Category Archives: Dan Branch

Low Battery

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My camera battery ran out of juice. But it doesn’t matter much on this flat-light day when almost all the usual users of the sheep creek delta are elsewhere. The sun just tried to burn the clouds off of Mt. Roberts but gave up after I used the last of my battery power photographing its effort.

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Now I stand, camera battery in my armpit, enjoying an impressionist’s reflection of Roberts in a tidal pond. A rising wind threatens to render the image too abstract for the camera. Aki stands by my side, sniffing the wind for promising smells. Nearby the creek makes it brief transit to Gastineau Channel where mergansers wait for it to deliver food. Just before the wind ruins the reflection, I slip the battery back into the camera, raise it to my eye and read in the viewfinder, “low battery.” The creek mumbles calm sounding words in a language I can’t understand. I listen to the moving waters, image a pre-symphony crowd full of cautious optimism as the house lights dim.

Messing About

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The storm wind whipping across the surface of this storybook-sized pond makes me think of Kenneth Grahame’s Water Rat in Wind in the Willows. I can see Ratty, in a slicker and storm hat fashioned from alder leaves, sailing his skunk cabbage boat across the pond’s riled surface. “Aki,” he might call out, “There is simply nothing—absolutely nothing—half so much worth doing, than messing about in boats.”

My little poodle-mix is a herder, not a water dog. The only reason she willingly boards our canoe is to avoid being left on the beach. If she and the water rat shared a common tongue, Aki would shout out, “Then you have never tried sniffing pee.” Having checked out all the messages left by prior canine visitors, she gives me her “let’s move it” stare, which shatters my illusion.

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It’s good that I followed her lead. The fifty-mile-an-hour gusts that ripple the protected pond surface rip through the forest canopy. We have just pasted a half-score of hemlocks tumbled by similar storms.

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Hundreds of crows huddle near the shoreline when we break out of the woods. Some hop about while others fly back and forth along the beach. Maybe the wind has them nervous. Or maybe, they are just messing about.

Herring Gulls

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As the second Pacific storm in as many days shakes the car, I drive Aki out to the old Auk Village site. It offers a trail through old growth large enough to protect us from wind-driven rain. Ducks—Barrow goldeneyes and harlequins—fish waters just off the crescent-shaped beach. We spot no eagles or ravens but herring gulls fill the air. They seem to ride the strengthening currents for recreation, not for advantage. Graceful in flight, they plunk onto the water when they land, wings half folded, as if they misjudged their approach. Many of the gulls land on the beach and gather where a fresh water stream erodes the beach gravel. Some flutter in the stream, splashing the water like children in a municipal pool. Others look for bits of food dislodged it or the small surf pushed onshore by the storm.

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Unattended In the Woods

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A week ago, the police found the body of a young man about 500 feet up this slide chute. It was close to the makeshift camp where he had spent the early winter and just a ten-minute walk from Downtown Juneau. According the police, the body showed signs of being unattended in the woods. It’s that statement that has me taking pictures of ravens during this walk down Gastineau Avenue.

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I think about the cloud of ravens, eagles and crows that Aki I watched during last week’s Gastineau Avenue walk. I remember the collection of similar birds drawn to a wolf-killed deer on the glacial moraine. I look away from a nearby raven’s stare.

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Jumpy Birds

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The flooding tide just displaced this murder of crows from an offshore bar. They regrouped on a lumpish rock thirty feet from where Aki and I emerge from the woods. My dog ignores the crows, as she tends to do with corvids except for our neighborhood ravens, which act like her teasing cousins. One by one the crows launch into the air. A small one keeps a look out while the rest line up like jets waiting to take off at the Seattle airport. I wonder if this organized nonchalance is designed to hide fear.

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The ducks and scoters are definitely jumpy. There were two rafts of mallards when we arrived but one group panicked into a short flight to join up with the other. Now they hang close to shore while one of their number cackles in way that would suggest insanity in a human. The party colored harlequin ducks are quick to dive until driven to flight by the appearance of a bald eagle overhead. This sets some mergansers off and into the air.

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The eagle pulls back its talons and skulks back to its spruce roost. I want to hang around and watch micro bursts of wind push small waves through the ducks’ formations but Aki whines. She has a point. It’s blowing hard, a wind that propels raindrops like missiles. I followed her into the woods where the storm hums through the canopy and we have to climb over a hemlock tree downed by the last windstorm.

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The Cold is Her Ally

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It was colder yesterday but my body doesn’t believe it. I’ve dressed Aki in her felted coat, one that helps her retain most of her warmth. The water bottle I left in the car last night is frozen solid. But still we drive out to the Fish Creek Pond to watch the sunrise.

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An incoming tide floods up Fish Creek, carrying wisps of fog that will soon congeal to obscure the other side of the stream. The tide-borne fog has already thickened over Gastineau Channel and Fritz Cove, hiding the glacier. Pieces of the surrounding mountains peek through, looking like puzzle pieces tossed onto a grey tablecloth.

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My camera punishes me when I remove a mitten so I can take a picture. Each depression of the shutter trigger delivers an ice burn. It feels like the transient sting of candle being snuffed between thumb and finger. For the thousandth time I wonder at Aki’s bare paws. The icy trail doesn’t seem to sting them while she waits for me to turn off the camera and get back to business. The cold is her ally.

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Boy Scout Beach

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Aki and I move down the Boy Scout Beach trail with an old friend. The thing that brings the most beauty to this trail makes it treacherous. Seepage from a steep hillside builds up complex frozen cascades over trailside rock faces also coats the trail with a glacial-slick layer. With the help of ice grippers we manage to negotiate all but the last ice covered section of the ice. While the humans test the start of this ice barrier, Aki scrambles up and over it. Realizing that it would take climbing crampons to gain a safe purchase on the ice, we turn back. The little dog doesn’t complain when we give up.

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After returning to the car we drive to the Eagle Beach picnic area from where we can see Boy Scout Beach across the river. We startle to flight a collection of Canada geese but they fly less than 50 meters and drop onto an offshore sandbar. A flooding tide swells the river, allowing a seal easy passage. Sunshine glistens off its head and reduces the snow covered meadow, blue sky, and spruce forest to colors you could find in a Crayon box.

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Avian Rodeo

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Trying to focus a camera is probably the worse thing to do when a dozen bald eagles are flying over your head. Bur here I am, pointing it skyward. There are ravens too, more athletic than the eagles, more aggressive. Holding Aki’s leash and a full poop bag in one hand, I move the camera in the general direction of the birds and click like mad. If I drop the camera now, I could watch their dives and in the case of the ravens, barrel rolls. I might figure out why they spend so much energy during this time of near-famine. Could it be sport—an avian rodeo?

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The little dog and I push on into the wind and climb from seawater to Chicken Ridge. A block from home we stumble on a small flock of European Starlings harvesting in our neighbor’s yard. Sunlight angling up Main Street enriches their chestnut feathers and brightens the males’ reds and violets. Here, the camera proves a better tool for accessing beauty and personality.

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Beaver Scent

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The little dog and I walk between two channels of the Mendenhall River on a trail only passable after stretches of cold, snowy weather. If she wasn’t such a brat about it, we could follow it all the way to the lake and loop back on a trail rich in dog signs. But Aki disappears across the river and into the woods whenever she sniffs a trail to her preferred route. She doesn’t care about solitude or silence or the reflected views we have of the glacier and Mt. McGinnis. She wants some same-species interaction.

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I crunch ahead, breaking through the thin crust covering the snow pack except where the wind had stripped the trail down to bare ice. We find what looks like a miniature bobsled course that runs from the river’s edge to a thick forest of alders. My suspicion that it is a beaver’s logging ice road is confirmed when the little dog rolls on a portion of the run with a goofy smile on her face. She does love beaver scent.

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High Wind Warning

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I’m standing on a downtown dock that is covered in ice. The ice has enough grit mixed in it to provide boot purchase on a normal day but 80-miles-an-hour wind gusts are sweeping down the channel. A gust snaps forward my knees and lifts my torso forward and up, like I am no longer anchored by gravity. Instinctively, I lean back into the wind to avoid being pushed off the dock and into the turbulent channel.

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I am glad that Aki is still in the car. It’s been awhile since I felt such a jolt of fear. We drive out to a North Douglas Island trail where the forest should provide some protection from the wind.

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Last night’s storm has stripped the forest trees of frost but the beach is still white with snow and ice. Waves born in Lynn Canal curl onto the beach and die. Their crashing noise mixes with that of the wind whipping over the treetops to make the little dog nervous. Protected from the wind by the beachside forest, we watch a small raft of mallards fly low along the surf, close to the beach where the wind gusts can’t interfere with their flight. The wind doesn’t inhibit crows, ravens, eagles or gulls, which wing through the gusts with an overstated nonchalance.

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