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| This trip report has a lot of pictures,
that take some time to load. Please stand up and stretch - go get a glass
of water (or any other preferred beverage). You have been sitting at your
computer for too long anyway. Have patience!
Duncan and I arrived at Nome on a VERY early flight out of Anchorage into a swirling snowstorm in Nome. This was nuts... it was +70F (+20C) in Edmonton. Why were we leaving early summer for a winter experience? We joined Ken and Judy Marlow, owners of Marlows on the Kenai, at the Anchorage airport for a four day birding trip to Nome. No-one had told the weatherman that we wanted better weather! It was bitterly cold, and we all felt that no self-respecting bird would be anywhere within miles of the place! |
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(Christmas Trees on the Ice Shelf) |
| The photos above were taken at about 8:30 in the morning, as we were waiting for the Nome Visitor's Centre to open (a necessary first port of call). Nome is far north of the tree line, and each year, the residents put all their Christmas trees (which have to be either collected from Council before the roads close for the winter or flown in) out on the ice after Christmas, and call it the Nome National Forest. I'm so glad that I took these photos, since the ice shelf broke at 3:00 p.m. that afternoon. This is what these two views looked like when we returned to town that evening..... |
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| We heard a rumour a few days later that
a group of seal hunters chased the ice shelf for hours the next day, and
were quite disgusted to learn that the black blobs on the ice were their
own Christmas trees rather than the seals that they thought they were.
The first order of business was breakfast - we'd heard that all the birders ate at Fat Freddie's, so we trooped off there, and, by the time we had finished our meal, the visitor's centre was open, so we headed off to talk to Lana Creer-Harris, the resident expert birder (e-mail her at tourinfo@ci.nome.ak.us). Lana doesn't take tours, but she will tell you nearly everything she knows (a girl's got to have some secrets....) about birding the area. And her answering machine acts as a local birding hotline (call 907-443-6624), with recent sightings kept up to date. |
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Lana, the resident "expert" |
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Nome Visitor's Center |
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There are only three roads
leading out of Nome (
for an Area Map). The first thing we discovered was that we were too early
- only the Teller road was open all the way. So, for our first day, we
decided to stick pretty close to town. Our first stop was this pond on
the road to Safety Lagoon (
for a Town Map). It was frozen solid, and we dispaired of ever seeing a
bird at all. To our surprise, the place was alive with birds, including
many Lapland Longspurs in full |
| breeding plumage, a Dunlin huddled up with three Western Sandpipers (all standing on the ice and looking absolutely frozen), four Northern Pintails, a lonely Long-billed Dowicher, a couple of American Golden-Plovers in breeding plumage, several Least Sandpipers, a Rusty Blackbird, and a variety of sparrows (White-throated, American Tree, Golden-crowned and Fox). Judy immediately started pretending to be a Western Sandpiper: "Norman, I TOLD YOU we should have turned right at Hawaii!" We must have spent nearly an hour there, with scopes and binoculars, in the whistling wind and blowing snow. Clear proof that birders can be totally nuts! We were only forced back to the truck by frozen hands ... | |
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| Then, we continued around the Nome bypass road, picking up our first Whimbrels and Long-tailed Jaegers, and about a hundred Iditerod participants. It was at this point that we realized that we had truck trouble. We had arranged for a 4X4 Suburban. Trip reports we had read warned us about rented vehicles in Nome. We actually got a very old Ford Explorer (not even a 4x4) that had an extremely touchy starter, instead. After experimenting with it for a few hours, we didn't have enough confidence that it would start once we were out on the long roads out of Nome, so we went to the only other company in town and got a better vehicle. | .jpg)
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| The photos above were taken
by Ken Marlow. We were too early for the warblers, but still managed to
see a good variety of birds.
for the complete bird list for the Nome portion of the trip. |
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| The second day, we decided to follow the Teller road. Birding close to Nome was wonderful, but as we got further afield, the proportion of snow to open tundra got greater, until we were driving through a surreal landscape of white road, white tundra and white sky. All we could locate for miles were huge flocks of ptarmigan scurrying around in the snow. We called it enough before we actually reached Teller, and turned around, spending the rest of the day closer to Nome. We had heard that the residents of Teller weren't too keen on visitors anyway. Given the lack of amenities outside Nome itself, we carried our own lunch, snacks and drinks in the truck with us. We spotted this huge wolf-print during our lunch break. | .jpg) |
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That evening, on our return to Nome, we discovered the Port of Nome, a great place for scanning the ocean. From that point on, we made the Port one of our required stops at the beginning and end of every day of birding. A great place for eiders, sea ducks, loons, murres and gulls. | .jpg) |
| The third day, we headed out towards Safety
Lagoon, a must-see spot for any Nome birders. Unfortunately, the road wasn't
open, and since it was Memorial day weekend, there was no work going on.
Similarly, when we headed up the third and final road toward Taylor, it
came to a sudden stop where the workers had been at 4:30 p.m. on Friday
night of the long weekend. This was a particular disappointment since the
nesting grounds for the Bristle-thighed Curlew were up this road. We decided
that the bank balance was not stout enough to manage a $1200 helicopter
trip into the area. However, we heard that there were some birders that
were actually spending that kind of money to see this rare and endangered
bird.
... It was along the Taylor Road that we invented Judy's Invocation (one of the laws of birding): "Never disbelieve the power of faith. No matter how unlikely, if an experienced but disappointed birder invokes the gods of birding by firmly stating "If I was at home, that would be perfect "XX" habitat... ", then the bird will appear. It helps to invoke the bird if the other birders provide great guffaws and disparaging comments. Especially if they drop their binoculars and stop looking....." This is how we found our life American Dipper! |
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Our last day we spent revisiting some of the spots closer to Nome that were very productive, including getting thoroughly lost in the network of roads around the airport and around Dredge Number 5, a leftover from the gold-mining days. Birding around Nome can be a bit surreal sometimes. Since everything has to be brought in by barge, when machinery |
| breaks, it is generally deserted where it was last used. There is no such thing as a town "dump". Instead, rusty left-over construction and mining equipment, as well as many dead snowmobiles, are scattered all over the tundra. Watch your step when off the road! | |
| In our travels around Nome, we saw several examples of cooperation, or at least non-aggression between animals and birds. The first photo below, of a Long-tailed Jaeger and a Ruddy Turnstone sharing the meat left on a large animal backstrap, happened somewhere on the road to Safety Lagoon on our first day in Nome. Although we tried for several days to go back to revisit the kill and see who else had dropped in, the road finally became a "Twilight Zone" experience for us. We never did find it again. |
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Long-tailed Jaeger and Ruddy Turnstone |
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Red Fox and Ravens with a Muskox Carcass Photo by Ken Marlow |
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Our mammal list for Nome was
quite impressive, including Reindeer, Arctic and Red Fox, Arctic Ground
Squirrel, Muskox, and many moose. We happened upon a cow moose, and her
calf, fairly close to the road to Teller. As we were observing, she lay
down and promptly produced another calf! This newest baby staggered to
its feet, while she stood and cleaned herself up. We left her in peace
with her infant twins.
A less happy story occurred on the bridge over Penny Creek, also on the Teller Road. As we drove up, we noticed two trucks stopped on the bridge, driving away just as we got there. A Red Fox was holding down the center of the bridge, so of course we stopped to take some photos. The fox dived under our truck, and we could hear it tearing at the various underparts of the truck. Ken looked out and saw the fox biting at the back tires. We drove slowly on, leaving the fox behind. |
| Then, Ken got out of the truck to take a photo. The fox headed straight for him, threatening and growling. We threw some salami out the window to distract it, and noticed it couldn't eat, and was gently whining in pain as it tried to eat the meat. The fox was rabid! We reported the poor thing when we got back to Nome and some wildlife folk were dispatched to destroy it, to prevent the spread of the disease to other foxes. | |
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A note regarding accomodation. Ken managed to find us a great main floor two-bedroom apartment for rent, and it certainly showed the casual attitude in Nome. Ken was told over the telephone to "just walk right in, the key will be on the table". And the landlord had no interest in taking a credit card number to hold the place. We didn't see hide nor hair of him until the last night of our stay, | .jpg)
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| when
we were getting a little concerned about how we were supposed to pay for
the place. But, he eventually turned up, and we spent a pleasant hour chatting
with him about Nome. The best quote: "I can't stand the Iditerod - it's
just a week of drunks and dogs. Then the birders come, and they're great.
No-one even knows they're here, but they spend a lot of money!"
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