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.