May 18, 2022 - North to Alaska!

It took me forever to finish the ‘daily Blog posts’ from my 2019 Year of Peregrination.  I’m hoping that my more recent ‘adventures’ don’t take nearly as long to write up.  Shep Thorp and I took a birding trip to Alaska in May of 2022 & I put some of the photos onto my FaceBook page, but thought that they might be appropriate for this Blog.

 

This post is of our first day from Seattle, where we caught a 6 a.m. flight to Anchorage, then transferred to the remote Island community of Adak, about 1,190 miles southwest of Anchorage.

Our initial intent was to have joined a vessel for a birding tour to the island of Attu, which is another 450 miles west, and in tomorrow's time zone.  Shep and I had been working with guides and Alaska Marine Expeditions, but the Pandemic put paid to the trip for the last 2 years.  Finally, things came together this Spring, but this year's tour was cancelled due to the unfortunate illness of the boat's skipper, Billy Choate.  So, our Aleutian adventure devolved into a week's birding at Adak, then moving to Nome for a week's birding.

After the hassle of checking in and making it through TSA Insecurity, we departed Sea-Tac at 6 a.m.  During the flight, we broke out of the clouds on our flight from Sea-Tac to Anchorage in the area around Glacier National Park.

The Alaskan coastline is really impressive.  Here, the Malaspina Glacier just looks Massive!  According to the National Park Service, the glacier, located primarily within Wrangell-St. Elias National Park on the coast, is the largest piedmont glacier in North America and one of the largest outside the ice cap regions of the world.

A bit further north, we passed The Bering Glacier, the largest glacier in the United States, near Cordova, Alaska. With its associated icefield feeders it is 203 km (126 miles) long and covers an area of more than 5,000 square kilometers (1,900 square miles).  Since 1900, the terminus has retreated as much as 12 km.  The glacier occasionally ‘surges,’ an acceleration of the flow rate of the glacier, every 20 years or so.  During these periods the glacier terminus advances; then the surges are generally followed by periods of retreat.  Despite the periodic advances, the glacier has been shrinking overall, as are most of the glaciers along the Alaskan coast.

After a short layover in Anchorage, we boarded a Boeing 737-800 and headed out off to the southwest past the Alaska Peninsula and over the Aleutian chain.  Above is our first view of Adak Island.

The water bodies are Clam Lagoon in the foreground, with Andrew Lake in back.  The lake had few birds through our visit, but we spent a lot of time birding at the lagoon, which had numbers of shorebirds, waterfowl, and sea otters.

Adak's Mount Moffett is covered by a cloud cap. The vegetation in the foreground is the "Elfin Forest", one of a few small groves of Sitka Spruce planted by the US Navy years ago to boost the morale of the military personnel stationed on the treeless island.

Welcome to Adak - "Birthplace of the Winds"!  There is no longer a Naval Air Facility on the island, as the Navy pulled out in 1997.  The former air base has reverted to civilian use, and hosts Alaska Airlines flights twice a week: Wednesdays and Saturdays.

This was Home-Sweet-Home for a week.  We rented the duplex apartment and the "Brown Excursion" from Scott Bullock at Aleutian Outfitters. This used to be US Navy housing.  When the military pulled out in 1997, people bought (or otherwise acquired) some of the residences. Most of the houses and other buildings, however, were just abandoned, and are blowing apart more and more every year.

After settling in at the duplex, we met up with birders Sam Brayshaw and Steve Noseworthy who we’d met at the Anchorage airport.  They were in one of the Adak-Aleutian units, and after we all got settled in, we joined up with them & got the “10-cent tour” of the island.  They showed us the usual feeder areas in town, the Sweeper Creek spots and Airport Ponds, and Contractor’s Marsh, then we drove out to Clam Lagoon.  Here, we check out the "Sandy Bluff Feeder" in town, which is where birders have scattered bird seed on a large rock to entice birds in for a good view. 

Sam, Steve, and Shep at lower Sweeper Creek, which is an inter-tidal channel with shorebirds and waterfowl.

On the road toward the marsh, we spotted our “Lifer” Rock Ptarmigan, we would see many of this species over the next several days.  Past the marsh we stopped to add bird seed at a feeder at the Adak National Forest.  These Sitka Spruce trees were planted by the Navy in the 1940s-70s. The sign reads "You Are Now Entering - And Leaving - the Adak National Forest."   The sign declaring that the clump of trees is a national forest first appeared in the 1960s.

In this photo Shep, Steve and Sam are seen scanning for birds in Clam Lagoon.  You can see a number of abandoned US Navy buildings on the hill across the water.  From the beach at Rainbow Bridge, at the far end of the road around the lagoon, we scoped our Lifer Arctic Loons out in Kuluk Bay.

All-in-all, it was a great day in a new birding location for us!  We saw 34 species of Aleutian birds & were rewarded with two Life species.  And, we met up with some good birding companions.