Raven Sunsets

We are nearing the winter solstice, the time when the sun slowly returns to the earth. Or so it seems this far north. This is a day I really look forward to, I love to watch the days grow longer. When we were house hunting, I had to picture what the house would look like in the middle of December. I needed a house that could be bathed in whatever available light there was. I did not want a dark house.

Right now the length of the day is 5 hours and 55 mins. That is from sunrise until sunset. I have included a little blue button below the blogroll that says what time the sun is rising and setting here in Anchorage. Since the twilight times get so extended this far north, we have visible daylight for about seven and half hours. That means we get a slow, forty-five minute dawn and sunset. Those times can be lovely; full of pinks and reds and golds on the clouds and mountains. The sunsets nearly due south, there is very little west about it.

Another activity around sunset is watching the ravens roost. Anchorage's ravens roost in the Chugach Range, somewhere close behind my house. I can stand at the end of the driveway at sunset and watch twenty to fifty ravens in groups of four or five wing their way east. Many will come from the dropoff below my lot, and skim just a few feet above my head. Sometimes they are talking to each other and sometimes I only hear the deep drafts of their wingbeats.