Sitka Nature

I spent most of today inside, but did make a trip to Swan Lake and then over to Alice Island this afternoon. I opted to bicycle today instead of taking Melissa’s scooter. I also bundled up a bit better than yesterday. The better clothing certainly helped, but I think actively biking instead of passively scootering made an even bigger difference. I noticed that even though my fingers started to get cold while I was riding, they warmed up right away when I stopped. I guess I had generated excess heat that needed to dissipate, so my body sent it to my hands and feet. On the way back (against the wind again), my hands and feet started to get cold, but once I got home, they warmed up right away, unlike yesterday.

Weather: Clear and cold again. Unofficially, it appears that the low temperature today (12F) broke the record (17F) set in 1955. It’s unlikely we’ll break the record again tomorrow as tomorrow’s record is 3F, set way back in 1985. Theoretically, I was old enough that I could remember that day, but I guess I didn’t pay enough attention to such things when I was 10. There was a wind out of the East that I noticed while on Alice Island, but it seems that we are protected from it at the house.

Birds: There are still ducks at Swan Lake. It looks like someone is keeping a hole open for them, or perhaps they are just swimming in it enough to keep it from freezing, I don’t know. If this weather keeps up all winter, I suspect there will be a fairly high mortality of ducks at the lake.

The main reason I went out this afternoon was because this morning a fellow bird enthusiast called me up to ask about the Snowy Owl. He had been unsuccessful finding it and wondered what the last report I had was. Part of his interest was because he had seen a raven on Alice Island with a wing that he described as ‘large and white with barring on it.’ The wing was stuck too high up in the tree to get a good look, but he wondered if it might be from the Snowy Owl. I was able to locate several feathers out near the bunker, and figured out from their dispersal and the wind direction the tree where the wing must have been stuck. After looking around a bit, I noticed something that I thought might be part of a wing on a branch that I could climb to. I climbed up the and it was a small part of the wing with bones and some primary feathers still attached. The feathers were too dark for me to think they came from the Snowy Owl, but they did seem fuzzy in a way that I associate with owl feathers (until I learn better, anyway). The longest of the primaries are at least 10 inches by my measurements. Given the coloring, size, and my assumption that it’s an owl, my best guess is that the feathers came from a Great Horned Owl. However, the photos of Great Horned Owl feathers that I have been able to find don’t quite match either.

After investigating the feathers, I walked back to see if I could get a look at the redpolls again. I heard, then saw, what I thought might be a sizable flock of Pine Siskins, but when I went over to see if there were any redpolls mixed in, I discovered it was actually a flock of Common Redpolls. Unfortunately the sun was setting, so I didn’t get a great look at them in the fading light, but I am pretty sure there were at least 30-40 birds in the flock. Either more have moved into the area, or they were gathering together in preparation to roost in a group tonight.

There were several Song Sparrows feeding on the abundant alder seeds around the island.

I thought I might have seen the Snowy Owl across the airport runway, but it was far enough away and my look fleeting enough, that I am not positive it was not a gull.

I noticed a Common Goldeneye near the entrance to Sealing Cove at the base of the bridge.

Earlier this year, I stumbled upon a paper in an 1898 The Auk that reported on an ornithological trip made to Sitka in the summer of 1896 by Joseph Grinnell. I found it very interesting to read; mostly because it gave me some insight into the birds that were here over 100 years ago (and their relative abundance), and also because it reflected a much different time in our approach to birds.

Grinnell comments that “No birds are included of which specimens were not taken, so that the identity is correct….” In several of the species accounts, he talks about the ease (or difficulty) of collecting specimans. For example, in the account of the Steller’s Jay he writes:

By concealing one’s self and imitating their callnote, their curiosity seemingly overcomes them, and they quietly come within a few feet to investigate. In this way I succeeded in collecting a series of 30 birds which are usually very wary and difficult to approach.

This seems a little much to my 21st century birder sensibilities. In general I’m not particularly opposed to killing birds for a good purpose, but it’s easy to forget that before the invention of high-quality lenses, there was no birding; just ornithology. Ornithologists carried shotguns and studied the birds in hand; sometimes lots of birds. It was a different time, for better or worse, and this report opens a window to observe it from afar.

Within the last month or so, I found a couple of other reports about the bird fauna in the Sitka area. The first was a report by George Willett in a 1914 edition of The Condor and the second was a follow-up report by Dan Webster in a 1941 edition of The Condor that commented on species that had been overlooked or little-commented on in previous reports.

The more interesting part of it all is the reports of the relative abundance and location of birds. Some species accounts do not seem much different than ones I might give today. Others are quite different. Of course one big influence on the reporting is the amount of time the ornithologist was able to spend in the Sitka area. Grinnell spent the summer in 1896. Willett spent two summers into mid-Fall in 1912 and 1913, but included information from locals including photographer and naturalist E.W. Merrill. Webster moved to Sitka as a 9 year old in 1928 and wrote his report while a graduate student at Cornell; his Master’s thesis looked at the life history of Black Oystercatchers studied around Sitka (a brief biography in pdf and a paper from his Black Oystercatcher research in pdf).

The Red-throated Loon entry from Willett:

Fairly common summer visitant on fresh water lakes. Plentiful on salt water during migrations. According to Merrill, a pair of these birds nest on Swan Lake, near Sitka, each year. They arrive about April 15, and the eggs are deposited about June 1. During my stay in Sitka, this pair had young on the lake, and they could be seen many times each day flying directly over the town to the salt water in search of food. Their loud quacking notes could often be heard before the birds were visible.

I may be wrong, but I suspect there have not been any loons nesting on Swan Lake in my lifetime.

As another example, here are the entries for Winter Wren from each of the reports:

Tolerably common in the more open forests, particularly where there was much recently-fallen timber. Especially numerous on St. Lazaria Island where their clear sprightly songs constantly uttered, seemed scarcely in accord with the harsh cries of the thousands of Sea-fowl. (Grinnell 1898)

Common summer visitant on grass and brush lands. Especially numerous on some of the smaller islands. Was fairly plentiful as late as October 1, but probaby does not winter. (Willett 1914)

Common resident. Noted daily from February 26 to September 7 in 1940; a specimen was taken on July 25; it was a juvenile about ready to leave the nest. (Webster 1941)

In the past few months I have been thinking about putting together a checklist of Sitka birds, so reading these reports (with their checklists) has provided an interesting perspective.

I have converted the pdfs I found on-line into html and cleaned them up somewhat (the conversion process introduced some errors). They are currently available through the following links (with the original pdfs linked from each page as well):

Grinnell’s 1898 Report (Name Conversions)
Willett’s 1914 Report
Webster’s 1941 Update

Other related links of interest include:
The Searchable Ornithological Research Archive (SORA) at the University of New Mexico. This is an on-line archive of several Ornithological journals going as far bask as 1884. I was able to obtain the pdfs of the reports I’ve mentioned from that site.

History of North American Bird names in the AOU checklists from 1886-2000 This site traces the names of North American birds as they were changed, added, lumped, or split, through the official checklists put out by the American Ornithologists Union.