Buckle up Xwinger because we’re starting a new Bird Tour series. You, like so many other Great Bird Pics members, couldn’t wait until Monday for the next post about our South Africa tour to drop – it took 23 posts to describe that 18-day trip. How many posts for this one? We were in Alaska 12 days, so you do the math…. Heck, by the time I’m finished with this Tour Report series the website might be back to functioning normally!
Let’s start out by setting the stage for this trip:
Why did we choose Alaska? It’s the final frontier. A big place with tall mountains covered in snow and glaciers, crystal-blue lakes, endless tundra, and breeding birds. Although still in the U.S. we went where few tourists go.
Who went? Karen and I signed up on this Red Hill Birding tour, which was led by Josh Engel (with able assistance from Johnny Wilson). We gained so much respect for Josh during our aforementioned South Africa tour when he was our guide that we knew Josh would do a great job setting this one up. Ten other participants joined us so there were 14 total.
Where did we go? We started in Anchorage for a day, drove to Seward and the Kenai Peninsula (to take a pelagic trip) for two nights before driving back to Anchorage for a night, flew to Nome for four days, flew back to Anchorage for a night, then flew to Barrow/Utqiagvik for three days, and then finally flew back to Anchorage for a night before taking the red-eye home to Chicago. As you can tell, we went back and forth to Anchorage many times. Josh said that of all the trips he arranges, this one has the most complex logistics with seven hotel reservations to make and three flights to book. Not to mention the van rental and restaurants to reserve! Here’s a map showing the hot spots we visited with Barrow at the top, Nome in the middle, and Anchorage/Seward at the bottom.
What was the birding like? Over the course of the tour we saw about 165 species of birds and ended up with 20 Lifers. More about why I didn’t get many Lifers later, but suffice it to say the ones we got were pretty spectacular!
What was it like being in Alaska? We went during the third week of June which is the time of the summer solstice; we were in Nome on that particular day and here was the sun report:
Yikes! Twenty-one and a half hours of daylight! When we got up to Barrow it was 24 hours of daylight because we were above the Arctic Circle. Heck, the first day there, we were out birding at 11 PM.
Mornings tended to be in the low 40ºs and warmed up to the low 50ºs – Karen says she was often cold, particularly on a cloudy day with a breeze (not that I would admit it to her, but I was chilly at times, too).
How was the bird photography? It was mixed. I took 7,203 pictures and kept 660, or about 9%. That’s a bit lower than usual and I blame that on my fondness for BIF shots which can add up real fast at 30 frames per second. I struggled to get good shots in the tundra and from the ship bobbing up and down during our pelagic trip.
With that as background, let’s get started in Anchorage.
As mentioned above we were in and out of Anchorage a lot and we always stayed at the Coast Inn at Lake Hood each time. The hotel was 5 minutes away from the airport and was situated right next to Lake Hood. The day we arrived we walked over to Lake Hood to do some birding before dinner and I was surprised to find that Lake Hood was an airport – for floatplanes! In fact they claim it is the busiest floatplane facility in the world! Many Alaskans have a floatplane to get from place to place because there aren’t roads to many locations, but lots of lakes to land on.
I don’t know if this is going to work on your device, but if you click the picture below you should see a 30 second video of a floatplane taking off right in front of us.
In spite of the floatplane activity there were many types of waterfowl swimming in the lake. Here are a couple shots of different species we saw:
The first bird we saw in Alaska was a Red-throated Grebe on Lake Hood. Several of them were feeding close to shore.
One of my favorite gulls anywhere is the Bonaparte’s Gull and they were swirling around Lake Hood in search of food. Notice this bird’s head is completely black for mating season. We usually see them in the US in the winter with more of a black smudge behind the eye.
We see Common Goldeneye in the Chicago area every winter but we saw Barrow’s Goldeneye in Alaska. Here’s a nice pic of a female.
Mallards are widespread in the lower half of Alaska (we did not see them up in Barrow). Here’s a male that is molting, which I’ve never seen before.
Finally, there were Common Loons on Lake Hood and this one was feeding near the area where the floatplanes were just lifting out of the water. Perhaps I’ve never been close enough to a Common Loon before to notice that the wide stripe around its neck is dark green (not black, like I previously thought).
We did spend the following day birding around Anchorage and I’ll share pics and tales about that next Monday.
CLICK HERE to see all the posts about our Alaskan Bird Tour. Karen and I have had the opportunity to travel to many interesting places in search of birds. If you would like read about some of our other Bird Tours CLICK HERE.
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