Category Archives: Nature

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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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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Low Tide at Fish Creek

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We have one more day of gray before the sun returns. According to the weatherman, it will bring glacier-borne winds to chill Chicken Ridge and the rest of Downtown Juneau. The promised wind will make short work of the frost feathers now decorating town. Thier angular crystals cling to almost every surface from car roof to spruce tips. They brighten the bare-branched alders that line Fish Creek. Aki and I visit there to enjoy the show.

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Aki finds a brace of miniature collie dogs to chase near the Fish Creek Pond but otherwise we have the place to ourselves. Leaving the pond, we walk down an icy trail that splits a frosty forest of beach roses and cow parsnip stalks to a spot offering an unobstructed view of Fritz Cove and the Chilkat Mountains beyond.

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All the bird action is near the tide line where mallards grumble, a heron wades, and a bald eagle rests on a rock. The sky hints at the change of weather. Rather than forming a locked pearl and gray ceiling above the mountains, the clouds scatter and pastel pinks and purples paint their bottoms.

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On our return to the car I hear what sounds like a murder of happy crows. When we get closer I can tell that it is a chorus made by children playing a pickup game of hockey on a small pond. Even if they look up from their ice, they wouldn’t be able to see the pastel clouds, the heron or the eagle. They wouldn’t even see the mountains. But their apparent joy exceeds mine.

Free Range Dog

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I was disappointed to find so many cars in the trailhead parking lot. But most of their occupants had already formed an ant-like line on the lake ice pointed toward the glacier’s ice cave. Aki and I keep to the eastern lake shore and wander toward Nugget Falls. Fog and low clouds form a grey and white ceiling above the lake, revealing only the lower half of Mendenhall Glacier.

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Aki usually keeps pretty close to me but today she ranges like a cattle drive scout, returning for a checkup and then dashing in another direction. No dogs or people draw her away. I blame interesting smells, entertain the possibility of ghosts. One time I spot her far out on the lake where she has acres of ice to herself.

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Fog

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Aki dashes around Sandy Beach, one of our most popular dog walk. She ignores the old mine air shaft, a tall, rectangular battlement with a pitched roof now appearing and disappearing in the fog. As I try to focus my camera, the fog appears to grow thousands of feet in height until it obscures all but the top of Mount Juneau. It deflates as quickly, as if it is being eaten like cotton candy by the sun. In a minute it is barely taller than the airshaft.

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All the miners who were served by the airshaft managed to escape before water from Gastineau Channel flooded the tunnels of the Mexican Mine. Before that day, even the sharp-eared Aki would not be able to hear my summons over the sound of ore crushers that ran 24 hours a day except for Christmas and the Fourth of July.

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I imagine the miners moiling in lantern-lit depths while fog shrank and expanded over the channel on sunny January days. They would never know the bright beauty that Aki and I share unless they took their lunch above ground. They entered their tunnels in the dark of morning and left long after the sun disappeared behind the Douglas Island ridge. Maybe, during their dinner after a day like this, their children told them about the fog and how an eagle emerged from it with talons lowered to snatch food from the channel waters.

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