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| Moody seas at Ridge Wall, August 2016 |
It's difficult to pin a date on the advent of fall in the Pribilofs. When the first southbound Ruddy Turnstone pecks down Marunich's rouge-and-olive kelp racks, it's the last week of June. Relicts of spring--a Gray-streaked Flycatcher lurking in my beloved Upper Cut, pausing on its journey north--remain. This time of year, when you walk home from the bar at 1 in the perpetual twilight, you're already racking species for the new day's eBird list. Sure doesn't feel like fall.
Is it fall when the Crested Auklets lose their namesake breeding plumes, follow their fledglings off the cliffs, out to sea until next spring? This is late July, and it still doesn't feel like fall.
Last year, "fall" to me was synonymous with the Season of Sharp-tailed, when rain squalls abated to reveal masses of the bright sandpipers snaking out of the fog, into the tundra. We'd just started bird-dogging through the hip-high celery. The skies were troubled and the days were short and it felt like fall.
But this year, fall seems earlier. Perhaps, this is just my flawed imagination, for my own seasons are changing--I leave next week, two months earlier than last year. I'll miss out on the masses of Sharp-tails and the celery sweeps. But maybe the reality of this pushes me to notice nuance--the wind is more insistent. Young longspurs are gathering on the roads' edges. We're lose daylight by the minutes now--we use our headlights when we retrieve our clients for breakfast at 7:30. The seal pups edge closer and closer to the water while the Orcas come closer and closer to land.
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| Orca, Southwest Point |
I eat constantly, remain unsatiated. Have this overwhelming urge to move, to migrate, like I always do this time of year. But do I feel this way because it's fall, or is it fall because of my feelings?
Fall is leaving: school then and now, the Philippines, laying under the stars with a summer fling as a few of the myriad songbirds winging south divulge their presence with a seep. The leaving has started hurting more than it did before. Places become a part of you. The more times you leave, the more of you remains behind. There's part of me that will always be on an Au Sable River dock, another part uncomfortably wedged into a bamboo floor on a Palawan mountaintop. And yes--some of me nestled into a St. Paul cliff, where seals porpoise across the Bering Sea and murres laugh under me.
I'm not sure what they've got to laugh about this year--sitting on the barren cliffs watching everything fail this year has made me feel like crying.
Almost everything. The fulmars at Ridge Wall made a baby, and it is adorable, a fluff explosion with a tiny tube on its beak. Although they're not as charismatic as the puffins, the fulmars are one of my favorite cliff birds here. They're masters of the wind, gracing land only to nest. When their breeding season ends, they'll depart the cliffs, their mate, but both will return to the same spot the next year, start the cycle again.
I wonder how a fulmar feels about leaving its land and its mate, if it leaves part of itself on St. Paul, then part of itself in the deep ocean canyons where it forages. Perhaps, fulmars do not feel such things, but they sure seem happy whether on land, where they cuddle and preen their mate, or over sea, where they ride the winds joyously.
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| Northern Fulmars, Low Cliffs |
Back in mainland Alaska, a Tacoma and the AlCan are waiting for me. I'm excited for new horizons, sad to leave St. Paul and the part of me that will always live here. Fall is here, with unsettled skies and an unsettled spirit.
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| St. Paul Island, late fall 2015 |
