Birds of the Flyway
Mark Vail hand feeds a chickadee at his home near the McCarthy Road.
Photo by Allison Sayer.
By Michelle McAfee
Mark Vail walks a mile-long footpath through the woods to his homestead west of McCarthy. Before reaching his cabin, he checks on his gardens which supply local restaurants with greens through the summer and yield him a good supply of preserves for winter. Mark is always aware of the birds flitting about and can name a species by its song. He’s lived on this land for thirty-four years and is deeply connected to the environment that sustains him.
Locally, he is known as The Bird Whisperer. He holds his hand out toward the sky and makes a pshpshpsh sound, and the birds come. Mark knows their patterns by heart and is the man to ask when you want to learn about migratory birds in the Wrangell-St. Elias and Copper River Basin.
“The first migrant to arrive in the early spring is the flycatcher. As spring progresses, ice melts off the pond, and swans come in next. As soon as there is open water, ducks show up. When the ground starts to bare, the sparrows appear.” Mark’s voice lights up as he describes how gulls head east into Canada in May, like a reverse migration, to nest on lakes in the high tundra. Around the same time, warblers, thrushes, and robins turn up locally from the south with the first green leaves of the warm season.
Migratory birds generally travel through valleys, following rivers up the coast where the food is plentiful. Songbirds arrive here in April, May, and early June, then establish territory by singing and displaying fancy flight. The birds morph into breeding plumage, males typically featuring brighter colors to impress and attract a female. After recovering from the long journey, they begin nesting. Their babies hatch at the peak of summer around Solstice when life is in full swing; flowers are blooming, bugs are out. The easiest time to raise young is when everything is lush.
When you are an observer, patterns start to emerge in nature. Mark Vail remembers a bird he became very familiar with, “I saw it here in my neighborhood. The robin was leucistic, which means it had a lack of pigmentation in the feathering making the bird easy to identify. That same bird came back to the neighborhood three years in a row.”
Mark Vail documents unusual birds he encounters in the Wrangells. In addition to the leucistic robin mentioned in the article, he has also spotted a leucistic junco.
Photo by Mark Vail.
They learn to return to the same summer range. It might be the only thing birds have in common with salmon. Young birds born in the summer must find a nearby territory to nest in or overlap with the parent birds in that area. When the young come back to the territory the following summer, they don’t always know how to do things. Their nests may fail from weather, predation, or not finding a mate. The birds that fail at nesting are the first ones to start out-migration that year.
Juncos and sparrows begin to leave the first week of August when grasses have gone to seed, generating a constant food source heading south down the flyway. Other birds stick around for the berry crop, and some birds hang out around here as long as there are leaves with caterpillars to gorge on.
By the end of September, golds and reds explode across the valley floors, and fresh snow drapes the peaks above. The migratory birds are mostly gone. Hawks, eagles, and a few short-distance migrators like ruby-crowned kinglets are the last ones to leave. Approximately twenty-five bird species stay and winter over here, like chickadees, red-breasted nuthatches, woodpeckers, owls, spruce grouse, ptarmigan, and sometimes juncos when there is a good spruce cone crop.
Birding became very popular during the pandemic. Parents could do it with kids, and adults could observe feathered visitors from their living room window. If you’re interested in birding, check out Cornell University’s e-bird website and try your hand at some citizen science by keeping a bird observation list for your neck of the woods. Or, just come to McCarthy in the spring when Mark Vail, better known as The Bird Whisperer, hosts his Annual Bird Walk through the Wrangell Mountains Center.
Want to read more about birds? Check out these articles!
