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.

 

Year of Peregrination 2019 - A Recap

 

Summary
	Jan 2019	Feb 2019	Mar 2019	Apr 2019	May 2019	Jun 2019	Jul 2019	Aug 2019	Sep 2019	Oct 2019	Nov 2019	Dec 2019
Number of Species	233	292	180	228	301	176	235	260	176	170	305	168
Number of Individuals	65,155	59,123	20,734	9,776	16,059	6,317	12,559	16,555	14,195	28,808	28,286	66,166
Number of    Checklists	140	87	83	108	91	61	67	92	45	59	121	82

It’s taken me a while to gather together all of the ‘statistics’ of my Year of Birding.  That’s what happens when one obsesses over how many miles one has walked, driven, boated or flown to see the birds, how much one spent on the endeavour, or how many hours one has spent playing this silly game of “Birding”.

And, when one would rather be birding than writing a Blog?

I knew that, in taking on a “Big Year”, I wasn’t about to break any records, as my resources were not sufficient to chase every rarity across North America.  My goal for the year was rather more personal:  I targeted seeing 75 new “Life Birds”, as my “Life List” stood at only 572 species at the beginning of the year.  If I could come in near 650 when I was done, I’d be one happy camper.

As it was, I ‘birded’ every day this year; at least I submitted one or more eBird checklists for 365 days in a row.  It’s not that difficult to do, the nice folks at the Cornell Lab of Ornithology encourage birders to put in an eBird checklist for even a 5-minute bird watch in your yard or at a feeder or wherever. 

I was away from home 190 of those days, spending ‘way too many nights in motels.  I’d planned on camping out a lot more than I ended up doing, but inclement weather and BUGS on top of coming in after a full day’s birding made it easy to default to just crashing at the local Motel 6.

Actually, I prefer to find some little locally-owned, clean 1940s-era roadside place, rather than end up at an overpriced chain motel.  I usually come in ‘way too late to want to use the pool or go to the exercise room, and for the price, I do better finding a little local café or diner for breakfast.

I did end up staying at some nice places during some of the Birding Festivals.  I think the  nicest was the La Posada Hotel in Laredo, Texas for the Birding Festival in that town.

My “Carbon Footprint” for the year was considerably higher than optimal.  Cris-crossing the continent a few times resulted in putting 46,343 miles on my 2015 CrossTrek.  Only 560 of those miles were actually “road birding”; the other traveling was getting from one point to another.

I won’t even discuss how much I went over the Budget that I’d given to Marty before I started this adventure . . .

I used the airline industry four times, putting 9,977 air miles on the Southwest and Alaska Air ‘rewards’ accounts.  Mind you, I hate flying; there are no more “Friendly Skies”, what with the airlines packing people in like sardines, reducing in-flight perks, and the nightmarish farce of TSA “keeping us safe”.

That said, I made round-trip flights to the Space Coast Birding Festival in Florida and to Saint Paul Island for a WINGS tour.  I also took one-ways to Los Angeles to board a Princess Lines’ relocation cruise and to Texas to pick up my daughter’s Subaru & drive it back to the Pacific Northwest - birding en route, of course.

The Princess Lines Cruise from Los Angeles to Vancouver, B.C. was the craziest “pelagic” trip I took.  This year I was joined by Anders Price, a birding friend from Olympia.  No “Lifers” for me on this voyage, but we picked up several Murphy’s Petrels, which is a difficult species to find unless you’re far out to sea.

The repositioning cruises are offered by several Pacific Coast cruise lines when they are moving their operations from winter trips into Mexico to or from their Alaska “Inside Passage” cruises.  For Birders, these trips provide a way to spend a few days further offshore than can be reached by the “traditional” pelagic birding trips.

The ships don’t stop along the way - staying over or beyond the Continental Shelf, and spotting scopes work well on the decks.  Dorian Anderson put together a great “Primer” for birding on a “Repo Cruise”.

That said, the ships also do not stop or turn around so that Birders can get better views of some “Lifer” seabird.  Therefore, I did avail myself of a few Pelagic trips.  My first was a mid-March trip with Westport Seabirds, picking up views of all three north Pacific albatrosses: Black-footed, Laysan and Short-tailed.

The Westport trips leave port and go pretty much straight out 30 miles to the edge of the Continental shelf, where they put out some chum (suet and fish oil) to draw in the shearwaters, petrels and albatrosses that can smell prey from miles downwind.  And, they will seek out fishing boats such as pink shrimp trawlers, etc. that attract birds.

I also was able to put in a day with Brian Patteson and Kate Sutherland on their June 8th Seabirding pelagic trip out of Hatteras, North Carolina.

Brian’s operation is different than what I am more used to out of Westport.  They ‘chum’ constantly, and there are no fishing trawlers to draw in hundreds or thousands of birds.  That said, I picked up four “Lifers” with this really professional outfit, and really enjoyed the trip.

I like to try to get both a Spring and a Fall pelagic trip on the West Coast, and tried to get an October trip with Westport Seabirds, but by the time I got around to it their trips were full.

I was lucky to be able to make it out with Oregon Pelagic Tours, which Tim Shelmerdine operates out of Newport, Oregon.  The distribution of birds on the Coast differs quite a bit through the seasons, and I was able to pick up four species that I’d missed on my trip out of Westport in March.  

Although it wasn’t a “true” pelagic trip, in the sense of going out to the edge of the Continental Shelf or into the Gulf Stream, I took John Drury’s boat “The Skua” out from Vinalhaven in the State of Maine, to “twitch” the Atlantic Puffin.

This trip had the added advantage of going to the island where a lone Red-billed Tropicbird had been returning for 14 years.

Sadly, no female ever showed up to help this individual establish a North Atlantic population, and he was last seen in 2021.

Through the entire year, I really benefited from attending field trips at several of the Birding Festivals around the country.  Besides being able to go birding in some of the nicest localities that I’ve ever been to, I had the advantage of being out with expert birders, having lots of eyes and ears to find the birds, and - what was best - learning about the natural history of the places from friendly and knowledgeable locals.

My first Festival was in January at the Space Coast Birding and Wildlife Festival.  The trip provided me with 122 species, of which 79 were new for the year and three were “Life Birds”.

Sadly, this Festival suffered from the Covid-19 Pandemic, to the point the organizers had to dissolve their 501(c)(3) corporation and the Festival is no longer being held.  It is unfortunate, as this was a big draw for the local Community and businesses, and was one of the ‘gems’ of the U.S. Birding Festivals.

In February, I flew down to Texas, reclaimed my daughter’s 2000 Subaru Outback, and drove it home to the Pacific Northwest, stopping to attend the Laredo Birding Festival.

I’d have to say that this Festival had the ‘friendliest’ welcoming feel of those I attended, the talks were great, and the field trips were well-organized and well-led.

Here, I ended up seeing 144 total species of birds, of which 59 were new for the year, and eight were Lifers, bringing my total number of new Life Species to 8 for the year: 67 to go!

I drove back through New Mexico, Arizona, California and Oregon, picking up another 10 Lifers.

These included two Rosy Finch species at Sandia Crest in New Mexico, seven southeast Arizona specialties, and the errant Red-flanked Bluetail in Los Angeles. 

This return trip netted me snow on the cactus in Arizona.

This wasn’t the last snow for the month!  Soon after, I was stuck in traffic as Interstate 5 closed due to snow on the Grapevine in California, and I-5 completely shut down again from Roseburg to Portland!  But, I found ways around the drifts.  As Marty reminded me, I was having fun!! 

In April, it was time for Chickens - so I loaded into the CrossTrek again and headed to Oklahoma for the Lesser Prairie Chicken Festival.  I really enjoyed the people from Tulsa Audubon who put this festival together, as well as the field trips and leaders. 

Besides seeing both species of Prairie Chickens, I was honored to be able to go birding with one of the Icons of American Birding: Kenn Kaufman.  He impressed me as being not only a great birder, but also a wonderful trip leader; making sure that all the people on the field trip get on the ‘good’ birds, and patiently answering questions.

This is another festival that was discontinued in 2021.  The reason they discontinued the Festival is that Lesser Prairie-Chicken numbers in that part of northwest Oklahoma are in serious decline. All of the birds on ranches that welcome birders are no longer present.  The last few years of the festival had been touch and go on whether they would have birds to show participants, and they just had no options left.

There’s still a Lek Trek for the chickens, but it’s now (2022) being hosted by Audubon of Kansas.  Many thanks to these fine advocates of the prairie birds!  

This was a ‘quick’ round-trip for me, but I took some time to do a bit of “Cowboying” in the Oklahoma panhandle after the Prairie Chicken Festival.

Making a side trip down to the Wichita Mountains to ‘twitch’ the Black-capped Vireo, I then drove back through Utah to the Pacific Northwest.  En route, I stopped along the San Juan river at Mexican Hat, and was greeted by a singing Lucy’s Warbler - my 600^th ABA Life Species!

I had a couple of weeks ‘resting’ at home, before setting off toward the next “Festival”.  Shep Thorp often puts together a group birding event at the famous Magee Marsh, either ahead or following the “Biggest Week In American Birding” sponsored by Kenn Kaufman’s Black Swamp Bird Observatory.  Not to dismiss the BWIAB, which is a great program, but Shep prefers the somewhat smaller crowds outside the Festival period.

Birding my way en route through the northern tier of States, I picked up 17 species for the year, including a Lifer - the introduced Eurasian Tree Sparrow.

I met up with Shep’s crew, including 11 of us from Washington State and the other 8 from the Philadelphia area.

This was my first time at Magee, and I honestly was unprepared for the pageantry of it all.  Hundreds of birders crowded the boardwalk, with calls of “There’s a Bay-breasted Warbler!”, “I think there’s a Philadelphia Vireo behind it”, and such ringing out all around us.  If you abhor crowds, this is not the place to be, but if you enjoy being with like-minded people, celebrating the birds, this is a great venue!

We also made a run to the other side of Lake Erie, to Point Pelee National Park in Ontario.  In all, I was pretty overwhelmed, and this week I picked up 40 species new to the year’s count, including four Lifers.

The trip “home” took me two months, as I drove down to visit my daughter near Houston.  My wife, Marty, flew out to visit as well as to present a paper at the Coastal Prairie Partnership's Prairie Restoration conference.  Then, after a few days ‘vacationing’ in Texas, Marty & I drove across to North Carolina to visit her sister Ellen and help with some household chores.  I dropped Marty off at the Raleigh airport and continued north to Maine & Quebec, and headed back home to Washington, finally arriving in Spokane on 14 July & met Marty where she was working for the week.

I’d only been home for two weeks when I headed out again.  I had registered for the Southeast Arizona Birding Festival.  This five-day event advertised a number of really good field trips, led by some excellent birders, and the trips were my reason for attending.  Following the Festival, I put in a few more days birding through SE Arizona, then worked my way home after three weeks on the road, garnering 33 new species for the year’s list - and 22 of them were Life Birds!

I took one trip with a “professional” outfit this year.  A September WINGS tour to Saint Paul Island in Alaska’s Pribilofs - only two weeks after I got home from Arizona.  Although I grew up in the Pacific Northwest, I had never traveled to Alaska, even though it’s only a short 3-hour plane ride to Anchorage.

I’d hoped to combine this trip with their Gambell Tour, but it was full.  As it was, this Island in the Bering Sea was amazing.  The WINGS trip leader was stranded on Gambell due to weather, but arranged for the group to be accommodated by Sulli Gibson, a tour guide for the Native Corporation’s Saint Paul Island Tours.  We were well served by the TDX folks.  The island seemed somewhat magical, and I fully expected to see Mammoths grazing on its tundra with Unangan hunters not far behind.

The trip to the North garnered me two dozen new species for the year, including 8 Lifers!  It was on this jaunt that I achieved (and exceeded) my Year Goal of seeing 75 Life Birds, with a view of a Red-faced Cormorant as I arrived on Saint Paul.

The last Festival I attended was the Lower Rio Grande Birding Festival in Harlingen, Texas in November.  After being home for nearly a month, I was on the road again toward one of the best-organized Birding Festivals in the country, and has some top-notch field trip leaders!  I’d picked up seven “Lifers” during the week, thanks in great measure to being out with some excellent trip leaders, and having the assistance of the sharp eyes of a lot of good birders while in the field with the group.

On the drive home, I visited my daughter in Dayton, then dropped down to Galveston, where I found a Lesser Black-backed Gull perched on a utility pole, for my 600th Species of the year.  Leaving Texas, I stopped at New Mexico’s Carlsbad Caverns and White Sands, then made another pass through Southeast Arizona, where I finally got eyes on one of my year’s “nemesis birds”, the Rose-throated Becard.

The remainder of the drive home took me through California to pick up a few local species, new to the year for me.  But, returning home got me away from the overly-imposing presence of America’s Homeland Insecurity along the southern border.

I’d made the mistake, earlier this Autumn, of checking the eBird Top 100 list, to see where I stood in the “North American Rankings”.  I wasn’t at all attempting to keep pace with the Deans, the Stolls, the McQuades, or John Weigel who regularly see over 700 species in a year.  But, I saw that I was neck-and-neck with a couple other birders for the Number Ten spot in the ABA rankings.

So, after returning from the Rio Grande Festival, December was spent locally, birding from my home in Olympia, with the hope of picking up a few “year birds” to stay in the Top 10.  Most of these were few and far-between, after all the hard Birding I’d done, and my reticence to travel a whole lot more.  I did make successful efforts to ‘chase’ an Emperor Goose, and a Mountain Plover, and twitched the Black Scoter that, somehow, I’d overlook through the year.

Finally, in mid-December, I chased and saw a Rustic Bunting in a southwest Washington State Park.  This was the last bird species I saw this year, number 610 for the year, and my 662nd ABA Area “Life Bird”! 

I “dipped” on seeing a number of birds that I should/might have done.  Rusty Blackbird, for Goodness' Sake.  Cerulean Warbler.  The Little Egret that I passed within a few miles of in the State of Maine.  The Yellow-billed Loon that my friends found on the Olympia Christmas Bird Count that I spent several days searching for.  The list could go on and on . . .

I’d ended up with 91 Life Birds, well-surpassing my beginning goal of 75.  I was really happy with that achievement.  Mind you, if I’d set my goal at 100 Lifers, I’d have been terribly disappointed to have fallen short.  Age and experience have taught me to set achievable goals!!

I wound up just out of the Top 10 ABA eBirders for the year.  Still, I think I did pretty darned well.

I’d planned a couple trips for 2020, just not as Gonzo as 2019, but the Pandemic put paid to that idea.  As it was, I kind of enjoyed taking some time off from hard-core Birding - once I got my mind readjusted.  Thanks to all and any who spent any time at all following me during the Peregrination year.  Thanks even more to those who understand just how difficult it is to maintain a Blog whilst travelling and birding 15-18 hours a day.

The best part of the year was the ability to spend hours and days with some wonderful people!  To a person, the Birders I joined in the fields, deserts, beaches and tundra of the U.S. and Canada were generous, helpful and encouraging.  Better yet, they were Friendly!  I appreciate all of your help, your good eyes and ears, and your comradeship.

Here's wishing you all Good Travels and Great Birding!