Mammals Archives | JuneauNature

Bob Armstrong’s nursing-fawn photo on right sums up the defining talent of mammals: warm-blooded, hairy milk-producers. (Well, I guess we guys can only lay claim to the first 2 attributes.)

Mammals is divided into Carnivores, Hooved and Rodents. Explore those sub-categories or view the entire JuneauNature hierarchy at this site map.

In Discovery’s Nature Studies program, pioneered at Harborview Elementary, mammals were front-&-center right out of the gate. That was partly because, in writing the first edition of Nature of Southeast Alaska, 1992, my then-senior-authors Rita O’Clair and Bob Armstrong—strongly grounded in plants, inverts, birds and fish—assigned me the mammals and habitats sections. Cathy Pohl and I concurrently wrote and illustrated dozens of mammal-related teacher materials for projects such as the Jordan Creek Curriculum.

In following decades, as my pen&ink creations transitioned more toward photography and GIS , those old materials gathered dust. But this winter (2021-22), they’re getting a facelift. Discovery staff are resurrecting our traditional pairing of bones-&-tracks, a natural and mutually reinforcing combination for winter Nature Studies.

This mammal family tree is an example. Based on more generic trees for North America, I largely winnowed out non Southeast-Alaskan branches as they climbed through the Age of Mammals (Cenozoic). Understanding evolutionary relationships is helpful when comparing, say, weasel to wolverine skulls—or when puzzling over similarities in mouse and marmot gait patterns.

For the use of our naturalists, and for anyone wishing to dig deeper into local mammals, I’ve compiled those 1990s resources, along with some fun newer stuff, into a downloadable document on Mammals of Lingít Aaní.

Not counting marine mammals, we have 57 known species in Southeast Alaska. No attempt is made here in JuneauNature to describe or even list them all. A comprehensive introduction is in the massively updated Mammals section of The Nature of Southeast Alaska (Carstensen, Armstrong & O’Clair, 3rd ed, 2014, linked above). A more exhaustive technical treatment with range maps is in MacDonald & Cook’s 2007 Mammals and Amphibians of Southeast Alaska.