Zugunruhe Birding Tours - Attu 2010 trip report

THE START OF THE TRIP - THE OUTBOUND CRUISE

I flew to Adak, the official start point of the trip, on Sunday, May 9, a week before it was scheduled to begin to lead a separate tour of Adak. A number of the Attu participants then arrived on Thursday, including my two co-leaders:


Rich MacIntosh, a long-time resident of Kodiak, had been to Attu before with the UAF crew. He's a birding animal. We thought it safest to keep him in an enclosure while not in the field.		Mike "King Toochinkhamun" Toochin. Mike was an Attour leader in the 1990s. Here he is, disappointed that he hadn't found a first North American record that day.

Meanwhile, the boat's arrival had been delayed by two storms in the Gulf of Alaska. It was originally scheduled to arrive a day before our departure for Attu, but I was getting daily updates that the arrival was being pushed back yet another day (OK, they weren't daily, but at times it felt like it). To further add to the frustration, the winds had almost continuously been from the north and northeast, not the best directions to bring in Asian vagrants, though in some ways it was nice because we could think we probably weren't missing much at Attu.

Like previous mornings, we headed out to bird Adak on Tuesday morning, May 18, but a speck on the horizon of Kuluk Bay changed our plans. It was the Puk-Uk, so we immediately turned around to pack. Everyone had remained in good spirits during the delay, but we were ready to go. By 1 PM, the boat was loaded, and we left Adak's Sweeper Cove. We first headed east to Little Tanaga Strait to see the Whiskered Auklets that gather in large numbers at this spot. It was a lifer for several onboard. There were thousands of them, along with the other members of the genus Aethia: Parakeet, Least, and Crested Auklets. We also saw a few Cassin's Auklets and other alcids.


Whiskered Auklet flock	Crested Auklet

We then proceeded west, hitting Adak Strait at dinner time. Everyone was down below in the galley, except Kirk Zufelt. We heard Kirk yelling very loudly just as we were finishing our meals. In normal life, a sound like this is usually a sign that something bad has happened. On a pelagic trip, it's usually quite the opposite. It took us about two seconds to process what was going on, and then we were sprinting up to Kirk at the stern. An adult or near-adult Short-tailed Albatross had just flown by the boat and was now far behind us in the wake. It proceeded to fly ahead of us far off our port side. No one but Kirk got a good look at it, but everyone got countable looks for a lifer.

Would you believe me if I told you this was a Short-tailed?

The next morning found us in Amchitka Pass approaching Semisopochnoi Island, America's "easternmost" point -- it's located just west of 180 degrees longitude and therefore in the Eastern Hemisphere. We cruised through the Rat Islands and at sunset, we were at Kiska's Sirius Point, the site of an extremely large colony of Least and Crested Auklets. There are so many Cresteds here that you can smell their citrus-like scent. Thousands and thousands of auklets covered the sky in a stream that didn't appear to end. By the time we departed the point, we probably had seen over a million birds.


Auklets at Sirius Point, Kiska

We were approaching Buldir Island when we awoke on Thursday, May 20. The seabird colony at Buldir is the most diverse in the northern hemisphere, with 21 breeding species. Again, we saw five species of auklets (a daily occurrence on the cruising portions of the trip), but I most appreciated the eight or so Red-legged Kittiwakes that were returning to the island. Later in the day, Fork-tailed Storm-Petrels were a constant presence around the boat, with smaller numbers of Leach's Storm-Petrels. About five Mottled Petrels were seen throughout the afternoon, though not by all. The most unexpected sighting was a male Brambling that very briefly landed on the boat. It had just touched the stern rail when it noticed four of us sitting there on lawn chairs and took off.

We stopped to chum at Ingenstrem Rocks, a hotspot for Short-tailed Albatross. We didn't see any, but we had about 40 Laysan Albatrosses around the boat. A Black-footed Albatross made a brief appearance. We continued westward, surrounded by Dall's Porpoises for quite some time. A Slaty-backed Gull was seen on the water as we passed Shemya.


Dall's Porpoises

To part 3>