“Are they like ducks?” This question from a newspaper reporter in Nome, Alaska, in the summer of 1984. She had invited us to her apartment to be interviewed about the muskox research work we were doing in the hills near Nome. She intended to write a piece for the local newspaper, The Nome Nugget.
It was afternoon when John and I arrived at the small gray building where she and her roommate shared an apartment. After introductory niceties the interview began with this odd question. I didn’t know what to make of it, as muskoxen are large grazing animals, and ducks are, well, ducks. Looking for a way in I said “okay, muskoxen have four legs, and ducks have two.”
Then she explained: she was wondering if muskox calves were like ducklings, in that they would follow the first animal they saw. So, she knew a little about the famous work of Konrad Lorenz, who found that geese (not ducks) would imprint on the first animals they saw when they hatched.
I said something like “well yes, muskox calves do bond with their mothers after birth.” We did not get into the differences Lorenz found in how hatching goslings and ducklings differ in how they bond with their apparent parent, nor did we mention that muskox calves are placental mammals born to lactating mothers, rather than hatching from eggs. We hoped that difference was well understood.
The subsequent discussion went surprisingly well, given the strange opening question, and a reasonably accurate short piece appeared in the Nugget some days later, with a large photo of John and me, me unfortunately with wet hair plastered down the sides of my head. We’d had no warning the photographer was looking for us.
For my graduate studies, I lived and breathed muskox biology and behavior for about seven years, starting in 1983. I was looking at nursing behavior as a possible indicator of nutritional status of the animals, and although most of my work was with captive muskoxen at the Large Animal Research Station* at the university in Fairbanks, I also worked on wild, free-ranging muskoxen near Nome in 1983, ’84, and ’85, ’84 being the longest field season.
Wildlife field work can be an adventure, sometimes good, sometimes bad, and spending time in remote communities, likewise, can be an adventure. Memories of those times resurfaced as though by a magnetic pull when I read an article in the August 17, 2020 issue of The New Yorker magazine, titled “Wanderlust: How a summer tracking musk oxen in Alaska led to a lifetime on the road,” by Jon Lee Anderson.
Forced by the pandemic to pause his relentless traveling and stay home for a change, Anderson had unearthed his old journals and read the notes he’d made in 1978, 42 years before.
As a 21-year-old, Anderson had traveled to Nunivak Island to make his fortune collecting qiviut, the brownish-gray wool of muskoxen, that he expected to find lying around on the ground. Qiviut is very long and fine, very warm, and very valuable. Because the fibers are so long it can be spun into very fine yarn and knitted into exquisitely soft garments.
Only six years after Anderson’s time on Nunivak Island we were about 300 miles to the north, near Nome, using radio-telemetry to track a small herd of muskoxen, so that we could observe their behavior.
Our adventure had a few hair-raising moments: like being exposed in a treeless landscape during an electrical storm. And weeks later we wondered again if our ends were nigh when we realized that a big brown bear, with two big two-year-old cubs, was rapidly advancing on us with serious intent before stopping to stand on hind legs and look us over more carefully. Reconsidering, the sow turned away, leading her youngsters as fast as they could go straight up a mountain, their three silhouettes disappearing over the top just minutes later.
Since that summer Anderson has adventured far and wide. His Nunivak summer reads as particularly foolish though, going alone to remote places where travel is very difficult, driven by a gold-rush fever for qiviut. He’s lucky the locals were kind to him, giving him food and lending him a small rifle.
Anderson’s slog around the island, the word adventure seems too kind, sounds grueling and mostly rings true, but some details stopped me in my tracks and even made me laugh. He says that “kites wheeled overhead” and “a stork on a nearby slope strutted about scornfully”. These sorts of claims make a person squirm. Kites and storks, scornful or otherwise, do not occur anywhere near Alaska. Perhaps, rather than kites, he was seeing jaegers, and it’s likely a sandhill crane was stalking by, rather than a stork.
Out on the tundra hill tops near Nome we had thrilled to see thousands of cranes swirling high, high overhead before setting a glide path, en masse, to their nesting grounds in eastern Siberia. It was the noise that made us look up. The cacophony of their guttural croaking was loud to us, down on the ground; it must have been deafening up there. Records of birds occurring on Nunivak Island include both jaegers and sandhill cranes.
But the real howler is when he describes how the muskoxen that he startled “loped away, as quick and graceful as gazelles.” Muskoxen are built to conserve heat, with deep heavy bodies, relatively short legs, and amazing thick wool. They can run fast when needed, and we even saw adult cows playfully spinning in circles on spring days just after the snow had finally melted. But they quickly overheated, panting to a stop. They certainly weren’t graceful, let alone gazelle-like.
I wondered where the famously fussy New Yorker fact checkers were on this story. Humorist David Sedaris good naturedly complains about their fact checkers giving him grief about writing that the spider in his window was getting fat because he was feeding her extra flies. The fact checkers huffed that spiders don’t get fat thighs; but Sedaris was hoping for a little leeway for a funny story.
Like Anderson, we also collected loose qiviut when we found it. We shared ours with a fibre artist who spun it into lovely, thin yarn. Anderson’s lonely slog through tussocks and clouds of biting insects also yielded a small bag of qiviut, which he left with a friend near Anchorage. It didn’t bring the fortune he’d dreamed of, but it did yield a hat.
And the question “are they like ducks?” remains in our family repertoire, popping up whenever the conditions are right for a non sequitur.
*since renamed: The R.G. White Large Animal Research Station (LARS), University of Alaska Fairbanks
** Muskox image credit: Mary Lieurance Sease