An Alaska Mother’s Day tradition: Mingling with ice age survivors on a farm

PALMER, Alaska (AP) — It is one of Alaska’s favorite Mother’s Day traditions, getting up close and personal with animals that have survived the ice age.

All moms get a daisy and free admission Sunday at the Musk Ox Farm in Palmer, about an hour’s drive north of Anchorage. Once inside they will have the chance to view 75 members of the musk ox herd, including three young calves just getting their feet under them. Also a draw is an old bull named Trebek, named after the late “Jeopardy!” host Alex Trebek, a benefactor of the facility.

“Who doesn’t want to celebrate Mother’s Day with a musk ox mom and the most adorable calf you’re ever going to find in your life?” said Mark Austin, the farm’s executive director.

Mother’s Day is the traditional start of the summer season for the farm, which traces its roots back to 1964 and at several locations before moving in 1986 to Palmer.

That move put it on Alaska’s limited road system, provided easier access to grazing land than in tundra communities and it to incorporate educational opportunities at the farm facility, which is dwarfed by the the Talkeetna and Chugach mountain ranges.

“When we opened the doors here, we started doing Mother’s Day as a grand opening every year,” Austin said.

He called it a natural decision, celebrating mothers with cute, newborn baby musk oxen on the grounds. So far this year, three baby musk oxen have been born and are on display, and more could be on the way.

Mother’s Day is the busiest day of the year, attracting more than 1,500 visitors. It is a tradition that now stretches over three generations.

“It’s a huge, just kind of rite of passage for a lot of people,” Austin said. “If we ever talked about not doing it, there’d be a riot.”

Musk oxen are ice age survivors.

“They were running around with saber-toothed tigers and mastodons, and they’re the ones that lived,” Austin said. The herd members all have diverse personalities, he added, and they are crafty, smart and inquisitive.

Their closest relatives to animals of today would be Arctic goats. Mature musk ox bulls can stand 5 feet (about 1.5 meters) tall and weigh as much as 800 pounds (about 360 kilograms), while female cows are smaller at about 4 feet (about 1.2 meters) and up to 500 pounds (about 230 kilograms), according to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s website.

They are stocky, long-haired animals with a slight hump in their shoulder, a short tail and horns, the website says. The Inupiat call musk ox “itomingmak,” which means “the animal with skin like a beard,” for its long hair hanging nearly to the ground.

The mammals once roamed across northern Europe, Asia, Greenland and North America before they began to die off. By the 1920s the last remaining ones were in Greenland and Canada.

Efforts to reintroduce the musk ox to Alaska started in 1934, when 34 were delivered to Fairbanks from Greenland. Since then, the wild population has grown to about 5,000, located throughout the nation’s largest state, Austin said.

The nonprofit farm welcomes donations from visitors on Sunday. Some people will make a beeline for the baby musk oxen, while others will throw a $100 bill on the counter first.

“We do like to see the donation, but we truly offer this as an event to the community, as a thank you,” Austin said. “It really gives us a chance to give something back.”