Arctic Terns Potter Marsh At Sunset

 

After a wonderful dinner with friends not far from Potter Marsh, we swung by to see what birds we could find.  Note the official time of sunset tonight in Anchorage was 10:46.  This picture was about ten minutes later.

Here's an arctic tern (as was the first one).  They fly between here and Antarctica and back each year.  They're such beautiful, sleek birds. 

This spot has terns and gulls nesting near each other.  Things were relatively calm, when all of a sudden the birds were all in the air screeching and flying this way and that.

And then I heard the unmistakeable croaking sound of a sandhill crane which flew over me, and I'm guessing disturbed the gulls and terns.  They're huge birds - wing span about 6 feet, probably a little less than bald eagles (though the web shows a variety of wingspans for bald eagles.)

[UPDATE May 18, 2014 noon:  Edgywytch comments below that sandhills eat tern and gull eggs.  The Crane Foundation website linked below says:

"All cranes are omnivorous. Sandhill Cranes are generalists and feed on a wide variety of plant tubers, grains, small vertebrates (e.g. mice and snakes), and invertebrates such as insects or worms. Sandhills find these foods in uplands and in shallow wetlands. Like most cranes, flightless chicks forage primarily on a diet of insects and other protein filled foods during their early stages of rapid growth. The Sandhill's tendency to feed on plant tubers creates conflicts with farming. Sandhill Cranes are adept at probing in the ground and finding planted agricultural seeds such as corn. When large flocks of cranes feed on planted fields, the damage they cause to an unprotected crop can be severe enough to force the farmer to replant the entire field. "]

Sandhill cranes are another great bird we get to see in Alaska.  You can read a lot more about them at the International Crane Foundation website.   I had my telephoto on and finding the bird in my camera and focusing in the fading light was beyond my ability and I'm a little embarrassed by how fuzzy the bird is in the next picture, but it gives you and idea of how big it is.  It's the white horizontal line in the picture.  I'm guessing it's approach is what upset the gulls and terns.  Since its wingspan is close to that of eagles, perhaps they originally thought it might be an eagle.  But that's merely a wild guess  - you'd think they should have learned to distinguish between the two.

It was pretty far away by the time I got this picture - about 11:05 pm. 

Why I Live Here - The Coastal Trail

The impetus for today's bike ride was a post, Have I Nagged You To Exercise Lately?,  on Peter Dunlap-Shohl's blog about a week ago.  He'd written about the importance of exercise for Parkinson's patients.  I'd asked about his exercise routine and he said he does a lot cycling so I suggested we go for a ride. 

I didn't say seeing them was easy, that's Mt. Susitna in the background

We finally got around to it today.  Since the Redistricting Board's meetings are unpredictable - you know when they will start, but not when they'll finish - I decided being outside on a bike would do me much more good anyway.  So after posting with the wifi help of the Westmark, I met Peter at Westchester Lagoon for a ride along the Coastal Trail.  On my way from downtown, I passed a couple of Sandhill Cranes working over the mudflat dining hall.  They're really big and were a ways out there. 

View North

We rode to the bottom of the hill from Kincaid, then locked the bikes and walked the path to a decent place to descend to the beach.  I'd never seen so many people down there. The closest car parking is about a mile away, so you have to want to come here.

And here's a view to the south.  That's a dog in the water.

But we also saw moose.  Actually, other people saw moose and pointed them out to us after we'd passed them.  I think we saw four or five altogether. 

I'm constantly amazed at how animals this big can manage to disappear in the background.

And here's Peter on a break on the way back.  I took the picture because even though I read his blog, I wasn't sure until he mentioned it, whether he could still ride a bike.  Or drive a car.  He said as long as the medication is controlling symptoms, he can. 

I'm normally more vague on the blog about friends I do things with, but Peter has a blog to help educate people - both with and without PD - about Parkinson's Disease.  His comment when I told him why I took the picture was, that he forgets what people know and don't know about what he's able to do.  We rode about 16 miles round trip from Westchester Lagoon


Peter's was interviewed as a cartoonist with Parkinson's Disease in the Washington Post recently.  There are extremely talented and amazing people all around us in Anchorage.  I hope the Board got a lot done this afternoon.  It was a great day to be in Anchorage.

Sun Damaged Sanity - Sandhill Cranity

The sunny, warm weather - better than I can remember at all last summer - has my mind unable to focus much on blogging or anything mental for that matter. So here's a picture from Dennis Zaki's Alaska Report (with his permission.) I was going to post the Snow Geese he had up yesterday, but they are gone and not yet in his galleries. So enjoy the crane.

For a wonderful book that uses sandhill cranes as its metaphoric theme, check out Richard Power's The Echo Maker. The link takes you to an old post on the book with some quotes on the cranes and a description on how the fit into his main topic which has to do with the human brain. A commenter came up with a much better title than I had for the post - Cranes and Brains.

Richard Power's The Echo Maker

Cranes keep landing as night falls. Ribbons of them roll down, slack against the sky. They float in from all compass points, in kettles of a dozen, dropping with the dusk. Scores of Grus canadensis settle on the thawing river. They gather on the island flats, grazing, beating their wings, trumpeting: the advance wave of a mass evacuation. More birds land by the minute, the air red with calls.

So opens The Echo Maker. The sandhill cranes who congregate along the Platte River near Kearney, Nebraska on their way to Alaska play an integral role in this novel about Mark Schluter whose car lands upside down in the middle of the cranes one night and who comes out of his coma with Capgras Syndrome - a cognitive dysfunction in which he believes that his sister is an imposter.

The way the birds remember the long journey to Alaska and back each year, is a metaphor for Powers' examination of the physiological basis of memory and the tricks this physiology plays with human perception.

What does a bird remember? Nothing that anything else might say. Its body is a map of where it has been, in this life and before. Arriving at these shallows once, the crane colt knows how to return. This time next year it will come back through pairing off for life. The year after next here again, feeding the map to its own new colt. Then one more bird will recall just what birds remember.

Mark's brain concludes from the signals it receives from the sensory impressions of Karin Schluter, that this lady looks, acts, and sounds like his sister, but isn't. Karin, the sister, begins to wonder if she is the same person who was Mark's sister. Gerald Weber, the famous cognitive neurologist's brain raises doubts about his whole career and marriage from his contact with Mark and Karin.

The birds also place everything into the context of time.

The yearling crane's past flows into the now of all living things. Something in its brain learns this river, a word sixty million years older than speech, older even than this flat water.

Karin moves in with an old boyfriend while she cares for her brother after the accident. Daniel, the saintly idealist who lives to save the habitat of the cranes from developers, is the man she admires for his goodness, but who also makes her feel inadequate. Sexually, she can't resist Robert Karsh, another former boyfriend, the moral opposite of Daniel, who is now a wealthy developer planning the condos in the birds' sanctuary.

There is also the mystery of the note left in Mark's hospital room:

I am No One
but Tonight on North Line Road
GOD led me to you
so You could Live
and bring back someone else.

Throughout, the book examines the mysteries of the human brain, its evolutionary functions, and the quirky ways its dysfunctions affect people. Professor Gerald Weber is fictional, yet his famous book, Wider than the Sky, is a real book about the physiology of consciousness, written by Nobel Prize winner Gerald M. Edelman, MD, PhD, some of which can be read online.

Overall, this is a stunning book, that has taken me off into Nebraska, into Mark and Karin's world, into Dr. Weber's questions about academic publishing and the value of his life, into the mystery of how the brain works, and into the lives of the magnificent, prehistoric cranes who we are sometimes lucky to see as they pass through Anchorage on their way further north.