part 1 of 3, The Plan:
Well this was definitely a trip with challenges and lessons learned, some funny stories, and some not so much. Traveling with heavy and expensive camera gear is always a challenge, but I envisioned this trip as more of an adventure than most bird photography trips, and that's about how it went.
The planning started years ago, when a friend, Frank, invited me to join him on a bird photography trip to St Paul Island, in the middle of the Bering Sea. I couldn't make it that year, but the seed was sown. This year, I returned to the idea, and looked up the guy who Frank recommended. His name is Bryan Holliday. Bryan had a St Paul trip planned, and a back to back trip to Barrow with it, at the northernmost tip of Alaska. St Paul seemed like mostly easy cliffside shooting which I'd done before in England, and this would complete my Puffin collection (woo hoo!). Barrow was hiking through tundra, which was even more appealing to me. I wanted to see what tundra was like, before it all disappears. Barrow has polar bears, the sun doesn't set in June, the walks to find birds could be a mile, some of that through 3' deep ice water, and it was just a rough and tumble place. The adventure really called out to me
Bryan then had a client who wanted to go to Nome, and so he added that to his offerings, and I thought hey, I'm up there, why not? So I signed up for that too.
Planning happened months ago and the stress began then. I had to find waders to walk through 3' deep ponds with icy bottoms. Nobody wades in LA, so they were hard to find. Fishing stores did the trick. Then, in the final few weeks before the trip, my father in law, Harold, 101 years old, began a steep decline, passed and was buried the day before I departed for Alaska. If he had passed later, I would have cut my trip short one way or another. Stress. We're really missing him, but he had an incredible life that was certainly not cut short.
The itinerary was Nome (5 days), Barrow (6 days), and then St Paul Island (7 days). Each leg involved flying out of Anchorage, and then back to start the next leg, overnighting in Anchorage as required. Different birds in different places.
I met up with Bryan (who just quit his day job teaching 8th grade science to do this full time), Kayla (a young biology student), and Mauro (a doctor from
Italy, my age, spoke little english) at the plane's gate to Nome. A quick study of the crowd, 2 men with a young lady, not Alaskan, not anglers, and a Pelican case, made them easy to spot.
Nome (June 12-16):
The weather in Nome was mostly cloudy, which I generally prefer since it makes for subjects without any shadows, but most of the time it was just too dark, too wet, and at times too windy for great photography. I was expecting fairer weather but this just elevated my mindset to rise to the challenge. Temps were typically in the 40s. I was watching the weather in Nome to get a handle on what to wear, but since we spent most of our time outside of Nome in the mountains, where there were no weather reports, and it was colder, wetter and darker, it took me a day to figure out I needed another warm layer and waterproof pants. My brand new gloves however (from the Heat Company), originally designed for the Austrian special forces, were fabulous, even wearing only 1 of the 3 layers.
Paradoxically, for reasons I can't explain, I was expecting fair weather on shore, but expecting the Bering Sea to be positively roiling In fact, it was calm like a lake, with waves not more than 1' high, which made shooting several shorebirds on the water possible. I had it completely backwards but it all worked out The landscape throughout the area was tundra, which is simply to say there were no trees. In places, there were some bushes that got about 10' tall, but 99% of the land was covered in tundra, which is a mixture of very short plants (less than 1') including short woody plants, flowering plants, grasses and lichens. It seemed to me that every square foot had 20 different plant species, and the next square foot might have another 20. There must have been hundreds of species of these plants, if not thousands, and walking on the tundra was like walking on a 6" thick wet sponge. The surface undulated like the surface of an exposed human brain, which gave me a creepy feeling that there was some hidden collective intelligence that I was trampling on, so I did my best to be gentle with it. Between the folds were pockets of water in the low spots and occasional rocks peeking through. When I could find a path on the rocks, I preferred to step on them in my attempt to be gentle and stay as dry as I could, but I still felt guilty that I was crushing the lichens which take so long to grow. On the other hand, laying down to get eye level shots of our subjects, was super comfy.
Unlike the others in the group, I'm a So Cal guy, so my boots were not waterproof (who knew they should have been?!). It didn't take long for the water to reach my socks, but there was only 1 time on St Paul Island, when they got completely soaked. Fortunately, I was wearing thick wool socks, so my feet were never cold.
The routine was pretty simple. We got up, had breakfast in the common space of our cottage, and then went birding until somewhere between 8 10pm. Lunch consisted of snacks from the market in Nome, dinner was at the Bering Sea Bar & Grill. The sun went down (I think) but it never really got too dark; Nome is 140 miles south of the Arctic Circle. Each day was a hunt for certain species in certain places, and Bryan managed to find most of what he was searching for. The days were long, at least for me, and I had to stay up long enough to download all the photos from my camera or my cards would fill up, and I was getting pretty tired from lack of sleep, or so I thought
My Verizon phone had no cell service in Nome, although Bryan and Mauro had some other service. Of course, that only works in, or near, Nome and we were usually far from it. Bryan
managed to rent a large pickup for all of us to get our gear into, and to be able to sit comfortably in the cab with our cameras (and big lenses). He rented it from some guy who lives there; car rentals are very limited up there.
There are 3 well maintained dirt roads leading out of Nome; one goes NW to Teller, one goes E along the shore and then turns NE to Council, and one goes N directly from Nome and peters out in the middle of nowhere. Each day we took one of the roads. Because I had no map, no sun, and no idea where we were, I can't say very much about where the birds we found were (with some exceptions). Outside of Nome, there are NO services whatsoever.
I was surprised at how few birds there were, and the locals confirmed that the area hasn't had its normal share of rain for a few years, and there are fewer birds this year. But, I was amazed that Bryan (sometimes with some help from Mauro) was able to find most of the species of birds that can be found up there, mostly not far from the side of the road, but also sometimes by taking small excursions off the main road, or even (god forbid) a hike. It's a mystery to me how he knew where to go. I'm sure we missed a few species, but I managed to bag 22 lifers on this leg of the trip, plus we saw Muskox, Red Fox, Snow-shoe Hare, and one Grizzly. I did not manage to get photos of everything, let alone good photos, but I did see them. Photos (from my phone) with captions below are only meant to help lay out the story, the bird photos (from my real camera) are on my Flickr site (provided below) One notable exception with respect to finding birds, is that we did not find a Bluethroat, a really beautiful bird, with, you guessed, a blue throat That was disappointing.
Other interesting things about Nome:
All the restaurants are on the ocean side of the street that runs along the coastline. Here's the view from the Subway sandwich place. That's the Bering Sea right outside the windows. You won't find a Subway right on the ocean in LA.
Nome is the end of the line for the Iditerod, a dog sled race from Anchorage to Nome
Nome is also a gold mining town. They've been dredging it forever, and there is heavy equipment all over the area. Its like a place where old machinery goes to die, and then, seemingly by magic (and some creativity), pieces of machinery rise from the rust of the old, in the form of a Mad Max dystopian array of boats and backhoes. Our Hotel was the Dredge #7 Inn. Here's one of the newer dredging boats.
And here's a more vintage copy:
Here are two interesting stops (among many) we made in our search for good avian subjects:
First, was a small road off the main road, which led to (1) cooperative Black bellied Plover. Bryan heard it was there somewhere, and he spotted it. But the road led to a small community that did not take kindly to strangers. There was an element of going out of bounds in search of a mythical creature, entering a place, or a dimension where we did not fit, and the light was different. That was the sign post we just passed, you just entered the Twilight Zone, where you should not go without permission from the residents. Of course, we did anyway. We got about a quarter mile past the sign when Bryan spotted the bird, and where we stopped to take photos. Its a bird I see frequently in LA, but not dressed the same way it is here, with its fully black belly. It was a beautiful bird in a beautiful setting. We were about 20 minutes into shooting the bird, laying in the tundra, when Bryan spotted headlights that turned off the main road onto the road we were on. We jumped into action, got back into the truck, turned it around, and drove like mad to get back on the other side of the sign, so that we weren't caught trespassing. I think we all felt like kids again and the truck filled with quiet laughter; it was quite refreshing!
Second, was a trip to see the Bristle thighed Curlew. It looks a lot like a Whimbrel or a Long billed Curlew, but its got bristles on its legs. Birders don't know exactly where they breed, except for a very few sites, and this mountaintop outside of Nome was one of them. We must have driven 50 miles to a pile of boots on the side of the road, which marks the trailhead up the tundra covered mountainside.
The hike up was a well worn path through the mud. My feet were wet inside of 20 steps, and the wind was whipping at about 30mph. It doesn't look too bad in the photo, but the mountain is rounded, so the top is well beyond the visible horizon. It was a good 1/2 mile hike before the slope began to soften up, and once you got to that area, the trail disappeared into untrod tundra. We hiked around looking and listening for the Curlew for about an hour, but to no avail. About 20 minutes into the search, Kayla spotted a Grizzly about a 1/4 mile away. It wasn't much, just a brown speck moving along a ridge. Thankfully, we were downwind of it. Had the wind been blowing in the other direction, and were it interested in us, we couldn't have run to the car fast enough. I gave up first and had to find a bush (there weren't any), so I headed back down to the car and some privacy along the way. I will say my relief came on a dish served very cold indeed.
On my way down the trail, I heard and saw a bird flying up the mountain that could have been the Curlew, but when I picked up my camera to snap a few shots for examination, it read Battery Exhausted. Batteries run out of juice quickly in cold weather. It looked like the right bird, and I tried to remember the call, which I'm absolutely terrible at, hoping that Bryan could play the song again and I could confirm I saw the right bird. Further down the trail, I heard the same call 2 more times.
Back at the car, I had lunch and simply enjoyed the scenery for a short while, waving at the occasional truck passing by. Then another group of birders arrived looking for the Curlew. I told them about the bear and they played the Curlew calls for me, and it confirmed the call I heard was the Bristle thighed Curlew, a real rarity. Shortly after that, Bryan, Kayla and Mauro came down the mountain, and confirmed that they too saw the same bird. Another lifer!
After a short time in Nome, I realized that I didn't have enough time to cull photos, let alone edit any. My camera shoots so many photos (30 frames/sec) that it takes a lot of time to separate the few good ones from the rest, and that wasn't happening. So I asked Bryan how he does that, and he suggested using Photomechanic, which I already had and use, but he helped me use it more efficiently. That said, my first round of doing so really screwed things up. I now had multiple copies of photos, some with the original file name, some with a 2, and some with a 2 2. They were not in sequence, and I just didn't have the time to sort it out, so that waited until I got home. I was afraid that I was going to run out of disc space before the end of the trip, but that didn't happen. Once home, I had 67,765 photos to go through and cull, about 10,000 of which were in the screwed up category from that problem. It took me 2 days to figure it out, sort them appropriately and delete the extras.
Another photography screw up (mea culpa) that I found towards the end of day 3, was that I was shooting in 'crop mode'. I can't believe I did that. What that is, is a setting that tells the camera to only use the center part of the sensor. So instead of my normal 50MP, I was shooting with 21MP. Using that setting is like having a longer focal length lens, or looked at another way, the field of view that gets displayed in the viewfinder is narrower. That means that its much harder to keep a flying bird in the viewfinder, and it requires more strength, more control, and if the bird gets close, the wings, tail or bill is more likely to get clipped by the edge of the frame. My arms were exhausted at the end of 3 days, and I lost a lot of shots because of that. And its hard to notice, because the electronic viewfinder displays the smaller field of view on the full viewfinder display. The only real telltale is that there is a tiny icon on one of the displays on the back of the camera. Its easy to miss. Bryan spotted it after I was complaining that zoomed in, things didn't look very sharp. Looking at photos after I returned home, I can see that there was a total eclipse of the moon a month before, and I had been shooting in 'crop mode' for a month. I never use crop mode for birds, landscapes or much of anything, but for the moon, it made sense to help me with fine focusing on it. I never changed it back. Oops.
Our last day in Nome was birding around town under the first blue sky of the trip, changing clothes, repacking and flying to Anchorage, where I figured out more about why my arms ached so much and why I was sooo tired.
Anchorage (June 16 17):
We landed late in the evening, dropped off our bags at the hotel and went in search of food as quickly as possible. Of course, we had no car. The Wendy's across the street was closed. The McDonalds across the street in the other direction was open, but not to walk in customers. I walked in from the drive thru area, but they wouldn't serve us. I went 'vroom vroom', and they told me to get lost. Strange.
About that time, an older couple from the hotel joined us in the search, and we found a pizza joint down the street a short way. The place was run by an Indian couple, who seemed inherently angry, kind of like 'pizza nazis'. It was strictly take out, so we got our pizzas and left. On the walk back to the hotel, everyone except me apparently saw a drug deal going down behind the Wendy's, and there were other shady characters hanging around. Things being closed and/or people being angry or paranoid started to make a little more sense. But the pizza wasn't too bad, so all's well that ends well.
The next morning, after checking out, there was considerable time to kill before needing to get to the airport, so I hung out in the breakfast area, working on photos.
A small group of big boisterous guys came in, sat down, and were talking loudly, but in some other language. It sounded like Russian. It was them and me. Big guys. Muscular, some were wearing tank tops. They had shaved heads, ponytails and tattoos all over. They looked and sounded like a tough, or at least a rowdy group of about 5 guys. I noticed, but didn't pay too much attention to them, but they were tough to ignore. After a bit, you know me, I asked them where they were from. "Rrromania" one guy answered in a deep voice rolling the R. They went back to yakking in Rrromanian. I then asked them what brought them to Anchorage. "Fishingk" he said in the same deep voice. Ok, there's no frikkin way these guys were anglers. They definitely fit more squarely in the Russian mafioso drug dealer architype if anything. I'm sitting there thinking this is where those drug dealers from the night before got their wares. I went back to my photos, and shortly after that, Bryan and Kayla joined me. We all agreed, they were not anglers.
Barrow (June 17):
Barrow didn't exactly work out for me. We flew there, but when the plane got close, the pilot decided he could not land there (weather?) so he turned the plane around and we went back to Anchorage. Damn! Or so I thought at the time.
Anchorage, again (June 17 26, for me):
We landed in Anchorage on an early Friday evening, with no hotel and a plan gone awry. Alaska Air was worthless. They not only didn't provide a room for the night, they didn't help find one, and most of the hotels were filled or tres expensive during the height of fishing season. AND, they don't provide any help re scheduling the next flight. By the time we got to ticketing, any empty seats on the next plane (Sunday) were filled, and there was no word of adding a make up flight. I felt like Tom Hanks in The Terminal.
In conjunction with the St Paul Island leg of the trip coming later, Bryan had a deal with a nearby hotel, the Coast Inn for the following weekend, so he called to see if we could get 2
rooms for the night, and that worked, so he rented another truck and off we went to the Coast Inn, and we had dinner there.
I have to say, I was a little congested at this point. I had noticed it a couple of days earlier, but chocked it up to the cold weather, going in and out of the buildings and truck and whatnot. But this night, it felt a little worse. And, given the long hours of birding we had been maintaining (sometimes as early as 6am to 10pm) I was exhausted, tired, and achy. I started to worry that I might have caught a cold, or worse (Covid). Still, in denial, I didn't say anything, hoping it was nothing. The next morning Bryan, Kayla and Mauro went birding in Anchorage, and I stayed at the hotel to sleep in and get some needed rest. When I got up, I thought it wise to test myself for Covid, just in case, ... and it came up Positive. DAMN!
I texted that to Bryan and began working on getting some medical attention and extending my hotel stay. Barrow was out, and Quarantine was in.
I'm still wondering where I caught it. I've been very cautious throughout this whole pandemic. But, there was the funeral the day before I left, and part of that was a lunch gathering afterwards; there were lots of people there. Alternatively, it seemed like no one was wearing masks in the airports or in the plane any more. Or, it might have been that Bryan, Kayla or Mauro were completely symptom free carriers. But it could also have been anyone who got near me. The latest Covid variants are super contagious
Bryan worked on getting tickets lined up for all 4 of us flying to Barrow asap, but succeeded only in getting 3 tickets on the next Alaska flight (Sunday), for Kayla, Mauro and myself. Me getting Covid, forced a change in that plan.
I called several urgent care facilities hoping I could get some Paxlovid or something to soften the blow and quicken my recovery. They either wouldn't take Medicare, wouldn't take my insurance, had to do a blood test (which they couldn't do, how weird is that?), or wouldn't prescribe Paxlovid because it wasn't fully approved by the FDA. I gave up after calling about 4 or 5 of them. I then tried an ER. I called them, and they said, cmon down! That began my effort to get to the hospital. I called an Uber, and in full disclosure, told the guy I had just tested positive. He laughed and drove off as quickly as he could. I called for a taxi, who did the same thing. My next move was to rent a car, but I had to get to the airport to do that and the hotel's shuttle driver was reluctant. It turned out he simply didn't have a mask (WTF?!), so I offered him one, and ran up to my room to get a brand new mask from my bag. Of course, I had to wash my hands before handling it, and even then, I handled it remotely with a tissue. He asked several times if it was really a new one (it was), and he seemed incredulous that I had an extra mask (I had about 10 actually) and was willing to give it away. Incredible. After a short
wait for a slot with no one else in the bus, I got my ride to the airport, and didn't tell the rental agency I was positive. Lesson learned. I figured that by the time I returned it, I would be long over Covid. So off I went to the ER in my rented Prius, feeling like I just pulled a bristle thighed curlew out of frozen piss stop.
Unlike any ER I've been to in LA, and I've been to many, there was no one in the waiting room. Instead of the normal 4 6 hour wait while I'm bleeding out, they took me right in! The nurse put a needle in my arm, ran the blood test, took the insurance and didn't charge me a nickel, gave me monoclonal antibodies and a prescription for Molnupiravir (Paxlovid was contraindicated due to me being on statin drugs for cholesterol) and sent me on my way in under 45 minutes. A mazing! If I get Covid again, its probably faster to fly to Anchorage, get treated there, and fly back to LA!
On my way out to the car, my plan was clear; pick up the prescription and begin my hibernation, but as soon as I got out to my car, Bryan called and needed help with ticketing at the airport, so off I went to the airport again. He and I got the 3 of them (Bryan, Kayla and Mauro) set up to go to Barrow the next day (Sunday), and I went off to Walgreens to fill my prescription and settle in back at the hotel. The hotel by the way didn't want to kick me out into the street, so I was able to extend my stay at the discount rate Bryan had negotiated earlier, and Mauro, who I shared the room with the night before, found another room for the night. Totally insane 24 hours, but it all worked out and no one else got sick.
The nurse at the hospital ER told me that with what I was getting, the next day (Sunday) should be the worst of it, and she was spot on. And the worst of it wasn't bad at all. Sore muscles, runny nose, a little bit of a cough, but I never had a fever, and never felt short of breath or anything else. I felt pretty lucky and got some time to work on photos and catch up on some news.
By Monday, my symptoms were gone. The Dr had recommended quarantining for 5 days after the fever broke, but I never had a fever, so I mulled over the ideas of either flying into Barrow for 48 hours or even just 24 hours, just to see the place, shoot 1 bird and say I was there, but I opted to play it conservatively and try to be absolutely over it so I could go to St Paul. I also didn't want to get anyone else sick. The St Paul govt rule was, I had to submit a negative result before being allowed to go and stay there.
Somewhere along the way, it occurred to me, that the plane not landing in Barrow, actually may have saved my butt big time, and my aching arms and being so tired, explained.
The hotel was situated on the edge of a lake that was used as a seaplane airport, the busiest seaplane airport in the world. There was a plane taking off or landing pretty much 1/minute most of the day. On Monday, amazingly, considering the noise and the waves, I spotted some birds out on the water, took my camera out there and sat down and enjoyed the blue skies, planes and waterfowl. I texted friends, telling them what a wonderful time I was having quarantining, sitting on the dock of the bay, shooting birds and watching planes. I even spotted a Common Loon, a lifer out there. Left is one of a plane's floats up close. It was a glorious afternoon.
Shortly after that, the hotel management called to welcome me to quarantine and explain the rules, and that pretty much ended my outings. I decided it was probably not my imagination that every time I left the room, the key stopped working Very tricky on their part. The rules included a part where, if i left the room, they could boot me. I ate a lot of the hotel's food and Door Dash deliveries after that. Oddly, it seemed like every type of food that you can seek on Door Dash, had pizza on the menu. There were no good restaurants on the app up there. Bryan, Kayla and Mauro had a great time in Barrow, and returned to Anchorage on Friday, but Kayla and Mauro went on home, so from here on, it was just Bryan and myself, and I was still testing positive. At that point, I was just being optimistic that I would test negative by my Saturday test. The flight to St Paul Island was on Sunday.
Apparently, and I knew this, one can test positive for months after getting Covid. That doesn't mean that you still have it, let alone are contagious. I certainly felt fine. So I called the woman who was the gatekeeper for St Paul Island to plead my case to let me go, but it turned out she was out sick. Bryan got me in touch with another person, Sulli, who was apparently the backup gatekeeper. It turned out that Sulli was our on island guide too, and he, smart guy that he is, more than understood my position, and let me go to St Paul Island. Yay!
Bryan and I tooled around on Saturday in the Prius. We went birding in a nearby park, and then at a lake that had looked good on my way to the hospital a week earlier It weird how, even when I'm sick and focused on getting to the ER, my eyes are now always prowling for birds.
The photo below is the park where we went birding. We found some cool birds, but the photo below is Bryan and the park itself (very lush, lots of mosquitoes) which doesn't really show up in the photos with my long lens. Note the bark above Bryan's head. He thought that was the result of a moose scratching its antlers. That must have been one heck of an itch. I bagged another 5 lifers in the park. Not a bad way to kill time before heading to my original destination.
part 2 of 3, St Paul Island (June 26 July 1):
The Airport in St Paul is also the King Eider Hotel, and the restaurant, which is really just a dining area with some cooking appliances at our disposal. The town of St Paul (photo below), didn't want non locals mixing with locals due to the pandemic and the island's isolation, so we had reheated pre prepared foods, make your own sandwiches, snacks and whatnot for the week. Not the Four Seasons, but no big deal. If you've ever seen the movie, The Big Year, I would say the accommodations were vastly superior to that on Attu Island.
Disembarking the plane.
Below is airport ticketing, baggage check, check in, and everything else. This is where you can see my red camera bag, just before I checked it for the flight home. Normally, when I fly for a photography trip, I have my camera bag as a 'carryon', and my big lens (worth 3x what my car is) as my 'personal item'. For St Paul, with its turboprop puddle jumper, I had to check the camera bag. Turns out, when we left, it was still on the truck at St Paul. They found it shortly after, and Sulli (our guide) took the initiative to get it moving on the next plane, which was an air cargo plane. It traveled to Anchorage and then was transferred back to Ravn Air, then to a Delta flight, and I picked it up in LAX at the Delta baggage claim. It was a little hair raising, knowing that there was about $23K in that bag!
Here's baggage claim (the back of the truck). The kitchen and dining areas.
We stopped at the market a couple of times. This was my snack/dessert kit for the week: $40.
But back to our time on St Paul. There were 2 groups of birders during our stay. Bryan and I were paired up with Amber and Dana (adventurer/nurses), and guided by Sulli, a very knowledgeable and upbeat young birder/naturalist We all got along quite well, and I hope I now have 2 new friends in Anchorage, and 1 on St Paul. The other group was led by Chris Dodd, a fairly famous, but not very friendly photographer, and they were guided around the island by Luis. They drove us around to where they felt the best birding/photography opportunities were given the time of year, time of day, weather, and our interests. The 2 groups coordinate to avoid being at the same site at the same time. Our van was a Freightliner sprinter type van, where the rear doors were either so messed up from the constant driving on the dirt roads, or just so poorly made, that their rattling was loud enough to prevent me from hearing pretty much anything of the conversation going on inside it.
As with Nome (and I'm told Barrow), the weather was cloudy, misty, cold, dark, and sometimes wet (we chose not to shoot in the rain). I can handle all that, but we also often had fog, and fog between me and my subject, es no bueno. But there we were, so I created lots of colorless grey images, which took a LOT of editing to make them look decent At left, this is about what it looked like 75% of the time. Uggghh.
The routine was perfect; breakfast at 7am, lunch at noon, dinner at 7pm, with birding at 8am noon, 1 6pm, and 8 10pm. That's a lot of photography, but I had just enough time to download photos from my camera, charge my batteries, and enough time to sleep. The island was south enough to actually get dark, but only for a couple of hours, deep in the night.
The birding on St Paul Island was just about what I figured; mostly clifftop shooting of birds perched on a cliff, flying to/from the cliff, or just flying by them, often at eye level. We also
shot some inland, on the tundra at large, and a great shoot of grey cheeked rosy finches at a quarry. I got about 12 avian Lifers here, plus Artic Fox, Reindeer and Fur Seals.
One quick birding story: The day we arrived in St Paul, we dumped our luggage at the room, grabbed our cameras, and went out shooting. On the way, we spotted a Snowy Owl. That's a bucket list bird for me, meaning, at some point, I'd really love to get a good shot at one. It was definitely a lifer for me, so the people in the van, who had all already seen them, said, 'take the shot'. It was on top of an antenna tower, really ugly. I said, 'no, we'll see it again'. They said, you never know, you might not. Take the shot'. So, reluctantly, I did. I still thought I'd get a better shot so I didn't put any effort into the shot. I mean, how far can the bird get, its not that big an island, right? Never saw it again. I took 1 shot, and it was facing the other way! Damn! Bird in the hand.
St Paul is a volcanic island, but mostly very weathered, so there were no jagged peaks, just rolling hills with some rock outcroppings here and there. The tundra was thinner than Nome's, so there were more rocks to stand on, and the trails were gravel rather than mud, which was great. Still, there was a lot of moisture, in the air, on the ground, and dew drops on the plants. Left, is Bryan shooting on the edge of one cliff, with Sulli behind him. This was closer to the edge than I wanted to get, and so he got some shots I couldn't (beside the fact that he's younger, quicker and stronger than I am!). The grasses were wet, and I never quite trusted the pile of rocks that seemed to make up the entire island.
There were lupines everywhere at this time of the year, and they were stunningly beautiful, although in the fog, the colors faded in short distances.
part 3 of 3, St Paul Island continued:
This was on the south side of the island. There's a lake on one side of this natural berm of rocks, and the Bering Sea on the other. We photographed some fairly cooperative Least Auklets in the rocks to the right. In the distance, there was a ridge, but I couldn't tell how tall it was. It turned out to only be about 150' 200' high, and we went up there in search of Crested Auklets. I don't recall if Bryan found any, but I got up there and said, ok, nice, snapped a few iphone shots and went back down. Frankly, again, I didn't want to go near the edge of the cliff, which is the only place to see the birds.
The berm was just a loose pile of rocks, washed bare by the tide on the ocean side, and covered with grass on the lake side. The ridge was the same, but steeper and with more grass and tundra hiding the spaces between the rocks. I had the feeling that the whole thing could come tumbling down if I stepped on the wrong rock, and in fact, some fairly sizable rocks wobbled under my foot. There was no trail, just rock/grass hopping. At one point, on the way back down, I stepped on some tundra, and there was no bottom, so my entire leg went down into a crevasse, up to the middle of my thigh. Miraculously, I only jammed my thumb a little and it recovered momentarily. Given all that, I didn't feel like standing near the edge. The shot below is one of those places near the top of the ridge, where it looked ready to come crumbling down with as little as a 200 lb nudge, just under my weight class. Obviously, the ground below is littered with the results of many such events.
Here's another one from a different site on the island. I honestly don't know what's keeping this up, and when it goes down, I'm thinking there's a lot of cliff that's going to go with it.
This shot was taken from the top, just before heading back down, and just before my leg went down. See the trail?
And to be fair, most of the cliffs were very safe, but I just didn't feel comfortable getting too close to the edge, especially with them being covered with wet grass; I reckon I'm just getting old.
Here's a shot of the quarry we shot at, on the only partially sunny day we saw on the island. It may not look like much, but I got some amazing shots of Grey crowned Rosy finches nesting there, perched on lichen covered boulders. The quarry rocked! (couldn't resist that one)
Amber and Dana were nurses, and had to get back to work, but got stuck on the island due to the weather, which is apparently an ever present risk when visiting St Paul Island. Normally, there are 3 flights in/out per week. We all flew in on Sunday's flight, and they were supposed to leave on Tuesday, but it got cancelled. Then Thursday got cancelled. Bryan and I were scheduled to fly out on Sunday. Since two flights in a row got cancelled, Ravn Air added a Friday flight and a Saturday flight. Brian had places to go and people to meet, and I had to be home by Monday, the 4th of July, or our crazy dog was going to overwhelm my wife, Adele, and I know who was going to be barked at for that. The women were way late for work, although Dana was able to do some tele work via Zoom. Amber was just late (neonatal care doesn't happen remotely, not yet anyway). Bryan and I thought it best to hedge our bets on getting off the island, so we were thinking about the Saturday flight, but as of Friday morning, Sulli said no one had signed up for it, so we figured it would be cancelled for lack of interest. All four of us wound up flying home on Friday, the women 3 days late, the men 2 days early. Such is transportation to St Paul Island.
In the interest of completeness, there are other ways to get to and from the Island, namely on a fishing boat. If you've ever seen Deadliest Catch, this is one of the places where the boats go to process fish and catch crabs.
On top of all the other weird experiences, challenges or outright problems mentioned above, I lost a really nice merino wool hoody in the Anchorage airport on the way home, my pocket knife got left behind on St Paul because we packed at the last minute and I screwed up, one of my bags was damaged, and my binoculars got a huge scratch (a divot) on the solo ride home via air cargo, Ravn, and Delta (TSA somewhere along the way, opened and inspected it, and rearranged the contents, which led to the chip). All part and parcel and the cost of doing business with 'adventure'.
In retrospect, the trip was fun, but filled with even more adventures, problems to solve and other stressors than I had hoped for. The new waders never got used in Barrow. I came home on a red eye, and I was in something of a fog for about a week. I can't say if it was long haul covid, or just the general confusion of just too many moving pieces all at once for 3 straight weeks. Chances are, at some point, I'll probably go back to Alaska; Barrow is still calling me and the waders are wading to be used. (bad one).
Before I end, I wanted to say a few words about Bryan, who I hope is another new friend. He just quit his day job teaching 8th grade science to do this full time. He's an amazing photographer. His style, of cautious approach to the birds, trying to not disturb them any more than necessary was very much in line with my approach to birding, but he was much better at getting them to perch on beautiful settings. He shoots almost exactly the same gear that I shoot, his laptop is about the same, we went through our camera settings to see if either of us had anything to learn from the other, and except for some minor stuff, they were set up the same! That's actually pretty remarkable, since there are many hundreds of settings, and millions of ways to set up one of these crazy complicated cameras. It also turns out that at home, we both work on larger monitors, and they're both of the brand BenQ. He was always consummately courteous, such as when he got tickets for the 3 of us, leaving himself behind on the flight to Barrow. His sense of humor was also like mine; you kind of have to listen for it, or it just sails by. Needless to say, we got along really well, and he may sign up for my forthcoming trip to the Falkland Islands (end of 2023). If you're interested, Google 'Bryan Holliday, bird breath', to see what is probably his most famous (award winning) bird photo. If you're a birder, you've probably seen it. He worked that photo for a long time to get it just right. You can practically hear the bird singing. Amazing shot.
The actual bird photos and more landscapes, in higher resolution, but without any captions, can be seen at https://www.flickr.com/photos/preinstein54/albums, and as usual, I always recommend viewing them on the largest monitor you've got. Enjoy!