Adak ... An Aleutian Setting
Posted February 3, 2006
...a sense of place and time
 May 20, 2003. The volcano on Great Sitkin Island disappeared in and out of ominous clouds as our Alaska Airlines jet approached Adak. My thoughts turned to Wilhelm Stellar's words of September 25, 1741, when he wrote how fortunate he was to have "caught sight of land(Adak) while yet day. Otherwise we should certainly & without any means of escape have been driven by the wind and wrecked on it." His fears would be founded two months later when he and the crew of the St. Peter, returning to Russia, would shipwreck for the winter on the Komandorski Islands.
For 200 years after Stellar, the Aleutians - it's people and wildlife - would be ravaged by war and the quest for wealth. 228 years later, winter of 1968, I made my first trip to Adak as an employee of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. Another 35 years would pass before I again traveled to Adak, but this time looking for Aleutian and Asiatic birds.
As part of the 1,110-mile long Aleutian Chain, Adak is 1,193 miles from Anchorage and 450 miles from Attu. More than 40 million years ago, the Aleutian Islands began growing from the volcanism created by the Pacific Ocean floor subducting beneath the Bering Shelf. On a clear day, 57 active volcanoes can be seen from Unimak to Attu.
Adak is one of 200 islands within the Aleutian Islands Unit, part of the 3.5 million acre Alaska Maritime Wildlife Refuge System. Adak lay in a unique biogeographic zone. Though one thousand miles south of the Arctic Ocean, the Aleutians are treeless. They fall within an isotherm that bends southward where the average July temperature is less than 10°C, 50°F. Yet, Adak is only 30 miles from the most southern point in Alaska, Amatignak Island; the same latitude as Bella Coola, British Columbia. Later as we hiked across the monotone tundra landscape of Adak, the contrast with the thick forests of coastal Canada and the Kenai Peninsula was obvious.
18,000 years ago, during the last peak of the Pleistocene Ice Age, the north side of Adak bordered a dry Bering Shelf. This was an intact continental ecosystem: a 1,00-mile wide landscape that for millennia allowed a steady flow of people, plants and animals back and forth between Asia and North America.
On the south side, however, the North Pacific Ocean floor, then and today, drops 30,000 feet to the bottom of the Aleutian Trench. With the end of the Ice Age and melting 3,000-feet of continental ice sheets that covered much of North America, the Bering Shelf was flooded to modern-day depths of 300-feet. From wooly mammoths yesteryear, to Whiskered Auklets today: a new Beringia.
A place for birds - mixing geography and ecology Alaska occupies a unique juxtapostion between continental landmasses - a bridge between the Old and New World. Combined with varied northern habitats, a nutrient-rich environment and long summer photoperiod, a diverse avifauna is attracted from six continents - unique in the world of birds.
The distribution of birds is better understood in the context of Alaska's six biogeographic regions. Each region has a characteristic flora, geography and climate that influences species and species associations, abundance and origins. Some Bering Sea birds are isolated from the mainland and winter out to sea. With the Russian Far East nearby, some Asian and African birds reach mainland Alaska via the Aleutian Chain.
With the Bering Sea north, and Pacific Ocean south, these productive neritic ocean habitats of the shallow continental shelf just offshore the Aleutians are enhanced thanks to thousands of tons of organic droppings from 10 million seabirds. With an abundance of rugged and rocky cliffs on the islands, the birds occupy nest sites located within easy reach of offshore feeding grounds. The Bering Sea is the wintering grounds for many of Alaska's seabirds. Adak's lagoons and lakes are especially rich in migrating waterfowl.
The Aleutians are known world-wide for Asiatic birds: the migrants, casuals and incidental species. With its proximity to Asia, geographic connection to North America and benefits of ocean currents and weather patterns, the Aleutians are in an ideal setting to see birds not likely elsewhere in North America. For more than 20 years, Attu produced the most revered bird list in North America. Now, we'll see what Adak brings us from afar.
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Describing my first trip to the North Slope of Alaska with Dr. John Kricher is as easy six months later as the day we arrived. I'll remember every day ten years from now. The experience is more indelibly etched in my memory than any other trip I have taken thanks to the grandeur and wildness of the tundra, and knowing it is still mostly pristine. Though it was the construction of the oil pipeline and highway across the tundra that enabled us to enjoy it, I hope the rest of that vast land remains unspoiled forever. Our group of 15 from Massachusetts, met our guide, Dan Wetzel, owner of NatureAlaska Tours, and his guide, Darren Rorabaugh, in Deadhorse, the "town" at Prudhoe Bay, after the flight from Anchorage through clear blue skies. It was June 11, 1999, and we had magnificent aerial views of Mt. McKinley and the Alaska Range, the mammoth Yukon River valley, the Brooks Range, and the treeless tundra sloping down to the Arctic Ocean at 70°N. The next week we explored the tundra and its wildlife between the polar ice pack and Fairbanks, 500 miles to the south. Our route would be the Dalton Highway, the last highway built in this enormous state. 
Greetings from my cabin here Fairbanks. January is a busy month with the expected surge in 2006 reservations after the holidays, getting the website online and planning the 2007 tour program. As the northern lights peak in March, and the birds return in May and June - only a few months down the trail, now is time to remind you to call or write soon, so I can save you a seat. There are only 14 for each tour program.