Fall Birding on St. Paul Island, Alaska - Part Two.

Fall Birding on Alaska's St. Paul Island - Part Two. 

The story to date: Eighteen birders arrived on St. Paul Island, the principal island of Alaska's Pribilofs, on 18 September. The next day they began their first full day of St. Paul birding under the leadership of Gavin Bieber, Scott Schuette, and Doug Gochfeld. An account of the first day continues in Part Two.

Small groups of Black-legged Kittiwakes buoyantly rode the wind over the breakers. Among them occasionally would be darker mantled birds, which when seen up close would have shorter bills and puffier-appearing heads. These were Red-legged Kittiwakes, endemic to only four groups of islands in the south Bering Sea. Seventy-five percent of the world’s population breeds on St. George Island.

Doug Hochfeld showed me a short series of lodgements for my feet on the cliff so that I could point my lens around the corner to get shots of the cliff-nesting Northern Fulmars which are common around the island in light, dark and intermediate morphs. Other species that nest on similar ledges include Common and Thick-billed murres and of course the smaller alcids, like Least, Crested, and Parakeet auklets, for which the Pribilofs are famous. The auklets had finished breeding and had left the island. Occasionally during seawatches the guides would proclaim a distant dot a Parakeet or Least auklet but for birders who want good long looks at these species spring and summer, not fall, were the times to visit the island.

Horned Puffins were still visible, however, and still in high plumage. A strong flier,  one would pass the point flying at medium height in preparation to landing on one of the cliff tops before bettling into its burrow where late season young still waited. Among the Horned Puffins were a few Tufted Puffins as well.

Horned Puffin at Southwest Point, 19 September, 2013. Ph - Chris Sidle

The last cliff dweller at the point was the Red-faced Cormorant, which like the Red-legged Kittiwake, is restricted largely to the Bering Sea. This is a like a bigger version of the Pelagic Cormorant which also occurs around St. Paul. The Red-faced has a slightly longer bill, red facial coloration, and when it flies a distinctive pop-bellied look.

At shallow Antone Lake Gavin showed us our only Red-necked Stint of the trip. The tour was a little late in the season for Old World shorebirds, most of which would have occurred in mid to late August. This stint had been on the island about four days and we were lucky to get it so late in the season. A few days later we were lucky again when two Gray-tailed Tattlers appeared at the Salt Lagoon.

The commonest shorebird of St. Paul Island is the Rock Sandpiper. It’s another bird that has a giant subspecies found only on the Pribilofs. Calidris ptilocnemis is divided by taxonomists into four subspecies. The nominate race is the big pale one, C.p. ptilocnemis. The other two races that occur in North America are smaller and darker: C. p. tschuktschorum and C.p. couesi. Twice we spotted smaller, darker birds among the big pale ptilocnemis birds.

Rock Sandpiper of the Pribilof race - larger and paler than the other races of this species. Photo - Chris Siddle

Near the hotel/airport was a pond named Weather Bureau Lake. When we checked it after lunch we were lucky. The first Emperor Goose of the season was resting on its shore. Nearby was an Aleutian Cackling Goose (Latin leucoparia), an individual which had been resident during the summer. The three waterfowl that breed on St. Paul were present in numbers: Green-winged Teal (in female type plumage so we couldn’t tell if a Eurasian type was present or not), Northern Pintails, and Long-tailed Ducks. On the salt water Harlequin Ducks are present year-round but do not breed.

Over one hundred Red Phalaropes spun and pecked the water’s surface. Among them were a few Red-necked Phalaropes as well. With individuals of both species wearing juvenile plumage it was surprisingly difficult at times to separate the species in spite of the larger size of the Reds.

Sturdy Red Phalarope appeared in numbers on several of the island's ponds. Ph - C. Siddle. 

Bathing in Weather Bureau Lake were about 100 Black-legged Kittiwakes. With them were two adult Red-legged Kittiwakes. It was here that we got our best look at the differences between the two small gull species. The shorter bill and puffier looking head of the Red-legged Kittiwake was almost as good a field mark as it mantle which was a full shade or two darker than the mantle of its close relative.

Polovina Hill sat low and green in the distance. On the south side of the hill were two pits, a small vegetated one and a much larger recent excavation. Such pits result from road crews excavating volcanic rock that can be crushed and used as material to cover roads with. Any such pit, given the right wind direction, can become shelter for smaller birds in general and accidental and casual wind-blown passerines in particular, so, like putchkie patches, guides always check their favourite pits especially in favourable windy weather.

We had no sooner approached the smaller of the two pits when sharp-eyed Gavin saw movement in the putchkie silohetted across the slope above the pit. As he yelled, “Here’s something good!” it was everyone for themselves as we scrambled from the bus. I make the process of exiting the bus sound like a swift one, but it wasn’t. Eighteen birders automatically reached for their binoculars, the straps of which might or might not become entangled in tripods attached to scopes that snag a camera strap on the way across the bench seat. Coats and  gloves are trampled, hats are hastily re-adjusted on tossled heads before with a final “ummmph” the birder launches him or herself from the bus’s only useable exit. I imagined we looked like the most disorganized string of parachutist tumbling from a plane.

At well over 100 m Gavin used his superpowered eyesight, or so it seemed to me, to identify the bird as our first genuine Asian stray. “Grey-streaked Flycatcher,” he said.

Grey-streaked Flycatcher? I thought that I knew my strays, at least in the field guides, but this was a new name to me. It turns out that it used to be named the Grey-spotted or Spot-breasted Flycatcher, but its new English name suits it better since spots do not seem to be involved at all. It’s an Old World Flycatcher of the Muscicapidae family. It breeds in northeast China and southeast Russia including Kamchatka, and winters in Taiwan, the Philippines, North Borneo, Sulawesi, Moluccas, and west New Guinea. Over the years a handful of records have accumulated from the Alaskan islands.

According to The Handbook of the Birds of the World, the Grey-streaked Flycatcher is “confiding”. Yes, maybe, but if a score of birders come at it from out of nowhere, it may have a tendency to fly away. That’s what our bird did, instantly. Fewer than half of our number saw the bird well enough to count it. I wasn’t one of them.

Then the little bird flew back, staying once again along the upper lip of the cut in the mountain. And then it took off again. I stuck with Gavin who suggested that some of us walk with him up the road to see if we could encourage the bird to return to its first sheltered nook.

The bird did return, just not when I was anywhere near the scope in which everyone else got a satisfying albeit brief look. Damn. I had to take consolation in watching a Pacific Golden-Plover zoom overhead as we explored the other, larger pit.

Pumphouse Lake and the little twins, Cup Lake and Saucer Lake, were our last stops before supper. Here most of us got fairly good looks at a juvenile Sharp-tailed Sandpiper, the first of many we were to see over the next few days. The guides organized us to tramp around Pumphouse Lake where there was a good chance of flushing a Common Snipe, the Old World species which was “left behind” when the American Ornithologists Union split out Wilson’s Snipe. Common Snipe occur was very uncommon migrants on St. Paul. The species has three field marks that can separate it from Wilson’s Snipe: a slightly differently pitched “ski-ape” flight note, a broader white trailing edge to its secondaries, and a paler white-striped underwing. These marks we noted when we twice flushed a Common Snipe from the sedges around the lake.

Sharp-tailed Sandpipers were fairly frequent migrants that often appeared on the island's roadsides. Ph - C. Siddle

Other birds in the area included four Green-winged Teal, a few Black-legged Kittiwakes, a score of Glaucous-winged Gulls and about 10 Northern Pintails. From out of nowhere one Red-throated Pipit chased a second one right in front of Doug who was leading the way back to the bus. Red-throats caused barely a flutter among the guides who regard it as an uncommon but regular fall migrant. As for the rest of us, at least some wished we had seen the birds better, but that’s always the way, isn’t it?

Cheerful and tireless, Doug Gochfeld tramped endless miles of the island in search of birds. Ph - C. Siddle

Earlier Gavin had explained how the long very narrow arm of land which stretched to Northeast Point, which resembled a clenched fist on the end of the long arm, had been within the history of human occupation on St. Paul a separate island but had become joined with sand dunes and the largest wetland on the island, Big Lake. This arm was known to the early Russian and the Aleutian workers as Novastoshnah, “the new growth” as Fisher explains in Wild America, and ended at what was then one of the largest fur seal colonies on the island, challenged only by the Reef colony. Novastoshnah once was home to 100,000 fur seals, possibly the biggest concentration of large wild mammals visible from one place (Hutchinson Hill) on the planet.

Lapland Longspur - one of three common passerines on St. Paul. Ph - C. Siddle

After supper we bumped and clattered our way over the dune road past Big Lake where thousands of kittiwakes loafed on a long narrow sandbar. A single modest wooden house, now empty but available as accommodation for any members of the St. Paul tribe, sat atop a low sandy hill. This was Webster House atop Webster Hill. And in the backyard was small circular Webster Lake, inhabited by a couple of hundred Red Phalaropes, and the usual three species of ducks. North of that was lowland covered by putchkie and finally Hutchinson Hill and the Novastoshnah rookery, as seal colonies are locally called.

The seal colony stretched from the beach to the base of the hill. Some fur seals climbed Hutchinson Hill for reasons best known to fur seals and were curious about the humans who were climbing the hill from the landward side. Once again Scott cautioned us to never approach a fur seal, not only because of the $10,000.00 fine for encroaching upon a federally endangered species, but also because fur seals bite.

We could see below us the remains of an elevated broadwalk strung across the middle of the colony. Long gaps between sections indicated that the boardwalk hadn’t been used in many years. On those boards seal researchers would use long poles with hooks to retrieve dead pups for necropsies to determine how and why they had died. The nightmare of many a seal scientist was to slip off the boardwalk and plunge into the colony to be savaged by territorial bulls and upset cows. I don’t know if such a thing ever happened but I know people did worry about such an accident.

Part of the old boardwalk over the formerly huge fur seal colony at Northeast Point. Ph - C. Siddle

The colony now held a few hundred seals, not crowds of thousands. The big bulls, the beachmasters, had returned to the ocean in August and life on the beach was as peaceful for the young males, females, and the pups as their boisterous social nature and the threat of seal-eating orcas just off the beach would allow. The bleats, belches and barks of the seals still rode the sea wind making the colony sound like sheep suffered from an extreme form of indigestion.

The guides had led us to a notch in the hill lined with vegetation. In the shelter of its steep walls a Brambling, a Red-breasted Nuthatch, a Red Fox Sparrow, and several Lapland Longspurs foraged. The Brambling, a female with a very bright white rump and lower back, was an uncommon migrant, as was the “Red” subspecies of Fox Sparrrow, the Sooty group of Fox Sparrows being much more usual, but the little Red-breasted Nuthatch was a prize, one of very few sightings on the Pribilofs. The presence of the Fox Sparrow and the nuthatch underlined the fact that vagrant birds were just as likely to be blown onto St. Paul from the east (North America) as from the west (Asia). It all depended upon wind direction, of course.

At Webster Lake Scott and Doug were leading files of birders through the sedges, Gavin was scouting an area of putchkie by himself, and the rest of us were quietly standing by some wooded pallets that had been flung upon a mound next to the house where the guides had thrown around some bird seed a few days before. The seeds were still attracting rosy finches, longspurs and Snow Buntings. Some of us were watching the volunteers tramping around the lake, especially since they were close to the spot where Scott and others had discovered a Middendorf’s Grasshopper-warbler on 16 September, a classic and ultra-rare vagrant from Asia. Others of us were squinting down viewfinders photographing Snow Buntings. Suddenly all hell broke loose with Gavin rounding the corner of the house yelling, “Swift. Swift. Pacific Swift!” and those of us who were lucky caught sight of a large swift directly over the house. Somewhat larger than a Black Swift, the Pacific (aka Fork-tailed) Swift is the largest of the Apus swifts, and in shape resembles the Common Swift of Eurasia which I had seen frequently in May 2012 during a visit to Prague. Laura Keene somehow managed to take several photos of the bird, a couple of which clearly show the bird’s rectangular white rump patch, its diagnostic field mark.

The bird gave no one a second chance. It flew steadily away, became a dot on the horizon and disappeared against the clouds. Those of us who had seen it were ecstatic; those who missed it were crushed, and those who had got on it late and had seen only a dot were torn between the desire to count it and the need to have seen it better.  “Jackpot birding”, as the ABA calls looking for ultra rarities in places like St. Paul can severely test a birder’s ethics. Should he count the bird if he himself couldn’t have identified it without the help of a guide?  Was the glimpse he got of the bird good enough to satisfy his standard of sightings? Such questions sometimes end up balanced against the birder’s feelings that he didn’t go to all the expense and discomfort of traveling to a remote place like St. Paul Island to miss a bird just because he didn’t see it very well.

So ended the first full day on the island. Full of talk about the birds we had seen and the ones we had missed, we were driven over the rough sand dune road back to the hotel. Settling in for a short night’s sleep, we all wondered what tomorrow would bring us. 

If you have comments please send them to me via my email at chris.siddle@gmail.com

Be sure to check out Laura Keene's photos of our trip. Find it at http://flickr.com/gp/keeneone/c6jbV1/

Fall birding on Alaska's St. Paul Island - Part One.

When my wife, Sonja, gave me the birthday gift of a place in an ABA birding tour of St. Paul Island in the Pribilof Islands in the Bering Sea, I didn’t quite know what to expect. As a long time birder I knew, of course, about the Alaskan specialties like the Red-faced Cormorant found only along the southeastern coast and around the islands of the state, and I knew that the farther west the island, the more likely it was to attract Asian species blown off course by storms, of which there must assuredly be plenty in this tempest-tossed part of the world. I vaguely remembered reading about the Northern Fur Seals of St. Paul Island in Roger Tory Peterson and James Fisher’s classic Wild America, and Scott Weidensaul’s excellent follow-up book, Return to Wild America. But I didn’t know if any seals would still be on the beaches during the tour which was scheduled 18 September – 25 September.

Sixteen other birders were joining me on this tour. As we waited at the Anchorage airport for a report that our Pen Air flight would actually happen, I wondered what my tour mates would be like. Little did I know that most of them would turn out to be warm-hearted, funny, and delightful field companions! More about them later.

Four hours late, the twin-engined turbo prop took off from Anchorage. The scenery was hidden below a layer of cloud. Three and a half hours later, about 8 in the evening the plane landed at the St. Paul Airport. A quick walk through a big hangar led us into a one story building which was not only airport but also the island’s only hotel, the New King Eider Hotel, our home for the next week.

Even though birds were hoping about outside the hotel, we had supper to eat and orientation to sit through. That didn’t stop the occasional birder from slipping outside to catch glimpses of the Lapland Longspurs, Snow Buntings, and Gray-crowned Rosy Finches that are St. Paul’s three common passerines. As well, two Ruddy Turnstones flew from the road to an open patch of ground though we were at least a km from the nearest shore. Yes, St. Paul Island was going to be a different sort of place.

Our tour bus parked near Hutchinson's Hill - the road is hidden by the putchkie.

The Gray-crowned Rosy Finches were members of the subspecies Leucosticte tephrocotis umbrina, resident to the Pribilofs and St. Matthew Island. Together with L.t. griseonucha of the Aleutians, the Alaska Peninsula and occasionally Kodiak Island, these races are the giant races of the Gray-crowned Rosy Finch. St. Paul’s “umbrina” were rich brown with pink on the belly and much pink edging to the coverts and flight feathers. They seemed to occur everywhere, especially where there were nooks and crannies for them to pop in and out of. I saw them on the roadways of crushed volcanic rock, among the black beach boulders, all over the running boards and cab of a truck, bathing in a puddle on the flatbed of the same vehicle, investigating a hole in a large bag of something that looked like gravel, and checking out under the eves and around the outside electric lights of the airport/hotel. Of the three common songbirds on St. Paul they seem to be the tamest, though not really tame at all. The longspurs and the snow buntings are quite skittish compared to the finches.

A young Gray-crowned Rosy Finch near the New King Eider Hotel 

Our guides (and drivers) Gavin Bieber, Scott Schuette, and Doug Gochfeld introduced us to the concept of fixed meal times at the Trident Seafood Company cafetaria where we took all of our meals except the one we were currently consuming and to the daily schedule which featured a leisurely breakfast at 7:50-9:20 while waiting for enough light to begin birding. The island is situated so far west (Alaska has only two time zones when it should have four, I read) that wristwatch time bears only a vague resemblance to solar time. Finally Gavin and Scott introduced us to putchkie, a specimen of which Doug held high for all to see. This type of wild celery stands almost a metre tall, and has course, stringy, hollow stems that sort of pop when you crush them. Not that we were encouraged to. Quite the opposite, in fact. We were told to leave the putchkie as intact and as healthy as possible, to step around it, a concept that we ignorant newcomers to the island didn’t know enough at this stage to find ridiculous.

A few days later, after having been force-marched through acres of the stuff, sore backed and stiff legged from wading and waddling through the crap weed which in combination with tussocks of sedge tripped us, tangled us up, and engulfed the shortest of us, we knew that you can’t hurt putchkie. Putchkie damages the birder, not the other way around. After humanity has played out is pitiful turn upon the stage we call Earth and we have blasted ourselves to extinction with nuclear weapons, only three things will remain on the planet, from which all future life will be derived – the rat, the cockroach, and putchkie.

Normally one could avoid putchkie, walk around it, but since the island is treeless, putchkie is the tallest plant and songbirds, blown out to the island, inevitably find their way into the putchkie and make do with its branching structure. To find the maximum numbers of rarities one must penetrate the putchkie patches and flush the rare birds out at least for a few seconds and then relocate the birds after they have dived back into cover. To penetrate the putchkie patches one needs a line of people who would slowly walk abreast a few metres apart, a human dragnet that lets nothing escape from the patch. And that’s were the birders came in, as willing and half-willing volunteers.

I swear Gavin would stay awake night dreaming of new ways to push through the putchkie. The manuvers he asked for always involved two lines of walkers, one walking slowly perpendicular to the road away from the dry comfort of our empty bus, while the other walkers formed a line to pivot on one end of the first line and swing like a gate through the cold, wet waist-high jungle. After studying the topography a moment he would call out variations on this basic plan, like a choreographer, a little testy or sometimes clearly frustrated with our inability to conform to his grand ideas of synchronistic movement.

“I said perpendicular to the road, not parallel,” he would shout. “Perpendicular!” he would cry. “Why are otherwise intelligent people are unable to do such a simple thing as walk equally spaced in a straight line?” All he lacked was an eye-patch, jodhpurs and boots, and a short leather quirk to beat against his hand.

But enough for the moment about putchkie.

Our first full day on St. Paul Island was brilliant. The sun shone for whole minutes at a time, the wind was not fearsome, the birds seemed plentiful. On our way from town to Southwest Point, we slowly passed Bachelor Beach named for the Northern Fur Seals that crowded the top of the beach to get a look at us.

These were not my first fur seals. I had briefly seen Australian Fur Seals in a sea cave on South Australia’s Kangaroo Island and New Zealand Fur Seals swimming in a beautiful bottle green inlet near Christchurch, New Zealand. However, this was the closest I had ever been to a fur seal.

The Northern Fur Seal appears to me to look like the classic circus seal – with large soulful eyes, a cute expression, tiny stubby ears and a mouth full of dog-like teeth. Except for the older males, fur seals look sleek. In the surf they are the porpoises of the seal world, torpedoing out of the water in a fast arc almost impossible to capture with a camera.

N. Fur Seals taking advantage of dry windless weather. 

As reluctant as the tour group was to leave the fur seals, we understood as our guides fairly quickly ended the stop and continued to Southwest Point where weird lichen-encrusted boulders broke up the tundra like mosses and low plants. We stood atop a short cliff to watch three Arctic Foxes tugging and chewing on a large pale, somewhat elastic looking mass, all that was left of a Gray Whale. St. Paul’s Arctic Foxes are blackish blue, closely matching the dark volcanic rocks that everywhere lay exposed. During our week we saw foxes in town, around the seal beaches, among the rocks of the quarry, and even out on the sand flats of the large Salt Lagoon. Arctic Foxes are well adapted to living in the cold. Found right across the Arctic, this species even has fur on the pads of its little feet, and fur so thick and of such efficiency that the animal doesn’t start to shiver until -70C.

On the rocks near the whale carcass were Glaucous-winged Gulls, one Herring Gull, and a near-adult Slaty-backed Gull. With its staring yellow eyes looking out from the dark that surrounds them, and its long sturdy bill, this is one menacing looking gull. We duly noted it, little suspecting that it was to be the only Slaty-back we were to see for the rest of the tour.

The St. Paul Glaucous-winged Gulls possessed much lighter gray primaries than the Glaucous-wings around Vancouver and southern B.C. do. Truly our southern birds are “Olympic Gulls”, showing evidence of their interbreeding with Western Gulls in the varying dark shades of gray or gray-black of their primary tips. If the Glaucous-winged Gulls of St. Paul Island interbreed, they do so with Glaucous Gulls, among others, so that large gulls with white primaries are sometimes seen among the light-gray winged birds.

Glaucous-winged Gulls near Southwest Point

To be continued.