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WORDS ON BIRDS
Curlews and Bluethroats Highlight Nome Visit
August 2, 2008
Steve Grinley
Our next destination on our Alaskan trip was Nome. Nome
is on the Seward Peninsula that reaches into the Bering Sea. It is an
old gold rush town, and it looks like it hasn't change much since its
hay-day at the turn of the 19th century. Gold miners still sift for
gold along the beaches there. Nome is now famous for being the finish
line for the Iditarod Dog Sled Race that starts in Anchorage.
Nome is near the Arctic Circle and we had more than 20
hours of sunlight each day with the sun setting, briefly, around
12:30am. The birding there was some of the best that we experienced on
the trip. This time, we were more comfortable in three 15 passenger
vans for the twenty of us and our gear. There are three dirt roads
that lead out of town and each ends seventy or more miles later at a
smaller town.
The road to Council, which headed east along the coast,
is the first one that we traveled. Mew gulls were the common gull
there, and arctic terns perched on telephone wires! A stop at the
mouth of the Nome River produced glaucous-winged and slaty-backed
gulls. Further along the road we found a colony of Aleutian terns,
another life bird for nearly everyone on the trip. We were searching
for Arctic loons, but we came up empty. We did find bar-tailed godwits
and several Pacific loons, including one with youngsters riding on its
back!
The next day we took the Kougarok Road which headed
north into the hills. (Of course, hills is a relative term here, as
many of these "hills" were equivalent to the "mountains" of the
Berkshires or White Mountains. But these hills were dwarfed by the
high mountain ranges that we encountered on much of our trip.) The
scenery was spectacular along this road, as was the wildlife. We saw
our first grizzly bear of the trip, a moose with calf, and a golden
eagle's nest with eaglets on the side of a cliff. On the down side, we
also saw a mew gull eating a young semipalmated plover.
We reached our destination some seventy miles along
this road, which was the nesting area for the rare bristle-thighed
curlew. It required that we hike up a hill of tundra to search for the
one or two pairs that might be nesting there. Now, walking on tundra
is not easy. It requires careful stepping around low growing
vegetation while trying to avoid the wet areas. We made our way up
hill slowly, but it was exhausting nevertheless.
We only saw whimbrels and golden plovers during our
first couple of hours. We then decided to split up and one of our
groups finally located a pair of curlews on a far ridge. We all made
the strenuous hike to that ridge to see the birds, and then had to
make the long trek back. We did encounter another pair of curlews on
the way down along with good looks at bar-tailed godwits. It was
arduous work, just to find our target bird, and a couple of our
participants got in trouble from exhaustion and dehydration. A
collective effort got everyone off the mountain safely, and with good
views of these rare curlews.
On our way back, we were further rewarded with
beautiful views of a pair of Bluethroats bringing food to a nest near
Salmon Lake. These beautiful birds have bright blue and red on the
neck and chest and was the favorite bird of most everyone. Some of us
also had life views of hoary redpolls, and a yellow wagtail, while a
wandering tattler, similar to our spotted sandpiper, walked the shore
of the lake. We also saw our first willow ptarmigans of the trip.
The following day, we took the road to Teller, which is
a fishing village on the north side of the peninsula. The song of
gray-cheeked thrushes and Arctic warblers accompanied us much of the
way. We finally had good looks at Arctic warblers and, after much
work, wheatears and rock ptarmigans with chicks. We found Pacific
golden plovers, a rough-legged hawk at its nest, and we encountered
our first Musk ox of the trip.
When we arrived at Teller, we watched jaegers try to
steal fish from the kittiwakes that were feeding offshore. We watched
a pair of horned puffins fly by, our first of the trip. We watched the
local fishermen casting for salmon from shore. Their pickup trucks
were backed up to the shore and as they pulled in a fish, their wives
would take the fish and immediately clean it, in seconds, right on the
back of the truck. As we drove through town, we could see the fish
hanging in the yards to dry, like clothes on a clothes line. Like the
birds, the native people here experience subsistence living. Steve Grinley
Bird Watcher's Supply & Gift and Nature Shop at Joppa Flats
Newburyport, MA
BirdWSG@Verizon.net
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