Grand Alaska: Pribilofs July 19, 2011

Posted by Kevin Zimmer

Kevin-zimmer

Kevin Zimmer

Kevin Zimmer has authored three books and numerous papers dealing with field identification and bird-finding in North America. His book, Birding in the American West: A Han...

Our flight to St. Paul Island was uneventful, and we were barely on the ground before we had tallied our first Gray-crowned Rosy-Finches, one of the few land bird species on the island. But we had not come to this tiny island in the middle of the Bering Sea for land birds. We were here for the fabulous bird cliffs, where thousands of alcids, cormorants, kittiwakes, and fulmars breed cheek-to-jowl, and offer up intimate studies and countless photo-ops for camera-carrying birders. We indulged in scope-filling comparisons of Common and Thick-billed murres, Black-legged and Red-legged kittiwakes, Horned and Tufted puffins, and more cute little auklets than you could shake a stick at.

Vagrants (and, indeed, migrants in general) were in short supply, but we did manage a cooperative male Brambling, a less than cooperative female Eyebrowed Thrush, 4 Bar-tailed Godwits, and a few non-breeding eiders of three different species (King, Common, and Steller's).

Vagrants should always be thought of as icing on the proverbial cake—it's the expected birds that one comes to these remote outposts for. Tufted Puffins close enough to touch, with their golden locks wafting in the bone-chilling maritime wind; Red-faced Cormorants with their impossibly bright facial skin; noisy Rock Sandpipers strutting their stuff in the middle of the road, with one wing proudly pointing to the sky; armadas of Harlequin Ducks ("Lords and Ladies") bobbing in the near-shore surf; or a Pacific Wren belting out his thin, jumbled song from the top of a boulder, fiercely defiant in the face of a cacophony of seabird noise and omnipresent winds; and, lest we forget, the bellowing and posturing of the beachmasters, the wily Arctic foxes, and the way-too-cute Pribilof Island shrews. These are the memories we take from the Pribilofs. That, and a new appreciation for the terms "ILS," "ceiling minimums," and "weather permitting"!