Category Archives: Nature

Hjorton Picking

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Aki looks frustrated. She sees no point in lingering on this remote mountain meadow, which is well off the beaten dog walker track. Why leave that rich environment to fill a recycled yogurt container with yellow berries? 

            I’d have much luck explaining my actions to the darning needle dragonfly that just landed on a weathered trail board as to the little dog. She has never bounced across a tundra meadow in Western Alaska during cloudberry picking time. She’s never climbed to a Swedish meadow in search of hjorton, the name the Swedes have given the cloudberry.

            I stop to plop one of the segmented berries into my mouth and remember watching families on a tundra plain near Bethel gathering in gallons of cloudberries, which they call “salmonberries,” so they could enjoy wild fruit during the coming winter. The kids giggled, the parents smiled and let all their worries disappear as they harvested summer. 

Whales

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I’m bouncing through the North Pass, riding in an old fishing boat to the east shore of Admiralty Island. Aki is safe at home. The little dog does not like boats. The boat captain and I will spend day in a fruitless attempt to catch silver salmon. We will have to settle for one pink salmon. But there will be whales. 

            We already passed four humpback whales in the pass. But up ahead, just off Point Retreat, a pod of them will be bubble feeding. They will swim circles around krill, forming a net of bubbles that will hold their favorite food in place. Some of the pod will burst up through the krill, jaws open wide. The rest will chase the remaining krill before forming a new net of bubbles around their prey. 

Digging for Small Beauties

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It’s a flat, gray day, the kind of day when I have to dig out beauty from close in things. Aki is having a great walk along the crescent-shaped beach at Auk Rec. Her joy depends on smells, not sights. 

            We move into the woods and then to the tip of Point Louisa. A few months ago we watched seal stalk a small raft of harlequin ducks. Those ducks are gone, moved out to the rugged outer coast waters. The seal is still here looking to nail one of the pink salmon leaping in and out of the water. 

            Turning my back on the seal, I watch honeybees flitting about stalks of magenta fireweed. We won’t see anything more beautiful today. 

Grit

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Aki and I are walking through one of the grittier sections of Downtown Juneau. Most visitors wouldn’t be impressed with its grit. But it is a place of parking lots, gas stations, and resident hotels. Aki isn’t happy walking through this landscape. But we’ve just dropped off the car for servicing and need to pass through here to reach home.

            I manage to convince the little dog to accompany me to the waterfront where we find a young woman sleeping rough. Her possessions form a fabric wall around her. She may have fallen into a financial hole, but still appreciates natural beauty. A handful of fireweed blooms, carefully arranged in an empty beer bottle, brightens the scene. 

            An adult bald eagle perches on top of a driftwood snag a few hundred meters away. The snag was planted by the city next to a new boardwalk. Rain has soak the eagle’s feathers, which makes it look hung over or like a homeless person in need of a cup of coffee. The eagle ignores Aki and I as we walk under its perch, like it can’t be bothered with the diminutive poodle-mix. 

Aki Drags Her Feet

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Aki knows that something is not right. She left the house in a car with two of her humans. Before starting this walk to salt water we had dropped off one of her people so she could pick berries. Aki wants to go back for her—-to return her lost human to the family herd. 

              I coax her down the trail, keeping her on a lead in case she decides to take matters into her own paws. Each time I stop to snatch up a ripe cloudberry, the poodle-mix tries to pull me back toward the car. We cross a meadow of tall grass, some knocked down by a sleeping bear last night. Now Aki has something else to worry about. 

            The trail to the beach takes us under an eagle’s nest. An adult eagle guarded the nest the last time we passed by. This time it looks to be empty except for bird sounds that could be made by juvenile eagles calling out for food. 

            Aki tolerates my decision to sit for a bit on the beach. From there we watch two unsuccessful attempts by eagles to pluck fish from Stephen’s Passage. Then a Dahl porpoise makes a rapid transit past us. None of this takes the little dog’s mind off of her other human. The sudden appearance of a deer focuses her attention until it runs into the woods. A frustrated little poodle and I drive back to the berry patch where Aki squeals in delight when her missing human approaches carrying a half-gallon of blueberries. 

Feisty Little Birds

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It’s another white sky day. Aki and I have just left the Treadwell Woods and dropped onto Sandy Beach. The beach’s “sand” is made up of crushed mine tailings mixed with the detritus abandoned when the Treadwell mines closed almost 100 years ago. 

            The sun is up but is blocked by the smoke. Light from it manages to power through the haze to sparkle on the surface of Gastineau Channel. We can hear eagles complaining from their beachside roosts. But tiny and feisty belted kingfishers are the only birds to show themselves. 

            A kingfisher lands on the top of a busted wharf piling, gives Aki and I a careful look, and turns to study the surface of the channel. Spotting movement, it dives beak-first into the water, raising a splash that would knock it out of any human diving competition. No fish dangles for the bird’s beak when it surfaces.

The Calming Place

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What a difference a few days can make. It was hot during our last visit to this rain forest. Forest fire smoke had turned the sky gray. The sky is grey today but colored so by clouds, not smoke. It is cool enough to need a sweatshirt to keep warm. Last week the trail was jammed with kids and their parents—all heading toward the tidal flats or Shaman Island. This morning the trailhead lot was empty until I parked there. 

            Without crowds, heat, or sun, the rain forest is a calming place. The quiet helps too. Only birdsong breaks the silence. It’s a once again a place to heal. 

            The little dog and I fall into our familiar patterns. She sniffs and I click my camera or look at reflections in the beaver pond. She sniffs and I pop a few sweet blueberries into my mouth.

A flurry of bird action takes us both surprised when we reach the edge of a little muskeg meadow. Chestnut-backed chickadees land on branches just above our heads. Thrush and their cousins the robin trot across the boggy meadow ground. Just ahead a red breasted sapsucker prospects the trunk of a slow growing pine tree for sap. After eyeballing us briefly it returns to his work. 

Even Bears Like to Have Fun

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Aki and I are walking along the edge of the Troll Woods. Mosquitoes buzz around us but can’t land if we keep moving. I pay for each photograph with a bug bite. Aki doesn’t seem to be bothered by the mossies. 

            When the little dog stops to sniff some pee mail I spot a line of tracks recently made in a muddy ditch. Stopping long enough to learn that a bear left them, I let a mosquito nip the back of my right thumb. It is a small price for priming my imagination with the image of a two hundred pound black bear waddling along in the mud. It could easily have chosen the firmer trail that the little dog and I are using to get back to the car. 

            Did the bear, which never has to worry about tracking mud onto a recently cleaned kitchen floor, chose to walk in the ditch just so it could feel mud oozing up between its paw pads?  Given their size and power, it is hard to think of bears as more than scary eating machines. The one that just left here with muddy paws is also a bit of a hedonist. 

Bears share other things in common with humans like the ability to have fun. Several springs ago, Aki and I watched a sow and her two cubs slide down a snow covered mountain meadow, climb back up and slide down again. The mom eventually stretched out on a rock in the sun while her kids continued to play in the snow. 

Eagles and Smoke

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Eagle screams are more prevalent than gull complaints this morning. Normally the screams make Aki cringe. Today she ignores them. Is the little dog going deft or has she finally forgotten the interaction with an eagle that made her distrust the big birds? She responds to my whistle summons so she can still hear. 

            Forest fire smoke still obscures the sky and softens the outlines of mountains. When we can see the sun, it mimics a glowing coal. Up north, large swaths of the Kenai Peninsula still burn. To the northeast Yukon hectares of forests are afire. I can almost taste the smoke. 

            We walk along the Mendenhall River, passing underneath roosting eagles. One watches a brother ripping flesh from a fish that it plucked from the river.  We could wait for a one of the eagles to try for a fish. But that might test Aki’s patience or make her remember why she used to be so scared of eagles. 

We climb up a gap in the beachside cliff and take a forest trail back to the car. It’s all eagles inside the forest. Their white guano dots the understory plants. One screams each time we approach its roosting tree. Every hundred feet we find one of their feathers. Just before reaching the car I almost step on an eagle feather. It looks like a child trimmed it with scissors. 

Natural Air Conditioning

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Aki spent much of yesterday afternoon panting in the shade. Her humans also felt the heat. To escape we packed up the car with camping gear and headed out to Mendenhall Lake. The dashboard temperature reading dropped as we approach the lake. It was ten degrees cooler there than downtown. A strong wind blowing off the glacier made it feel colder. Good thing we brought firewood. 

            This morning Aki joins two of her humans for a canoe ride on the lake. It is flat ass calm. The little dog makes the ride interesting by shifting the boat’s balance dashing from side to side of the canoe. 

The sun is up, turned red by the forest fire smoke. We paddle toward the glacier and then divert toward a spot where we found good blueberry picking in the past. 

            Aki hops out of the canoe when we beach and soon finds herself wading down a flooded trail behind her humans. She dog paddles over submerged blueberry plants and past white stalks of lady tresses. Soon she is back in the beached canoe, looking tiny against the still massive glacier.