Thunk!

Late at night, when it’s quiet and I’m upstairs in my office, I hear our neighbor. He visits without fail, usually after dark, sometimes with a friend.

For almost a year now, northern flying squirrels have stuck landings on the wood siding of our house. I first saw one appear at the window feeder last fall, when I was on the phone with a friend.

That was a big night for me. For all the hours I’ve spent outside in the dark in Alaska during the past 20 years, I’d never seen a flying squirrel, though I’ve always looked for them. I was beginning to doubt a biologist who said they were as plentiful as red squirrels, the noisy, hyper-noticeable residents of the spruce forest.

Now, flying squirrels visit us every night. Sometimes we know of their visit only because the blob of peanut butter on the feeder has vanished.

They are mysterious creatures, with teddy-bear eyes and a blanket of skin from wrist to ankle that allows them to glide from tree to tree, or to the side of our house. Sometimes, when I’m outside at night and it’s pitch dark, I can hear their high-pitched squeak, which sounds like nothing else in the forest. It’s a sound you’d miss if you never wore earplugs at all those Judas Priest concerts and lost your high-frequency hearing.

In the growing light of early summer, another neighbor appeared in the spruce woods surrounding the house. I was tenting in the yard one night, awaiting the return of our bad, bad runaway dogs, when I noticed flashes of movement around a wooden owl box nailed to a spruce tree.

On evenings after that, I’d walk out to see a round head popping out of the box. Boreal owls are the tiniest of Alaska’s owls, not much bigger than your hand. We knew they were around in past years by their spooky trilling calls we hear most springtimes. But these were the first to breed in the owl-box; we knew the owls had young because sometimes a smaller head would peek out of the box. The wee owl-let would be turn its head toward me every time I pulled out my bike for a ride to work; its eyes would follow me until I was out of sight. There’s a start to your day.