in 1949 by the staff of the Pechora-Ilych Nature Reserve, outside of the settlement of Yaksha in the Komi Republic. Rare photos from that period, one of a moose being ridden and one of a moose pulling a sledge, reproduced from Ye. P. Knorre’s 1969 paper, “Behavioral changes in elk in the process of its domestication”, can be seen at one of the Kostroma Moose Farm web site’s pages.
Since 1963, moose breeding has continued at Kostroma Moose Farm, which had a herd of 33 tame moose as of 2003. Although at this stage the farm is not expected to be a profit-making enterprise, it obtains some income from the sale of moose milk and from visiting tourist groups. Its main value, however, is seen in the opportunities it offers for the research in the physiology and behavior of the moose, as well as in the insights it provides into the general principles of animal domestication.
A fully grown moose can carry about 275 pounds (125 kg) and work with a sleigh laden with 600 to 800 pounds (3 00-400 kg); it can pull a heavier sleigh, but not all day. Its walking speed is 1.8 to 2.5 miles per hour (3-4 km/h), and the comfortable working range in a four- to six-hour working day is about 12.5 miles (20 km). Greater performances are possible. Moose can carry packs through the roughest of terrain without doing the slightest damage to the pack. They crawl under windfalls, slither across swamps, jump obstacles, negotiate thickets, and swim torrents. Yet at the end of the day, the packs remain securely in place. Hand-reared moose have utter faith in their trainers. They will, for instance, calmly walk up to an aircraft whose engines are howling. Cow moose trained for milking shower their keepers with affection-a “problem” that, in one form or another, has been reported by all keepers of moose. The most useful working moose, not surprisingly, are castrated bulls, which grow large and strong and are easy to handle. Those who have kept tame moose report that the experience is more like keeping a friendly, loyal dog (one six feet high at the shoulder) than like hosting a member of the deer family.
Although moose are useful and have some endearing characteristics, one reason they were never domesticated is that they are notoriously difficult to feed and keep healthy in captivity. Attempts by Russian scientists to subsidize the natural forage of moose with oats, barley, and wheatgerm failed as the moose became ill. What work the moose did perform was sustained by natural forages. Today, we know that the natural diet of moose can be supplemented with oat mash, beets, and potatoes; however, disease remains a problem. Moose are not only susceptible to livestock diseases, but also to the diseases of other deer species. American moose have an especially dismal record in captivity.
A problem hindering the domestication of moose is that they cannot be worked year round. In late winter, spring, and early summer, they are thin and weak and cannot be used as beasts of burden on natural forage alone.
I thought I would add another view of Chester Creek. The view in the original Chester Creek post looks to the East; this view looks West from the same general area. And I used a different style this time than last.
Hope you like it.
Click on image for full-size view.
Chester Creek in Anchorage, AK looking West
Spring has come at last to Alaska and as the snow begins to give way in the Chugach mountains frigid meltwater flows through Chester Creek in Anchorage not far from where I live. The birch and other trees have yet to leaf out, but the promise of warmer weather is in the air. This image is from a photo I took.
Click on the image for full-size view.
Chester Creek
A gray spring day at a pond, still partially choked with ice, not far from where I live. Two Canada Geese, often referred to as “honkers,” swim together in the frigid water.
Click on image for full-size view. As usual this is available at my Zazzle store.
Canada Geese
The Canada Goose, Branta canadensis, has a black head and neck, white patches on the face, and a brownish-gray body.
The black head and neck with white “chinstrap” distinguish the Canada Goose from all other goose species, with the exception of the Barnacle Goose, but the latter has a black breast, and also gray, rather than brownish, body plumage.
The Canada Goose ranges 30 to 43 inches in length and has a 50 to 73 inch wingspan. Males usually weigh 7.1–14 lbs and can be very aggressive in defending territory. The female looks virtually identical but is slightly lighter at 5.5–12 lbs, and has a different honk. The life span in the wild of geese that survive to adulthood ranges 10–24 years
Canada Geese are native to North America. They breed in Canada and the northern United States in a variety of habitats. Nests are usually located in an elevated area near water such as streams, lakes, ponds and sometimes on a beaver lodge. Eggs are laid in a shallow depression lined with plant material and down.
In recent years, Canada Goose populations in some areas have grown substantially, so much so that many consider them pests for their droppings, bacteria in their droppings, noise, and confrontational behavior. This problem is partially due to the removal of natural predators and an abundance of safe, man-made bodies of water such as found on golf courses, in public parks and beaches, and in planned communities. Due in part to the interbreeding of various migratory subspecies with the introduced non-migratory Giant subspecies, Canada Geese are frequently a year-around feature of such urban environments.
Canada Geese have reached northern Europe naturally, as has been proved by ringing recoveries. The birds are of at least the subspecies parvipes, and possibly others. Canada Geese are also found naturally on the Kamchatka Peninsula in eastern Siberia, eastern China, and throughout Japan.
Like most geese, the Canada Goose is migratory with the wintering range being most of the United States. Honking from large groups of Canada Geese flying in V-shaped formation signal the transitions into spring and autumn. In some areas, migration routes have changed due to changes in habitat and food sources. In mild climates from California to the Great Lakes, some of the population has become non-migratory due to adequate winter food supply and a lack of former predators.
Canada Geese are primarily herbivores, although they sometimes eat small insects and fish. Their diet includes green vegetation and grains. The Canada Goose eats a variety of grasses when on land. It feeds by grasping a blade of grass with the bill, then tearing it with a jerk of the head. The Canada Goose also eats grains such as wheat, beans, rice, and corn when they are available. In the water, it feeds from silt at the bottom of the body of water. It also feeds on aquatic plants, such as seaweeds. In urban cities, they are also known to pick food out of garbage bins.
Adult geese are often seen leading their goslings in a line, usually with one parent at the front, and the other at the back. While protecting their goslings, parents often violently chase away nearby creatures, from small blackbirds to lone humans that approach, after warning them by giving off a hissing sound and will then attack with bites and slaps of the wings if the threat does not retreat or has seized a gosling. Most of the species that prey on eggs will also take a gosling. Although parents are hostile to unfamiliar geese, they may form groups of a number of goslings and a few adults, called crèches.
According to Elton John, “Mars ain’t the kind of place to raise your kids. In fact it’s cold as hell …”
NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter has taken a picture of what they say is an elephant, but looks more like a young mammoth to me. My artistic input was merely to give the original black and white photo a reddish tint for atmosphere.
It’s the low gravity whut lets ‘em grow so big.
http://www.space.com/15207-mars-lava-elephant-mro.html
Elephant on Mars Sculpted by Lava Flow
SPACE.com Staff
09 April 2012
Martian Mammoth
The dried flood of lava over the surface of Mars has created the spitting image of the eye and trunk of an elephant.
The curve of the animal’s forehead and the dent of an ear also appear in a new photo taken by the High Resolution Imaging Science Experiment (HiRISE) on NASA’s Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter.
“This is a good example of the phenomena ‘pareidolia,’ where we see things (such as animals) that aren’t really there,” University of Arizona planetary geologist Alfred McEwen wrote in an update posted on the university’s HiRISE website.
The Mars elephant illusion photo shows a region of the Red Planet called the Elysium Planitia, which is the youngest flood-lava province on Mars.
Scientists aren’t sure if the lava flows on Mars were deposited quickly, or over a longer time period, as is the case on Earth, where most lava floods were put in place over years to decades.
“This is probably true for much of the lava on Mars as well,” McEwen wrote. “An elephant can walk away from the slowly advancing flow front. However, there is also evidence for much more rapidly flowing lava on Mars, a true flood of lava. In this instance, maybe this elephant couldn’t run away fast enough.”
The Mars Reconnaissance Orbiter, which has been circling the Red Planet since 2006, was launched in 2005. The orbiter, currently in an extended phase of its mission, has transmitted more data to Earth than all other interplanetary missions combined, NASA officials have said.
A couple of other interesting photos from Mars:
Earth seen from Mars
Earth seen from Mars
The Earth is the small dot near the center of the photograph.
Sunrise on Mars
Sunrise on Mars
