Petersburg, Wrangell Narrows, and Snow Pass, Southeast Alaska
Fall is coming to Alaska. It may still be warm where you are reading this, but here there is a nip to the morning air, and morning mist snags on the tips of spruce and hemlocks. Plants have turned from flowering to fruiting. As salmon runs up the streams abate, the bears prepare to move to higher elevations, gorge on berries to top off their body fat, and prepare to enter dens for the winter spent in a state of deep sleep.
Alaska's commercial fishers, too, are nearing the end of their season. This morning, as the mist departed leaving bright, warm sunshine, we visited the town of Petersburg. No rows of T-shirt and jewelry shops here. Fishing rules the local economy, and "friends don't let friends eat farmed salmon." The economic center of town is the local hardware store, where everything needed to keep the fishing fleet in action is available. Some walked the dock (and talked the talk) to see the trollers, long-liners, seiners, and gill-netters that bring the bounty of Alaskan seas - proper, wild-caught Alaskan salmon, halibut, and black cod - to market. (For those readers who have joined us in the Norwegian fjords, "troll-caught salmon" has a different meaning here than in Norway.) Across Wrangell Narrows, on the island of Kupreanof, we followed a boardwalk trail through Old-Growth Temperate Rainforest of Sitka spruce and Western hemlock to reach a muskeg bog habitat. Here, scattered, stunted trees of shore pine and Alaska yellow cedar struggle up through waterlogged soil, and sundews snare their insect prey above mats of sphagnum moss.
Back on-board the National Geographic Sea Lion, Dr. Andy Szabo of the Alaska Whale Foundation (a conservation partner of Lindblad Expeditions and the National Geographic Society) told us of their research on the humpback whales of Southeast Alaska and, especially, their unique feeding methods. Since humpback whales feed little if any during their winter in Hawaii, they must spend their summer in Alaska replenishing depleted stores of blubber. Summers are for feeding where the water is most productive; winters are for birthing and breeding where the water is warm. It must be working for them, because this northern population of humpback whales is increasing at about 6% per year, a very impressive population growth rate (the population doubles in size every twelve years) and a validation of conservation measures.
In the late afternoon, in Snow Pass, we watched, enthralled, as humpback activity went on all around us, providing the laboratory component of Dr. Szabo's course on whale biology. All around us were the blows of whales feeding solitarily. Off in the distance we spotted a large aggregation of gulls. Suddenly, the birds took to the wing and gathered in a feeding frenzy over a disturbance in the water. The cause of the disturbance was the synchronous rise to the surface of a group of bubble-net feeding humpback whales. Counting flukes as they descended for their next iteration of this most remarkable behavior, we saw that eight or nine whales (otherwise said, 400 or so tons of whale) were participating. And when 400 tons of whales reach the surface at once, their huge mouths agape, it makes a mighty disturbance! (Imagine 400 tons of humanity in an area half the size of the Sea Lion lounge.) Fish forced to the surface by the bubble net but escaping the gulps of the whales became prey for the gulls. The ship's hydrophone was deployed so we could hear the powerful sounds that the whales use to coordinate this behavior. Remarkably, the sound was a bit different from the group of whales that use bubble-net feeding farther north, in Chatham Strait, where the Sea Lion has encountered the behavior earlier this summer. As if jealous of the attention and cameras focused on the bubble-netters, a solitary whale off in the distance began a bout of conspicuous surface behavior, breaching and tail-lobbing. We hardly knew where to look. The sun descended behind the mountains of coastal Alaska and the temperature dropped, but we were reluctant to leave the bow. I know not how many images were clicked to record this natural moment. A lot. May the mental images last every bit as long as the photographs.
