The day · Fairbanks, Alaska
Midday · 34 min left
Sun 25.7° up, in the south-west · Boreal North & Taiga
The kind of day it is
Front passing
and wet, high overcast
Pressure is moving. Animals feel this before you do: the hours ahead of a falling barometer are often the best feeding of the week, and the bright, cold, high-pressure day behind it is usually the worst.
Go now, before it arrives. Afterwards, give it a day.
The day, phase by phase
Happening now · 11:41–15:51
4h 10m long
Midday
Where the sun is this minute. Its highest today: 27.9°.
The sun is at its highest and the shortest shadow of the day sits under everything. Light is coming through the least atmosphere it will all day, so it is at its whitest and its most intense — and leaves start defending themselves from it.
Where the light lands · Boreal North & Taiga
Even at its highest the sun here is well short of overhead, so shadows are long all day and the north side of everything stays cold.
Up close
On the ground the difference between a sunlit patch of moss and a shaded one can be fifteen degrees. Insects commute between them all day rather than regulating their own heat.
The whole landscape
The permafrost boundary is a real line across the continent and it moves with these summer days. Each warm one thaws a few more centimetres of the active layer, and each one releases carbon that has been locked away since the ice.
In the water now
Cruising the weed edges, pads and shallow flats, ambushing anything that moves across the top.
Sitting still in the weeds in one to three metres, facing out, waiting. Pike hunt by sight and prefer daylight to dark.
On the beds and the shallow flats, in water warm enough to see the bottom.
Holding in the current and rising steadily to anything that drifts over. Grayling feed through the long northern day.
Feeding hard on the drop, shut down behind it. The two days after a front are the slowest of the week.
In the garden now
Honey beebest now
Working flowers from about 13 °C upward, most heavily mid-morning when nectar has risen and the dew has gone.
Hoverflybest now
Hanging motionless in a sunbeam, then darting — hoverflies use warm still air and are strongest in the middle of the day.
Swallowtail butterfliesbest now
Patrolling sunny openings and puddling on damp ground for minerals.
Lady beetlebest now
Walking the growing tips and the undersides of leaves, eating aphids in warm sun.
Wind shift and a drop in pressure — stake, tie in, and pick anything ripe before it arrives.
Sitting this one out
Walleye · Lake trout · Brook trout · Rainbow trout · Green lacewing · Ground beetle
The full guide
Everything for Fairbanks this week in one place.
Boreal North & Taiga
The region this day belongs to, and what lives in it.
The almanac
The year's arc: day length, the moon and the water behind the air.
The week ahead for Fairbanks
One email, Sunday evening. Unsubscribe anytime.