Bird Calendars
Postcard from the President
By Jer Toll
Summer is almost over and the kids are back in school. The fall migration has started with early migrants. On my birthday, August 17th, (now you know, send presents) I spent an enjoyable evening counting Purple Martins migrating over my house. Within an hour I had counted 1,667 martins flying over. I wonder how many had flown past before I came outside and noticed them. I love counting birds - raptors at the hawkwatch, doing breeding bird surveys and Christmas counts, to name a few. It adds to the bird population knowledge base which aids conservation, and I am giving back something to the birds from which I derive so much pleasure.
Carol and I spent our summer vacation in Alaska. Along with Jean, Carol's mother, we visited her two brothers in Anchorage and Fairbanks.
Alaska is very different from Nebraska. Because of the richness of the land, the Midwest is perhaps the most intensively used landscape in the country. Alaska by contrast remains mostly wilderness. There are few roads and few people, mostly concentrated around the above two cities and Juneau. The rest of the state requires plane or boat travel.
We took a slow train between Anchorage and Fairbanks that took 12 hours. I saw very little sign of humans even though this corridor would be considered "densely populated" by Alaskan standards. While at Fairbanks, we took a boat out on the Tanana River. It is a braided river about the same size as the Missouri. We explored some of the numerous islands and shallow channels in the meandering river. I wondered if the Missouri was much like this before channelization and damming, a wild, free-flowing river teeming with wildlife and fish.
Along the shore were rocky outcrops where we happened upon a peregrine nest scrape with the adults and one recently fledged young. The peregrines in Alaska and the high arctic are of the tundrius subspecies, a separate subspecies from those nesting in the lower 48. I felt a kinship to this pair because a majority of the migrant peregrines we have passing the Hitchcock HawkWatch near our metro area, are of this subspecies. Nebraska is along a migratory corridor for them to and from South America where they winter. While at the HawkWatch I sometimes muse about what they must experience during that long and arduous journey.
Also seen was the one-and-only Redtail Hawk I in Alaska. It was the dark form of the Harlan's subspecies that only nests in Alaska and nearby Canada that migrates past Hitchcock and winters in the Great Plains.
I was disappointed that I did not see a great number of birds, no bears and only a few moose while in Alaska. After some contemplation, I realized that perhaps it was better that I hadn't. Here in Nebraska quality habitat is at a premium for wildlife, so birds are concentrated in those areas, so called "hotspots."
In Alaska, with the exception of special places like Denali National Park or shoreline rookeries of seabirds where animals are concentrated, wildlife has hundreds of thousands of square miles of richly varied habitat to occupy. For most species there is little need to be near human habitation.
Remaining huge expanses of wilderness in the boreal forests and tundra to our north still exist. They sustain me as we grapple with environmental issues locally and broadly.
09/01/10