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Alaskan Wilderness is Home to Many Species

Posted on: Tuesday, 2 August 2005, 09:00 CDT

Anchorage, Alaska, is a typical small-to-medium-sized American city located smack in the middle of wilderness.

It is not unusual for traffic on Fourth Street, Anchorage's main downtown thoroughfare, to be held up by a wandering moose.

Rick Taylor, CEO of Borderland Tours ( www.borderland-tours.com ) and leader of the birdwatching tour of Alaska that I joined in June, is well aware of this fact.

So before we plunged into the vast boreal forests, he led us to a few locations around town where he knew we might find birds that were unusual for us .

At a place called Hillside Park, we found the three-toed woodpecker, a bird particularly drawn to spruce trees. Most woodpecker species have four toes to help them grip tree trunks and large branches where they search for food, but this species has dispensed with one of them. It is not known what advantage this confers.

An especially observant member of our expedition spotted a newly fledged black-capped chickadee hiding in an alder bush. I know that anthropomorphism, the assignment of human emotions to animals, is an error in nature study, but the tiny creature's expression of exasperation at the binoculars and cameras in its face could only be translated as "DO YOU MIND!"

Anchorage is a city by the sea. Cook Inlet is lined with gooey quicksand. Not a few unwary waders have stood trapped in its mud while the high tide, one of the world's fastest, raced toward them.

Just above high tide line, the tracks of the Alaska Railroad and Seward Highway provide a vantage for observing the mudflats. From the tracks, spotting scopes picked out several species of birds for whom the mud was a banquet table rather than a deathtrap.

Short-billed dowitchers probed the mud for tiny invertebrates. Mew, Glaucous and Glaucous-winged gulls squabbled over scraps, while Arctic terns dove for small fish just offshore.

The railroad and highway have created a large freshwater lagoon, called Potter Marsh, which is the home of many other water birds. Arctic terns and mew gulls nested, while a family of red-necked grebes, colorful waterbirds who carry their babies on their backs and eat their own feathers to absorb the bones of the fish they eat, swam in the sunshine.

The group surrounded and eventually flushed from hiding an Alder flycatcher, whose fee-be-o song is its most, practically only, distinguishing characteristic.

At a restroom stop, a golden-crowned sparrow, a northwestern specialty, sang from an aspen tree.

Ptarmigan Creek Campground produced a northern goshawk, fiercest of raptors, but I missed it. I did; however, find and photograph a handsome Townsend's warbler, a species I had been particularly keen to see.

Seward nestles at the north end of Resurrection Bay. On the bay's west side is Kenai Fjords National Park, where mountains rise precipitously from the sea while massive glaciers disgorge their burden of ice into the narrow fjords. This icy vastness is a refuge to many wildlife species, especially marine mammals and birds.

Tour boats cruise the inlets and glacier outlets during the season. Since our primary goal was birds, our leader persuaded a bird-savvy captain to handle our voyage.

A humpback whale appeared within minutes of our leaving the marina, which made all aboard happy, and birds began appearing at once.

Alcids are robin-sized sea birds with chubby bodies and stubby wings more adapted to pursuing fish underwater than for flight. Since they almost never leave salt water, they were our principal targets.

Tufted puffins, with outsized red bills and golden head plumes skittered across our bow before launching into flight. Rhinoceros auklets, so called for the hornlike projection on their upper bill, bobbed in the waves.

A pair of ancient murrelets, named for the white feathers on the males' head that resemble the hair of an elderly man, popped up just under our bow. Horned puffins, common murres, red-faced and Pelagic cormorants and even a rare Kittlitz's murrelet made appearances.

On a rocky shore, our captain spotted a black oystercatcher. This shorebird sports a large, flat red bill it uses to open the shells of bivalves. Some birds pound the shell from above to break in while others slice through the muscle that holds the halves together. Individual birds use one method or the other, never both.

Before returning to Anchorage, a quick tour of the town located a Steller's jay, which looks like a blue jay whose head and wings have been sprayed with black paint and a marbled murrelet in the bay just off a jetty. A stop at Kenai Lake produced red-breasted merganser ducks, pine grosbeaks and a white-winged crossbill. Crossbills are sparrow-sized finches whose mandibles cross at the tips, an adaptation for opening conifer cones.

For those interested only in numbers, the Alaska adventure was exciting. One hundred-nineteen bird species, of which 37 were life birds and 15 mammal species, including six lifers is impressive.

Alaska stirs the soul of anyone who cannot live without wild things.

Van Harris is past president of the Memphis chapter, Tennessee Ornithological Society; a member of the Mississippi Ornithological Society and the Mississippi chapter of the Audubon Society. His column runs twice each month. E-mail questions to PYRPYRFECT@aol.com.

Source: Commercial Appeal, The

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