There’s far more to Alaskan wildlife than moose and grizzlies. Above: The weasel from the story.
Holding my breath camera ready, I crouched by a ledge of lichen-crusted shale. Around me stretched an expanse of wind-scraped tundra hills grooved with caribou trails, marked here and there by the bleached bones of wolf kills, grizzly scat, and the hoofprints of muskoxen. But my focus just then wasn’t on that limitless landscape and the unseen, outsized creatures that roamed it, but on a cleft in the nearby rock.
I waited two minutes; five. A pair of bright, unblinking black eyes materialized out of the shadowed crevice, a stare so piercing I couldn’t avoid a startle reflex. And behind those eyes, a lithe, immaculately furred body—reddish brown uppers, white undersides, and a black-tipped tail. I was face to face with Mustela erminea, the short-tailed weasel.
Among Alaska’s fiercest and widespread predators, it’s capable of taking down hares many times its 7-oz. size, though it specializes in smaller prey. In winter it turns pure white except for that black tail tip and remains on the constant move even in arctic cold, hunting in rodent tunnels beneath the snow. It’s known to the Inupiat as tibiaq, and they warn their children it might slither down their throats while they sleep and steal their souls. Despite that menacing reputation, this critter was…well, dammit, cute.
In typical weasel fashion, this guy cased me fearlessly, disappearing from one crevice and materializing in another; as he worked to within arm’s length, I couldn’t help feeling that I was being some crack-fueled whack-a-mole, he kept popping up and vanishing. My shutter whirred as I burned through dozens of frames, many of them blurred or empty. But I managed a couple keeper shots; and the minutes we spent together on that tundra hill remain on my all-time list of wildlife highlights, still vivid decades later.
No one comes all the way to Alaska to see a weasel. The Great Land’s cachet revolves around its iconic, charismatic megafauna: moose, whales, bears, and so on. I totally get that; big wild animals are exactly what pulled me north. Not that I didn’t have an appreciation of smaller creatures; I just paid them far less attention than the marquee lineup, like pretty much everyone else. And sure enough, my first grizzly, caribou, and wolf sightings brought on adrenaline spikes still etched in memory. But from my first days in wild Alaska, I began encountering those myriad other beings that made their home here—some, mere scuttles and rustles underfoot or flashes of fur; others, due to their size or habits, easier to identify, watch, and get to know.
I had my work cut out for me. On land and sea, Alaska is home to 112 mammal species—a total I find astounding. Though I’ve spent decades surrounded by and focused on the Great Land’s natural world, I can claim to have seen fewer than half that number; and I doubt most wild-wise Alaskans can tally more. That’s partly due to Alaska’s mind-boggling size, with some animals existing in ultra-remote areas; some species are also rare and fleeting, or hard to spot or identify even if they’re right in front of you—or all the above. Keep in mind that Alaska is home to seven species of mouselike vole; 10 types of shrews, six varieties of bat, and nine different seals (that’s not counting sea lions nor walrus). Many lifelong residents would struggle to name even one species of any of these groups correctly, let alone distinguish a meadow vole from a singing vole. Pretty humbling to face up to how little we really know about what we claim to love.
Familiarity is said to breed contempt; but the more time I’ve spent around any of Alaska’s less-heralded, smaller creatures, and the more I learned of their lives, the more I’ve come to consider them all equally fascinating; in fact, downright miraculous. Sure, an orca, Alaska’s largest predatory mammal, has it all going on; but at the other end of the size spectrum, consider the water shrew: the world’s smallest diving mammal. Found across much of Alaska, this fierce little predator, less than 6 inches long (more than half of that tail) and weighing half an ounce, resembles its land-borne, perennially fast-forward cousins; but it does its hunting underwater in streams, sniffing for insect prey as it paddles along the bottom, buoyed to the surface by air bubbles trapped in its fur, its tiny heart beating 16 times every second over its entire two-year lifespan.
Over forty-some years hanging around Alaska rivers, I’ve seen just one water shrew alive—watched as it scurried to bank’s edge and slid beneath the surface of Miluaq Creek—and dozens more in the stomachs of fish: grayling and pike that turned predator into prey. That’s just one example of thinking outside the big-animal box; every species has its own unique story and knowing more is addictive.
While water shrew-watching may offer a scant success rate, some Alaskan mammal species are far more accessible— and at times can seem downright friendly. Hoary marmots, beefy northern wood-chuck cousins, locally common on rocky slopes, display a calm curiosity toward humans who do the same; beavers, most active in twilight hours, will often tolerate viewers who remain stationary and low-profiled as they go about their endless dam-building and food-gathering.
Feistier and more personality-laden than their larger gray relatives to the south, red squirrels will go out of their way to engage and cuss out interlopers passing through their patch of woods. Porcupines, sedate by nature, may feed in trees, unconcerned by our presence just feet away.
That’s just a short list; I’ve also found that individuals of certain smaller species can be tolerant, curious, or sociable on a semi-predictable basis. Over the years I’ve met a half-dozen-plus foxes, several lynx, and a passel of snowshoe hares and arctic ground squirrels that seemed surprisingly relaxed around humans. Maybe acting ‘tame’ is a regularly occurring, gene-controlled behavioral outcome for these and other species; or it could be that special circumstances encourage such behavior to emerge. For example, it’s a no-brainer that locally dense numbers of a given species tend to result in a general tolerance that radiates outward to include us; I’ve experienced just that several times.
Here’s the cool thing about casting a wider net when wildlife viewing in the Great Land: you don’t have to choose between, say, caribou and lemmings; they both occupy the same habitat, and while waiting for the big guys, you can watch the smaller. The actions or abundance of one species affects the other. Both compete for an overlapping assemblage of food plants; and large numbers of either can have an impact on the other in sometimes surprising ways. For example, thousands of grazing caribou can trample tundra down to bare earth, depriving the rodents of cover and food; and in rare instances, caribou have even been observed deliberately killing and eating lemmings. Who knew?
It keeps going like that, and we’ve just brushed against mammals. Keep in mind that in addition to those 112 mammals, the subcontinental vastness of Alaska is home or waypoint to more than 500 species of bird; more than 600 insect types, and a similar count of fish; then add in 2500-plus different plants. The task of identifying, let alone knowing them all, would take lifetimes. But lean in and look down. Keeping a sharp eye out for anything that moves, and the signs of its passing, is a self-fueling habit that broadens both your appreciation and understanding of the complex web of living things that make up not only Alaska, but this little rock we all cling to, hurtling through space and time.
Nick’s new, all-ages color photo story-book, Romeo the Friendly Wolf, is available at nickjans.com.
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