Subject: Back from beyond
Date: Jul 30 10:46:45 2004
From: Connie Sidles - csidles at isomedia.com


Hey tweets, On Monday I returned from nearly a month in Kamchatka, Alaska
and the Aleutians, but in fundamental ways, I am still gone. Will I ever
return? Not if you mean will I ever be the same. My eyes have looked on the
far stretches of the Bering Sea lit by a sun so low it barely set. I have
seen the old remnants of the land bridge, islands that seem ever new because
the lava flows that made them are not much eroded. I have floated on the
waves with crowds of whiskered auklets, my green eyes meeting their white
ones as we gazed across the abyss of unshared experiences.

My creditors might be clamoring for my checks in the mail now now now. My
editors might be bombarding me with demands for my late stories. My laundry
might resemble the Fresh Kills landfill. I know that today I must wash the
car, take out the garbage, make the bed, go to the bank, read the pundits'
spin on the Democratic Convention - these things are all on my to-do list.
But so is: Take a moment to look into the distance and remember.

What memories can I share with you? How can I make you see what I have seen?
My head hurts with all the visions pressing against the inside of my skull -
or maybe the room is spinning because my mind is still at sea, swaying with
the roll of the swells. Is it delirium, hearing the siren call of the north
while I'm tied to the mainmast of life in the real world? I dunno - could be
something more mundane: I picked up a bug on the last day and man am I sick..

So, dear tweets, please excuse the flight of fancy. I'll try to give you the
highlights of my trip in as straightforward a fashion as a bloviator at
heart can do, but I warn you - I might go off again at any moment.

I began with a few days alone in Anchorage, birding a city where park signs
show you two pictures of a moose: This is a calm, happy moose. See his ears
pricked up, the foliage dripping from his mouth. He looks dumb and content.
This is an angry moose. See his fur sticking up along his back, his ears
laid flat. If you see the moose in the first picture, relax and take a
snapshot. But if the moose standing in front of you resembles the second
picture, run for your life. Most helpful. Highlights in Anchorage include:
? large flocks of HUDSONIAN GODWITS in full breeding plumage
? SURFBIRDS in breeding plumage, foraging on mudflats instead of pecking
through rocks like they do here
? RED-NECKED GREBES sitting on grassy nests floating in the middle of city
ponds
? LINCOLN'S SPARROWS foraging for their young - ah, so this is where you
guys go when you leave the Fill. Nice to see you again.

After my few days alone, I hooked up with three friends and a rental car,
and we went touring along a giant rectangle north and east to Denali,
beginning along the Arctic Valley and continuing along the Glenn, Richardson
and Old Denali Highways. We were gone for several days and saw:
? two PEREGRINES demolish a BONAPARTE'S GULL on a pond. The female made the
first strike, driving the gull into the water, where it defended itself by
feebly raising a wing every time one of the falcons flashed by. ARCTIC TERNS
tried to help by dive-bombing the falcons but they did as much good as
inconsequential mosquitoes. Finally, after some 20 passes, the female
latched onto the gull and carried it off, still flapping. Nature is not
always kind.
? the first flight of a baby GYR, nesting on the hoodoos near Gilkana
Glacier. What are hoodoos? We didn't (and still don't) know, but we figured
we'd know them when we saw them.
? a WILLOW PTARMIGAN family caught going across what laughingly passed for a
road to the hoodoos (really a streambed). The parents crouched and froze but
were unwilling to leave because the clueless babies were scampering around
without a care in the world for the dangers that we might have posed.
Typical.
? a baby NORTHERN SHRIKE pestering its two harassed parents, the whole
resembling a family of chickadees, only enlarged. Somehow, one doesn't
expect great birds like shrikes to act so mundanely.
? a ROCK PTARMIGAN sitting on a nest on the crest of a giant rock ridge
above a talus slope loaded with nesting AMERICAN PIPITS. On the ridge spine,
the only sound was the wind and the lonely cry of an AMERICAN GOLDEN-PLOVER,
whose watchtower was a low-lying rock, the tallest structure to be found in
that treeless place.
? a SHARP-TAILED GROUSE stretching its neck on the roadside of the
Richardson Highway near Meier's Lake, hoping that it blended into
invisibility with the bushes. No such luck - we got great views.
? a family of RUSTY BLACKBIRDS feeding their young in a swamp, along with a
couple of BOHEMIAN WAXWINGS gorging on low-bush cranberries. Hard to know
which to look at first: RUSTIES in breeding plumage or BO'S close up.
? ARCTIC WARBLERS playing hide-and-seek with BLACK-POLLS amid the densely
compacted willows of the muskeg, as clouds scudded across the eggshell-blue
sky, bringing quick flurries of mist and sun.
? a NORTHERN GOSHWAWK signing a gray streak across the road, vanishing into
the spruce forest, one cry (the bird? a hare?) and gone.

Upon our return to Anchorage, we spent 24 hellish hours trying to fly to
Petropovlosk in Kamchatka, where our ship awaited. One hundred twenty people
crammed into the airport gate area, all of us looking pregnant because we
had loaded ourselves up with our heaviest objects. The Russian plane had a
weight limit of 40 pounds, *including* carryon but not including our own
weight. Sometime when you have nothing better to do, you ought to try
packing only 40 pounds for a three-week expedition. To make my weight limit,
I had stuffed myself with two radios, three bird books, heavy boots,
binoculars, one shampoo bottle, two bottles of insect repellent and four
layers of clothes, not to mention jacket and hat. I resembled a green igloo
and had a hard time sitting down - igloos packed as full as I was do not
bend in the middle, you know.

On board the luxurious Clipper Odyssey, we set sail north for the Zhupanova
River in search of STELLER'S SEA EAGLES. At the river's mouth, we boarded
Zodiacs and motored all of 200 yards to a sand island in the middle of the
river. "There's the eagle," someone cried.

"Where? Where?" Bouncing up and down in the Zodiac, I scanned frantically
with my binocs, passing over inanimate shapes of brown and gray, the
boulders and driftwood scattered on the sand. I finally settled on a large,
dark bird standing near a log. It looked like a raven. I studied it harder.
Still raven. "That looks like a raven to me," I said tentatively. After all,
I was in the company of some of the most elite birders in the world,
including a plummy Brit; these were not the sort of people you want to make
a fool of yourself in front of. On the other hand, I am a Bird Master of
Seattle Audubon. I can make a fool of myself in front of anyone.

"Not that," someone said. "Go three feet to the left."

I did and saw what I simply could not have fathomed earlier when I was
scanning for birds: the eagle. Not a bird at all. An avian Godzilla the size
of my youngest son, who, I might mention, is a college man now and not
short. The creature was standing like a bronze monument on the beach. It was
an immature in brown plumage with a beak so huge it made a bald eagle's bill
look like a pygmy owl's. Slowly the eagle turned its head and stared right
into my binocs. It blinked once, then looked away, cutting me dead. I was
not on its A-list and never would be, thank goodness. Such wildness should
never be civilized. Eventually the eagle unfurled its wings and rose
ponderously into the sky, not because we had driven it off but simply
because it wanted to go someplace else. We sighed and then headed up the
river to look for more eagles. Within a few minutes, we spotted two adults
perched (if you can call it that) in a tree. Were they hiding? Impossible to
hide things that large. Resting? The tree limbs seemed uncomfortably small
for their enormous feet. The eagles tired of their perch and launched
themselves into the sky in a burst of impressions I could not take in: white
legs, white leading edge on wing, brown body, a hang glider alive, gone.

That night, Debi Shearwater, the leader of our little group of 12 birders,
told the ship's audience, "We have two icon birds on this trip. One you saw
today, the Steller's Sea Eagle. The other is one of the rarest birds in the
world, the Short-tailed Albatross." Debi explained that the short-tailed
albatross had been hunted for its feathers until only 12 birds were left. In
fact, the species was thought to be extinct until a few birds were
rediscovered on Torishima Island. There they have been nurtured back from
the brink by a dedicated Japanese ornithologist. The birds' future is still
precarious. A few years ago, the island's volcano erupted. Fortunately, the
albatrosses weren't at home; they were all out to sea. "We will be very
lucky to see one," Debi said, "but I saw one last year on this same ship. It
was an immature and looked like a black-footed albatross without the white
around its face."

I spent the next four days enduring the cold winds of the Bering Sea as we
cruised toward Attu and the westernmost Aleutians. I scrutinized every dark
seabird I could see, and I could see thousands. From time to time, the
naturalists on board would call out when they saw cetaceans, identifying
them by their backs and their blows. I saw Baird's Beaked Whales and smiled
but did not get up. I saw a superpod of Orcas stretching over a mile in a
chorus line rarely seen by humans, but I did not get up. I saw Laysans and
Black-footed Albatrosses, FULMARS and SHORT-TAILED SHEARWATERS, and a
MOTTLED PETREL. I didn't have to get up for the petrel - it sailed right
over my head across the bow, glancing down to lock gazes with me before
peeling away on the wind.

On the fourth day, I gave up sitting in the bow. My hands seemed permanently
carved into claws of ice. My joints were frozen, my smile fixed by the cold
into a rictus that Botox could not have bettered. I retreated to the back of
the ship and reclined out of the wind on a lounge chair. Soon two other
birders joined me. This was the life, sipping coffee on a flat sea, watching
the world go by, chatting about birds, slowly getting warm again. Then came
the shout, "It's the bird. Six o-clock off the stern."

We shot to our feet like we'd been blasted out of a cannon, slapped our
binoculars to our eyes and there it was. Not a bird, but a dream of white
tipped with black, a full adult ghosting above the waves, leaning first this
way and then that, letting its gleaming wings catch the light and blind us
into glory. Feet pounded up the spiral stairwell as one of my birder friends
ran from the bathroom, her pants still unzipped. "Where is it? I knew I
shouldn't have left," she panted, holding her binocs in one hand and her
pants in the other.

"There," we said, and she let go her pants. Who cares about modesty when
perfect beauty lies before your eyes? We followed the albatross as long as
we could, tracking it to the horizon until it became lost in the mists
rising from the sea. And so it passed from our sight forever, but it will
never leave my memory. It is a white beacon that will always beckon me to
the wild. It is a shrine to Life that so richly endows our planet and that
was almost - but not quite - destroyed by what I have come to call our
chimpness, our mindless focus on the material and on me. It is a wellspring
to those who think that one person can change the world, because the
SHORT-TAILED ALBATROSS was saved by one man.

Do you imagine that such a transcendent experience makes everything else
seem anticlimactic? Think again. On Attu, we saw a KITTLITZ'S MURRELET with
two chicks! On Kiska Island, we saw a spectacle that few can see anymore:
millions and millions of seabirds filling the sky and the sea, diving off
cliffs, crying from cliffs, clinging to cliffs, every ledge filled with a
bird: TUFTED PUFFINS, HORNED PUFFINS, BLACK-LEGGED KITTIWAKES, RED-FACED
CORMORANTS, CRESTED AUKLETS, LEAST AUKLETS, PARAKEET AUKLETS, COMMON MURRES,
THICK-BILLED MURRES, SNOW BUNTINGS. On Buldir we saw blankets of RED-LEGGED
KITTIWAKES. On St. Paul we saw hulking big GRAY-CROWNED ROSY FINCHES. On St..
Matthews we saw breeding MCKAY'S BUNTINGS. On St. Lawrence we saw
WHITE-WAGTAILS and HOARY REDPOLLS. In Nome we saw ARCTIC LOONS in breeding
plumage. In all, I saw 46 new life birds.

We saw something else. Debi was the first to notice that something was
wrong. "There are no murre chicks anywhere in the Bering Sea," she said.
"It's complete nest failure."

We searched for murre chicks. We saw two eggs, total. But we could not
discover what was wrong. "The murres are saving themselves for another
year," Debi said, trying to comfort us. "They are long-lived. They're
adapted to save themselves when food is short. They'll try again." Today in
the paper, there is a short piece saying that the temperature of the
northern oceans 300 feet below the surface is too warm. Perhaps this
explains somehow the murres' failure. Nature endures, but Nature is not
always kind.

Now I am home, but home is no longer just a place to me. I know now that
home is where my heart is. A part of my heart will always be in the far
north, where the albatrosses forever glide on the wind.

For those who are interested, here is a list of everything I saw:
Red-throated Loon
Arctic Loon
Pacific Loon
Common Loon
Red-necked Grebe
Short-tailed Albatross
Laysan Albatross
Black-footed Albatross
Northern Fulmar
Short-tailed Shearwater
Mottled Petrel
Fork-tailed Storm-petrel
Leach's Storm-petrel
Pelagic Cormorant
Red-faced Cormorant
Trumpeter Swan
Tundra Swan
Canada Goose
Green-winged Teal
Mallard
Northern Pintail
Northern Shoveler
Gadwall
American Wigeon
Canvasback
Ring-necked Duck
Greater Scaup
Lesser Scaup
Common Eider
Harlequin Duck
Long-tailed Duck
Surf Scoter
Black Scoter
White-winged Scoter
Common Goldeneye
Barrow's Goldeneye
Common Merganser
Red-breasted Merganser
Bald Eagle
Steller's Sea Eagle
Golden Eagle
Northern Harrier
Red-tailed Hawk
Rough-Legged Hawk
Northern Goshawk
Merlin
Peregrine Falcon
Gyrfalcon
Spruce Grouse
Rock Ptarmigan
Willow Ptarmigan
Sharp-tailed Grouse
American Golden-plover
Semipalmated Plover
Eurasian Oystercatcher
Black Oystercatcher
Greater Yellowlegs
Lesser Yellowlegs
Solitary Sandpiper
Wandering Tattler
Gray-tailed Tattler
Spotted Sandpiper
Hudsonian Godwit
Ruddy Turnstone
Surfbird
Least Sandpiper
Western Sandpiper
Rock Sandpiper
Dunlin
Short-billed Dowitcher
Red-necked Phalarope
Red Phalarope
Pomarine Jaeger
Parasitic Jaeger
Long-tailed Jaeger
Black-headed Gull
Bonaparte's Gull
Mew Gull
Herring Gull
Slaty-backed Gull
Glaucous-winged Gull
Glaucous Gull
Black-legged Kittiwake
Red-legged Kittiwake
Common Tern
Arctic Tern
Common Murre
Thick-billed Murre
Pigeon Guillemot
Long-filled Murrelet
Kittlitz's Murrelet
Ancient Murrelet
Parakeet Auklet
Least Auklet
Whiskered Auklet
Crested Auklet
Tufted Puffin
Horned Puffin
Rock Pigeon
Cuckoo sp.
Belted Kingfisher
Downy Woodpecker
Northern Flicker
Tree Swallow
Violet-green Swallow
Bank Swallow
Cliff Swallow
Gray Jay
Black-billed Magpie
Common Raven
Carrion Crow
Black-capped Chickadee
Boreal Chickadee
Willow Tit
Eurasian Nuthatch
American Dipper
Ruby-crowned Kinglet
Winter Wren
Middendorff's Grasshopper-warbler
Lanceolated Warbler
Arctic Warbler
Alder Flycatcher
Red-breasted Flycatcher
Siberian Rubythroat
Eyebrowed Thrush
American Robin
Gray-cheeked Thrush
Swainson's Thrush
Hermit Thrush
Varied Thrush
Yellow Wagtail
White Wagtail
Black-backed Wagtail
Olive-backed Pipit
Pechora Pipit
Red-throated Pipit
American Pipit
Bohemian Waxwing
Northern Shrike
European Starling
Orange-crowned Warbler
Yellow Warbler
Yellow-rumped Warbler
Blackpoll Warbler
Northern Waterthrush
Wilson's Warbler
American Tree Sparrow
Savannah Sparrow
Fox Sparrow
Song Sparrow
Lincoln's Sparrow
White-crowned Sparrow
Golden-crowned Sparrow
Dark-eyed Junco
Lapland Longspur
Rustic Bunting
Gray Bunting
Yellow-breasted Bunting
Snow Bunting
Mckay's Bunting
Rusty Blackbird
Red-winged Blackbird
Gray-crowned Rosy Finch
White-winged Crossbill
Common Redpoll
Hoary Redpoll
Pine Siskin
Oriental Greenfinch
Eurasian Tree Sparrow - Connie, Seattle

csidles at isomedia.com