Not What We Expected, But It Turned Out OK

Eureka! from Seward, Alaska!

I didn't see that coming.

Sunday, we set out right on schedule for our boat trip, checked in with no issues, and were the second people on the boat. We departed at the proper time, gently cruised out of the harbor on glassy water, and then picked up steam crossing the bay. Then, about 90 minutes later, after sightings of Bald Eagle, porpoises, and orcas, one of the boat's two engines died.

Now, I'd like to say that it went down like this:

Boom! The engine exploded into a huge ball of flames! The boat rocked forward, then backward, then heaved dramatically to the left...we were taking on water! Automatic life support systems caused life rafts to deploy! Passengers were tossed life vests and the Captain shouted, "Prepare for the worst!" But, then! Lo! A pair of whales breached right behind the boat! Their splash put out the fire! And -- believe it or not -- the whales then nudged the boat forward, and then pushed us all the way back to the harbor. True, 'dat.

Actually, we just limped back to the harbor on one engine, and the boat company offered to fully refund everybody or rebook on a different day. We opted to rebook for Monday, and gave it one more shot yesterday.

Man, was that a good choice!

The weather was nearly perfect, with blue skies and sun all day. We saw incredible scenery, had about 15 minutes of watching a Humpback Whale repeatedly breach and slap its tail, got up-close and personal with a glacier, and added 3 life/year birds. Fortunately, a birding tour group happened to be taking the same boat, so we were also in proximity to two expert guides to help with Bird ID, and the captain went out of his way to pull up next to places that were known to be good for birds.

If you ever find yourself in Seward, I highly recommend a trip with Kenai Fjords Tours. The captain was great, the boat was comfortable (although the food could have been improved), and when something went wrong, they did a perfect job of customer service.

So, in the immortal words of The OG William Shakespeare, all's well that ends well!

We're finally headed home today, with only a few days for work, laundry, and cleaning cobwebs off the walls before embarking on our next journey: a short trip to Tucson to find some weird-ass hummingbirds and a rare visitor from Mexico called a Tufted Flycatcher!

Hasta la vista,
Me

Dall's Porpoise. It was completely underwater and swimming alongside the boat, so you can see how glassy the water was at that time.

Northwest Glacier

Momma sea otter with pup

Parakeet Auklet!

Thick-billed Murre! Like the Common Murres we see in Cali, but note the blacker color; thick, almost raven-like bill; and white line on the side of the bill.

Look! It's Humpy the Humpback Whale doing the Tootsie Roll!

Postcards From The Edge

Wet fishy kisses from Seward, Alaska!

The town is named for William Seward. Old Billy was the savvy Secretary of State to Abraham Lincoln who conned Russia into selling us Alaska for all of about $7 million, or $0.02 per acre, in 1867. Since that deal worked out so well, maybe we should keep investing in real estate? Mexico seems like a good "buy low" opportunity, and doesn't "Tequila: Made in America" have a nice ring to it?

Seward is also known for being the start of the Iditarod trail, of which we saw the finish line in Nome. I believe we earned an Achievement today for seeing both ends of the trail, but XBox hasn't yet credited my account. I'm still waiting, XBox.

It's also home to the famous Polar Bear Jump-Off, in which clinically insane people jump into the frigid waters of Seward's harbor IN JANUARY to raise money to fight cancer. Maybe they should be raising money to fight brain damage, which they clearly all have, but, hey, to each her own.

We are in Seward tonight in preparation for tomorrow's boat trip out to the Kenai Fjords National Park. This may be a shock to some of you, but the highlight of the trip is...drum roll... Fjords! Besides being a fun word to pronounce (roughly "fe-YORD"), these are narrow, steep-sided valleys formed by glaciers and then flooded by sea water. Aside from dramatic cliffs and coastline, we should get glaciers and a number of marine mammals. Importantly for our Biggish Year, it's also our last chance for Alaskan seabirds, so we will have our attention torn in many directions!

As this trip winds down, here are a few of the sights you missed by not coming with us. I mean, we didn't offer, but you still could have popped over for a few days.

It's never too early to re-model your home...

But that DIY is some seriously tiring work, man!

Seriously, give it up for the Arctic Tern. These sun-loving birds breed in the Arctic during June and July, fly south to ANTARCTICA to hang out during the southern Summer, and then fly BACK again the next spring! At a minimum, this is about 24,000 miles of flying per year, and many birds take meandering courses that are much longer, up to 57,000 miles per year!!! They often live to be more than 30 years old, so in a typical lifetime, they could fly a distance equivalent to going to the Moon and back three times. And here I get tired walking from the couch to the fridge and back.

A wonderful creature is the Caribou
His antlers can grow more than an inch per day
I don't know how the Hell-he-do.

Denali, covered in clouds, like it apparently usually is. Even in the summer, about half the days the mountain is enveloped in clouds and is not visible at all.

Jaeger coming in a for a landing.

Dall Sheep in Denali. Two mammal pics in one post is evidence that I'm not JUST about birds!

Rusty Blackbird says, "Seriously? Can't a guy eat lunch without somebody whipping out a camera? Why you gotta point that thing at me? Jerk."

Until next time,
Me.

Spotted

A mis amables osos polares,

This missive is fired your way from Denali, Alaska! We flew from Nome back to Anchorage on Wednesday and then drove up here on Thursday. Today was our tour of Denali National Park, which involves a 66-mile bus ride from the park entrance to the Eielson Visitor Center, located about 30 miles away from Mt. McKinley, and back again.

You can't appreciate how big Mt. McKinley is unless you get a clear view of it. Like LeBron James surrounded by the Fern Grove Elementary basketball team, McKinley literally towers above the other mountains around it. I've seen big mountains before, but nothing like this, which was a very cool experience.

Aside from the scenery, the other cool thing about today's tour was the fauna. We saw Moose, as well as our first-ever sighting of Caribou and Dall Sheep! Plus, we found one of our two target birds for the park, a beautiful Gyrfalcon hanging out on a cliff ledge near its nest! (pics to follow soon)

But, the weirdest thing happened on Wednesday.

We were sitting in the tiny Nome Airport, and I was reading the daily Rare Bird Report out loud to The Wife.

"Hmm...maybe we should go to Tucson soon to find the Tufted Flycatcher," I mused aloud.

At which time a voice behind me says, "Hey, are you Ms. Biggish Year?" apparently to my wife.

"Uhhh....," says The Wife, stunned, "yeah?"

"And are you Mr. Biggish Year?" he asks me.

"Well, ummm...." I said, thinking quickly about how the heck he could have known our names, and where the closest exit door and security officer were.

"Cool. We saw your names on eBird reports and so knew you were around. My buddy here is doing a Big Year and he's near you on the list. We've been following your progress, so were wondering if we'd run into you."

Now, I've been doing my own share of cyber-stalking this year, identifying several people we've met in the field by comments they made, their first names, and eBird reports. But of course I didn't tell them that; having a stranger call your name tends to freak people out.

But, the tables had turned! Now, we were the ones being stalked! Freaky!

Fortunately, the guys were very nice, and we exchanged stories about our experiences in Nome until the plane boarded. They had spent a week in Nome and found many more birds than us, which made us insanely jealous and instantly started us planning how we could get back to Nome before the snows hit. Which, sadly, probably won't happen.

So, guys, if you read this... congrats on your week and good luck the rest of the year!

At least there weren't any paparazzi...yet.

Me

Nome

How the heck did we end up in Nome, Alaska?

Just a few days ago, we were hanging out on our deck in Napa, CA, enjoying dinner on our deck on a warm spring evening.

Today, we find ourselves on the edge of the Arctic Circle, birding one moment in dense fog, another in 30mph winds and 45F temperatures, and another in California-like blue skies and 70F.

Nome is a 75-minute flight north of Anchorage, or almost the same distance as between San Francisco and Portland. So, while Anchorage is currently experiencing 20 hours of daylight, Nome is getting 22 hours! While I'm writing this, at 11:30PM local time, the sun is still well above the horizon and won't dip under until about 2am, only to pop up again at 4am.

A challenge in small towns is finding good food, and the food here has been OK. Tonight we dined in an Italian/Korean/Japanese restaurant, not an unusual combination for small towns. We chose our cuisine based on the ethnicity of the hosts, assuming they would know the most about that type of food, and sure enough, the Bi-Bim-Bap was pretty tasty.

The birding has been great, as Nome is far enough north to get birds that don't like to travel to where the weather is decent. So, our list now include some exotic names like Northern Wheatear, Eastern Yellow Wagtail, and Bar-tailed Godwit. But, the bird of the day was this sexy little number:

The Willow Ptarmigan is wearing Uggs. In June. Apparently, he's a California Girl at heart.

Note that, the wife cracked herself up when she came up with this, said in the style of Chubby Checker:

The young-un's should consult YouTube for a reference

The remaining lyrics are left as an exercise for the student.

One more day here in Nome, and then we fly back to Anchorage on Wednesday evening. We are only 13 birds from our original goal, and that may be achievable in our remaining 5 days in Alaska!

Ptarm-igan-ing, like we did last year
Me

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