September 26-October 5, 2024 with Doug Gochfeld
Birding the Bering Sea islands during fall is in some ways one of the most unpredictable types of birding in North America. The Bering isn’t on the regular flight path for many species of migrants, so there is no migration spectacle that you can bank on. Whether we see far flung vagrants from Asia, interesting seabirds which spend their time over the open ocean far from land, or American species which found their way out to the Bering during their own journeys south depends on a combination of the whims of mother nature and the decisions of individual birds as they choose the next steps on their journey south.
We boarded the Ravn Airlines Dash-8 in Anchorage brimming with optimism due to their recent productive run of Asian birds and the new batch of west winds that were incoming to the island. We hopped off our 4-hour flight (including a re-fueling stop in Bethel) in the mid-afternoon, and after quickly being shown our rooms and getting into our birding gear, we were off to the races. We made a brief stop to see the Bering Sea specialty Red-legged Kittiwakes coming in to bathe at a lake, and then were quickly off to search for a Baikal Teal which had been seen on the island for the past few days, and after some slogging around one of the larger lakes on the island (Pumphouse Lake, since the aquafer under it is where the town gets its drinking water from), we found this cryptic duck amidst the horde of Green-winged Teals haunting the marshy edges of the lake. We also saw our first Sharp-tailed Sandpipers, and a trio of Long-billed Dowitchers (our best views of the tour), completing an excellent first stop, and getting the tour started with a bang.
Our next few days went as many on the Pribilofs in the fall go: A combination of driving around to various windbreaks, walking through or around wetlands, seawatching, walking putchkie (a four-letter word for some, but the favorite word in the vocabulary of a St. Paul Island tour guide), and responding to radio transmissions about rare birds that other groups on the island found. All the while, St. Paul was living up to its reputation for wind, so we did lots of our birding by targeting the aforementioned sheltered locations. On the first of these days, we encountered a rare-for-the-Bering Warbling Vireo, and then were almost immediately called to the opposite end of the island for a Wood Warbler which had just been found. This is an old-world warbler of the genus Phylloscopus, which, before 2014 had only been recorded in North America three times (twice on the essentially inaccessible Shemya Island at the end of the Aleutians). In the fall of 2014, St. Paul hosted two or three individuals, which seemed to be the harbinger of more North American records. There have been a couple elsewhere in the ABA area since, and there was another record on St. Paul last fall (which our tour also intersected with!), so St. Paul in the fall seems to be the best spot to hope for this species in the New World. Aside from the lone California record from a couple of years ago, the rest of the occurrences have been seen by very few people. Once we were up at the Northeast point of the island, we enjoyed an excellent spectacle of swarms of Short-tailed Shearwaters migrating south and east, and we estimated 15,000, which could have been a very conservative count. We continued our birding in the afternoon, and in no time were running back to the car to respond to another call - this time about Eurasian Bullfinches in the Quarry. This turned out to be a flock of three roving around the area, as they happily munched on seeds. Excitement was high, and we rounded out our excellent day by tracking down a Common Snipe that had been seen the day before.
A couple of days after our initial afternoon encounter, we were able to see the cryptic Baikal Teal once more, and much better to boot. On one of our only calm days we saw a couple of distant Marbled Murrelets and a large raft of King Eiders, thanks to the lack of chop on the ocean. Our seawatching exploits on other, windier days, included an adult Yellow-billed Loon and three Laysan Albatrosses. The albatross is scarcely seen from land here on the Pribs, despite the fact that they are common inhabitants of the Bering Sea over the shelf break and undersea canyons, the closest of which are about 65 miles from St. Paul. We encountered adult Slaty-backed Gulls in at least three locations during our trips around the island, and this accounted for perhaps up to 4 individuals. Fleeting views of Brambling eventually gave way to reasonable, and sometimes, great, views of multiple birds on several occasions. A brief encounter with a Song Thrush (fewer than ten North American records at this point, though with a clear uptick in recent years) got our pulses racing. This was an in-flight only view, but it proved to be somewhat fortuitous timing on our part, as it then disappeared, and the other groups were unable able to relocate it, despite multiple efforts.
Then the storm came. The remnants of Typhoon Jebi, which had attained major storm strength for just long enough to become a named storm as it passed east of Japan, entered the Bering Sea. The stiff 30 MPH wind that we landed in felt like a light breeze compared to the nearly 60 MPH wind that racked the island by the afternoon. Needless to say no planes landed that day, and we got ready for a couple of “bonus days” on the island, with strong westerlies bearing down upon us, bringing who-knew-what from Asia. The next day saw winds gusting as high as 75 MPH, though mostly in the now pedestrian 35-50 MPH range, and perhaps most impressive were the 30 foot waves that were rolling into the southern side of the island. And somehow, despite the difficult weather, rare birds that were arriving with, and taking shelter from, the storm, were being found. We answered the radio call of a Common Sandpiper in the morning, and shortly afterwards saw a Gray-tailed Tattler a bit farther up the same road. Then, the other birding group on the island came upon a Fieldfare in the road to Marunich, but it proved exceptionally wary, and tricky to pin down for views. We settled for brief in flight views, but it made for a very exciting afternoon and evening in the blustery Bering weather. The next couple of days provided about the best views you could ever hope for of a handsome and tired Fork-tailed Storm-Petrel, which had ended up fighting the wind on Big Lake after the storm, as well as a characteristically skulky Bluethroat. Four of our number were able to get onto the next flight off the island on Sunday, via standby, and the rest of us had another two days to stomp St. Paul’s putchkie. The final full day featured a Horned Lark of the Asian subspecies, yet another Eurasian Bullfinch, another Warbling Vireo, and yet another single-flush, unsatisfying flight view of a new Song Thrush – the Turdus on St. Paul sure can be difficult to get good looks at! The next day, the rest of us finally extracted ourselves from the fall’s bounty on St. Paul, spending the night in Anchorage, before heading back home the next day.
This autumn’s tour of St. Paul gave us the full spectrum of St. Paul experience. We had a big dose of Bering Sea weather, from huge storms to beautiful rainbows, we experienced the unpredictability of transport that the residents of these remote islands live with throughout the year, and foremost, we had some great birding and natural history moments, from a windfall of Asian vagrants to some Killer Whales hunting just off shore.
We had ten write-in additions to our already-generous checklist, of which 7 were from Asia (2 were Bering-dwelling seabirds, and the only American landbird write-in was Warbling Vireo), with highlights from the Eastern Hemisphere being Baikal Teal, Wood Warbler, several Eurasian Bullfinch, two Song Thrush, Fieldfare, Asian Horned Lark (flava subspecies), Common Sandpiper, Gray-tailed Tattler, Common Snipe, Yellow-billed Loon, and several each of Slaty-backed Gull and Brambling.
We saw a few high quality non-birds during our touring around the island, and that list follows:
Pribilof Shrew (Sorex hydrodromus)
Killer Whale (Orcinus Orca)
Arctic Fox (Vulpes lagopus)
Steller’s Sea Lion (Eumetopias jubatas)
Northern Fur Seal (Callorhinus ursinus)
Harbor Seal (Phoca vitulina)
You can see my complete trip report on eBird at this link: https://ebird.org/tripreport/283957
You can download a combined PDF of this page and the eBird report at this link: https://fieldguides.com/triplists/ag124TRIPLIST.pdf
--Doug Gochfeld (Treeswift)