John Wheeler: On a sunny November day, embrace the shadows

FARGO — At the bottom of the year, in late November and December, a sunny day is a kind of a special treat. For one thing, sunny days are relatively rare in our climate this time of year. Secondly, with nights that are 16 hours long, sunlight is just hard to come by.

When there is a sunny day, notice how the sun rises in the southeast and then follows a path along the southern sky before setting in the southwest, never getting very high in the sky during the day. Shadows are long even at noon. Lit from the side, trees and houses in the neighborhood literally glow in their southern exposures.



Except for the notable absence of warmth, the effect is like a long summer evening that lasts all day. Black capped chickadees and nuthatches flying back and forth from a wooden fence to their feeders, create bizarre, stretched out, flying shadow patterns to the north..