Delta Dawn

A few weeks ago my boss' PhD advisor came to visit the camp for two days. Really great guy, he brought his 6 year old daughter for her first field experience. It was a blast having them out. That little girl was a trip. She loved playing with Delta, my boss' dog and expert nest searcher. when she was asked who she was going to miss most, she exclaimed emphatically and with out hesitation, "Delta!".

As I spend my last few hours in camp making arrangements for my travels about Alaska and packing up my kit, I wonder who I'll miss most. It's a toss up between Jolene the moose, Ryan and Delta. But Delta is hard to beat.

Molting Shoveler

We have been doing molting drives the last few days. These are much like duckling drives except we are going for adult birds during the time they are flightless during molting. We caught 108 birds in one two drives two days ago. I got to band an entire drive's worth, about 50 birds! Yesterday I got to band my first blue-winged teal. We also had a duckling goldeneye that got caught in the drive, I banded him too!

Loons

The last week or so at least 70 common loons have been in front of camp on the lake. Sometimes just beyond our boats. Sometimes they are so loud in the morning they wake me up. Stupid loud loons! Makes me want to throw something at them! (Jokie!) Actually there isn't a sweeter sound. Two Pacific Loons were with them a week ago, unfortunately they didn't come to close to shore that time.

The wind is blowing fierce, hence I have time to post. We can only do our bait trap rounds (twice a day) and do no drive trapping. The wind blows the duckings and our kayaks all over. However the bait trap rounds can take 2 to 4 hours depending on how many birds we catch each and how far out and apart from each other our traps are. We move them often.

Few days left in camp on to Denali

Wild Iris

I have only a few days left in camp. I'll be flying out to Fairbanks on the 30th or 31st. I'll spend a few days around Fairbanks then off to Denali for two nights and to Anchorage. A very nice birder and local artist has offered to let me stay in her cabin near town. What an amazing offer and it goes to show what a strong community the birding community is! I've certainly hosted my share of travellers in my day but now I got to come up with some more traditional accommodations to repay the non punk birders! I'm not sure how many birders would want to stay in my punk house in the anarchist enclave, however we do have a roof top garden and a moon bounce in the back yard. My Aunt does have a house in Cape May and that is how I've been keeping up the more traditionally adult birder accommodation karma up.

I plan to rent a bicycle while I'm in Fairbanks and try to see a spruce grouse.

I doubt I'll be able to post much until I get back to Philly, and my camera is at home so unless, like out here, other people take pictures then I'll have to do just text posts.

Oh, I heard new info on the bear, it was drinking their beer! No wonder they shot it. Amazing!
I learned today that Alaskans don't lock thier cabins in the bush to let people who get into trouble access to shelter, water and food. Also it is common to leave bung wrenches on fuel drums to help out folks who are stranded without fuel.

I'm so exhausted from catching ducks all day, we work till midnight or two sometime even three then back at in the morning. I'm teetering on the brink of exhaustion and barely get enough sleep to function. Haven't had a day off in almost three months Can't wait to just kick it.

The Family

The funny thing about the family is that we have caught at least three hens with them. We have no idea who the real mother is. We should take them on Jerry Springer and do a DNA test.

Bait Trapping

Recaptured Mallard Hen, this one has a reward band.

While we still are brood driving we have started bait trapping. Bait trapping consists of a welded wire fence loop that has the open end for a funnel. The top is covered with deer fencing. The trap is zip-tied to rebar and stuck in a cleared area of mud or shallow water. Barley and corn is spread around the outside of the trap and through the funnel and inside. Eventually once the birds know about the trap only the funnel and inside is baited. The birds can't seem to find the way out, like a fish trap. We roll up to the trap and open a section of the top and fish the birds out with a dip net.

Currently we are catching mostly ducklings and occasionally the attending hen. We are beginning to catch molting males.

We have been catch the same eight mallard duckings for the last three weeks. They are in the same trap at least once a day. We refer to them as "the family".

Bladderwort sp.

This is a really cool carnivorous plant that is quite common here in bogs and marshy areas.

keeping duckings warm

Grebe Chick

Horned Grebe Chick,

Today we got a horned grebe and its chick in a bait trap. The chick was surprisingly docile considering the ferocity of its parent. Brandt despite handling thousands of birds in his day was quite nervous of taking the adult from the dip net, even with his manly field mustache.

The bear is dead

The Fish and Game guys reported that people staying at a cabin nearby killed a bear on their porch last week. The bear turned out to be a grizzly.

We actually met these guys on July 4th. They had a huge air boat and stopped by to say hello. The one guy was super jacked and bald and he was driving the boat high up on his chair. He reminded me of Lord Humongous from the road warrior.

Cold Missouri Waters, Demystification of What's Going On

Wigeon Duckling

I mentioned the song "Cold Missouri Waters" a few posts back. My dear friend Julie sent my Cry Cry Cry's chilling version of it and I am extremely grateful. The song was written by James Keelaghan about the Mann Gulch Fire of Montana in 1949. The lyrics are pretty much the exact story and very little artistic license is taken. Man, this is a strange time we live in, it's cool that you can just google a song and find out the story behind it. However, I wonder if too much demystification is a bad thing? Should we have any information we want so easily at at fingertips? As Joseph Campbell reminds us,mysticism and mythology is important. However Daniel Quinn would argue as he does in "Ishmael" that the wrong mythology can lead to the destruction of a culture and even the world.

For a song that argues for demystification I recommend "Demystification" by the great English anarchist punk band Zounds from the early 80's. I love the line, "I'm not looking for escapism, I just want to escape." Brilliant.

Nest Searching: What a Drag!

Ryan during a nest check

Nest searching is over officially now and we are on to brood drives and bait trapping. I am glad to see the rope drags stowed away. Dragging a thick 60' rope though floating bogs, flooded grass and over tussocks, frankly sucks! It's cool to find nests and to be out in the field...also the workout is tremendous. However 3 to 6 hours of dragging that rope is brutal. It's often pretty warm out here and the bugs can be merciless. Imagine dragging a rope though chin high grass and tussocks, working up some mean swamp ass only to have to walk through some flooded grass, horestails and much. Every step is in sucking mud and you excite hordes of blood crazed mosquitoes. It reminds me of the opening sceen in Day of Dead when the protagonists are searching with a helicopter the post zombie apocalypse Miami for survivors. At first they find nothing but abandoned city. You even see an aligator walking down the street and a news paper blows by with the headline, "The Dead Rise" or something to that effect. The Cat Stevens looking dude keeps yelling "Heeeelllloooo, Heeeelllllooo", looking for human survivors. At this poit the movie shows zombies starting to wake up as they hear the yelling. Eventually the zombies mass and head toward the search crew. The Jamacian chopper piolot exclaims, "Listen, you can 'ear it over da engine" as the collective moan from the undead horde approaches. This is what the mosquitoes are like, one minute nothing, then you disturb the wet grass and then you can just hear this hum and suddenly you are in a cloud of hundreds of blood frienzied drones.

So now that is over and I will celebrate by posting pictures of ducklings!

Boreal Forest

On our few hours off Ryan and I crossed the late to explore the boreal forest. It was an especially hot day so when we arrived there was little bird activity. We only saw a few black-capped chickadees, yellow-rumped warblers and a gray jay. We did however get to do a fair deal of botanizing. We identified cloud berry, marsh blueberry, bear berry, wild red current, nagoon berry for all you wild berry enthusiasts. The forest is mostly black spruce and willow with stands of alder and paper birch. In the more upland areas we encountered white spruce that actually got fairly tall, maybe 40 to 50 feet tall. The ground cover is mostly the aforementioned berries with ample Labrador tea, fireweed and horestails.

Sandhill Crane Colt

We come across sandhill cranes while nest searching very often, finding nests several times a week. Everywhere we stop in Minto Flats we either flush cranes or can hear them.

Fire Update

The fire across the lake appears to be just smoldering now. The fire department went full force on it with at least 2 belly planes, I other plane dropping retardant and one helicopter working on it. It poured last night and the wind is now blowing West so the smoke is away from camp today. There is still a 175,000 acre fire to the South in Minto Flats, but much further away. It felt like a nuclear war had occurred when I woke up this morning, high wind, orange and purple sky and smoke. It felt like I was in Cormac McCarthy's "The Road". I was expecting to have to fend off post-apocalyptic cannibals at any moment. That reminds me of the great Patty Smith song, "Summer Cannibals". There is a great folk song by an artist I can't remember about smoke jumpers dying in a wildfire called "Cold Missouri Waters". I hope I can find that song again, I'll have to ask my pop.

Fire

There is now a fire across the lake from us, about 5 miles away. Ryan and I enjoyed the extremely rare pleasure of having a few hours off by hiking in the forest across the lake. As we boated back across the lake we looked back and saw the fire on the ridge. We assumed everyone at camp had seen it already; we were surprised, however to discover that they were unaware. We could see a plane and a helicopter fighting the blaze. Soon after arriving at camp "belly planes" started landing in the lake to take on water. The plane takes four minutes to make a load up, drop its load and refill. The plane doesn't even land, it just skims the surface. Brandt contacted the proper authorities and alerted them to our presence. We were told to have food and water and valuables at the ready. We were informed we had the ultimate safety zone, the lake. We have a satellite phone and radios and the fire crew knows we are here. I'll keep you informed.

Boreal Burning

There are several forest fires in the area right now. Sometimes the smoke is so thick your boogers are black, you feel like you've been at a bar in Europe and you can't see the mountains across the lake. We had a retired couple land their float plane at our camp because they couldn't make it over the ridge. They were flying from their cabin 15 miles further out than our camp and could not fly any further and decided to land on our lake at our camp so they would be near people. Their Cessna was black with yellow and white stripes so I asked them if they were Steelers fans. I was informed with a chuckle that it came that way.

Forest Fires

Weller Nest Trap

Brood Drives

Currently we are finishing up nest searching and trapping and starting brood drives. Brood driving is catching ducklings! Expect many cute pictures to follow. We set up a holding pen with too long net leads fanning out from them. Two teams set out and each boat drops a person off to walk the flooded vegetation on the shoreline to flush out the broods. When a brood is flushed the boats launch inflatable kayaks to heard the duckings into the nets.

It's a load of fun, but can be stressful.

More Moose

Return of the Bear.

So the bear came back early this morning. At around 5:30am I awoke to the sound of something sloshing through the water. Our camp is located on the shore of a peninsula between two lakes and moose are frequently in camp. I wasn't sure whether to investigate because it was probably just a moose. Then I heard Delta bark and then there was a bit of movement and splashing and the beast started making a pig-like grunt and a wet snarl that sounded like an orc from Lord of the Rings. At this point I shot up out of my sleeping bag and grabbed my desert camo shorts (commando, bear spray and put on my rubber boots, I grabbed a case for my glasses but it was empty. I could hear the beast moving across the peninsula to the other lake. I emerged from the willows and could see the head of a bear popping up through the marsh blue-joint grass all the while making its orc noises. Since the bear was galloping away from camp, I didn't feel the need to wake alert the camp to the now passed danger, so I climbed the observation tower next to my tent with my (Kowa Genesis 8.5x43) binoculars but could not relocate the bear. I climbed back down and went to Brandt's (my boss) tent and told him about the bear He informed me that he just had a moose “bug out” of camp. My faith in my sighting was a bit shaken but I was pretty goddamn sure I saw a brown colored bear-like creature making orc noises high-tailing it out of camp. I returned to my tent to find it filled with mosquitoes. I was getting hammered by bugs on this warm still morning. I hurried over to the communal cabin and retrieved one of the electric tennis racquet bug zappers and cleared the tent of the wretched swarm and returned to my slumber.

At breakfast Brandt informed me that there was indeed a moose but something else. Tom had heard a moose and the grunting orc-beast noises too. Brandt saw a year old moose swim out in the middle of the lake. So what probably happened was the bear and the moose had an altercation next to camp and the bear bugged out in one direction and the moose in the other.

I have nice named the bear “Gothmog” in honor of the orc in Return of the King. Also in the movie Gothmog is portrayed as being very pale, and this bear is somewhat pale in its pelage. Brandyt keeps referring to it as a black bear, he hasn't seen this bear yet. Ryan, Tom and I have and it is brown in color. I know black bears can come in many color phases besides black, no one who has seen this bear has definitely identified it as a black bear. It may well me a small young grizzly. Considering the Fish and Game guys saw a young grizzly not very far away and that bears are scarce in these parts, I think t is highly likely that it was the bear they saw. We'll just have to wait until it is seen well enough. Although black bears are in season and at least one guy in camp has a tag, maybe it's just wishful thinking.