Alaska News

The making of an Alaskan bird nerd

CAPE CONSTANTINE -- Yvonne Leutwyler and I were relaxing on the purple-green tundra above muddy Ten-Day Creek drainage when a tawny, chicken-sized bird hopped into view out of a willow thicket about 40 yards below us. I nudged Yvonne and pointed. "Check that out!" I whispered. Each of us lifted binoculars dangling from cords around our necks and trained the optics on our visitor.

We saw a long, dark, slender bill curving downward, distinctly different from bills on other shorebirds — plovers and sandpipers, dowitchers and yellowlegs — we'd been viewing earlier. This was something new, maybe something none of our fellow birders had seen.

"Get out the book," I whispered.

On the previous morning, a blustery Friday in early May, we had flown south with the rest of our small Birds of Alaska class from Dillingham to Cape Constantine. The cape, at the tip of the Nushagak Peninsula, where Nushagak Bay joins the Bering Sea, is part of a migratory flyway for birds traveling north to feed and breed in the spring.

Despite gusting winds, pilot John Bouker had smoothly landed his sky-blue Cessna 207 on the sandy beach near the creek mouth, and as we dumped our gear onto the shore, I noted dark, streaky rain clouds in almost every direction. Bouker, wearing shorts and apparently unconcerned with the weather, wished us well and then blasted his plane down the beach and into the air. He was scheduled to return on Sunday.

To the south lay endless saltwater flecked with whitecaps. To the north lay treeless tundra; low, mossy ridgelines; and mud. I wondered where all the birds were hiding.

It would be an understatement to say that Yvonne and I were ornithological amateurs. We were wannabe bird nerds hoping that this course, which had begun on Thursday with four hours of classroom instruction, would nudge the needle of our knowledge-meter a few ticks beyond pure ignorance.

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Sure, we could recognize a few birds before we joined the class: the common raven, the chickadee, the bald eagle, the American robin, the great horned owl. We knew gulls, too, but on this trip we would be expected to differentiate the species. After all, we had field notes to generate, and a paper to write once we returned to Dillingham.

Fortunately, we had as our birding guru Nathan Coutsoubos, an affable and gregarious Dillingham High School science teacher with years of knowledge and ample birding enthusiasm. After we pitched our tents and took an initial walkabout, we congregated around Nathan to watch an expert in action. He didn't disappoint.

Binoculars firmly affixed to his eyes, he turned into the wind and scanned the waves. "Right over there," he said, pointing, "we've got a red-throated loon … two, actually. And a little farther out — see that dark group of birds flying? We've got black scoters, four of them. … Oh, and over there I see two, three, four, five white-winged scoters …" He went on like that for several minutes, noting mew gulls and glaucous gulls, arctic terns and common murres, parasitic jaegers and red-breasted mergansers — identifying them swiftly and rattling off the names so fast that my head swam faster than the seabirds.

The "empty" sea I had observed earlier actually was teeming with life. Besides the birds, the head of a harbor seal occasionally popped up in the surf. The spouts of cruising gray whales, feeding on immense schools of herring, were visible, too. And flock after flock, raft after raft, of birds flew or swam past.

"What I want you guys to do for the rest of today is practice your identification," Nathan said. "Watch for birds. Figure out what group or guild they belong to. Gather as much detail as you can, and then get out your guidebooks and key out your findings."

He turned toward the tundra. "All right, out there in that pond we've got a pair of ducks. Look at them. What do you see?" It went on like this for almost an hour before we were released on our own recognizance.

Armed with "The Sibley Guide to Birds," Yvonne and I stayed mainly in our comfort zone, checking out a nearby bald eagle nest, glassing for noisy sand hill cranes in the tall grass across the creek, and attempting to learn the difference between scoter species.

The next morning — after a late-night visit from a large, prowling brown bear — we found ourselves in the sunshine on a low ridgeline, in the lee of a cold morning breeze, puzzling over the bird with the downturned bill.

According to Sibley, only four species of shorebird have a downturned bill, and three of them belong to the same genus: Numenius. The other, the curlew sandpiper (Calidris ferruginea) is only half the size of the bird we had been observing. That left us with the whimbrel (N. phaeopus), the bristle-thighed curlew (N. tahitiensis, a threatened species) and the long-billed curlew (N. americanus).

Its bill was too short to belong to a long-billed curlew, so we eliminated that. The other two birds, we noted with dismay, were practically identical. While a whimbrel sighting might have been unusual, according to Sibley's maps, a bristle-thighed curlew sighting would have been exceedingly rare.

Our binoculars up, we called out details: "Gray legs." "Horizontal black stripe through the eye. Black-and-white striping on the top of its head." "Whitish belly."

"He seems gimpy," said Yvonne.

"Yeah," I responded, "and you know why? It's got only one foot — two legs, but only one foot."

We excitedly speculated that the wounded bird had become isolated from others of its kind, foraging more slowly than more agile counterparts. After scribbling notes in our field books and giving each other congratulatory grins, we pulled out pocket cameras and snapped off grainy-looking images we hoped would help later with more precise identification and provide proof of our discovery.

The rest of that day and the following morning were filled with continued adventures — breaching whales, a red fox marking his territory, a large set of caribou antlers, a red-necked phalarope, a tundra swan and some partial mammoth remains. But nothing bird-related generated quite as much excitement as the possibility that we had seen a bristle-thighed curlew, which nests only on the Seward Peninsula and in the Nulato Hills between the Lower Yukon River and the Norton Sound.

Back in camp, we jumped from guidebook to guidebook, looking for minute differences that might give us the defining clue to a correct identification. Nathan spent the better part of an hour examining our photographs, leaning heavily toward curlew over whimbrel. He excitedly reiterated the curlew's rarity. Avid birders from all over the world, he said, would pay big dollars to observe a bristle-thighed curlew. He had never seen one himself.

"When we return to Dillingham," he urged us, "get on the eBird website. Submit your claim and your photos. Let the experts there make the call." And we enthusiastically agreed.

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Without realizing it, we were becoming bird nerds.

Clark Fair, a resident of the Kenai Peninsula for more than 50 years, is a lifetime Alaskan now living in Dillingham.

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