August 27, 2004

No Track, No Engine, No Map

My view of the world, my personal perspective, is that of a flatlander. The Texas Gulf coast is relief deprived. I remember my first bicycle ride up a hill — an overpass. Between Galveston and Houston, about a 45-mile drive, the coastal plain struggles to rise 45 feet. Compared to the Texas coast even North Dakota’s Turtle Mountains are true to the name (if not just the imagination).

A flatlander in Vermont is a person not from the state, an outsider. In Texas we call outsiders "Yankees," although for my grandfather anyone from north of the Red River earned that title and his suspicion. My personal favorite is from Maine. Outsiders there are simply from "away." Either you are a Mainer or "away." How neat and complete.

As a Gulf coast flatlander I cut my birding teeth on waterbirds. Pelicans, herons, egrets, ducks, and shorebirds were the first creatures that I recall trying to identify and name. The bays, beaches, and marshes that encircle Galveston Island were (as today) teeming with an overwhelming density and variety of birds. Dawn broke to the cackles of Laughing Gulls, and the croaks of Black-crowned Night-Herons signaled day’s end. On Galveston Island birds were unavoidable, inescapable.

As my birding skills developed I became increasingly interested in shorebirds. Sanderlings, for example, were ever-present fixtures on the beaches, joined seasonally by an assortment of species such as Ruddy Turnstone and Dunlin. Yet as a young birder the notion of "migration" had yet to sink in. Yes, there were clear ebbs and flows in these bird populations, but to where they disappeared escaped my attention.

Finally I began to read about these beach birds, and learned that most were spectacular long-distance migrants. Most only traveled to the Texas beaches in winter. In summer many of these birds nested in the tundra or taiga of Alaska, Siberia, and Canada. Nothing could have sounded more exotic at the time than "tundra" or "taiga," considering that at home temperatures rarely neared freezing.

One of the shorebirds that I read about caught my fancy, the Surfbird. The Surfbird is exceedingly rare in Texas, so I had no personal experience with the bird. Yet how fantastically exotic their lives seemed, nesting in the tundra of northern Alaska yet wintering as far south as the tip of Chile.

I learned that Surfbirds spend virtually all of their lives within four to five meters of the Pacific Ocean. In the boreal winter Surfbirds (according to the Birds of North America account) are found from "Kodiak I., AK, to the Strait of Magellan, Chile, a distance of >17,500 km, and the winter range extends inland only a few meters above the tide line."

I also learned that the species had been described to science based on a specimen collected from Prince William Sound on Captain Cook’s voyage to Alaska in 1778. However, I found that only in 1926 did Dixon find a nest near Mt. McKinley. Natives had told scientists for years that Surfbirds nested in "bare mountains in the interior," but scientists could not imagine such a coastal bird venturing into the interior of Alaska to breed. My advice to future scientists? Listen to the locals.

In July, Virginia and I traveled to Denali National Park to look for Cook’s Surfbird. We stayed a week at Camp Denali and hiked daily in the Alaskan backcountry. On our first hike we climbed a ridge above the camp, and after lunch I wandered around the tundra that carpets the landscape at that altitude and latitude. I did not hold much hope that I would actually find a nesting Surfbird (although we had seen a few migrants in Anchorage earlier). Yet as our group lunched and napped I scoured the landscape and finally stumbled into my objective.

Though tempted by grizzlies, caribou, and moose, my Surfbird sighting will be the one that will remain carved in my memory. The Surfbird connected me with my youth, to a time when most of natural world still existed only in my imagination. Paul Theroux wrote about trains through the Americas in The Old Patagonian Express, yet my subject traveled the same path with no track, no engine, and no map. What could ever be more unreal than reality itself?

For more Alaska photos, visit the Fermata gallery.

Top

Trip du Jour, 27 August 2004
No Track, No Engine, No Map
by Ted Lee Eubanks Jr.