Anchorage Daily News

ST. PAUL ISLAND -- British birder Annie Andreae bristles at being called a "twitcher" -- friendly slang in England for someone who will drop everything and go great distances for a chance to glimpse a must-see bird.

"I'm not a twitcher. I just like watching them," Andrea said. "They look lovely sitting there like that."

Nevertheless, Andreae flew about 5,000 miles to St. Paul Island last month to see birds. While she dislikes being known as a twitcher, she doesn't mind being called cuckoo.

"We're a mad lot," she said as she and her fellow British birders stood close to the edge of 100-foot cliffs in gale-force winds, peering over the edge to see nesting seabirds.

Ask Steve Bird (yes, that's his real name) if in fact he's brought twitchers to this remote island in the Bering Sea, and he says, yup, they're twitchers, willing to pay $16,000 or more for a 25-day bird-watching trip to Alaska.

"We have a lot of rich clients that want to go around the world and see the wildlife," said Bird, a 46-year-old wildlife artist from Plymouth, England, who is founder and director of Birdseekers, which offers bird-watching tours at nearly 30 locations around the globe, including Alaska.

The British are the "ultimate twitchers," said Forrest Davis, owner of High Lonesome BirdTours of Sierra Vista, Ariz., another outfit that brings small groups of birders to the Pribilof Islands.

CLOSE-UP VIEWS

Davis pointed out the different birds nesting on the cliffs.

"For these seabirds, it is really spectacular. It is the best place to see the Bering Sea birds in the world," he said.

One of several spotting scopes set up on tripods was trained on a northern fulmar clinging to the cliffs. To the untrained eye, the bird looked a lot like a common sea gull.

No, much better, Davis said as he ticked off what sets the fulmar apart, including a tubular structure atop their beaks that is actually their nostrils. The birds also can spit sticky, foul-smelling oil at intruders.

"This is the best place I know of seeing them close up," he said.

With cold winds buffeting her, Andreae held a broken shell in her mittened hands as if cradling a Tiffany egg.

The shell was light olive green with speckles. It was the shell of a murrelet. Andreae searched for a pocket, predicting the egg would be in a thousand pieces by the time she returned home.

After St. Paul Island, the birders were to travel to Barrow, Dutch Harbor, Seward and Nome, with stops at Kenai Fjords National Park and Denali National Park.

The hope-to-see list in Alaska included the bristle-thighed curlew, McKay's bunting, Smith's longspur, red-legged kittiwake, emperor goose, Aleutian tern, snowy owl and various auklets, murrelets, puffins and other seabirds.

Frank Andrews, 72, of Dunstable, said he hoped to see the bristle-thighed curlew, a species that numbers fewer than 10,000.

"We haven't seen it yet," he said. "There was one here the day before yesterday. We missed it by minutes."

'PRETTY INCREDIBLE' ST. PAUL

About 250 people -- more than half the island's population -- travel to St. Paul each year to get a look at some of the 284 species of birds, see the fur seals and learn more about its rich history, said tour director Jolene Lekanof with St. Paul Island Tours, which works with 18 travel agencies in the Lower 48 and in Scotland, England, Japan and Canada to bring birders to St. Paul.

Cameron Cox, 28, one of the tour guides, had heard about St. Paul for years before visiting.

St. Paul is special, he said. There was a recent sighting of a gray wagtail, seen rarely in North America.

"When you haven't been to anyplace similar, you can't imagine it until you've been here," Cox said, describing himself as from "Anywhere, U.S.A." -- anywhere that has lots of birds.

St. Paul is "pretty incredible," he said.

Part of the appeal for dedicated birders is seeing a particular bird in an unusual location.

St. Paul is known for that, Lekanof said. The island is famous for its Asian vagrants -- birds blown off-course that end up on St. Paul because it is the only place around to rest; it's part of the Pribilof Islands, about 300 miles from the Alaska mainland.

The common cuckoo shows up on St. Paul every year but is otherwise rare in North America, Lekanof said. On June 6, the first black-tailed gull showed up in the Pribilofs, flying with a group of kittiwakes.

That was topped three days later when the first rufous-tailed robin was sighted. The bird is normally confined to northeast China and southeast Russia. It was only the second known sighting of the bird in North America. The other time was June 2000 on Attu in the Aleutian Islands.

About the same time, another Asian vagrant, the common rosefinch, made an appearance.

Lekanof said sightings like that give St. Paul its reputation.

"It is called birders' paradise," she said. "For the hard-core birder."

www.birdseekers.co.uk

www.hilonesometours.com

www.alaskabirding.com

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