Cirque de la Lune
Surprising discovery
My introduction to the fascinating world of flying squirrels started when, needing a weasel photo for an upcoming book, I set up my camera near a recent wolf kill in a vast snowy field in the middle of a northern Montana coniferous forest. Much to my surprise, the animals that landed on the kill in the middle of a frigid December night were a pair of northern flying squirrels – a species that only rarely feeds on carrion. Even more surprising were the unusually lengthy gliding flights that the squirrels undertook to get to the kill from the nearest tree more than 100m away. These initial observations of eerily silent gliding flights under moonlight over a snowy field prompted me to start an in-depth study of the biomechanics of this species’ flight abilities in the wild.
