2008 Tour Narrative
In Brief: It isn’t often that a tour records a first North American record, but this year our fall Gambell tour did just that—albeit on the post-tour extension to St. Paul Island. At the northeast tip of the island, a Solitary Snipe was found and photographed at Hutchinson Hill. This enigmatic highland snipe was entirely unexpected as a potential vagrant to North America, but now joins the 2002 Willow Warbler on the list of North American firsts discovered on this tour.
In Detail: The main tour at Gambell did great as well, with some high-class Asian vagrants as well as almost all of the western Alaska specialties we have a hope of finding in autumn. Fall 2008 in the northern Bering Sea was characterized by excessive northerly and northeasterly winds, not the direction that normally produces good landbird strays. But we were blessed with several days with very light winds, and on those days we recorded such mega-goodies as Brown Shrike, Willow Warbler, “Siberian” Stonechat, Pechora Pipit, and a ridiculous total of four Dusky Warblers. Add to that a fine showing of Sharp-tailed Sandpipers and Alaska/Arctic specialties including a record total of 980 Emperor Geese one day, a Spectacled Eider dabbling with Northern Pintails (!), small numbers of Steller’s Eiders, Yellow-billed Loons, several Slaty-backed and Sabine’s Gulls, several Ancient and a Kittlitz’s Murrelet, several Snowy Owls including goggle-eyed juveniles, and good numbers of the “trans-Beringian” landbirds that migrate across the Bering Sea: White Wagtails (local breeders), Eastern Yellow Wagtails, Arctic Warblers, Bluethroats, Northern Wheatears, and Red-throated and japonicus American Pipits. From the other direction came a wayward Warbling Vireo and a very lost apparent Willow Flycatcher, the first for the Bering Sea and western Alaska. Add to that the many Short-tailed Shearwaters, large numbers of the standard eight alcid species—including crash-landed juvenile Parakeet, Crested, and oh-so-cute Least Auklets—and a fine Gray Whale show.
The pre-tour extension to Nome found many birds not seen on the main tour at Gambell, including Arctic Loon, Gyrfalcon, Bar-tailed Godwit, Northern Shrike, and American Dipper, along with mammals such as Muskox. At the end of the main tour, Nome also produced point-blank views of a Northern Hawk Owl dining on an unfortunate Tundra Vole, as well as a Gray Jay that had wandered far out onto the tundra. And the post-tour extension to St. Paul found—in addition to the snipe—a Little Stint, a Gray-tailed Tattler, yet another Dusky Warbler (!), a single wayward Merlin and a Chipping Sparrow, and such Pribilof specialties as Red-faced Cormorant, Red-legged Kittiwake, and Gray-crowned Rosy-Finch.
- Paul Lehman
Updated: December 2008