For those of you non-Alaskans who are unfamiliar with this little jewel of a road, let me explain the appeal. The 146-mile-long Denali Highway cuts east/west across the south-central part of the state between Fairbanks and Anchorage. It connects the Parks Highway (to Anchorage) at Cantwell and the Richardson Highway (to Valdez) at Paxson, just south of the Alaska Range. It is paved for about 10 miles on the Paxson side and about 5 miles on the Cantwell side, and the rest is a well-maintained gravel road. At Cantwell, if you go east you end up on the Denali highway, and if you go west you enter Denali National Park (Denali/Mt. McKinley is quite a bit west of the rest of the taller peaks of the Alaska Range).
The cool thing about the highway is that you’re able to camp pretty much anywhere there’s enough of a break in the willows and dwarf birch to pitch a tent. Willows are a pebble in the metaphorical hiking boot of every Alaskan field biologist. Occasionally painful but always irritating until they go away. They can also, on occasion, contain bears. Or moose. Pebbles can’t do that, metaphorical or otherwise. There are also actual campgrounds with parking areas and fire-pits and bathrooms and RV hook-up thingies scattered throughout.Also, and most importantly: the Denali Highway and the bits of the Parks and Richardson Highways leading into it are the most beautiful stretches of road in Interior Alaska. Ask anybody.
I drove down on Sunday afternoon. I made pretty good time (4 hours exactly), stopping only once to fight with my computer about why my iPod only contained the first dozen parts of the audiobook I was listening to, instead of all 60 or so. Sue and her crew were set up near the McLaren River Lodge (mile 42 from Paxson), so I took the Richardson Highway through Delta Junction. I’d made that drive before, in 2007 when I was working for the Mammalogy department of the UA Museum of the North but I wasn’t driving, so I was most likely asleep in the back of the van and missed a good portion of the scenery. It was fun to drive past those old field sites and wonder if the pikas were still there.
The crew had set up camp right across the road from the McLaren River Lodge. The lodge is right next to the McLaren River bridge, and if you look up the river valley, you can see the McLaren Glacier that feeds the river. On a clear day, you can also see the Alaska Range (most notably, Mt. Hayes), but Sunday was not one of those days. Neither was today. The lodge owners were kind enough to let the crew use their bathrooms, showers, and WiFi in exchange for small favors during the summer.
I discovered around this point that my camera batteries were as good as dead and I didn’t have any replacements. The remaining photos are mostly from other folks’ cameras.
I decided that the best-looking spot to camp (fewest plants to deal with) was down right next to the river. This is my tent’s maiden voyage, so hopefully the river won’t rush up and carry it off. By the time I’d gotten situated, it was about 8pm and definitely time for bed. I had a hard time finding a happy medium between covering my head and eyes with my sleeping bag to block out the light and not suffocating myself. The constant light is a bit harder to deal with when you don’t have a window you can just throw a blanket over to create bedroom darkness.
The 2:30am alarm on my cell phone came rudely early. In the summer at these latitudes, dusk and dawn run right into each other, so this was just an undefined partial light. Get up, put shoes on, stumble blearily (without glasses, left them in the car) to the bathroom for contacts and morning ablutions, walk back to tent, get dressed, pack the vehicles, grab breakfast and coffee for the road. We were pulling out of camp at 3:30.The Denali Highway crew includes Sue, 2 field techs (Harley and Cassandra) and 2 interns (Dan and Mitch), as well as Harley’s wife and 4 children (ages 18-months-ish to 10-ish), and Sue’s very sweet black Lab-ish dog named Phoebe. Sue had been doing target netting and color banding while the techs and interns did nest searching and monitoring and a few other things. I went with Sue to help her with the banding.
Target netting was a new experience for me. It involves listening for where the birds are active, picking a spot, setting up one or two portable mist nets, and playing calls and songs to encourage the birds into the net. At this point in the season when the females are incubating eggs or brooding young and the males are actively guarding their territories, simulating a trespasser or invader is a pretty sure-fire way to get at least the males to come close enough to investigate.The point of color-banding is to aid in the recognition of individuals without needing to capture them. It also helps to sex monomorphic species when breeding characters aren’t visible without capture. A numbered aluminum band can only be read when the bird is in hand, while a 3-color combination plus the aluminum band is recognizable from far away. For example, that Savannah Sparrow over there has a red band over his aluminum one on his right leg and green over yellow on his left leg, while his neighbor across the way has red over aluminum on his right leg (also) and orange over blue on his left leg. These bright colors are easily visible with binoculars. This can also help identify which nest belongs to which female and which male is feeding her and how far his territory extends. All of this is dependent upon being able to differentiate individuals (and sex) at a distance.
Our first morning (on Study Plot #3) was quite successful. We caught 4 at the first place we stopped, 5 more at the second, and another 4 at the third for a grand total of 13 birds (all male) of 6 species: SAVS, ATSP, GWCS, WIWA, BLPW, and ARWA. This was very exciting because the crew had just started hearing Arctic Warblers on any of the plots on Friday, and we caught 2 of them. ARWA’s winter in the Philippines and are the last migrants to arrive in the Interior... they’re also the first to leave, with the females building nests, mating, laying and incubating the eggs, feeding, brooding and fledging the young and getting them ready to migrate, all in as little as 6 weeks. Very little is known about their breeding ecology, which is what this project is designed to rectify.
