72 Hours in Alaska

Greetings from Anchorage, Alaska!

Great White North my ass. This is the Blue-Green North, where the skies are clear and a beautiful deep indigo, the forests are fiercely verdant, and yesterday’s temperature topped out at…

So, I can confirm that if your concept of Alaska evolved from watching too many episodes of Ice Road Truckers or Deadliest Catch, and you think that the entire state is permafrost or constantly battered by horrific storms, then you would be wrong. (But BTW, if you have not seen Ice Road Truckers, then what the heck are you doing with your life?)

On the other hand, if you’ve heard of Alaska as “the land of the midnight sun” then you would be correct. Sunset in Anchorage today occurs at nearly midnight, and here is what the street outside last night’s restaurant looks like at 10:30pm:

But, you ask, what about the birds??? The past three days for us have been a blur or birding and traveling, as 20 hours of daylight means lots of time to look for birds!

We arrived in Anchorage on Thursday evening and birded some of the local area. A common thread of the past few days has been that birdie babies are just now hatching and stretching their wings, such as these Arctic Terns from a park south of Anchorage:

Friday, we drove down to Homer, and along the way encountered our first Moose. If you’ve never seen a moose, you might think of them as large cows or elk. If this sounds right to you, then you are comically mistaken. An adult male moose is about the size of a Mack truck, or so they appear from relatively close distance: from about 100 yards away, we saw a moose run across the road and behind a group of motorcyclists, and I swear that it looked more than twice the height of the cyclists.

Saturday, we boarded the ferry to Kodiak, and proceeded to spend most of the next 23 hours on the ocean, as Kodiak is a 10-hour one-way journey. Why in the world would we do this? Well, we couldn’t find a pelagic birding trip that worked with our schedule, so we decided to take a ferry instead!

An ocean-going trip to look for birds consists of long periods of boredom interspersed with short periods of frustration, as you attempt to identify birds you’ve never seen before while the boat is moving one way and the birds are moving another. Thanks to years of experience combined with the famous Spray-And-Pray photographic technique, we managed to bag several good birds including:

The incomprable Northern Fulmar

The freaky cool Fork-tailed Storm-petrel. How fantabulous is it to have "Storm" be a part of your name!

Tufted Puffin, who *just* missed being a spokesmodel for Jheri-curl

While scheduling the ferry on these particular days worked great for our timeline, it also meant that the morning of our wedding anniversary was spent in separate twin bunk beds in a tiny cabin. Fortunately, she is used to such inconveniences and will likely value the Storm-petrels more than any other gift she might have received, so all will be well. One hopes.

Next on the itinerary is Nome, Alaska, the home of the finish line for the Iditarod race and not much else. But, the birds are supposed to be amazing, so wish us luck!

All the best,
Me