Monthly Archives: May 2017

Silver Bay

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Yesterday, Aki was whimpering under an airline seat. The airplane took the little dog and her two humans to Sitka, on the outer coast of South East Alaska. Today, she appears to have forgotten the traumatic twenty-minute flight. We walk on a causeway that links a series of small islands in Silver Bay. Most of the place’s original wildness has been tamed away by carpenters and landscapers. But it’s early summer here and the house owners years ago planted rhododendrons that are now flowering. When no boat is passing, we can hear the hermit thrush’s song and small waves dying on the rocks.2

Just offshore schools of dolly varden char worry salmon smolt into panicked balls. Some of the smolt leap in the air in an effort to escape the hunters. The pure, intense morning light overwhelms my digital camera. But the thing manages to photograph a large, green glass ball that someone us using as a float for their anchor line. These glass balls were once common as kelp in the fishing industry. Now you only find them in high-end tourist shops and museums. I am glad to see the owner of this one dedicated it to its intended use.1

Predator and Prey

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While Aki reads the scents left by dogs and other mammals along the trail, I search a disturbed section of the Gastineau Meadows for insect-eating sundews. The cry of another predator makes Aki cringe and startles me into an upward look. We both watch a red tail hawk continue its hunt across the meadow. The hawk’s distinctive cry, which  froze my little dog must do the same to its prey.

 

4I watch the red tail circle over the eastern meadow but rather than dive, it rises higher and higher, shrinking to a brown dot against the clouds disintegrating on the flank of Mt. Jumbo.

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It’s too early for the shooting stars to flower but there should be some other flashes of magenta on the meadow. I head up the trail to find some. Aki won’t follow so I turn back toward where we startled a Sitka black-tailed doe. Just our smell was enough to send it running for cover. I wonder if we carry the odor of the meat eater, like the wolves that leave tracks in the meadow snow.

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On a morning where events established Aki as possible predator and prey, we return home where the little dog hopes to hunt up some cheese to go with her breakfast of kibble.

Little Drama

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Two Canada geese are the only things moving on Saga Meadows. The larger bird started honking when I slipped on the gravel trail and hasn’t stopped. He walks to and fro, like an over trained Shakespearean actor, while the smaller birds feeds on the new meadow grass. They provide the most drama Aki and I have experienced on this Amalga Harbor visit.

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The rain, really a soft purgatory of drizzle, pockmarked the water in front of the salt chuck cascade where I fished in vain for dolly varden char. It soaked into Aki’s gray curls while I searched for whales or Stellar sea lions from a place where Aki and I have seen both in the past. Giving up on drama, I concentrated on five harlequin ducks that fished around my whale-watching promontory. The little hens didn’t show much color but the drake’s feather show almost equals that of a wood duck.

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Sunday Morning Coming Down

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Most of the ravens we pass on this Sunday morning stroll through downtown exude the confidence I’ve come to expect from the opinionated birds. They poise their rain-slick bodies on prominent cottonwood limbs or gather on newly green patches of grass. Some chase away eagles with triple their wingspan. But the two that we spot on the docks look hung over.

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Near the morose corvids, two large rafts of surf scoters dive on balls of herring that have formed under the new cruise-ship dock. The ravens appear to cringe when the scoters panic onto the tips of their wings and use them to run across the surface of Gastineau Channel.

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Under the partial protection of the Marine Park shelter, a homeless couple ignore the scoter’s din, dive deeper into their nest of castoff down sleeping bags, and try to gain a few more minutes of sleep. Soon city workers will start up their noisy power washers to hose down the docks. Then the homeless and the low ravens will have to find a quieter place to finish coming down.

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First Sighting, Nervous Geese

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Aki and I are walking along the north bank of Eagle River. A line of Canada geese cackle and slow walk to the river. We are not making the geese nervous. The little dog isn’t even in their line of sight and I am careful to keep a respectful distance from the birds. Something at the edge of the sand bars is stirring them. Through my telephonic lens I can just make out a mature bald eagle being chased by a Canada goose. The eagle climbs to hunting height and circles over a gathering of geese feeding on emerging grass. Several of this group cackle and fly, only to land a few meters out in the river.

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More geese stir when a northern harrier flies over at a low attitude. Its flight path takes it over our head. But even after all this negative attention most of the Canada geese continue to feed along the river. Only when a circus of children, and them on the southern bank of the river, make their noisy way to Boy Scout Beach do the Canadians take to the air.

3The kids swing over to a big tidal meadow and trigger another exodus—a big flight of snow geese that had been refueling on the meadow before continuing on to their nesting sites along the Bering Sea. The powerful fliers change from white line to a cloud as they move over Lynn Canal. It’s my first sighting of the legends even though I lived for years in Western Alaska less than 100 miles from their northern nests. Here in the rain forest elders tell children that hummingbirds migrate here burrowed in the feathers of snow geese. For the rest of the walk I will check each blossoming blue berry bush for hitchhikers.

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Imperfect Cover

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Aki and I climb up the old gold road that leads to Perseverance Basin. The sun, which yesterday lit up Juneau with garish light, now tries to hide behind a thin sheath of clouds. I can see you. Any thing that can tries to hide from the little dog and me. But their efforts are imperfect.

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Keeping a wall of alders between itself and us, a marmot (Alaska’s Guinea Pig) lets out a peeping whistle to give itself away. The air is full of bird song but we can’t spot the singers. I want to watch the resident mountain goats feed on the flank of Mt. Juneau but until the return leg of the hike, we only find a patch of white goat fur caught on a trailside branch. While we walk down the Basin Road trestle bridge, a goat appears as a puffy white dot against the mountain’s gray stone. But even he is partially screened by a tall cottonwood.

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The Feel of Snow

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Living along a fjord that cuts through steep sided mountains has pluses and minuses. I feel the negatives most on January days when the sun barely manages to crest the Douglas Island ridge. Plato’s’ analogy of the cave rings true on those days. But today, Aki and I experience the benefits of fjord land.

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After a three-mile drive from salt water, the little dog and I are crossing a mountain meadow still blessed with snow patches. It’s in the mid-50’s so I can get by with just a sweatshirt. Aki wears nothing. We visit this meadow each year just before true spring. The air is sweet and clean, as if expired by a land thankful to be free of most of its snowy burden. Thrush and robins sing, Stellar’s Jays scold. The little dog rolls in every snow patch we find and then runs it’s length, savoring the way it gives beneath her tiny feet.

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First Flower of Spring

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Just minutes into this walk along the Auk Rec Trail, Aki and I find one of the year’s first salmonberry blossom. While listening to small waves braking on the beach, I think about a Haida woman I knew in Ketchikan. She taught traditional weaving classes to keep those traditional alive. One night she burst into a carving class I was attending while holding a magenta colored salmonberry blossom. “I wanted to share this first sign of spring,” she said before returning to her class upstairs.

2Salmonberry blossoms provide more than beauty in the rain forest. Most will died to give wave to sweet, plump, multi-segmented fruit—The first berries to ripen each year. I always look forward to their harvest even though I buy domestic berries and fruits from the store. Imagine what the taste of their sweetness would mean to someone that had made it through the winter on preserved fish and oil, deer meat, and what the tide exposes.

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Back in the Rain Forest

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Just back from California and reunited with Aki, I lead the little dog down the rain forest trail. It’s early morning but we have missed the blink of sun that often comes at the start of a cloudy day. No one else has walked the trail yet so we have good bird watching. The persistent trills of thrush bird song dominate the other forest sounds and the tall, yellow skunk cabbage flowers grab the eye.5

It’s early spring in the rain forest so the alders are just leafing out and tiny pink and white lantern flowers hang from trailside berry brush. Yesterday, spring was ending in California where her green hills were turning golden brown. There, harbor seals were pupping. Here that’s a month off.2

When we reach the water, scooters, harlequin and golden eye ducks hug the beach. Just offshore the eyes, nose, and forehead of a harbor seal appear above the water. Judging the seal the lesser threat, the birds move away from the beach.

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None of the instruments of Juneau’s industrial tourism invades the calm morning. Soon the dam and princess boats will tie up at the new downtown panamax docks. The first of a million tourists will negotiate gangplanks and line up for whale watching and helicopter tours. Then, the now peaceful Lynn Canal waters will be noisy with tourist boats, the skies with helicopters. Ah little dog, let’s linger in the calm a little longer.

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