Birding Marathoners Pedal into Spring Migration
I am standing on the mushy shore of Smith Lake at 7 a.m., watching three women take my money. They squint into binoculars, turn their ears to familiar songs, and check a list every time they identify a new bird. Each time the pen hits paper, I owe them another $1.50.
Kristen, Anna-Marie, and Jackie are the Buff-Breasted Sandpipers, a team competing in the Farthest North Birdathon, a fundraiser for the Arctic Audubon Society and the Alaska Bird Observatory. Their birding marathon will continue for up to 24 hours. To hit the local birding hot spots, they ride bicycles. Also on a bike, I’m following them to protect my investment, and maybe learn something about the feathered creatures now flooding Alaska.
After seeing a few dozen birds at Smith Lake, including a regal flotilla of loons, we ride to a coffee shop for a break. Jackie buys me a cup of coffee, but the money I saved goes right out the window as she spots a raven through the glass.
From the coffee shop, we pedal a few miles to Creamer’s Field, a bird refuge larger than downtown Fairbanks. I know I’m in trouble here. Ponds, open fields, forest and marshy wetlands at Creamer’s offer habitat for waterfowl, songbirds and raptors. Here, the checklist pen heats up—cliff swallows poke their heads from mud nests under the eves of the barn, cranes and Canada geese stalk the fields, yellow-rumped warblers and Hammond’s flycatchers sound off in the woods. I listen to the songs and confirm the sightings with my binoculars. When I question the unsure tone in Anna-Marie’s voice as she identifies a species, Jackie calls me a “bird cop.”
In an attempt to shake me, the women hike a forest path to a raven nest. Here, in a balsam poplar, is a basketball-size clump of twigs about two stories off the ground. While the women track down a woodpecker, I focus my binoculars on the raven nest.
I hear a prehistoric squawk, then see a triangle of beak popping from the nest. Two ragged nestlings strain their necks toward the sky. After a few minutes, an adult raven perches on the nest. Soon after, the other parent lands. It bobs its head and regurgitates a few wormy objects, then places them into two open mouths. The young ravens follow the adult’s beak like dandelions tracking the sun. The raven with the full belly burbs again, this time passing food to the other adult, which gives the grub to the young. In my rapture, I miss the Buff-Breasted Sandpipers’ advance on another section of Creamer’s.
From Creamer’s, we ride through the asphalt heart of Fairbanks to the south end of town, where the pavement turns to gravel. We stop at a lake near the Tanana River. Here, Jackie notices a longish beak on a shorebird walking the water’s edge. The bird is one of millions of shorebirds that travel to the Arctic each spring through the rich feeding grounds of the Copper River Delta. After studying the bird with a spotting scope and comparing it to pictures within a field guide, the women agree the chubby bird with curved-pencil beak is a Hudsonian godwit. These birds sometimes fly thousands of miles without landing as they migrate from breeding grounds in South America to nesting sites in the Arctic. Another impressive commuter is the arctic tern, which hovers above the pond before folding its wings to drop upon a small fish, which he then presents to his mate. The terns, on their way to breeding grounds farther north, started their journey in southern South America or Antarctica.
Twelve hours after meeting at Smith Lake, the women pedal for home. Their checklist has 59 marks on it, and I owe them eighty-eight dollars and fifty cents. It’s a bargain. Today, we witnessed the breeding season in all its stages: the “I’m available” song of the blackpoll warbler, a recent arrival from points south; the “I’m worthy” courtship feeding of the arctic terns; the “I’m willing” copulation of a pair of gulls at Creamer’s; and the “I am” of the brand new ravens.
