Muroran, Hokkaido

 September 3: 

We traveled overnight and through the morning, south along the coast of Hokkaido for about 200 nautical miles. We spent the afternoon in Muroran, on the southeastern end of Hokkaido. Muroran is a heavily industrialized city, home to Nippon Steel and Japan Steelworks as well as oil refining and ship building. Its natural harbor hosts one of the largest ports in Hokkaido. Muroran also has the longest suspension bridge in eastern Japan, with a length of 4500 feet and a center span measuring almost a mile. We were welcomed by the mayor himself, recently returned from a visit to their sister city of Knoxville, TN. It is amazing that our 130 passenger ship receives this kind of attention. 

We traveled north from the city to explore the area around Mt. Usu in the Shikoku-Toya National Park. Mt. Usu rises 2420 feet above Lake Toya, itself in a caldera. Mt Usu first erupted 20,000 years ago and the main peak has collapsed and eroded, but the Usu system has continued to erupt and create new cones. The 1943-5 eruption created Showa Shinzen, a new mountain that includes a lava dome that filled in its caldera, all created in just two years. It is still steaming. 

The most recent eruptions of Mt. Usu were in 1977 and 2000. We traveled by tram up to an overlook above the still smoking caldera of the 1977 eruption.  While we were grateful that the predicted rain held off, we did have fog roll in as we went up the mountain, which was a little disappointing. 

Later we traveled to a nearby town and surveyed the damage from the 2000 eruption and a massive mudslide in 2001. The local community begins evacuation as soon as there is a “warning earthquake” and there were no casualties from the 2000 episode despite the visible damage. It is humbling to consider what it’s like to live under such a threat, especially as Mt Usu has tended to erupt every 30 years and it has now been 26…

Pictured: lighthouse and cliffs entering Muroran harbor, Showa Shinzen, the Muroran bridge at night, the 1977 caldera, snail on a tree at Mt Uzu, Chestnut-cheeked starling 

Kushiro, Hokkaido

 September 2: 

We made our first landing in Japan at Kushiro, an industrial hub on the northeast corner of Hokkaido. Hokkaido is the ancestral home of the Ainu people, who had a separate culture from the Japanese communities on Honshu and other islands to the south. The Ainu were very connected to the natural world, but were absorbed by the Japanese and forced to abandon their language and culture in the 18th and 19th centuries. Recently there has been an increase in recognition and efforts to re-establish their traditions. 

We spent the morning on a hike at Kushiro Shitsugen National Park, the largest marshland in Japan ( about 4 times the size of  Manhattan) and home to the highly valued Red-crowned Crane. In the afternoon we went to the Kushiro City Museum, which had a wonderful display of Ainu artifacts, including clothing made from fish skin, bark fibers, or layers of silk. The museum bordered a lake and an inlet from the sea, so we did some birding there too. 

It is a bit unusual for a cruise ship to stop in Kushiro. We were welcomed by the community, including a send-off concert on the pier as we left this evening en route to Muroran. 

Pictured: Great Spotted Woodpecker, Ainu garment made from elm bark, Eurasian Nuthatch (white-bellied subspecies), flowers of the local monkshood, the most deadly plant in Japan. 

Sea days

We have spent four days at sea en route to Japan (August 28, 30, 31 and September 1). We skipped August 29th by crossing the international date line. Each day held a mix of time spent looking for sea birds and sea mammals, educational sessions with our naturalists, historians and photographers, and of course wonderful and interesting meals. The presentations covered natural history topics, the role of the Aleutians in WWII,  and preparation for our experiences in Japan. 

We have been exceedingly lucky with the weather on these sea days. The seas have never been more than 10 feet and while some days have had winds of 35 knots, the ship is built to maintain a smooth ride. The North Pacific is often much rougher. 

Our wildlife viewings have been great. We have seen blue, fin, killer and sperm whales, and Dahl, Pacific White-sided and Pacific Right Whale (finless) porpoises/dolphins. Dahl porpoises look like small killer whales and are very speedy. And of course we have seen new bird species. 

We watched blue fin tuna leap out of the water while hunting Pacific Saury, a small migratory fish that the albatrosses seem to like as well. We saw a feeding frenzy, this one including tuna, 2 kinds of dolphins, and seabirds. At one point the ship was entirely surrounded by jumping dolphins. 

Today was amazing: we saw two groups of fin whales, a blue whale, four groups of sperm whales, tuna, sharks and a swordfish. The sighting of 20 sperm whales playing around in front of the ship for an extended period was particularly special. Sperm whales are the largest toothed whales and their bulbous heads contain huge brains and echolocation organs. They have wrinkled skin, which can expand and contract as they deep dive in pursuit of giant squid. Some of the sperm whales showed scars from the suction cups of giant squids. 

Pictured (from all 4 sea days): killer whale, Dahl’s Porpoise, Northern Right Whale Dolphins, Pacific white-sided Dolphins, wrinkled side and fluke of a sperm whale, fin whale, sperm whale group, blue fin tuna jumping and with pacific saury trying to escape, providence petrel, broad-billed swordfish 

Chuginadak

 Monday August 24

This morning we approached Chuginadak, the largest of the “Islands of the four mountains” group west of Unalaska. These are volcanic islands created only about 10 thousand years ago. They are so rugged and isolated that they have never been inhabited. All four islands are part of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge and permission must be obtained to land in specific locations. Chuginadak includes Mount Cleveland, a still active volcano (last eruption 2022) which is monitored because an ash cloud here could disrupt a lot of pan-pacific flight patterns. As far as the local pilot knew, no tourist vessel has gone ashore here in recent memory, and certainly none of the staff or crew of our ship had. 

As we pulled in to Shiff Cove, the winds were at 40 knots and gusting higher, with the beach a collection of kelp-covered (slippery!) boulders. Not a good landing spot, although the landscape itself was lovely and green. We proceeded to the second of our permitted landing sites (Appleton Cove), and while the wind was still fierce, a gently sloping black sand beach allowed us to land and go ashore. A bumpy zodiac ride got us to shore, where we disembarked in knee-deep surf. We hiked for about 90 minutes through a landscape our guide described as “the surface of the moon”. It was great to hike, but between the wind and the sand, it was a workout!  Once back on the ship we cruised past the other islands, pausing by bird cliffs full of Common Murres. The volcano cones of the islands played hide and seek with the clouds and fog throughout our visit. 

Pictured: sunrise, lovely waterfall at Shiff cove, our black sand hiking landscape, Mount Cleveland from Appleton cove, fumerole from our ship cruise, the cliff of murres. 

Unalaska—birds and whales

 Sunday August 23rd

Overnight into Sunday we traveled south, reaching the uninhabited Baby Islands by mid morning. We sailed past thousands of sea birds in the air and on the water, and at the Baby Islands found ourselves near a rookery for Tufted Puffins. It was hard to even look for other birds because the puffins were so numerous and distracting. We also got our first look at Steller Sea Lions, the largest species in North America.  The fog raised and lowered throughout the morning, adding to the viewing and photography challenges. 

Sunday afternoon the group split up to do several activities around Dutch Harbor, some related to local history and some to nature. We chose a nature walk and saw more sea lions, sea otters and both songbirds and seabirds. The weather was sunny and warm, a real change from the morning. 

Dutch Harbor is the port for the city of Unalaska, population 4200. It is one of the largest fishing ports in the US and central to the King and Snow Crab industries. The nearest town of any size (Kodiak) is 600 miles to the east. As isolated as that sounds, we are at the eastern end of the Aleutians and have many hundreds of miles yet to go. 

Unalaska Island has been inhabited by the Aleut people for thousands of years, and was an important Russian fur trade site. There was a US military base in Dutch Harbor created after the 1942 attack. 

Many of the birds we have been seeking (and seeing) are members of the auk family.  These are birds like puffins who swim underwater with their wings rather than their feet and can fly (sometimes a bit awkwardly). They tend to be black on the back and white on the tummy, which is camouflage both with respect to avian predators and the prey that the auks pursue underwater. All are colonial nesters, meaning that whether they nest in burrows or on ledges, they return to nesting sites with hundreds of their friends and relations. The largest current auk is the thick-billed murre (18” body length) and the smallest is the least auklet (6”). We have seen both, as well as many other species in the same family.

At dinner, as we headed away from Dutch Harbor into deeper water along the north shore of Unalaska Island, we thought we saw the “blow” from a pod of whales off to the side of the ship. The captain pivoted the ship to increase our chances of seeing them. As we ran up to the bow, we encountered an amazing sight. Directly in front of the bow, the sea was black with seabirds, literally thousands of shearwaters (medium sized sea birds), as well as gulls and fulmars and puffins and murres. There were also about 20 humpback whales which moved back and forth sucking in herring and then closing their baleen-filled mouths to strain the water back out. We stood mesmerized. As the ship got closer to the action, we heard the sound of rain on the water—- but it was the herring, surfacing in pursuit of their own prey (phytoplankton ) that tends to rise to the surface around dusk. Amazing.

Finally, just at sunset (and moonrise), about 10 pm, a pod of killer whales chose to feed near the ship. Credit to our captain and her pilots for getting us into position for both of these encounters. 

Pictured: Kittlitz’s murrelet, American pipit, Arctic ground squirrel, bald eagle, feeding frenzy, humpback feeding amongst the birds, male killer whale 

The Pribilof Islands

 Saturday August 22nd

Overnight and on Saturday morning we traveled another 200 miles south to St Paul, the more northerly of the Pribilof Islands. It has about 400 residents. These islands are a famous birding destination during spring and fall migration, and even now in mid-summer the islands host a few species that are hard to see elsewhere. St Paul is also the location of a vast Northern Fur Seal rookery. 

We were very lucky to have clear skies and mild winds; the locals said it had been very foggy for weeks. We walked to the seal rookery, where we enjoyed watching mothers and pups. We also got to see a few males, away from the rookery, and sea birds on the cliffs.  We had hoped to cruise past the bird cliffs on St George (the other island of the Pribilofs) after dinner to see the colonies of red-legged kittiwakes, but the fog closed in, preventing views. 

The Pribilof islands were uninhabited until the mid 1800s, when Russian fur trappers brought Unangan (Aleuts) from Unalaska to work the seal processing plants. The local population rapidly merged with the Russians (many of whom were from Siberia, rather than from European Russia), creating a respected and well educated creole class. The Unangans  adopted the Russian Orthodox faith and Russian names. The church in turn incorporated many concepts from the nature-focused local religion to make the transition easier. The creoles were literate in both Russian and Aleut, and had positions of authority in the seal fur business.

That all changed when the US bought Alaska in 1867. The American government took direct control of the seal fur business and changed the Unangans into government employees. Basically the Aleuts were treated as “Native Americans”: the Unangan managers were replaced with Americans; it was forbidden to speak the Aleut language in public or in the schools, and local cultural traditions were encouraged to fade away. The Unangans were not recognized as US citizens until 1924. 

In 1942, shortly after Pearl Harbor, several sites in the Aleutians were bombed by the Japanese. The US government forced anyone with 1/8 or higher Unangan heritage to evacuate from the Pribilof Islands. They were sent to a camp in SE Alaska without running water or sufficient supplies. When they returned to their homes they found they had been ransacked by US troops; even the icons from the church had been taken.

The seal fur trade was banned in 1983, and the community has struggled since then. The islands are working hard to re-establish Unangan customs and to save the language while there are still some native speakers to instruct others. Unexpectedly, the fur seal population has not recovered but continues to decline. It is suspected that a combination of commercial fishing and climate change have reduced the available food supply, and there is great concern about the possible introduction of bird flu. 

Pictured: male Northern Fur Seal, St. Paul with Orthodox Church, seal pup nursing, Horned Puffin, helmeted crab 

First days in the Aleutians

 Thursday August 20th and Friday August 21st 

We flew to Anchorage on Wednesday August 19th and on to Nome on the 20th, where we boarded our ship.  Nome has been inhabited by indigenous tribes for centuries, but the American city of Nome grew (explosively ) due to the 1898 Klondike gold rush, especially after gold was found along the shoreline. Today Nome is about 3700 people, over 70% of them Alaska native. It is courtesy of the native Alaskans that the city has a good medical center and other services. Gold dredging is still an important local industry, as is fishing. The houses are built on pylons to avoid melting the permafrost. There is a sea wall and protected harbor, with a plan to extend the sea wall and dredge a deeper port in support of increased US military presence in the Arctic. 

We headed south to St. Matthew Island, a volcanic island formed 80 million years ago, and located about 320 nautical miles south of Nome. Numerous sea birds accompanied us on our travel. When we arrived mid-afternoon Friday, the ship moored off shore, we suited up in waterproof gear and muck boots, and headed ashore.  We walked along a pebbled beach searching for wildlife.  Between the time at sea and the time ashore we saw 17 kinds of birds, 6 of them new to us. It was particularly fun to see a McKay’s Bunting during our walk. It is the only endemic bird in Alaska. 

St. Matthew Island has been uninhabited for most of its history. The exception was a brief period during WWII when the Coast Guard established a temporary radar station there. They also introduced reindeer as an emergency food source. As has happened on other islands, the original 29 reindeer grew to over 6,000 by 1963. However harsh winters and overpopulation caused the number of reindeer to drop to 42 by 1965  and by 1980 they reindeer were gone. 

Saint Matthew is part of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, so before we went ashore every piece of outerwear (including our backpacks) had to be checked and cleaned to prevent the introduction of non-native seeds or dirt (spores) into the environment. We also step into a biocide to clean our boots before leaving the ship. Upon returning we must scrub our boots and again step into the biocide. This will be the routine throughout our time in the Aleutians. 

Pictured: McKay’s Bunting, Parakeet Auklets, Rock Sandpiper, Nome waterfront, Tufted Puffin