Ciblek Mania

In mid-May, Julie and I were invited to be the keynote speakers at The Kenai Birding Festival located in Kenai, Alaska, on the Kenai Peninsula. Do you know what the name of the local bird club is? The Keen Eye Birders! I'd never been to this part of Alaska and Zick had never been to Alaska at all, so we said "heck yes."

Our journey to Alaska was going to be long, even before the fog-canceled flights in Columbus, Ohio and Atlanta, Georgia made us re-direct our trip via Dallas. But a mere 20 hours later we were trudging zombie-like out of the Anchorage airport and into the waiting arms of Janet Schmidt from Kenai National Wildlife Refuge and our friend Tricia Grenier and daughter Vivi who met us at the airport with snacks and gifties. A meal and a beer later we headed out on the three-hour drive to Janet's home in Soldatna, AK. Once there we slept the sleep of the undead for a few blissful hours.

The next day, as a "welcome to Alaska", the festival's organizers had arranged for us to go on a Kenai Fjords boat trip. We got up early (easy coming from the eastern time zone!) and drove down to Seward to meet the boat. Along the way we saw many coll things: Dall sheep, mountain goats, moose, and a distant brown bear, plus a mess of bald eagles. We also heard the ethereal fluting of varied thrushes. The scenery was just stupendous: deep forest giving way to soaring mountains covers in snow.


We made it to Seward just in time for our departure and a short visit with a representative of the cruise company Kenai Fjords Tours. Our boat was a very stable, diesel-powered catamaran with plenty of outside deck space for viewing, birding, and photography and an inside cabin below where you could get out of the wind (it was chilly on the water despite the sun). Inside was also where the food and hot coffee was!



Right outside the harbor we began finding lots of birds and wildlife. I'll share some of the wildlife highlights in this post, and some of the birds in forthcoming posts.

Spectacular views lay in all directions from the boat, even from the stern. And then the water around us came alive with a pod of marine mammals

Orcas appeared in small family groups and larger pods. Our captain knew many of them by name, using their fin shapes and other markings as ID clues. This was a lifer mammal for me. We later had one breach in front of the boat, but it happened so quickly that no one could get a shot.

Otters were encountered in several spots, often floating on their backs cracking open urchins.

As we got farther from the harbor, and into some of the protected waters of the fjords, we began encountering small flocks of birds. I'll get more into that in the next post.

After a delightful week in North Dakota at The Potholes and Prairie Birding Festival (yes, you should go), the family and I headed west into the Rocky Mountains. Our ultimate destination was to be Yellowstone National Park, a place none of us had ever visited. I will be sharing some of the highlights of that trip, but they will not always be in chronological order. This is due to a few reasons:

1. My brain does not always work chronologically.
3. Some stories demand to be told NOW.
2. My brain does not always work chronologically.

We were told by friends that we should enter the park through Beartooth Pass, which sounded ominous enough in name only. When this bit of travel advice was followed by the phrase "if the road is plowed and open this early in June," it added an additional schpritz of foreboding to the mix.

It took a long time to drive from Medora, North Dakota to Beartooth Pass in Montana. Along the way we stopped at a national historic site: Pompey's Pillar. I'll save that post for another day. Today I want to talk about starting out in the flatlands of North Dakota and driving along a highway through the snow-capped mountains.

This was not a casual lah-tee-dah drive along a mountain road. This was The Beartooth Highway, one of the most challenging high-elevation drives in North America. The Beartooth Highway cuts across and around parts of the Absaroka and Beartooth mountains which have many, many peaks topping 12,000 feet (which is an elevation that is palpable in the head and lungs for us relative flatlanders).

We were headed for Yellowstone National Park and our primary targeted species were not birds, but mammals. I'd never seen a live, wild bear of any species and YNP promised a chance to see two: grizzly and black bear. But before we could get to the park's entrance, we had to traverse Beartooth Pass.

Ears popping and lungs gasping both at the scenery and at the thin mountain air, we climbed ever upward on the snaky mountain two-lane. Soon we were hitting patches of roadside snow—sometimes the snow was piled so high it formed eight-foot-high walls on either side of the road. American pipits and mountain bluebirds drank from melt pools. The croaks of ravens could be heard when our vehicle slowed to navigate a turn. Yellow-bellied marmots (lifers for the kids) stared at us with eyes both wary and weary. I spied a distant Clark's nutcracker flying away over a canyon—everyone else missed it. So we pulled into a roadside rest and scenic overlook to empty our bladders and fill our eyes with purple mountains majesty.


While Julie and the kids sought relief, I got my spotting scope out and began scanning a distant hillside where a sole patch of white seemed out of place. There was no snow anywhere else on the west-facing mountainside, which struck me as odd. What WAS that thing? Did I just see it move?

One scope glance mostly confirmed my hunch—that this was a mountain goat grazing on the tundra-like meadow. Yes, it was moving—and casting a shadow.
Then a second glance revealed one large white dot and two smaller ones—mountain goat kids!!!

I quickly shouted for Julie and our own kids to come and see. "Wow! Awesome! Ohhh they're SO CUTE!" were the reactions I got. Within seconds we had a half-circle of strangers around us asking for a look in the scope. This was a scene that was to be repeated many times in Yellowstone during the ensuing days. I'd see something, or Julie would, or Phoebe would, or Liam would—we'd train the Leica spotting scope on the creature and, because we could not help remarking, gasping, or high-five-ing, our fellow travelers would notice and come to see what all the commotion was about. Most folks were nice and asked politely for a look. Others just walked up, shouldered their way in, and grabbed a look. Presumably these people thought that we were Park Service employees sent out into the field to spot and identify wildlife for the touristy public. It was fine with us.

The mountain goats were a life mammal for 75 percent of our family unit (I'd seen them poorly in Alaska in the late 1990s). Though they were at a great distance, we still got a nice look thanks to our trusty scope. And if we hadn't had all that water to drink along the way, who knows, we might not have pulled over near the top of Beartooth Pass.