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Watching and Waiting and Trying not to Whine (Not so Murrily)
My goal on Monday morning (yesterday) when I went birding was to go to an ocean inlet overlook in Anchorage to see a Common Murre and to have that adventure be the subject of today’s blog post. I would write about that overlook (Point Woronzoff) and about the delight of seeing a murre there. I planned, after I glowingly and gloatingly described seeing the murre (or maybe more than one murre) to discuss the rarity of Common Murres in Anchorage (the local checklist says it is “accidental: only one or two ever seen here”), to discuss the good but sad fact that a single Common Murre was reported by Aaron Bowman on Friday off a creek flowing into the Knik Arm of Cook Inlet in north Anchorage, which was then seen and reported by a couple of other birders, and then was seen being carried off in the clutches of a Bald Eagle later the same day. Then I was going to cover my delight that other Common Murres had been seen over the weekend from the Point Woronzoff overlook, and my decision to do a local bird chase for a Common Murre.
I have not spent much time staring out over water looking for birds. For most of my birding life, I have lived inland, far away from ocean overlooks or any other water overlooks. My only seabirding experiences have been limited to trips to the ocean or on pelagic trips. Ever since I moved to Anchorage, other birders have reported good things seen from the Point Woronzoof overlook, so I was, and still am, expecting to see good things there. Unfortunately, so far (including Monday), I have not had much luck.
From the Point Woronzoff overlook, one has a spectacular view of mountains (unless fog has rolled in).
On Monday, the skies were clear and the view was gorgeous. Two Bald Eagles coasted slowly by at eye level. Common Ravens dipped and swirled in the wind over the cliff edge, dropping suddenly and effortlessly rolling in the air, pairs of them sometimes making little gurgle sounds as they seemed to be playing with each other. Every now and then a couple of the ravens would fly out over the small ice bergs floating out on the tide. A small flock of Common Redpolls flew low past me. And that was it for birds for three hours. I took a short break to look out from another viewpoint, through unseasonably early-blooming pussy willows, at the water and the Anchorage skyline visible back to the east, and then I returned to the Point for more scanning of the water.
As I continued to not see Common Murres, I contemplated doing a sort of reprise of my last blog post, discussing how birds with “common” in their names are definitely not common everywhere. I spent all of 2012 not seeing a Common Raven in my South Dakota big year, and only saw Common Redpolls a couple of times for the 3-plus years that I lived in South Dakota, although both are common now in Anchorage, even in my yard.
The post that I was attempting to write in my head took an abrupt turn after a couple of hours of seawatching. Now it was about birders’ persistence and stick-to-it-iveness, about how some of what is good about birding is the looking for birds, not just the finding of birds, and about why no one can stay a birder for long if they can’t live with disappointment and failure to meet their birding goals.
Or maybe the blog would be about the wildness of a windy clifftop overlook with gray-blue seawater below carrying ice clumps away and not a sign of civilization as I looked westward out over the water, and how the wildness did not even seem to diminish as giant planes loudly took off from behind me periodically and flew out low over my head leaving Anchorage International Airport.
My thoughts circled back to the murre, or the lack thereof, as my wait approached three hours, and how ironic it was (and how typical of many of us nutty birders) that I was obsessing over seeing a bird that I should be guaranteed to see in great numbers three months from now when I have booked time on Alaska’s St. Paul Island, the home of many, many breeding Common Murres. There they are common, at least in spring and summer.
Now, as I wind down on writing this post and take a quick break, I find that I am pacing the floor, wondering if I should go back out to the Point to see if any murres are there. I need to check the Alaska listserv to see if anyone else has seen one there, or anywhere else nearby.
Join the American Birding Association at www.aba.org!
Source: http://blog.aba.org/2015/03/watching-and-waiting-and-trying-not-to-whine-not-so-murrily.html
