{"id":1409,"date":"2009-04-01T12:13:46","date_gmt":"2009-04-01T20:13:46","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/mlmlblog.wordpress.com\/?p=1409"},"modified":"2009-04-01T12:13:46","modified_gmt":"2009-04-01T20:13:46","slug":"unimak-bliss","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/mlml.sjsu.edu\/student-life\/2009\/04\/01\/unimak-bliss\/","title":{"rendered":"Unimak Bliss – A Dizzy Dance of Birds and Whales"},"content":{"rendered":"

\n

\"Nathan<\/a>
Nathan Jones<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

by Nate Jones, Vertebrate Ecology Lab<\/p>\n

(Note:\u00a0 I last posted about my Alaskan surveys\u00a0 loooong ago in October, with a post about how stormy it’d been out on the Bering Sea…)<\/p>\n

10 June, 2008: <\/strong>Today has been marvelous.\u00a0 The storm had passed, and wildlife was everywhere! <\/span>My seabird surveys are keeping me very busy, but the whales are stealing the show.<\/p>\n

The ocean is impossibly calm, like glass; when I got up to the bridge to look out over the surroundings, it was difficult to tell even if the boat was moving – so smooth was its progress, and so monotonous is the gray sea surface.\u00a0 Spotting birds today has been a treat.\u00a0 Lots of little auklets, looking like buzzing avocados, their stubby wings flapping furiously.\u00a0 We also have had some good whale sightings.\u00a0 At least three Fin Whales… and two groups of Killer Whales have passed within viewing distance.\u00a0 It’s so peaceful here today.\u00a0 The ship’s engines just rumbling along, and only a very slight rocking under me to bring water to mind.<\/p>\n

\n

\"Killer
Killer Whales<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

(Photo: NOAA\/NMML)<\/p>\n

And, then, this evening I had one of those peak life moments that I feel so privileged to experience: a feeding symphony of birds and whales<\/p>\n

We had slowed for a trawl to try to catch some pollock (fish) to sample.\u00a0 It was going on about 10:30pm<\/span>, and still plenty of dim light left in the day.\u00a0 Marty and I don’t survey for birds during trawls because the flocks of scavenging fulmars and gulls present during fishing exercises confound our estimates of what\u00a0free-ranging birds are “normally” doing.\u00a0 So, I was done for the night.<\/p>\n

\"Shearwaters\"
Shearwaters (Photo: NOAA\/NMML)<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

\n

But, we were fishing right on the north side of Unimak Pass, one of the larger gaps in the eastern Aleutian chain, and a major funnel through which water and animal life move between\u00a0Pacific and Bering waters.\u00a0 There is often an abundance of marine life at these Aleutian passes, so I stuck around upstairs on the bridge to see what might show up…<\/p>\n

<\/p>\n

The night shift junior officer in command prepped the bridge for night work by modifying all screens to red (night-vision), and plugging in an iPod for some electronica.\u00a0 He and I were the only ones left up top as the dusk deepened, and the driving dance club beats began to race.\u00a0 The ocean was quiet and smooth, and once again I had that feeling of floating through a gray other-world.\u00a0 In the distance I could see some fog-shrouded cliffs of remote Aleutian islands<\/span>, and the gap between them that was Unimak Pass, the gateway to the Pacific Ocean.\u00a0 The next land beyond that portal was Hawai’i, 2250 miles further south!<\/p>\n

I lingered there in the red-tinted lighting, looking out at one of the most productive marine hotspots on planet earth.\u00a0 The techno music raced in crescendo. <\/span>Sitar riffs, sampled and remixed, dissolved my sense of time.\u00a0 We watched as tens of thousands of shearwaters massed and swirled in all directions across the horizons.\u00a0 Huge black clouds of them, billowing like smoke on the waters.\u00a0 They flooded across the bow of the ship in waves hundreds of birds deep.<\/p>\n

\n

Dozens of Humpback whales were surfacing and diving, throwing their flukes up high with every descent, blowing hard between feeding bouts.\u00a0 They were everywhere I looked, dotting the ocean with dim white plumes and leaving slick trace “footprints” of disturbed waters in their wakes.<\/p>\n

\n

\"Feeding\"
Feeding<\/figcaption><\/figure>\n

Fulmars swirled in a frenzy where our fishing lines met the water.\u00a0 Hundreds of them, like aerial ants, swarmed the water looking for scraps.\u00a0 Two gigantic Laysan Albatrosses flapped laboriously in the still twighlight, circling our ship, no doubt anticipating a free meal when the nets were pulled up. <\/span>Puffins huffed past us at bridge-eye level, about 40′ above the waterline.\u00a0 Murres disappeared, then surfaced to the south.\u00a0 The ocean was absolutely alive.\u00a0 It was boiling with birds, heaving with whales, nearly prehistoric, overwhelming. \u00a0I stayed for over two hours as darkness slowly took my views away.\u00a0 I couldn\u2019t believe how lucky I was to be alive.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

by Nate Jones, Vertebrate Ecology Lab (Note:\u00a0 I last posted about my Alaskan surveys\u00a0 loooong ago in October, with a post about how stormy it’d been out on the Bering Sea…) 10 June, 2008: Today has been marvelous.\u00a0 The storm had passed, and wildlife was everywhere! My seabird surveys are keeping me very busy, but […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":291,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[1],"tags":[258],"class_list":["post-1409","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-uncategorized","tag-seabirds"],"distributor_meta":false,"distributor_terms":false,"distributor_media":false,"distributor_original_site_name":"MLML Student Life","distributor_original_site_url":"https:\/\/mlml.sjsu.edu\/student-life","push-errors":false,"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/mlml.sjsu.edu\/student-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1409","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/mlml.sjsu.edu\/student-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/mlml.sjsu.edu\/student-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mlml.sjsu.edu\/student-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/291"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mlml.sjsu.edu\/student-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=1409"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/mlml.sjsu.edu\/student-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/1409\/revisions"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/mlml.sjsu.edu\/student-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=1409"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mlml.sjsu.edu\/student-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=1409"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/mlml.sjsu.edu\/student-life\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=1409"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}