July 14: Sitka

 We disembarked this morning after breakfast, and visited both the raptor rescue center and the local national park. The raptor center was begun in a man’s backyard in 1980 and now helps injured birds from all over Alaska. While it is called the raptor center, they also treat everything from eagles to sea birds to song birds. Most birds are rehabilitated and released back to the wild, but a few stay at the center permanently (a peregrine falcon with an irreparable tear in its shoulder, or a saw-whet owl that is blind in one eye would be examples). The center’s main focus is bald eagles, many of them injured by collisions with vehicles or window glass. They have a “flying room” where they can assess an eagle’s recovery. When an eagle flies up to land on the ropes handing high in the roof, they are ready for release. They also receive a number of juvenile eagles each year that have fallen out of the nest. Sadly these birds often break their legs in the fall, and the recovery rate is not good. We watched the medical staff treat an adult eagle with beak and talon damage. 

The Sitka National Park is the smallest national park in the US, and is located on the site of a battle between the local Tlingit peoples and Russian colonists in 1804 and 1806.  The locals call it “Totem Park” because of a display of totems from all over Alaska. The totems were collected by the provincial governor in 1904 (when Sitka was still the capitol rather than Juneau).  They were part of an Alaska exhibit at the St Louis and Portland worlds fairs, and then installed along the trails in the park.

We were surprised by the degree of Russian heritage in southeast Alaska in general, but particularly in Sitka. There are four buildings in Sitka from the 1802-1867 period, the only four buildings from this time period on the entire west coast of North America. The Russian Orthodox Church, built in 1837, was in use for services this morning.  We also learned that in Alaska, there are really no counties, all land is ascribed to cities and towns. So by that measure, Sitka (which sits on Baranof Island (100 miles x 30 miles)) is the largest city in the United States! 

The steady rain followed us until about 4pm, but then the skies almost cleared so we went back to the national park to hike the trails a second time. As we passed the city harbor, we noticed several bald eagles perched on the top of fishing boat masts, as good vantage points.  We were rewarded with seeing three bird species that we had heard but not seen throughout the week. We also saw a salmon resting along the shallows of a stream.  We walked a little further to a local brewery with the best pizza in town. A great final day.

Pictured: totem, bald eagle drying his wings, salmon, Swainson’s thrush singing

July 13: Ushk Bay

 Alaska weather really found us today. Our trip leader’s morning wake up call included “it’s 49 degrees with a steady rain”, and that was the story of the day. At home we’d have said” let’s wait and hike tomorrow” but on vacation you have to do what you can do- so off we went on a three hour bushwhacking walk through the forests and bogs of Ushk Bay. 

Our group of eight started off with a vertical climb through brambles to a boggy plateau. The bog was largely carpeted in moss and heathers. If you pick up a piece of the moss you can squeeze water out of it. The bog had many small pools that looked fairly shallow, but probing  with a hiking pole showed them to be at least 3-6 feet deep! The bog also had many different wildflowers, orchids and water lilies. On the way back down, we snacked on wild blueberries while scrambling through their branches. We also had to work around dense areas of Devils Club, a tall plant with nasty thorns on the stems and the undersides of leaves.  A salve from Devils Club is sold in Alaska as a remedy for arthritis. 

The lower section was a drier forest including alders as well as spruce and hemlock. The scat of bear and deer were everywhere we walked today, but we made enough noise that the animals never appeared.

The final section of the hike crossed a soggy meadow. As with our other landings this week, Ushk Bay has large tidal swings— we saw evidence of this in the stranded jellyfish well into the meadows. 

The fog closed in as the ship navigated through narrow straits en route to Sitka tomorrow morning. 

Pictured:  the ship in the gloom,  the group climbing through the undergrowth, water lilies in the rain, the undergrowth following the group.

July 11: Glacier Bay

Today by special permit we cruised about 100 miles of the coastline of Glacier Bay, a 33 million acre national park. We were joined by a forest ranger named Allie, who gave us an overview of what we might be able to see at different locations.  Our luck was good and we saw them all. 

At South Marble Island we saw two kinds of puffins, both the more common Tufted Puffins and the rare Horned Puffin, as well as Harlequin ducks and Common Murres. There are only 2-3 pairs of the horned puffins in the entire park so it was great to see a pair.   At Tidal Inlet we watched a Coastal Brown Bear moving through the intertidal zone turning over rocks to look for barnacles and clams. Coastal Brown Bears are slightly larger than the brown bears found in the interior, probably due to the richer food sources along the coast. At Gloomy Knob we watched a group of 12 Rocky Mountain goats cross the steep rocky terrain, including two kids who played and scampered along the way. And on the ice floes in front of the Johns Hopkins glacier we saw harbor seals resting, including a few weaned pups left behind by their mothers.  The pups looked really sad and forlorn.

Overall it was a misty chilly day, particularly up by the glaciers, but the landscape was beautiful. We took a leisurely pace (speed limit is 13 knots) in order to protect the whales in the bay.  In 2001, a female humpback named Snow was hit by a large cruise ship and killed in the bay, but that disaster prompted much greater protections for them including the speed restriction.

Glacier Bay is the ancestral home of the Huna Tlingit people, who had summer camps along the braided rivers of the valley. In 1750, at the end of the little ice age, the great glacier surged forward and filled the whole valley as far south as Icy Strait, displacing humans and wildlife alike. Erosion from contact with the ocean then caused the glacier to recede again, and the current Glacier Bay is a consequence of the glacier’s action and the recovery of plants and wildlife over the past 200 years. 

Pictured: harbor seal pup, horned puffin, tufted puffin, Rocky Mountain goats, coastal brown bear 

July 11– sea lions and sea stars and humpbacks, oh my!

 We began the morning at George’s Island, near the northern entrance from the Pacific Ocean into the Inner Passage. After the Japanese bombed and invaded the Aleutian Islands in 1942, a long-distance cannon and a detachment of US army personnel were sent to George’s Island to protect that access to Alaska. For us, George’s Island was a chance to kayak and hike. We hiked through spruce and hemlock forests and got to see one of the bird species we’d been hoping for. The kayaking was particularly fruitful, as we discovered different species harboring within the bullwhip kelp forest and the tidal pools. We particularly enjoyed seeing the moon jellies and four colors of ochre sea stars.

In the afternoon we toured the Inian Islands by zodiac. We passed a rocky outcropping with at least 150 stellar sea lions, not counting the dozen or so that swam all around our zodiac, lifting up their heads to get a good look at us. The sea lions were so active and playful that it felt as if the sea was boiling around us. A few sea otters floated through the chaos, apparently unafraid of their larger neighbors. As we headed out into deeper water, we saw several “blows” of humpbacks— and then two surfaced immediately behind our zodiac, so close that we could see their bodies through the water as they glided past.  The animal viewing was so wonderful that we barely noticed that we’d been traveling in a light rain for 90 minutes!

After dinner we had a short presentation by one of the dive team. Just as she finished some passengers declared that there were whales off the starboard bow. We had another humpback show. This time there were no breaches or bubble-net feeding behaviors, but there were over a dozen humpbacks (perhaps up to 20) that surrounded the ship— we couldn’t decide where to look as whales were surfacing all around us. In some cases whales came right towards the ship and dove, and in a moment appeared on the other side of the ship.  At another time, three sea lions swam alongside the ship, apparently along side a humpback swimming in the same path. The whole experience was simply spectacular.

Pictured: moon jellyfish, chestnut-backed chickadee, stellar sea lion, sea otters, a double fluke.

July 10: Sea otters and other creatures

 We looked out our window this morning to see sea otters swimming past.  We also saw Sitka Black-tailed deer on the shoreline. Alaskan weather caught up with us— it was mister drizzly or raining all day.  After breakfast we kayaked in a quiet bay at the edge of Chatham Strait, where a male otter floated at his ease, unaffected by the humans in their bright orange kayaks. 

We also hiked through the neighboring forest, learning about its ecosystem. The forest is carpeted in sphagnum moss and consists of a mix of Sitka spruce and hemlock trees. The entire forest is connected via the mycelium network —- while mushrooms are the visible portion of this network, the rest of it (hundreds of miles of connections) entwines the roots of the forest and enables nutrients to be passed from tree to tree. In fact, deep in these forests, scientists have found traces of compounds that should only exist in the deep ocean, a consequence of the network distributing nutrients from salmon carcasses on the shoreline. On our hike we also saw banana slugs (including an albino), important members of the decomposition team of the forest. 

The afternoon was spent heading north through the Chatham Strait towards Glacier Bay.  We stopped to see a lovely waterfall, and saw another humpback very close to the shore. As we left, it raised its pectoral fin to wave goodbye. We encountered another group of bubble-net feeding humpbacks and some more buoy-resting sea lions. 

One of the elements of Lindblad trips is that the naturalist staff includes a diving team. In the evening we watch videos taken below the surface while we were exploring above. Yesterday’s presentation showed anemones, urchins and other species of deep water that live on the underside of the floating docks at Petersburg. Petersburg has 15-25 feet of tidal swing in a day, so the docks float (riding up and down on their pylons) so the bottom of the dock is always submerged… enabling deep water creatures to live there successfully. 

Pictured: sea otter, waterfall, humpback waving goodbye, albino banana slug 

July 9: Petersburg

 We spent the day in Petersburg and gained an appreciation for life in a small fishing town in SE Alaska. Petersburg was founded in by a Norwegian settler who values the combination of available fish (largely salmon but also halibut, rockfish, crab and shellfish) and fresh ice from nearby glaciers. The town retains its reliance on fishing and treasures its Norwegian heritage.

We went for a walk in a muskeg (peat bog) forest. The bog had many of the same attributes as an Irish peat bog, including plants and trees adapted to the extreme acidic conditions. One such plant is the sundew, a lovely little carnivorous flower that lures small insects to their doom. 

Our guide was a young woman who moved here from Nome (she quipped that she moved south for warmer weather) and worked in a purse seiner fishing boat for four years. She was able to give us a deep understanding of the mechanics and hard work involved in such fishing. Most families in Petersburg have a fishing boat, even if just for subsistence fishing. She also spoke about the isolation of towns like Petersburg, where a student might miss a week of classes in order to travel to and from another town for a sports event. She described the way she and her partner live off the land, fishing, hunting, gathering plants and berries—- as she said “there’s nothing to do here but we are always doing something” and she clearly loves it. 

As we left the Petersburg harbor, we saw a Stellar’s Sea Lion swimming across the channel— and then saw eight more dozing on the bases of two marker buoys at the entrance to Frederick Sound.  

As about 9pm, as we were composing this blog, an announcement over the speaker system mentioned some humpbacks off the port bow. Of course we rushed up to see, and were rewarded with three whales, one of them quite small, who “pectoral flapped”, spun and breached for over 45 minutes as the sun set and the light faded. 

Pictures:  sundew bog plant, stellar’s sea lions on the bell buoy, Petersburg harbor with coastal mountains behind, humpback breaching in the twilight 

July 8 Endicott Arm

Monday July 8th — Endicott Arm

Yesterday we walked around Juneau prior to boarding the National Geographic Quest.  We hiked along the Gold Flume trail, which commemorates the channel they brought mountain water down into Juneau to process gold in the early days. It was a lovely walk and allowed us to refresh our binocular skills with several new bird species sightings. 

Our entire week long trip will be within the Tongass National Rain Forest, 17 million acres in size, the largest temperate rainforest in the US. 

The Quest traveled south overnight through Stephen’s Passage and into Holkham Bay towards the Tracy Arms-Fords Terrer Wilderness and within it the fjord of Endicott Arm. We were awakened at 6:15, a little earlier than expected, with an announcement that humpbacks had been seen bubble-net feeding up ahead. While it was a little off our planned route, the ship’s navigators diverted a bit to the south, into Frederick Sound and the Five Fingers Lighthouse.  Bubble-net feeding is an unusual cooperative behavior (humpbacks are solitary animals rather than family pods) where a team of whales corral more (in this case herring) into a tight space and then all the whales surface together, mouths open to catch as much food as possible. Humpbacks are baleen whales, meaning they have no teeth. So in this example they take in a huge volume of water as well as fish and then force the water back out through the filter of their baleen sheets. 

Humpbacks migrate to this area in the summer to feed, and then migrate south to Hawaii for the winter to breed and give birth. In general they do not eat during the southern half of their journey, and can lose up to a third of their body weight over the winter, particularly for nursing females. Of the thousands of humpbacks that summer in SE Alaska, only about 50 are known to exhibit the bubble-net feeding behavior.  We saw 10 whales today and watched for an hour as they surfaced every 1-4 minutes to feed repeatedly. They were so close we could see the bubbles and the fish—- something so rare that the naturalists onboard were stunned with delight.  

That was just the beginning of a warm and sunny day (also rare!) that included at least 30 harbor seals (many lying on small icebergs near Dawes glacier), a zodiac ride near a calving glacier, and riding the resulting swells from a large calving back to the ship. Endicott Arm is a 34 mile long fjord carved by the Dawes Glacier, which is now about 12 miles long and 1/2 mile wide. The fjord itself has walls 200 feet high and water 650 feet deep—- all 2650 feet (and 34 miles) were originally the glacier’s ice! As we waited for our turn to go out in the Zodiacs, small ice floes from the glacier floated past the ship, several of them carrying sunbathing harbor seals. 

Pictures: humpbacks surfacing for a bubble-net feast, harbor seals, Glaucous-winged Gull in front of the Dawes Glacier