Strangers

Homeless Heidi recently posted about her unexpected guests. However, this isn't just a normal neighbors dropping by sort of thing. This is the first new faces the folks at South Pole have seen for 8 months. A Besler airplane and crew showed up a few days early from Rothera, a British base at the base of the Antarctica Peninsula bringing fresh fruits and vegetables and pisco from Chile. She comments on how weird it is to see an airplane after so long without having one around and how they will need to learn how to behave in public again when the new summer people start arriving shortly.

I remember how strange it was to see other people unexpectedly in a remote area too. It happened to me one afternoon at Copa field station on King George Island. We had finished up our penguin work (counts, weights, nest status, etc) for the morning and were working on station maintenance work when I glanced down the rock beach and noticed two figures heading towards the station. If they had been coming from the direction of the nearby Polish base Arctowski, it probably wouldn't have been such a shock, but they were coming from the sea.

The three of us actually ducked behind the hut and peered around the corner, checking to see what sort of people would be coming from that direction. As they got closer, Laina, who had worked at the station the year before suddenly recognized one of them. This is where it got even more strange. She said "remember the "boat" I showed you down the beach that direction?" The "boat" she was referring to was a welded metal box that looked more like a garbage dumpster abandoned down the beach. She said they owners left it there when the outboard quit.
Andre and I nodded affirmatively. "One of those guys is the one who abandoned it on the beach. He left the broken Evinrude from the "boat" at the hut and said he would come back for it later. I guess it's later"
Once we figured out who they were it wasn't quit as weird, but it still definitely strange. Turns out this guy had a non-governmental base on one of the nearby islands. He had apparently lost a couple of associates trying to canoe across the Bransfield Straight at one point and conducted hypothermia experiments on the people he could convince to join him at his base. On this trip he had a Czech boy scout with him who was going to remain over the winter by himself. They had taken two inflatable kayaks to King George Island and then walked the edge of Admiralty Bay to reclaim the outboard to get it repaired since the warranty was ending soon! We fed them, visited a while, and then the boy scout strapped the outboard to his back and the two of them disappeared down the beach from where they had come.
I never heard any more about them and I wonder if the boy scout wound up spending that winter alone or if he came to his senses and found his way home before winter set in.

I also remember the joy at getting fresh fruits and vegetables after ours had eaten or reduced to moldy mush, the challenge of adjusting to new people, both when they arrived at the station or when I got home where I had to deal many more people than I had seen in a long time, and, something that doesn't happen any more with email and internet, receiving mail (I suspect it is still a pleasure to get packages though).

Favorite birds I haven't seen

Favorite? I am not sure if that is the right word though. How can it be a favorite if I have never observed the bird? Either way I am going to stick with favorite because I can't come up with another word that describes my infatuation with a few species. Here are two.

photo courtesy of Pete Morris at the Surfbirds website www.surfbirds.com

The first species is the Spectacled Eider (Somateria fisheri). Other than the obvious - the velvet green feathers on the head and the goggle eyed appearance - what I remember of my initial interest in this species was that it disappeared in the winter. Literally disappeared. No one knew where they went, but it was suspected that the wintering area was somewhere in the Bering Sea. Then in 1995, a satellite transmitters implanted in an eider on the breeding grounds that hadn't functioned for months, came to life and transmitted a coordinate and then fell silent again. A couple of weeks later two Fish and Wildlife Service biologists, Bill Larned and Greg Balogh, along with the pilot, checked out this location south of Saint Lawrence Island and found a brown smudge on the ice which turned out to be about 50,000 Spectacled Eiders crammed into a small lead in the ice. Here is the complete story from Greg Balogh. More information on the project that implanted the transmitters can be found here.

Photo courtesy of Bill Larned, USFWS. Bill told me there were 80,000 birds in this flock!

Photo courtesy of Pete Morris at the Surfbirds website www.surfbirds.com

Spectacled Eiders were listed as a threatened species in 1993 after an apparent 96% decline in population from 1957 to 1992. Populations have since stabilized.

I once had a job to work on these birds on the winter grounds. I was ready to go but then got a new permanent job and was unable to make the trip. I still think about that missed adventure often.

Photo courtesy of Pete Morris at the surfbirds website at www.surfbirder.com

The other species is the King Eider (Somateria spectabilis). I have been enamoured with this species since I was young. The pale blue head, sea-green cheeks, and large orange knob on the bill - what a look. I also like the shark fin feathers that project above the back.

I may have observed this species while working in the Canadian arctic a few years ago, but I was unable to get good enough looks at the only eiders I saw that fall to ID them to species.


Photo courtesy of Kit Day at the Surfbirds website at www.surfbirds.com

Skies

Last night I let the dog out for the last time before bed and looked up. The Milky Way was spectacular. A clear and cool sky really brightens up the stars and this view is one of the benefits of living in a rural area.

This morning provided another treat in the skies. Molten waves of clouds greeted me on my drive into work this morning and I just had to pull over and take a few photos.

Odds and Ends

So many posts have come and gone through my mind over the last few weeks but never made it here for one reason or another.

There was the day the crows were migrating through in long scattered groups. The sight reminded me of the fall day a number of years ago when I was watched a long broken line of these birds chasing the light south. At the top of a large hill near here, I was able to connect scattered groups of crows from as far as I could see to the north, over my head and again as far as I could see to the south - with my spotting scope! This stringy line of scattered crows, moving near the earth stretched for at least 10 miles. Maybe they really stretched from daylight to dusk.




Then there was the first flock of cranes. Sandhill cranes in swirling lines forming large masses moving in the same direction as the crows, but much higher. The fall cranes always prompt memories from my childhood of walking home from school for lunch on a yellow October day and hearing that sound. If you have heard it before you know what I mean - that rolling call of the Arctic and muskeg connecting to the playas of the southern grasslands. I remember being stopped in the open field between the school and my house when the churling bugles registered in my mine and my eyes moved skyward to trace the sound to the gathered specks moving south in shifting lines high above me.





Oh, and ambiguity and bird identification from David Sibley mixed with the Dunning-Kruger effect (from a post by Pluvialis at Fretmarks) prompted lots of thoughts, particularly during this time of year when I am reviewing a number of bird observations submitted to the Montana Bird Records Committee for review. But I am not going to chase that right now.


Then there are these guys...





And her..





And it is a gorgeous fall day in October, upland gamebird season is on, waterfowl opened last weekend, birds are migrating through, I can see the bison grazing out my front window as I type this and I should not be sitting in front of my computer. My camera/binoculars/shotgun should be in my hand and I should be out the door and.....did you hear the door slam shut behind me?

Bull

More fall migrants

Here are a few photos of the migrants moving through the area lately.

Nelson's Sharp-tailed Sparrow

Broad-winged Hawk (new yard bird)

Yellow-rumped Warbler
Yellow-rumped Warbler
Cape May Warbler (another new yard bird)
Orange-crowned Warbler

Nice compliment

I was checking the blogs I usually read today and found a very nice compliment from Patrick Burns at Terrierman. Thanks Patrick.

I have to confess, I am a bit worried about the traffic I might get with his description of my blog using the words photographer and bird fetish though!

I read Terrierman daily and I although I don't cover a lot of the same ground, I find myself agreeing with him quite frequently, especially when it comes to hunting ethics and dogs. Patrick recently posted a nice tribute to one of his special dogs that he lost just over a year ago. He knows.