Bald Eagle tracks at Kenai Beach, Cook Inlet

Right before I left Alaska, a dear friend and her family visited me on the Kenai Peninsula. Before I got the job with the USFWS, Nadia had been planning a trip to Anchorage, AK to visit a family member. When I got the job just 3 hours from there, she promised she'd come visit me.

Nadia, her husband David, and sons Oliver and Griffin, picked me up one morning at my cabin and we spent the day sight-seeing around where I had been living for the summer.

The 'A' is where I lived in Soldotna, and the large blue expanse of blue that curves up to Anchorage and beyond is the Cook Inlet.

We spent a lot of our time on the beach of the Inlet that morning, walking the shore. The Inlet has a huge flucuation in water levels when the tide goes in and out. When the tide is low, it leaves a wide expanse of scary, "quicksand-like" mud, that animals and people alike have gotten stuck in, and then drowned when the tide comes back up. I explained to the boys to not step in the mud, and they had a lot of fun chucking rocks into the sludge instead.

We saw cool stuff like:

Shells

Dead salmon sharks

And many other dead fish, like this flounder and...

 

...whatever this thing is. Not a salmon, so therefore: out of my range of knowledge :)

 

What I was most excited about seeing though, was this immature Bald Eagle (Haliaeetus leucocephalus):

We watched it come in to land, and it first landed on the ground, and took a few steps around. Then he or she sat on that stump for a long time, just taking in the sights and watching us. We eventually got too close though, and it took off. I wandered up there, to check out the spot and see what was so interesting. I was rewarded with some beautiful tracks in nice moist sand.

This bottom picture is just of the single left track in the first track picture. Sorry for not using something for scale...but you can see how big it is in comparison to my hand.

 

This was the first time I think I have found nice bird tracks, that I KNEW who they belonged to. I've speculated and said "duck" or "goose" or "songbird", but I saw the Eagle leave these tracks.

 

I referred to easily one of my new favorite guides, Bird Tracks and Sign: A Guide to North American Species by Mark Elbroch with Eleanor Marks.

 

Their measurements for Bald Eagle tracks are: 6-8 1/4" L x 3 1/4-5 3/4" W, on average, for an adult. As you can see, this bird is an immature. It's not that dark brownish black, with the distinctive white head and tail. Bald Eagle's can take up to 5 years to completely mature, and I'm not expert on micro-aging. So all I can say is this bird isn't a chick, nor a true adult.

 

By my judgement of the size of my own hand, and a ruler I have now here in my kitchen- those tracks seem to be on the small side or just under, average.

 

Other notes that Elbroch and Marks have written about the characteristics of Bald Eagle tracks:

 

-Classic bird tracks.

-Very large.

-Anisodactyl (3 toes pointing forward, one toe (the hallux) pointing backward).

-Toe pads very bulbous and rough.

 

-Trail (or I like to call it 'Track Pattern'): Walking with strides of 4-11", on average, for an adult.

 

They go on to say:

 

-"Predatory birds don't often stroll...if an eagle is on the ground, there is often food nearby. Look for signs of feeding, such as fish or carrion remains."

 

Well, as shown in the above pictures, there were dead fish everywhere. Lot's of scavenging opportunities each time the tide receded.

 

I love tracking, I think it offers so much insight into the animal's life and movements. In this case, I lucky to see the tracks be left behind, but that's not always the case!

 

 

 



My first solo birding adventures!

This past semester I became more interested in birding. Birds are so much more accessible than mammals, and to be honest- I knew very little about birds. I could identify common feeder birds, and birds of prey...but that was where my knowledge ended.

I did a bunch of birding in the Finger Lakes region of NY this spring with faculty and staff at school to study for a test that included NY birds, as well as just to get a taste for it.

Then I got hired to work in Alaska for the summer and many of the bird species that I'm comfortable with, aren't here! SO I've been spending time outside with my binocs, a notebook, a camera, and my field guides. The guides that I'm using these days are Sibley's Guide to Birds (the big one including all North American birds), and the Audubon Birds app for Android. Some people aren't big on apps as field guides, but Amazon.com gives away an app a day, and this one was one back in April. It's awesome...has tons a of calls, images, natural history, and the ways you can look up birds in ingenious. I can select a "type", so chicken-like for example, type in Alaska, and pick the month I'm in, and it will bring all the birds that fit those descriptions. So cool.

Anway, the following are some pictures I've gotten in and around Soldotna, AK which is where I live.

Gray Jay (Perisoreus canadensis)

I called 3 of these birds into me at once! Super curious, not exactly "tame", but definetely not shy. They've been known to thieve a campsite or picnic lunch. I love them!

Dark-eyed Junco (Junco hyemalis)

I also called several of these little sparrows in as well (did you know D-EJ is a sparrow?!), which the Audobon bird app. I heard a bunch of birds calling, so I played the D-EJ call to see if it was them singing, and it was. This Junco above was particularly enamored with me/the app. It actually landed on my knee before uttering a sparrow version of "OH S***" and taking flight again. The picture above required little zoom action, this bird was very close to me!

Allright, here we go with the gulls. I'm going to make it my summer mission to learn to ID local gulls.

For this guy here, I'm going with Glaucous-winged Gull (Larus glaucescens). I know these birds are common here, but I'm just a little stumped by the wing tip color. In Sibley's it says "wingtips patterned in gray, about the same color as the mantle (shoulders/back)". I think that this Gull's wingtips are much darker than the mantle, but nothing else really seems to fit with bill coloration, eye ring color, leg color...etc etc. I'm soliciting input here! 

Lesser yellowlegs (Tringa flavipes)

I'm going with the Lesser and sticking to it! After careful consideration of all the other photos I didn't post, I'm saying Lesser because: the barring on the flanks doesn't seem to be AS pronounced as described for the Greater, the bill does not appear to curve upwards like the Greater, and it just was a delicate looking bird. Not to say Greater isn't, I just feel it was. And since I was with a bunch of 'Fish-heads" who don't care about it unless it's scaly and has fins, then I was the local expert and so I say Lesser!

Stumped. Here are my choices: Bonparte's Gull (Larus phildelphia), Black-headed Gull (Larus ridibundus), or Franklin's Gull (Larus pipixcan). I guess I can be happy that I got it down to all the same genera...but I'm just perplexed! The leg color and hood shape and eye ring and bill color are all mixy-matchy with these 3 species, nothing seems to match up. I am LEANING towards Bonaparte's.

Arctic Tern (Sterna paradisaea)

Bald Eagle - adult (Haliaeetus leucocephalus)

Bald Eagle - juvenile (2-3 year perhaps?)  (Haliaeetus leucocephalus)

Bald Eagle - adult (Haliaeetus leucocephalus)

And that's pretty much my birds so far. It's a personal goal of mine this summer to get "good" at birding...and I don't think I mean being able to ID things right off the bat, but to be able to recognize key features that can differentiate species, and perhaps even sex of the bird. We'll see. There is a birding group that works out of the refuge I'm living at, so I'm going to try and hook up with them and take it from there! For now though, I'll just keep fighting with myself and Sibley's over what bird I just saw :)

AJ goes to AK

So, I'm here in Alaska on the Kenai Peninsula! I arrived here last Sunday night after a LONG day of traveling and adjustments to time changes. I think 6 days later I'm finally adjusted to the difference in time, though not to the long days of light.

So to catch people up, I live on the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge (KNWR) in this gorgeous cabin:

This one and I coincidentally share the same name, which is funny to me! There are 5 of these cabins, each house 4, and then there's a common building with kitchen setups, washers/dryers, and bathrooms with showers.

I have seen some intern housing on another wildlife refuge that I visited earlier this spring and it did NOT look like this! I really lucked out with the summer housing!

I currently have just one roommate, Mercedes, who is a wildlife students from Georgia U I think, and she's working on the refuge this summer.

I'm considered a "fish person" here, which is just too funny to me. I know the bare minimum about fish ID and natural history, but I'm one of the fisheries team this summer. There are 6 seasonal staff, of which I am one, and all the rest are men. All of us are similar in age, probably mid 20s to early 30s. The permanent staff out of the Kenai Fish and Wildlife Field Office are men as well. There are some women on staff, but I won't have much interaction with them.

Anyway, back to housing- the 5 guys will be heading out to remote field camps coming up here soon. And I will remain in this town (Soldotna, AK) for the summer working out of the office. The other people who live on this camp where I am now work for the refuge, so I'll still be with people when the guys leave!

I have ALOT to write about so I'm going to break them up into a couple of entries. This first Alaskan entry will be dedicated to the adventure I had on Memorial Day, my first day in AK!

I travelled all day last Sunday (5/27), arriving here around 4pm, really 8pm EST. I had to meet everyone, and get settled in, and also had to go grocery shopping, which I didn't finish until around 8pm here...12am at home. I was dead tired, and despite the broad daylight, I crawled into my bunk bed and passed out for 12 hours.

The next morning I was up around 8, and outside my cabin on the phone with a friend from home, when one of the guys that I work with stopped and asked me what my plans were for the day, and of course I had none. He invited me to join a couple of them on a tour of the Kenai Fjords by boat! It was super nice of him to invite me, and I jumped at the chance to travel with my coworkers and to see Alaska that you see on postcards!

We drove 2 hours across the peninsula from Soldotna to Seward...

And booked our 4.5 hour tour. With tax it came out to about $110 for the tour and a stop off at a remote resort for an all-you-can-eat buffet of prime rib and salmon! It was a chunk of change to spend my first day, but going on a boat tour was one of the things I really wanted to do here. And it was so worth it!

Seward, Alaska...stunning even in overcast skies!

I wasn't sure what to expect, except maybe whales. Here's my list of critters viewed that day:

-North Pacific humpback whales
-Dall's porpoises
-Coastal mountain goats
-Steller sea lions
-Sea otters
-River otters
-Moose

-Black-legged Kittiwakes
-Crested Puffin
-Glaucous-winged gulls
-Bald Eagles
-Common Murre
-American Oystercatcher

The following images are what I was able to capture at a distance, rocking on the waves!

A Bald Eagle hunting on the banks of the marina. This picture was littery in the midst of hundreds of boats...amazing how common they are here!

North Pacific humpback whale "blowing"!

NPHW

NPHW

Resurrection Bay

The resort we had lunch at on Fox Island.

Our boat docked at Fox Island

River otter right off the dock I was standing on

Coastal mountain goat...that was almost a vertical incline! Crazy goat!

A Black-legged Kittiwake and Glaucous-winged Gull rookery...the largest on the Peninsula! The Captain/tour guide told us that if these birds could figure out a way to lay their eggs on the water they would...they barely even build nests...just hang out on these sheer cliffs.

A pic of the Fjords and a group of very gregarious critters below...

Steller sea lions! They were: loud, stinky, and laying everywhere! Occassionally one, the male (top left on his side) would sit up and yell at his wives, then lay back down...

Common Murre...NOT penguins!

Tufted Puffins... I was told these were Crested Puffins by our Captain, but that's not a standard name for them. Thankfully a Bird Nerd emailed me and let me know that Tufted is the correct name :)

Dall's porpoises

The rookery

And finally, a picture of myself on the back of the boat on our way back to Seward! It was an AWESOME first day in AK, and I thank the guys for inviting me out :)

It's taken me literally 3.5 hours to write and upload all of this at a McDonald's in town and the obnoxious teenagers are annoying me...so I'm calling it a day blogging. If you're interested in keeping up with my summer adventures, either "follow" me if you're a GMail user or add your email above in the bar to get updates when I post. Then you can leave comments and ask questions on the posts. Til next time!

Wildlife Wednesday: April 18th, 2012

This past Wednesday, the 18th, our Wildlife Society Club rallied together for a field trip to our local National Wildlife Refuge: Montezuma. We were able to snag a college van, and headed out mid afternoon. It was a perfect day for birding, which was the theme for the day. MNWR is known for it's migratory birds that take a stop off the flyway during migration. Of course there are resident birds year round, but we're able to see many different water birds that we might not without the refuge.

So under sunny, mild skies our first stop, just outside of MNWR was at a Bald Eagle nest. This nest was naturally made by the birds on top of a utility structure right at the North end of Cayuga Lake at the outlet. As we pulled up, we were excited to see an adult Eagle up there. As we stood and watched we saw 2 brown fuzzy heads pop up, and then another adult off in the distance, perching in nearby trees.

Mom?

Club members checking out the nest, and some of the students to the right are watching the other adult soaring above us.

Kelly and Delicia using the scope John brought for us.

An Eaglet!

TWO Eaglets!

Photo credit: Joe Varga 

I recently bought a beautiful Nikon with a 36x zoom, but that camera did not take this picture. The club's VP, Joe, took this picture with his smart phone lined up to the scope we had set up. A little bit of ingenuity got the shot!

Photo credit: Adriel Douglass

And finally, both adults! The one in flight has a stick that he/she is bringing back to the nest to add to it. I'm sure with 2 rambunctious Eaglets up there, some of the structure of the nest is lost.

After a half hour or so at the viewing site, we had to get going. We headed back to MNWR and stopped at the Visitor's Center to look out over the first marsh flat.

Photo credit: Kevin Skrzynski

As we walked up to the observation deck, we noticed a little Tree Swallow on the railing. It didn't fly away for a few minutes, and allowed us to get some great pictures!

I love the markings on the face, I didn't realize that they had a 'mask' like the raccoon...it makes this little bird look so stern!

We then loaded back up into the van to do the several mile "wildlife drive" through the refuge. This refuge is known for migratory birds using the land as a "stop-over", and that's what we saw!

Photo credit: Adriel Douglass

 Green-winged Teal

Friend, classmates, and students! And our tour guide, John, is in there too somewhere :)

Canada Goose demonstrating a yoga pose?

Great Blue Heron

Trumpeter Swan and an American Coot

Coots! One of my favorites! I would love to handle one someday...

A male and female Mallard

Blue-winged Teals, male and female.

Caspian Terns

Pair of Mallards on a nest, which also happens to be on top of a muskrat lodge.

Yellowlegs

A brief stop at one of the pull-offs.

And some of us are very excited to be at the refuge!

In the background you might be able to pick out a tractor trailer. MNWR is cut right down the middle by Interstate 90. This has been pretty controversial, but human necessity out-won the wildlife and precious ecosystems that were there first.

A panorama from the top of an observation tower at Tschache Pool.

Miscellaneous ducks.

And that was our final stop at Montezuma for the day!

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After we regrouped back at the visitor's center, John invited us all to his house for dinner and a dusk walk. He lives nearby and owns 50 acres of old farm land that has been allowed to run wild. Because it is in the earlier stages of succession, it's brushy and shrubby, but still open more or less, and John mows trails through it. The point of this dusk walk was to look for the Woodcock, which is an awesome springtime bird to look for.

Unfortunately I didn't get any pictures of the Woodcock, but we did see and hear one. The sun was setting, and I didn't even both trying to play with settings on my camera. I didn't want to miss any of the action! The following picture though is one of John's that he got on his property a few years ago.

Photo credit: John Van Niel

How awesome is this? An adult and baby caught at just the right time of year! John wrote an entry about this last year, to check that out visit: Sky Dance: An April Tradition.

As the sun hit the horizon we headed out for our walk to be in place for when the birds came out to do their "dance"...

Two years ago when I started at Finger Lakes Community College, the first class I was in was "Introduction to Environmental Conservation" taught by John. In this course, John intruduced us to Aldo Leopold who writes about the Woodcock and its 'spring dance' in A Sand County Almanac. The read was a hard one, if anyone has read or tried to read Sand County before. I'm a 'reader', always in the middle of a book for leisure, but I struggled getting through that book. Over this past winter I picked it up again and read through it. It's still a tough book, but the content meant so much more to me now being 2 years deep into conservation-minded life. Visiting John's home, and finding the Woodcock performing this annual 'dance', just brought my time here full circle. It was such a fun day with friends, classmates, and a professor that goes out of his way to educate and connect with his students.

This was one of my last events involved with FLCC's Wildlife Society, but I'm glad to have been apart of it and to experience days and nights like this.