Last day at sea

The final day of the cruise was mostly at sea again, as we exited the inner passage and headed down to Vancouver.

Black-footed Albatrosses were about in small numbers

Very high winds were predicted and the decks were closed for fear that people would blow away I guess, so I was lucky to be able to watch from the cabin.  I heard that the captain deviated the planned course considerably inland to avoid the worst of the wind which also likely limited the pelagic opportunities.

I didn't see many shearwaters at all.  This one is Sooty.  I probably saw a Pink-footed Shearwater, but only once and very distantly.

Rhinoceros Auklet is technically a puffin and after traveling about 800 km south of where we started it had replaced its more northerly cousins.

Finally another lifer, a Killer Whale

There was a small group of them and there was definitely a sense of awe around this apex predator.  Most of the (presumed Fin and Humpback) whales we saw moved very slowly and quietly through the water.  These animals cruised and turned rapidly, leaving large boils in the water.  While they behaved a lot like dolphins they were a lot more menacing given their size.

Mew Gulls in Alaska

Mew Gull is a bird that is on my lifelist, identified when I was a kid, but I have no memory of and really don't know if I had correct, so I was looking forward to seeing this bird again.  It didn't disappoint in Ketchikan.

 With the petite plain bill and dark eye they really reminded me of kittiwakes.

The giant white windows in the primaries were fairly unique however.

The extent of white in the wingtips varied from bird to bird, and not just with the stage of molt.

Even the darker wing-tipped bird above has a pretty decent string of pearls.

I was hoping to see some young birds, but this sub-adult was the only one I came up with.

Assuming these birds are representative of whatever subspecies would turn up in Berrien, I feel better that they'll hopefully stand out.

Glaucous-winged x Herring Gulls (?)

I can say with 100% certainty that the birds you are about to see are gulls.  I can even say that they're large white-headed gulls.  Beyond that, well, at some point we cross much more into Wild Ass Guess land than most of the birds that get featured here.

Returning to Juneau, 2 posts ago I ran through as many Glaucous-winged plumages as I could find.  I was trying to get as many portraits of as many individuals and appearances as I could since it'll be a while before I see these birds again, but a lot of the pics don't really fit, and I suspect they're Glaucous-winged x Herring hybrids.

Here's a young bird with an adult Glaucous-winged.

The young bird's bill is barely half the thickness of the adult's, and given the juvie Glaucous-winged from 2 posts ago had a honking thick bill I'm inclined to think this is outside of pure Glaucous-winged.  It's also A LOT paler than most of the one year old (2nd calendar year) birds I saw and its bill is fairly bicolored.  It still has the Glaucous-winged white outer primaries though.

The other young bird it was with also had a narrow bill, though was darker overall both in bill and plumage.

I'm saying its bill is too narrow to not have HERG genes as well.

This next bird is either more advanced and the same age or is a year older with a clearly bi-colored bill.  To me the bi-colored bill screams Herring, but it looks a little heavy headed so I'm putting it here as a possible hybird.

This bird may just be a Herring, though even the extreme ones we see on the Great Lakes aren't usually quite so dark in the wing coverts

Here's a subadult bird.

It has the Glaucous-winged marbling of the head and breast, but the bill is thinner than the adult in the background and it has marked pale-ness to the eye.  Glaucous-winged has dark eyes.

This is a similar bird in flight.

The milky tail and darkish eye look pretty good for Glaucous-winged, but the fresh adult primaries' black tips are at least a shade (and probably two) darker than most of the other adults.

the Spiny Bear

Day 4 (I think) was at Juneau.  Without trying we turned out to be the first ones off the boat that morning, which was useful to hop in the only waiting cab and head out to the Mendenhall Glacier.  We hiked a few trails to look at the glacier and a big waterfall, looped back to the visitor center, and found a Porcupine right next to the trail.  I'd seen one when I was a kid, but this one was either full grown, or a different species since it looked enormous.

Its teeth were stained orange.  I was tempted to show the picture to a ranger to show off my bear picture to see how incredulous of a look I could get.

There were a lot of flowers covered in dew and and mist.  I think this is a lesser fireweed.

This one is a pyrola of some sort.

 There were lupines, fireweed, yellow paintbrush, and a lot of others, but I had trouble getting images that really popped.

We just missed a black bear that had disappeared off the trail and had 2 other hikers' knees shaking as they held hands and stood atop a stump.  There wasn't a ton of bird activity, the birds were done breeding and I didn't hear any song.  I glimpsed a Varied Thrush deep in the underbrush, and saw a few RC Kinglets.  A Townsend's Warbler was more cooperative than any I'd seen before (though I can count them probably on one hand so that might not be saying much).

Haines, Alaska

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.

Kitti-nados

After a day of cruising across the Gulf of Alaska we entered the inland passage and Glacier Bay National Park.  You can't go ashore there, but there were (distant) brown bears, glaciers, a bit of dense early morning fog, more otters, and did I mention glaciers?

This is a close-up of a section of the Vanderplugh Glacier.

 A Glacous-winged sitting atop an iceberg off the Johns Hopkins Glacier.

We would occasionally see eagles atop the bergs, this one flew across the bow.

Other icebergs took on quite unique appearances.

We made our way to the Marjorie Glacier, which advances 10-15 feet per day if memory serves.  I'd never seen a glacier calve icebergs, but it did a few times for us.

There were some serious swarms of kittiwakes feeding in the waters next to this active glacier.

 Finally a view of a Peregrine that ripped past the boat.

Open ocean means albatrosses

The first full day of the trip was spent entirely at sea.  I've never been out of sight of land on the Pacific and I had high hopes for my first ever albatross.  High enough hopes that I was awake at 4:00 am local time (not that hard when it's the same as 8a eastern).  The first bird I saw off the deck turned out to be ... a Black-footed Albatross.  I didn't actually believe myself, but as I strained to see in the early half-light it turned out they were the only thing big enough to see. 

All the pics in this post are really heavily cropped.

I started seeing other smaller sea birds and it took a while to figure out that they were Fulmars, another lifer.

Fork-tailed Storm-petrel was another bird I was hoping for, and was even harder to pick out with the scope or camera.  Here's a couple montages...

The ship was large enough that I could manage the scope, but it was really difficult to transition from bins to scope with zero landmarks or from bins to camera.  Most of the birds were really far away and quartering away from the ship so it usually took several looks at new species to convince myself that I was seeing what I thought I was.  Even Tufted Puffins at great distance going away were tough ID's without enough experience to gestualt them.  Fortunately a few of them came a lot closer than the sea birds.

The old man of the sea

I'd never done a cruise before, and after my mother-in-law did one of sorts in the Caribbean this spring my kids were pretty amped to try one.  I found a conference on a cruise ship and we headed to Alaska.

We flew into Anchorage and were driven 2 hours south to Seward where we boarded the ship.  We'd barely gotten settled aboard when I noticed a speck floating in the harbor ... a sea otter.  Hazel and I promptly got off the ship to get closer.  Initially it was floating in the middle of the harbor, but a seal scared it closer and eventually it was basically right next to the dock.

It paid us no mind and proceeded to groom its rear flipper feet.

We celebrated with a selfie with a sea otter.  It's the speck in the water above Hazel's right ear.  An SLR makes a big difference.

 Here's a gif of the the otter interacting with a seal.  I'm not sure what clued the otter in to the seal's presence since it starts looking all around before seeing it.  After the seal splashes the otter the otter snorkels under the water, then rolls and dives itself.

A few last pics from the harbor.  Hazel saw the magpie and asked,"What is THAT???" 

My first lifer was flying about as well, a Northwestern Crow.

Good luck evaluating the primary formula with birds molting.

Nothing says Alaska like eagles and Glaucous-winged Gulls.

The next morning we'd wake up in the open ocean ... stay tuned.