Category Archives: Nature

The Black and the White of It

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Ravens and gulls are the black and white of it this morning. Aki ignores both. She doesn’t notice how the birds feed on spent dog salmon carcasses or wait for the ebbing tide to reveal more. She has no time for sights or sounds this morning but uses all her energy to study pockets of smells that dot the trail. Each one seems just out of her reach when I stop to photograph a bird. She manages to jerk forward just as I hit the shutter button on my old camera. This frustrates both of us but produces one little blessing in the form of a raven’s portrait captured in flight.

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A Blink of Sunshine

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After days of heavy rain, Aki and I finding ourselves squinting into sunshine. We just left the flume trail that links the Juneau Highlands to Perseverance trail, knocking accumulated rain water off elderberry plants that crowd the trail. I probably shouldn’t have chosen this trail because it is flooded at by charged streams that plunge down the side of Mt. Juneau to Gold Creek.

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Even the humble salmonberry leaves sparkle in the sunshine, which also turns the normally dull devil’s club berries into bright red globes. When the sun moves back behind the marine layer colors fade and we return to the world of muted greens that typifies the rain forest.

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In Spite of the Rain

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On this walk through the Treadwell ruins it will rain hard but there will be no wind. We will pass many dogs and their humans. Aki will play with the dogs and ignore their humans, including the woman who will shout, “Keep that dog away from me,” even though Aki will already be twenty feet down the trail. A raven will waddle between the stubs of wharf pilings and stop only long enough to give us the stink-eye. Three kingfishers will chase each other across the surface of the glory hole and one will land in a nearby branch for the sole purpose of scolding my innocent dog. An eagle will sink its talons into the top of a ruined wharf piling and screech defiance at a pair of other eagles who will show the good sense to perch under the shelter offered by beach-side spruce trees. It will be a good walk in spite of the rain.

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Whale or Squirrel

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Today I planned on writing about the rain after Aki and I returned from walking a circuit around Outer Point Trail. A hard storm had hammered the forest just before we arrived, leaving behind beads of water that clung to berries and mushrooms. These water beads captured all the surrounding light and then shined like globes of hope until destroyed by wind. Globes of hope are compelling subjects, more interesting than politics or street violence. But a whale trumped them when it surfaced and exhaled a one hundreds meters from the little dog, swam through its own mist cloud and disappeared. Aki, who finds squirrels the most compelling things, turned away from the whale while I fiddled with the lens cap on my camera. But she waited we me, without complaint, for the whale to resurface. When it did, all but its spume hidden by the Shaman Island spit, she led me back into the forest toward the chitterling squirrel.

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Sacrilege

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Near the downtown Juneau bus terminal, Aki ignores the guy standing next to a spray-painted sign that asks, “Why Me?” I can’t. In his hand, he holds a beautiful, if old, carving adze. It’s one of the curved-bladed ones, handy for scooping out the back of a mask but hard to sharpen. Performing a sacrilege, he uses the adze to dig a trench in the soil of a planter box. Above the sound of passing tourist buses, we hear a song of condemnation hurled in the man’s direction by a nearby raven. I’d join in if I knew the words.

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Interludes

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Back in Juneau and back with Aki, I load the little dog into the car and head out to North Douglas Island. This morning’s light, but steady rain doesn’t deter us. We stop near the boat ramp where fog rising off Fritz Cove obscures the industrial buildings that dot the north section of the Mendenhall wetlands. For once, we can see the glacier snake off the Juneau ice field between coastal mountains as one could have before Joe Juneau and Richard Harris followed Chief Kowee up Gold Creek—before the mining and all that followed.

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Minutes later, we walk onto the Rainforest trail and hear the voice of a tour guide educating cruise ship passengers about the old growth. We will pass three more guided groups before the walk ends. During interludes when the forest manages to swallow projected voices and camera clicks, water and bird songs dominate. “Plunk….plunk…plunk,” chant drops striking elephant-ear like skunk cabbage leaves while the varied thrush whistles.

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Cranes

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It’s raining on this, the last morning of writer’s school—my last chance to spot a moose. I choose the Chester Creek trail even though it doesn’t offer the best chance of encountering big animals. I just hope to watch the sandhill cranes.

It’s windy. Last night a gust knocked over a portal toilet that is used by residents of a makeshift camp. Near downtown I pass a pile of black trash bags, each stuffed full of the possessions of homeless people. The only mammals I spot on the ride to Westchester Lagoon wear spandex and high tech rain gear.

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At the lagoon’s western edge the resident Canada geese wait out the wind. Comfortable in such a large group, each goose seems reluctant to yield enough space on the bike path for a jogger and I to pass. Surviving the geese traffic jam, I pedal to the mouth of a small slough. The ratcheting cry of two cranes reaches me as I put on the brakes. Another pair of sandhills flies low over the singing birds.

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The feeding pair stretch out their long necks when another crane call sounds. Soon five cranes gather to feed at the edge of salt water even as a bald eagle flies over at hunting height. One crane seems to stand guard as the others feed in pairs. There is no morning class scheduled to force my departure but I only stay ten minutes. The cranes might stay nearby all morning or explode into flight in seconds. But I feel sated, like I might after a rich dinner followed by cake.

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Sparks of Life

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Sand hill cranes have dominated my twelve-day stint at the Anchorage writer’s school. No moose or bear sighting yet. This morning, at the mouth of a slough that drains into Cook Inlet, two cranes foraged on a small island of reeds. Yellow legs scurried over the surrounding mud. When another crane called, one of my pair stretched its long neck to full height and looked toward the call. I looked in the direction indicated by the searching crane, hopping to spot a descending one. We were both disappointed.

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Saturday afternoon, I might have seen the off-stage singer feeding along with this morning cranes on the inlet’s mud flats. Even though they had sole possession of the flats, the cranes gave each other excessive personal space. Watching from the Tony Knowles Coastal Trail, I envied the cranes’ solitude. Every few seconds strolling tourists or bike riders filled the air with chatter. Some of the cyclists talked about their hope of seeing the carcass of a dead humpback whale now stranded on a beach near the motocross track. I would never see or smell the whale. Nor would the hundreds of people who poured down from the Kincaid Park chalet to hunt for its bones for it rested elsewhere. As I weaved through them, I wondered why they so wanted to see a whale that had lost its spark of life.

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Unencumbered

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I’m back in Anchorage for writer’s school. While I am gone Aki is living large with friends at their waterside property. Last summer I saw many moose on my morning bike rides but this week I’ve only spotted homeless folks and grim faced commuters on the Chester Creek bike path. Until reaching Winchester Lagoon, I ride through light filtered by birch leaves. But the fireweed-covered islands in the lagoon almost glow thanks to the unencumbered early morning sun. The resident Canada geese have already formed lines of battle, each five birds long. When I stop riding, they move slowly past me, just a few yards from the bike path.

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I’m awed but also a little sad to see this calm reaction of once wild birds to my presence. Swerving to avoid goose scat, I pedal toward the coastal trail where two days before I heard and saw a pair of sandhill cranes. They have always been an icon of wildness since I first watched they fly low over tundra near Bethel during their Spring migration. In the thirty something years since that day, I always savor the sound of their ratcheting cry.

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I won’t see the sandhills on this ride but a flock of yellow legs mitigates the loss. They explode from the beach when the engineer of a Fairbanks-bound train releases a mournful warning whistle. I am near a woman with face hidden by a high-end DSLR camera. The shorebirds circle around us, instantly change directions and fly another circle in the opposite direction. Lowering her camera she gives me a stunned look. “Did you get a good shot of the birds?” I ask. “I don’t know,” is her reply. Unencumbered by camera, I cached a memory of the flight, how they instantly transformed from creatures of shadow into those of light when they snapped off their coordinated turns.

Fireweed

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“Just to let you know. There’s a bear hanging around down there,” the nice sounding dog walker in expensive casuals says while pointing at a field of flowering fireweed that seems to stretch to the Mendenhall Glacier. I smile back, thank her, and walk onto the meadow. A bear is never far from you anywhere in Juneau this time of year.

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An electric-orange plastic fence blocks the trail but the note stuck to it warns of erosion, not bears. Last week the ice dam that backed up water on the glacier at suicide basin broke, flooding the lake and raising the river to a record flood stage. Charged with fast water, the river undercut the trail, making it unsafe for travel. The little dog and I move onto a gravel “work around” trail and spot matted vegetation where a bear had slept and many bear sized trails through the five foot tall fireweed plants. Panting from the heat, Aki collapses in a patch of shade near some fireweed stalks and pants. I think of the cool forest the trail would take us through if we preserve, if we risk the bear. It’s not worth it. We turn back to the trailhead, arriving as a family with small children, all on bicycles, pedals to their car.

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