Muskeg Love, or a Bog Blog
We've just returned from an amazing trip to southeast Alaska. Alaska is full of many wonderful, big things: ice-sculpted mountains, huge trees, humpback whales, orcas, black and brown bears, mountain goats, tidewater glaciers. Dawes Glacier has a wall of ice some 300 feet tall above the waterline, and it extends about a thousand feet down under the water! Big! But of course this blog is about (mostly) the small, weird things, and so I want to talk about my love of the muskeg, a habitat of many things that are small and strange. Muskeg near Wrangell, Alaska Muskeg is a First Peoples word in common usage in Canada and Alaska that means a grassy bog or swamp. We suspected that bogs were near when we were hiking around Ward Lake near Ketchikan. The river feeding into the lake was the color of strong tea. Some bog plants, such as sphagnum, leach tannins into the water, staining it. You may have heard of tannins in wine; it's the same group of compounds. Tannins not only add color,...