Early May is always a long time in coming. Between the last of autumn’s migrants
and the lingering snow drifts of March, the landscape truly thirsts for
birds. Sure, there are birds in
the winter, and cool ones, too, but in Ithaca or Ann Arbor, the emptiness
between them looms larger than the birds themselves. Early April lends a few new birds to the mix, like Phoebes,
Hermit Thrushes, and a spattering of icterids
that are only sufficiently appreciated in these few days of limbo, when even
their ubiquitous summer presence has been missed—but really, April just enjoys
toying with us. She brings the spring
migration fever to a boil, but doesn’t deliver too much to satiate the cravings. So these cravings have festered since
the first snowfall, and by mid April, the yearning is tangible. It drips from the trees where warblers
ought to be, and where a deceitful mind detects the phantom movements of such
would-be, wayward warblers.
This year was the same…save for a few big differences. The anticipation was growing, with
promise of good birds, but this time, I wouldn’t be seeing many warblers, and
the balmy weather that brings so many migrants would have to wait; instead of
hovering around 60˚F, I’d be hovering around 60˚N: Anchorage, Homer, Beluga,
and finally Churchill – so no qualms about the weather this time. This winter I heard that I was the
recipient of the Tim Schantz Memorial Scholarship, courtesy of a foundation
established by Mike and Tom Schantz in honor of their late brother, Tim, who at the
age of 36, had died guiding a birding tour to St. Lawrence Island, Alaska. Tim loved Homer and the Kachemak Bay
Shorebird Festival, so fittingly, the scholarship brings a college student each
year to give a presentation there at the festival in Homer. But before heading for Anchorage on May
8th, I had four exams in as many days, another to take with me to
Alaska, term papers, and of course, a presentation to prepare for. So in that first week of May, the
amount of stress embedded in my head didn’t leave much extra space for the
volumes of excitement that normally accompany May. But that all changed when I boarded a flight for Alaska – a
flight many years in wait.
I met Mike Schantz at baggage claim late the following
night, and headed to our host for the night’s beautiful home, situated on a
small rise overlooking Cook Inlet—at least, that’s what I had heard, and I was
excited to see the view for myself the next morning. We would be driving from Anchorage, southeast around
Turnagain Arm—a finger of the Inlet with sharply rising mountains on either
side and the prospect of Dall Sheep clamoring among the high rocks—and then
back along Highway 1, eventually travelling southwest the length of the Kenai
Peninsula to reach Homer.
As the road crested a hill and banked left, a view of the
mouth of Kachemak Bay panned across the windshield to the south, its entrance
guarded by the long, narrow peninsula of stony beach and quaint restaurants and
charter offices known as the Homer Spit.
A drive along the Spit ends at a hotel and restaurant known as “Land’s
End,” and from here, one can walk along the point’s rocky shore, perched
halfway across the bay, looking out to the Kenai Mountains. Following a winter with twice the
average annual snowfall, May still gripped these mountains with snow down to
their coniferous feet, until they plunged abruptly into Kachemak’s frigid
waters. The sky above these cold
mountains was similarly bleak, but its smooth, deep gray was in stark contrast
with the mountains’ rugged, gleaming walls. On this overcast evening, as I walked along the beach past
weathered driftwood, smooth stones grinding under foot, I watched thousands of
Common Murres flying towards open water on rapid wings, hugging the waves in
tight flocks of a few dozen to a few hundred. This exodus of hardy birds seemed endless, headed for what
seemed an uncertain fate as they disappeared on a foggy horizon. But this daily flux of Murres in and
out of the Kachemak Bay is far from uncertain; sunrise would witness an equal
and opposite movement when the birds returned to these protected waters for the
day, as predictably as the sunrise itself.
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| Common Murres |
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| Common Murres coming in to Gull Island |
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| "Land's End" |
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| A Red-faced Cormorant shared a rock with his Pelagic brethren at Gull Island |
Where we were staying on a hill overlooking the bay, this
particular sunrise revealed several inches of fresh snow blanketing the lawn
and the broad arms of the conifers that ringed the yard, reminiscent of a clear
day in January. A red-breasted
nuthatch bleeped from the tops of these firs, a fox sparrow sang from the very
top of another, a song as rich, full and sweet as any; and a varied thrush
uttered its dissonant, even-pitched whistle from the shaded recesses of a fir’s
heavy trunk, in thorough concealment, as if tired of sharing his good looks
with the world.
While shorebirding along the Spit that morning, a call came
in reporting a bristle-thighed curlew at the Anchor River mouth, just a 20-minute
drive to the north. Tom Schantz
and I immediately left for Anchor Point, willing it to stay while we
drove. The light was fading fast,
and when we arrived, Tom and I were alone. Given the bristle-thigh’s considerable rarity and incredible
life history, I was expecting an exodus of festival participants to converge on
the reported curlew (the first here in about a decade), but inexplicably, the
task of refinding the bird lay solely with us. These large shorebirds, tawny brown with a striped head and
a distinctive patch of bright buff on the rump, breed solely in the lower Yukon
delta and Seward Peninsula in remote western Alaska. As its Latin name Numenius
tahitiensis suggests, this high arctic breeder is equally (if not more)
familiar with tropical beaches and atolls of the South Pacific, where it was
first described in Tahiti during James Cook’s expeditions in the 18th
century. But it was not until more
than one hundred and sixty years later that the curlew’s nest was first
discovered in 1948, during an expedition led by Henry Kyllingstad, Warren
Peterson, and Arthur Allen. On a
tundra plateau outside of Mountain Village, the team had arguably one of the
most rewarding experiences any human has even had under any circumstances, and
it’s worth reading a full account here (http://arctic.synergiesprairies.ca/arctic/index.php/arctic/article/view/4006/3980). But since this well known
discovery, representing one of the most recent discoveries of a North American
bird’s nest, recent work with surgically implanted satellite transmitters has
revealed a more detailed picture of the birds’ incredible journeys. From Alaska, they fly at least 2,500
miles (4,000km) nonstop to Laysan and nearby islands in the western reaches of
the Hawaiian archipelago, and may continue south to winter in Fiji, Tuvalu,
Tonga, and other island nations of the South Pacific.
As we hiked north, we came to a low ridge, with the river
snaking to its mouth on our right, running parallel to the shoreline on our
left. Here, at a small oxbow in
the river was a large patch of thick beach grass, matted down by wind and rain,
a perfect spot for a curlew to nestle down for the night. Sure enough, nearly the first thing my
binoculars met was a good-sized, brown bird, hunkered low in the grass, sitting
still. The scope revealed a bird
very similar to a whimbrel, but with a slim bill and buffy scalloping on the
back. But without any whimbrel
present to compare with, I was worried that my hopes of seeing this wanderer en
route to his remote summer home were making me too quick to call it a curlew, especially
in fading light and without any views of the diagnostic rump. Soon, and to our relief, several people
who had had previous experience with this species were making their way down
the beach, and the eager but cautious conversation that made its way through the maze
of scopes and tripods was leaning towards a bristle-thighed curlew – it looked
good, but notes and photos would need to be reviewed against references.
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| Bristle-thighed Curlew |
So the next morning, our first stop was the Anchor River mouth
– it would be hard to leave Alaska without being completely convinced of this
bird’s identity. As Tom and I
walked out the beach, we were again alone. I heard a whimbrel calling as it flew up from the oxbow
where we had watched our so-called bristle-thighed curlew last night – and just
like the “curlew,” the whimbrel was alone. I was quickly beginning to doubt, as painful as it was, that
our sighting the evening before had been anything out of the ordinary – save
for extraordinary levels of probably unwarranted excitement. But then another whimbrel flew up from
the beach ahead of us, among others, and I couldn’t be sure, but I thought I
had heard a soft “piu-weet,” the clear flight call of a bristle-thighed curlew. Then
Tom’s arm flew up as he exclaimed, “There! That one’s got a bright rump!” I snapped a few record shots as it fled
further down the beach, and then, as another whimbrel flew past, I thought I’d
get a comparison shot – but as I found it in my viewfinder, I realized this
second bird also had a pale rump!
There were two bristle-thighed curlews, and here we were with no one to
share them with – one for each of us!
We followed them slowly down the beach to the river mouth, where they
crossed and foraged comfortably within a short distance. In this new day’s light, and with a
flock of whimbrels to compare them to, there was no question this was a very
different bird. The buffy
scalloping on the upperparts stood out plainly compared to the whimbrels’ even, brown tones; the bills were thin at the base, and seemed to curve more sharply
downwards. I was ecstatic, and
when I spotted a bar-tailed godwit joining the flock along with a small group
of long-billed dowitchers, I simply couldn’t believe my eyes. The godwit is another bird usually only
seen in remote western Alaska in North America, aside from rare records along
both coasts, and this bird had probably just flown from New Zealand and Japan
or Hokkaido. Shortly after, a group of birders made their way down the beach, and we rushed them onwards to share this incredible spectacle that lay in wait at the end of a long walk.
.jpg) |
| The bristle-thigh's buff rump patch, which Whimbrels lack |
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| Bar-tailed Godwit with two Bristle-thighed Curlews and a Whimbrel (front) |
Throughout the next two days, I was able to spend several
hours with these birds, including another lonely evening where a flock of
eleven whimbrels, the two bristle-thighed curlews and the bar-tailed godwit
landed a few dozen yards in front of me, with soft “piu-weet”s floating over
the beach among the melancholy tremolos of the whimbrels. On this calm evening, there was no wind
to stir the ocean or ruffle the birds’ tired feathers, feathers which had just
carried them thousands of miles over the open water whose cold fingers were now lapping
softly at my feet. I looked out past these purpose-driven globetrotters, toward a horizon of snow-capped peaks
extending to the right and hazy emptiness to the left. These three birds – the godwit and his
curlew companions – had certainly seen worse days over that ocean, now as
docile as it was when it was named.
But here they were, alive and breathing, readying for their last quick
jaunt to the breeding grounds, and here I was, sitting in the sand not twenty
feet away as they settled in to sleep for the night.
* * *
That Sunday I left Homer for Anchorage, where I would take a
Cessna 207 to Bleuga, a small settlement west of Anchorage, built chiefly
around the Chugach Electric power plant, situated over a gas reserve and
powering about half of Anchorage.
I was here to visit another field site for Nate Senner’s Hudsonian
Godwit research, the project I’ve spent two summers in Churchill working
on. On our way there, we dropped
into a viallge called Tyonek, a few miles past Beluga. We dropped casually into a dirt landing
strip, where the pilot promptly began handing out packages to locals: “Is Joe
here? This is his. Maria? Here you
go. Grandma?” and so on…certainly a small town feel, to say the least. He hopped back in, closed the door, and we were immediately
bouncing down the runway again, gaining speed – no taxiing around to gates or waiting for fuel trucks. This is
the way to fly!
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I could write plenty about Beluga, but given that you now
represent the maybe 5% of readers who have made it this far, I will
refrain. It was, however, a very
cool experience to see this disparate breeding area for the godwits, especially
after seeing them on wintering grounds in southern Chile and working with them in the eastern arctic – I have been
incredibly fortunate to have followed so much of this far-flung species’ annual
cycle. By the end of their season
this year, the Beluga crew had recaptured 24 geolocators, a truly incredible
number (as compared to our abysmal 2 from Churchill in 2011)! Hopefully, I can have a small fraction
of that success in the summer of 2013, when I return to Churchill to recapture
some of the 25 geolocators I will be deploying this summer on Whimbrel (more on
that in a later post).
And last, but not least, after visiting Beluga, Hope
Batcheller, Nate Senner, John Fitzpatrick and I drove back to Homer, once
again, to attend Chris Wood and Jessie Barry’s wedding – an awesome event that
brought together some of the country’s most ridiculous birders, all sweeping the Kenai peninsula, undoubtedly with centuries of collective experience behind their eyes, affording many
great looks at the lingering bristle-thighed curlews, yellow-billed loons, Kittlitz's murrelets, and so forth. Many thanks and huge congratulations to Chris and Jessie!
After a quick drop to some 42˚N, I’m now back at 58˚, in
Churchill, Manitoba, starting work on a project with Whimbrels – birds with an always-pleasant
resemblance to a certain pair of neatly patterned Pacific wanderers. More on them soon!
