Wild Shots: See photos of Mother Nature in Alaska<\/a>]<\/ins><\/p>\nMating season is in spring, but fertilized eggs are not implanted in a female’s uterus until nine or 10 months later. Then, the embryos develop into babies in about a month, the newborns staying in the nest for a couple of months or so. Litter size is variable, usually four to eight kits, but well-fed females can produce much larger litters (up to 18 kits). Juvenile females become sexually mature while still in the natal nest and may (if a mature male was nearby) already carry fertilized eggs when they disperse to establish their own home ranges. Males can’t inseminate their female litter-mates because they don’t mature until about a year old.<\/p>\n
Here are a few more interesting tidbits about weasels: They have excellent color vision, unlike most mammals. They climb well, with reversible ankle joints (like squirrels) so they can descend a tree head-first. If threatened by a superior predator, such as a cat, they may pretend to be dead; if not eaten, they quickly revive and run away.<\/p>\n
At this time in October, there was a thin sheet of ice on my home pond in the morning and the ponds at Eaglecrest were ice-covered. Nevertheless, we saw caddisfly larvae in their cases, hanging out on the bottom of a few ponds or moving extremely slowly. They probably spend the winter as larvae, feeding on detritus when possible, but otherwise quiescent; pupation and metamorphosis into flying adults would occur the following year.<\/p>\n
A few blueberries clung on their bushes, and I was informed that they were exceptionally tasty. The bright green fronds of deer fern and fern-leaf goldthread stood out on a background of brown, dead and dying vegetation. On the surface of some old skunk cabbage leaves, tiny pools of water had coalesced and frozen solid, forming jewel-like, nearly spherical beads that gleamed in the sunlight.<\/p>\n
We ate our lunches in warm sunshine, all spread out in the lee of a grassy bank. The first wintery walk of the year turned out to be a good one.<\/p>\n
• Mary F. Willson is a retired professor of ecology.<\/em> “On The Trails” is a weekly column that appears in the Juneau Empire every Wednesday.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Darting in and out of the rocks was a small, white critter that quickly disappeared. <\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":106,"featured_media":64668,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_stopmodifiedupdate":false,"_modified_date":"","wds_primary_category":11,"footnotes":""},"categories":[11,4],"tags":[149],"yst_prominent_words":[],"class_list":["post-64667","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-home2","category-news","tag-outdoors"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64667","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/106"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=64667"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/64667\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/64668"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=64667"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=64667"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=64667"},{"taxonomy":"yst_prominent_words","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.juneauempire.com\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/yst_prominent_words?post=64667"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}