Winter solstice dawns clear, with the sky awash in cloudy streaks of remnant aurora and northern stars sitting above a cold atmosphere. The temperature here at the snow-covered surface of the Earth is six below.

The day is dark, and will it stay that way for a while yet. I stoke the wood stove and walk a small loop for the newspaper with the dogs, who are black whisps bounding through the darkness. I spill sunflower seeds on the platform feeder and spread a wad of peanut butter on the window box.

After I feed the dogs, they curl up in their spots and go back to sleep, joining my wife and daughter, who are still dreaming on this longest of northern nights. Our baby’s breathing is rhythmic and peaceful.

At 9 a.m., the sky is still dusky enough that trees and the sky merge in a dark curtain. Sunrise won’t be here until 10:58 a.m. In Fairbanks, that’s when the sun pops over the pointy peaks of the Alaska Range to the south of us. There, it arcs over the mountains and floats to the west, never reaching higher than two fingers above the white peaks named Hayes, Hess, and Deborah. It will drop behind those mountains at 2:39 p.m. That will be it for this solstice day, a day people notice here.

Winter solstice is unique here among American cities. Cold air robs our closest star of whatever punch it might have at this latitude. Direct sunlight this time of year provides no warmth on your cheek. Solar panels don’t work now, sitting idly on a few rooftops, and sunlight striking the bulb of a thermometer does not excite the mercury to action. Fairbanks is a cold place.

The three hours, 41 minutes and 29 seconds of daylight today makes the night more than 20 hours long. And while that provides plenty of foraging time for the flying squirrels and boreal owls, a person wonders how the songbirds, inactive in darkness, make a go of it up here.

The glob of peanut butter hardens on the window box, waiting for the first members of the small gang of songbirds that visits our acre every day. I sit by the table reading the paper with a strong cup of coffee.

At 9:33 a.m., coincidentally the precise time of civil twilight, a red-breasted nuthatch lands on the feeder and begins pecking at the peanut butter, which has turned to cement in the six-below air. The nuthatch is a handsome addition to the small winter flock on this plot of spruce trees, with its orange belly, black eyestripe that makes it look like an African tribesman, and slightly upturned needle beak. Nuthatches are showing up at many Fairbanks feeders this winter, which is a mild surprise to birders; the birds usually escape the cold and dark by migrating in fall to warmer places. We wonder if these pioneers will last the winter.

With the nuthatch hammering at the peanut butter, the shadow of a second small bird appears. It’s a favorite in these parts, a boreal chickadee. In contrast to the black-capped chickadee—ubiquitous at feeders throughout North America—the boreal is more earthy and subdued, wearing a coat of brown and black feathers with an eye like a small black BB. If the cheery black-capped is the dapper member of the chickadee family, the boreal is its Carharrts-wearing brother. I see the tiny birds in lonely spruce forests, miles from any sunflower seeds. When I hear a chickadee when I’m on a long ski trip I assume it’s a boreal. The tiny birds represent a wildness to me, and it’s always good to see them, whether at home or on a trip.

Both the nuthatch and the boreal chickadee showed up at the start of civil twilight, a time defined as when the sun is 6 degrees below the horizon, more simply as dawn and dusk.

After I see the birds, I use the day’s new light to go out to gather some logs for the wood stove. At civil twilight, it’s too dark to read a book outside, but you can split wood into kindling without nicking your fingers. Pilots using the landscape to navigate appreciate civil twilight because it extends their flying time. The sky has brightened to the point where you can tell a spruce tree from a birch. Ravens chuckle above the treetops as they commute into town from their mysterious roosts in quiet spruce groves. Redpolls trill as the tiny finches prepare to monopolize the feeding platform. The shortest day is now in full swing.

Organisms within our house begin to stir. Kristen and Anna have a day planned, and they prepare in the glow of electric lights. Our two dogs rise from their nests when they hear me work the zipper on my jacket. It’s time to be outside, to spend solar noon on the cold, newfallen dusting of snow.

I click into my skis and head for a good dog loop to mark the winter solstice. On our way out of the yard, Chloe nips my mitten in excitement; Poops is well ahead, leading the charge into the day. Snowshoe hare tracks run in random lanes across the snow behind the house. Near my neighbor’s house, I see fresh ski tracks leading towards the university. Dave Klein, our 80-year old neighbor, has skied into work again. I can picture him in his blue anorak and nylon pants and leather mittens, striding along as he did forty years ago. He recently printed a picture of himself from 1947, standing next to a Model-A Ford on the gravel of the brand-new Alaska Highway. I sometimes wonder how he’s endured so many winters up here. This is my twentieth, and the darkness and deep cold of December and January sometimes makes me wonder if humans can thrive in low light. I find it difficult to leave the sheets on some dark mornings, with no cue from the sun, and I feel wistful when the clock nears three and the light is draining from the sky. The best defense, which neighbor Dave employs, is to embrace what light we have.

The dogs and I cross a road and make for my old stomping grounds, a protected 100-acre forest of spruce trees and summer wetlands. In winter the trail network crisscrosses Pearl Creek, a little waterway that’s ankle-deep at its spring peak. When I lived on a little cabin 20 steps from the creek my first 12 years in Alaska, I’d sometimes pitch a tent near Pearl Creek to hear it gurgle in the spring, as it washed the snowmelt from the hills to the Chena River, and eventually the Bering Sea. Sleeping there gave me the illusion that I was deep in the wilderness, despite being 10 miles from an international airport; these trails can have the same effect.

I veer off the trails at a curve and start skiing over tussocks to a special grove of spruce on the creek. As I walk on skis over tundra toward the tall trees that are indicative of a creek bottom, I strain to see a small tree on the forest floor. When I find it, all bent over like the Charlie Brown Christmas tree, I’ve found my dog Jane’s grave. I shake snow off the little tree, the one I transplanted after Jane’s death, and it springs upright.

Jane was the dog of my first decade-plus in Alaska. On summer solstice in 2000, I buried her here with the help of my friend Andy, who helped me chip a grave from the permafrost. On that day, the summer solstice that’s almost impossible to imagine now, one can read a book using only natural light, every hour of the day. Your fingers would turn to stone if you held a book in front of you today.

Jane’s collar hangs in a seven-foot spruce with a broken top. I shake the snow off the tree, bend it down to me, and give the collar a kiss. As I think of my old pal, I also think of how Christmas music this time of year reminds me of my parents. My dad, who died two months after we buried Jane here, visited me at my cabin off Pearl Creek my first summer in Alaska, when Jane was a puppy. My mom, who died last year, never made it this far north. She loved to see new things and eventually would have made it up. But Alzheimer’s set in early, robbing her of the ability to travel more than a decade ago, and the chance to visit never came.

After a goodbye to my parents and Jane, I cross the frozen puddles that make up the winter version of Pearl Creek. The dogs are waiting ahead on the trail. I join them and ski on paths I know blindfolded.

We are reaching solar noon, the midpoint of the day. Most people will pass this subtle milestone without noticing it. At 12:50 p.m., the sky is bright, but clouds to the south hide the sun. There will be no direct sunlight falling on us today. Skiing up a familiar trail, rutted because of a lack of snow, I hear a downy woodpecker call. Two gray jays appear, and a raven perches on the crown of a spruce. I wonder why they appear all at once, as most creatures are hard to find this time of year. It’s a good solstice moment.

I ski home, having made a wonderful loop the dogs seemed to enjoy just as much as I did. I reach the door just before sunset, 2:39 p.m. I go in and let in some air to the main chamber of the woodstove. After I give them a treat, the dogs curl up by the fire, and I sit back to watch the birds at our feeder. My new favorites are the pine grosbeaks. They are shapely and round and so smooth you want to cup them in your hand, but most engaging about them is their color. Males have bright red feathers along their backs; females are tangerine orange. They splash tropical color on our black and white world.

Looking out the window, I can tell the sun has dropped behind the Alaska Range, and the dusk portion of civil twilight has again begun. I pull a chair to the window and watch for the last bird foraging in the low light. Will the birds use every second of dusk before they head back to roost in places unknown? I guess that they will.

Dawns and dusks are longer in Fairbanks than in lower latitudes because of where we’re positioned on the planet. While San Francisco gets an hour of total remnant light each day, civil twilight in Fairbanks gives small creatures about three hours of extra foraging time. That’s no small thing.

I sit in a chair and watch the feeder again as the bluish light of day fades. The end of civil twilight today is 4:06 p.m., so I expect to see little birds until about 4. But no. The last bird on the feeder is a boreal chickadee. It flies off into the dusk at 3:45 p.m.

I continue watching the feeder, but see only deepening darkness. No birds. It feels a bit lonely to know they are gone for the day. They are out there somewhere in the cold boreal forest, preparing for the night when most people in Fairbanks still have an hour left in their workday. If a person is unlucky enough to have an office without a window up here, he or she might come to work in the dark and go home in the dark, like a vole living under the snow. Fairbanks is a cold place.

It has been a short day for the handful of northern songbirds that don’t migrate away from this latitude. From my limited observations, they were active from about 9:30 a.m. to 3:45 p.m. That gave them six hours and 15 minutes to stuff themselves. That means they must survive a night that is 17 hours, 45 minutes long. How do these tiny creatures do it, and where do they go to endure the long, cold night?

For most of the 50 species of birds that winter in Alaska, scientists just don’t know. There are research papers on birds and animals at lower latitudes, but far north versions have proven to be a bit different. For all the great and small mysteries out there in those cold spruce woods, there is one species that scientists have been able to follow. That bird is the smallest overwintering bird in Alaska, the black-capped chickadee.

(written on solstice 2006)