While waiting for winter to become summer, outdoors lovers turn to beauty pageants

It is a tough time of year for those who prefer to spend their time outdoors.

Snowmobiling is at the marginal state in most locations other than the Denali Highway, especially in the afternoons. Ice fishing is still fair, but lake access is becoming tougher on ponds that are a distance from the highway. Bird hunting is closed everywhere. You can hunt for hares, but it seems a bit wrong to be chasing them during their breeding season.

That leaves three spring activities for the sportsman: birding, sportsman shows and beauty pageants.

Beauty pageants? Sure enough, Sports Illustrated has a Swimsuit Issue, and it is a magazine otherwise all about sports.

I learned a fair amount about pageants with a few minutes of research. Here's what I'd like to share with my fellow sportsmen and women:

Vaseline. That's how you get the radiant smile.

Double-sided tape. This is the ticket to keep those hems from sliding up and showing things unnecessarily.

Guys, are you wondering where the duct tape in your shop went? A little silver tape makes the waist a bit skinnier. It also keeps things from bouncing on stage.

Even if you know what happened to the tape, you may be wondering why your wood glue is missing. The women have it. Butt glue. Yup, gluing the swimsuit keeps it from sliding around when doing the "S" curve walk on stage. They look good, but I'm wondering how they get this stuff off.

Why do women go to these lengths to look good? I think somewhere down the line we humans have skewed things. Most of the natural world provides the male with all of the color and flare.

The common house finch furnishes a great example. The male has bright orange and reds in his plumage. The brightness in his feathers is directly related to the pigments he picks up from high quality seeds. The brightest males are preferred by females because they are deemed better at gathering food.

In the feathered world, drab females are the order of the day. Our state bird, the willow ptarmigan, is a perfect example. The female changes quickly into her summer colors as she begins to lay. She is hard to spot and creeps quickly into the heavy willows. In contrast, the male sports his white plumage, with a brilliant chocolate brown head, until quite late in the spring. The male also sits high in the willows to draw attention to himself. He is a target for predators. The goshawk takes him and leaves the hidden female to finish brooding and raise the chicks.

The birds are not the only creatures in the wild with a male focus. Look at the big impressive antlers on a Nelchina caribou. Male mink are larger and shinier than the females.

Male pink salmon get that big, attractive (?) hump. Arctic grayling males are more colorful than their female counterparts and sport a much longer dorsal fin. The back fin reaches all of the way back to the soft dorsal, while the female's is much shorter.

I did find an Alaska female critter that is naturally prettier than the male of the species — the common wood frog. The female is bigger than the male and also sports an attractive reddish tone to her skin, similar to spray tan our beauty queens like to use. However, it is the male wood frog that does all of the singing.

Whether you decide this spring to check out the singing at the beauty pageant, the sportsman show or see what birds are arriving this week, it's important to get out of the house. However, if you have read this, you will never have quite the same view of a pageant.

John Schandelmeier is a lifelong Alaskan who lives with his family near Paxson. He is a Bristol Bay commercial fisherman and two-time winner of the Yukon Quest International Sled Dog Race