They sat like silent sentinels on hummocks way out on the tundra – each seemingly with its own territories. As I gazed through a scope, I could see the scattered brown flecks of the Snowy Owl’s summer plumage.

The opportunity to see these wonderful birds was one of my motivations to visit the North Slope of Alaska – and I was not disappointed. I traveled to Barrow on an informal post tour with five other members of the Audubon Naturalist Society and our two guides.

As our plane began the descent into Barrow, I slowly grasped the fact that I was traveling 340 miles inside the Arctic Circle to the northern most occupied area in North America. Tiny lakes and ponds dotted the barren landscape, many still covered with snow and ice.
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The American Dipper has managed to elude me for several years.

“While you were in the restroom,” my friend Barbara lamented sadly, “there was a dipper under the bridge.” It was early in January and we were at the Bosque del Apache. Dippers are not normally seen there. This was my first missed dipper, but not too great a disappointment, since I had not been birding long.

I searched for dippers by rushing streams in Wyoming, Utah and Colorado. Alas no dippers.

On a visit to Glenwood, NM, the motel owner told Barb and me that a dipper had a nest along the stream that runs under the Catwalk. We carefully scanned the edges of the rushing stream, the rocks and the water all the way up one side of the canyon and down the other side. We saw my first Painted Redstart, but no dipper. When we reached the picnic area at the bottom, I popped into the restroom.

When I emerged, Barb had a sheepish look on her face. “I saw the dipper leave its nest and dive into the water. It has returned to the nesting area,” she related. We hung around watching intently, but it didn’t re-emerge.

The American Dipper was on my list of target birds for my trip to Alaska with the Audubon Naturalist Society.

On our drive from Anchorage to Seward, we stopped at the north end of Tern Lake. After watching the Arctic Terns and a couple of Wandering Tattlers, we followed the stream leading into the lake. “Would this be a good place to spot a dipper?” I queried Mark, the trip leader. “The dipper is one of my nemesis birds.”

“It’s possible,” Mark responded. We looked diligently, but didn’t see a dipper.

Every time we stopped along a rushing stream, my friend Sue would say, “Maybe Judy will see her dipper.”

As we left the Denali River Cabins, Mark announced that we were going to make a stop right up the highway at a fish hatchery. As we drove into the hatchery, we crossed over a rushing stream. I hopped out of the van to see if perhaps a dipper was nesting there. There was a group of male Harlequin Ducks, resplendent in their ‘coat of many colors,’ that paddled off down stream, but no dipper.

Mark motioned for us to join him over by the hatchery bins. “Luke is going to share the breeding process of the Copper River Salmon,” Mark said. “However, he won’t mind getting interrupted if you happen to see a dipper.” And, he motioned to the bins.

I squealed with delight as I watched a dipper hatchling wander between two of the bins. “Instead of nesting in the river,” Luke told us, ”the mother dipper built her nest above a swallow nest box on the side of a building adjacent to the rushing stream. She had three chicks.”

As Luke shared the salmon’s life cycle, he told us about how they use a crop dusting plane to deposit the salmon fry in the three lakes they stock. The salmon will live there for three years, before heading down stream to the Gulf of Alaska.

When he was finished, I wandered around looking for the dipper who had disappeared behind the bins. At the end were the other two chicks huddled together, moving their mouths to indicate they were waiting to be fed.

What a delightful way to add a bird to my life list.

The alpine tundra was spongy beneath my feet and rose up in clumps and mounds from the permafrost action. Occasionally I had to maneuver over or around dwarf birch bushes. I pulled the hood of my windbreaker over my fleece cap to block the chilly breeze against my neck. A thick fog was moving across the tundra. It was 7 a.m. and we were searching for longspurs that were preparing to nest.

One of the only accessible places to see Smith’s Longspurs in breeding plumage is near milepost 13 on the Denali Highway. Our trip leader Mark, as well as Barbara Jean, had ventured out on the tundra first to scout the bird’s location, and then whispered into the two-way radio for us to join them.

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I sat on the porch of cabin 5 at Sheep Mountain Lodge at milepost 113.5 on the Glenn Highway, a National Scenic Byway. It was sunny with moments of warmth between the cold gusts that had been blowing all day. The normal songs and chirps of warblers and sparrows were drowned out by the sound of the wind. Across the valley the mountains were iced with snow – in some places still solid, while in others the snow was more streaked, like glaze running off the sides of a cake. A ‘river’ of snow filled a narrow canyon. I was awed by the scenery. Suddenly, a Black-billed Magpie sailed over the willow bushes at the edge of the property. And I thought back over our stay at this beautiful location.

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“There are orcas breaching at our location,” came the call over the radio. I was sitting next to Dan Olson, our captain on the Misty during our Kenai Fjords boat cruise. The morning had started with a drizzle and the weather had gotten worse all day. We were crossing 3 foot swells in Resurrection Bay. I was glad I was wearing my acupressure bands and had taken 12-hour bonine as an added precaution. Dan circled back and headed near their other cruise boat’s location so we could see the whales.

I left my spot in the bridge, pulled on my rain hood and headed out on the deck to get a better view. During the next half hour we watched Orcas, or Killer Whales, that are really large dolphins and Humpbacks. When the black and white Orcas would hump high, we knew its next move would be to dive. As it lifted its tail flipper and slapped it against the water, we would yell, “Fluke.” The Humpback would hump, and then disappear when it dove. When they humped, we watched for the water spray from its spout. It was quite a show.

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