by Jeff Stehm

More rapid than eagles his coursers they came,
And he whistled, and shouted, and called them by name:
"Now, Dasher! now, Dancer! now Prancer and Vixen!
On, Comet! on, Cupid! on, Donner and Blitzen!
To the top of the porch! to the top of the wall!
Now dash away! dash away! dash away all!"
As leaves that before the wild hurricane fly,
When they meet with an obstacle, mount to the sky;
So up to the housetop the coursers they flew….

​He sprang to his sleigh, to his team gave a whistle,
And away they all flew like the down of a thistle.
But I heard him exclaim, ere he drove out of sight--
“Happy Christmas to all, and to all a good night!”
 
Excerpt from “A Visit from St. Nicholas”
By Clement Clarke Moore ​

Christmas is approaching and with it, undoubtedly, comes a yearning in the hearts of master naturalists for a better understanding of reindeer. So here are some fun facts about reindeer to entertain the holiday crowds.

• To accomplish Santa’s Christmas night visits to children, his reindeer would need to fly about 600 miles per second, more than 3,000 times the speed of sound. (How reindeer fly has not been scientifically worked out yet).
  • If you want to see for yourself, click here on Christmas Eve and track Santa's world tour.
• On days other than Christmas Eve, scientists say reindeer can run as fast as 48 mph (80 km per hour), when alarmed by a predator.
• Although the Night Before Christmas introduced the world to Santa’s eight male reindeer, in all likelihood Santa’s reindeer are female. Older males lose their antlers in December, but females do not and Christmas reindeer are always depicted with antlers. (Yes, female reindeer have antlers).
• While Santa gets cookies and milk, reindeer are vegetarians and eat herbs, ferns, mosses, grasses, and leaves. They dig through the snow pack using their hooves and antlers to reach these tender morsels.
• Reindeer stay warm by having two layers of fur – a dense undercoat and a top layer of hollow, air-filled hair.
• Reindeer are the only mammals that can see ultraviolet light to help them see things on white Arctic snow.

And did you know that Rudolf’s red nose is not an anomaly. Most reindeer have red noses as a result of a dense network of capillaries that carry blood to the nose and keep it warm in the cold environment as well as help regulate the reindeer’s body temperature. 

Now if you really want to impress your holiday guests with the extraordinary depth of your master naturalist training, here are a few scientific points for recitation at Christmas dinner (be sure there is plenty of eggnog):

• Reindeer and caribou are the same. Caribou is often a term used in North America to refer to wild reindeer. Reindeer is a term used more frequently in Eurasia to refer to domesticated herds.
• Reindeer classification – remember your taxonomy training?
  • Kingdom: Animalia
  • Phylum: Chordata
  • Class: Mammalia
  • Order: Artiodactyla
  • Family: Cervidae (includes deer, elk, moose)
  • Genus: Rangifer
  • Species: Rangifer tarandus (and 14 subspecies)
• Reindeer are social herd animals, and travel in groups of 10 to 200, but in spring herds can reach sizes of 50,000 to 500,000.
• Reindeer grow to be 28 to 53 inches high, 6-7 feet long, and 120 to 500 pounds.
• Reindeer can have home ranges of up to 190 square miles or more.
• Reindeer number about 8 million worldwide, with about 3 million of those being domestic reindeer. 
• Reindeer evolved about 3.6 to 2.6 million years ago and were an important food source for Stone Age tribes.

But climate change is harming reindeer. With warmer Arctic temperatures, more rain as well as melting/refreezing snow creates a hard ice surface that the reindeer find difficult to break through to obtain the food they need. Large-scale starvation of 20,000 to 60,000 reindeer have been linked to this climate change. 
 
Sources:
www.en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Reindeer
www.pbs.org/newshour/science/7-things-didnt-know-reindeer
www.britannica.com/animal/reindeer
www.mentalfloss.com/article/29470/11-things-you-might-not-know-about-reindeer
www.livescience.com/56310-reindeer-facts.html​ 
​

Submitted by Barry Buschow

Commercial pumpkin growers routinely rent honey bees so they have enough insects to pollinate their crops, but a new study published in the Journal of Economic Entomology suggests that wild bees can do the job for free. The three-year study found that wild bumble bees and squash bees could easily handle the pollination required to produce a full yield of pumpkins in all of the tested commercial fields, according to Carley McGrady, the lead author of the study.
​
The pumpkin study was part of a broader initiative, called the Integrated Crop Pollination Project, or Project ICP (http://icpbees.org/), which was headquartered at Michigan State University and funded by the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s Specialty Crop Research Initiative.  To read more, click here. 

Big Money Is Building A New Kind Of National Park In The Great Plains
NPR, Nate Hegyi, December 8, 2019 · 6:00 AM ET
​

 By SANDY HAUSMAN, Radio IQ WVTF,  NOV 29, 2019
(submitted by Barry Buschow)

Hundreds of people spends each spring and summer checking on baby birds in their neighborhood. They’re part of a national effort to bring back bluebirds after their population dropped 90%. You might expect those volunteers to retire in the fall, but one bird lover from Virginia is busier than ever.


​200 years ago, eastern bluebirds were common in Virginia. Settlers would find their nests in the holes of trees, but the situation changed as farmers took down forests and non-native species arrived in America – cavity nesters that compete with bluebirds.

“One of them was house sparrows, and another is the starling, and those two species of birds are now the two most populous of all bird species in North America, ” says Clark Walter, a man who played professional basketball in Europe in his youth. He stands 6-foot-six but has great compassion for smaller creatures. “Bluebirds are tiny little things, and they just weren’t winning the war against the starlings and the house sparrows,” he explains.
Now retired from the Cleveland Zoological Society, Walter knew it was possible to help bird populations recover.
“I’ve had some exposure with Andean condors into Venezuela or Trumpeter swans in the state of Ohio, but I didn’t know much about my own backyard,” Walter admits.

So he became a master naturalist and built a trail through his Albemarle County neighborhood, putting up specially designed boxes for bluebirds. He turned his garage into a cozy workshop with a wood stove and more than a dozen antiques, including a cabinet with 125 tiny drawers that supplied a 19th century pharmacy.