ST. PAUL ISLAND, Alaska — British birder Annie Andreae bristles at being called a “twitcher” — friendly slang in England for someone who will drop everything and travel great distances to get a glimpse at a must-see bird.
“I’m not a twitcher. I just like watching them,” she says. “They look lovely sitting there like that.”
The evidence may speak for itself. Andreae flew about 5,000 miles to get to St. Paul Island to see birds. While she dislikes being known as a twitcher, she doesn’t mind being called cuckoo.
“We’re a mad lot,” she says, as she and her fellow British birders stand close to the edge of 100-foot cliffs in gale-force winds, peering over the edge to see nesting seabirds.
Ask Steve Bird (yes, that’s his real name) if in fact he’s brought twitchers to this remote island in the Bering Sea, and he says, yup, they’re twitchers, willing to pay $16,000 or more for a 25-day birdwatching trip to Alaska.
“We have a lot of rich clients that want to go around the world and see the wildlife,” said Bird, a 46-year-old wildlife artist from Plymouth, England, who is founder and director of Birdseekers, which offers birdwatching tours at nearly 30 locations around the globe, including Alaska.
The British are the “ultimate twitchers,” said Forrest Davis, owner of High Lonesome BirdTours of Sierra Vista, Ariz., another outfit that brings small groups of birders to the Pribilof Islands.
Davis points out the different birds nesting on the cliffs.
“For these seabirds, it is really spectacular. It is the best place to see the Bering Sea birds in the world,” he says.
One of several spotting scopes set up on tripods is trained on a northern fulmar clinging to the cliffs. To the untrained eye, the bird looks a lot like a common sea gull.
No, much better, Davis says, as he ticks off what sets the fulmar apart, including a tubular structure atop their beaks that is actually their nostrils. The birds also can spit sticky, foul-smelling oil at intruders.
“This is the best place I know of seeing them close up,” he says.
With cold winds buffeting her, Andreae holds a broken shell in her mittened hands as if she was cradling a Tiffany egg.
The shell is light olive green with speckles. It’s the shell of a murrelet. Andreae searches for a pocket, predicting the egg will be in a thousand pieces by the time she returns home.
After St. Paul Island, the birders were to travel to Barrow, Dutch Harbor, Seward and Nome, with stops at Kenai Fjords National Park and Denali National Park.
The hoped-to-see list in Alaska includes the Bristle-thighed Curlew, McKay’s Bunting, Smith’s Longspur, Red-legged Kittiwake, Emperor Goose, Aleutian Tern, Snowy Owl and various auklets, murrelets, puffins and other seabirds.
Frank Andrews, 72, of Dunstable, said he hopes to see the Bristle-thighed Curlew, a species that numbers fewer than 10,000.
“We haven’t seen it yet,” he said. “There was one here the day before yesterday. We missed it by minutes.”
About 250 people — more than half the island’s population — travel to St. Paul each year to get a look at some of the island’s 284 species of birds, see the fur seals and learn more about its rich history, said tour director Jolene Lekanof with St. Paul Island Tours, which works with 18 travel agencies in the Lower 48 and in Scotland, England, Japan and Canada, to bring birders to St. Paul.
Cameron Cox, 28, one of the tour guides, had heard about St. Paul for years before having the opportunity to visit. St. Paul is special, he says. There was a recent sighting of a gray wagtail, seen rarely in North America, he says.
“When you haven’t been to anyplace similar, you can’t imagine it until you’ve been here,” Cox says, describing himself as from “Anywhere, U.S.A.” — anywhere that has lots of birds.
St. Paul is “pretty incredible,” he says.
Part of the appeal for hard-core birders is seeing a particular bird in an unusual location.
St. Paul is known for that, Lekanof says. The island is famous for its Asian vagrants — birds blown off-course and ending up on St. Paul because it is the only place around to rest; it’s part of the Pribilof Islands, about 300 miles from the Alaska mainland.
The common cuckoo shows up on St. Paul every year but is otherwise rare in North America, Lekanof says. On June 6, the first Black-tailed Gull showed up in the Pribilofs, flying with a group of kittiwakes.
That was topped three days later when the first Rufous-tailed Robin was sighted in the islands. The bird is normally confined to northeast China and southeast Russia. It was only the second known sighting of the bird in North America. The other time was June 2000 on Attu in Alaska’s Aleutian Islands.
About the same time, another Asian vagrant, the Common Rosefinch, made an appearance.
Lekanof says sightings like that give St. Paul its reputation.
“It is called birders’ paradise for the hard-core birder,” she says.
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