The first place we actually landed off the cruise was a small town named Haines where the Chilkoot (?) River empties into the inner passage. I think if one bird was emblematic of this trip it would probably be Pigeon Guillemot. They were common and frequently swimming around the harbors like mallards.
The crazy color of the water is due to large amounts of glacial silt suspended in the saltwater.
Northwestern Crows were raising a ruckus with lots of newly fledged young along the edges of the beach. The tides there can mean 20 foot differences in water level so you can imagine there was a lot of beach for them to prospect looking for food exposed by the falling waters.
We took a raft trip down the Chilkoot. It's the last river in the area to freeze in the winter and in November can be absolutely jam-packed with eagles.
We probably saw 12 or 15. The river was very interesting, fairly shallow but very wide and moving quickly. You could hear the silt brushing the bottom of the raft with a sound like slowly releasing air. There was so much silt you couldn't see the oars once put into the water. The ever changing rivr channels capped the lifespan of the trees along it so all the eagle nests in the area were relatively small since the trees are downed by the river before the eagles can build truly massive structures.
If the light had been a little better I would have tried to walk a little closer to this group of Glaucous-winged (with a few Herring) Gulls. I left that for another day though.
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