The Gambell gamble

Gambell, AK, is a small whaling village at the northwest tip of St. Lawrence Island in the Bering Sea. About 600 people live there. A lodge is available for visitors. Our birding guide Aaron Lang, owner/operator of Wilderness Birding Adventures, arranged for our group of 7 to stay there. He and assistant guide Steve Heinl had access to the kitchen area and prepared our meals for the 6 days we stayed there. Both guides are very knowledgeable about all Alaskan birds. Steve is among an elite group of five people who have seen more than 400 species of birds in the state of Alaska. Both Aaron and Steve are highly respected in the birding community and both serve on the Alaska Bird Checklist Committee. Aaron also serves on the ABA Checklist Committee.

Our group included Sue Riffe, Tom Hall, Michael Costello, Sandy Winkler, Lori Pivonka, Oliver Komar and yours truly, Nick Komar. Most of us arrived late morning on June 4, almost a full day later than planned because low cloud cover over Gambell delayed our one-hour flight from Nome with Bering Air. Aaron had been there a couple of days. My brother Oliver had arrived on a flight from Nome on June 3. The airport at Gambell is a single runway with no terminal or staff. The pilot opens the door. The copilot pulls out the stairway and out we went. Two ATVs were waiting for us. One pulled a wooden cart for our luggage and the other pulled a makeshift trailer with benches for our group to sit on. This was the “Birding Bus” available exclusively for Aaron’s tours. Within minutes we were settling in at the lodge, a no-frills barracks with about 20 small bedrooms with two single beds each. Showers and bathrooms were communal. Aaron informed us that another visiting birder, Brad Benter (who was actually in Gambell on official USFWS business) had refound the Common House-Martin that had showed up a few days earlier in Gambell and was waiting for us to arrive at the site to make sure we got it for our checklist. 

With Asian vagrants like this swallow, the bird could fly away or perish at any time, so it was important to search for this bird without delay. This bird is similar to the Tree Swallow in North America. Like the Tree Swallow it is dark iridescent blue above (back, wings, nape and crown) and bright white below (throat, chest and belly). It differs primarily by sporting a large white patch on the rump feathers. Its tail is more deeply forked as well. It survives by hawking small insects in flight, but at Gambell the air temperature rarely surged above 35F and patches of ice and snow still covered the ground. We were lucky this house-martin was still present. 

Aaron was excited for us because the wind had been consistently from the west for about a week so he was expecting more East Asian vagrants. But sometimes they don’t show up. John Vanderpoel spent 10 days at Gambell during the peak of spring migration for his Big Year effort in 2011 and was virtually skunked. Spending valuable time and funds to be in Gambell was certainly a gamble. And we hoped to strike gold. After being ferried by the Birding Bus about a mile from the lodge we found Brad perched between Gambell’s only lake which was mostly frozen and Gambell’s only mountain which featured many boulders and cliffs  and patches of snow, and some seedless grasses. Aaron explained that his land use license allowed access only to the lake area and the town and the sea shore. The mountain side was used as a burial ground and hunting  zone and was off limits to birders. The rest of St. Lawrence Island was similarly off limits. The island is several hundred square miles in area but we birders were restricted to an area about 5 square miles in size.  

As I looked around at the ice of the 

lake and snowfields of the mountainside I understood Aaron’s urgency to find the swallow for us now. “There it is,” exclaimed my brother. A tiny swallow was flying towards us. It seemed to be foraging low over the snowfields perhaps looking for ice gnats in the snow. We could see the forked tail and the white rump that determined the swallow’s identity as Common House Martin. Amazing. I told Aaron that this was my 699th bird of the year within the USA and it’s Territories. “In that case, let’s get your 700th species before lunch. A Rustic Bunting has been in the circular boneyard the last few days and it was seen this morning by the VENT group.”

Off we went in the birding bus to a weedy patch near the edge of town. Aaron explained that the four weedy patches spread around town are boneyards where the whale bones left over from the community whaling hunts are buried. The nutrients from the bones support the growth of seed-bearing weeds. Furthermore, these weedy patches are full of shallow holes where townspeople have dug for bones that can be recycled for carvings and jewelry and the like. Many of the holes had accumulated water which could also attract birds. We spread out as we moved slowly through the boneyard, to ensure that we didn’t miss any skulking vagrants. We flushed a few Lapland Longspur and Snow Bunting, both common summer residents. A White Wagtail was also presumed to be a local breeder. It is one of a handful of species that spend the winter in Asia and regularly arrive annually to breed in Alaska. Aaron spotted the female Rustic Bunting which flushed in front of him and flew a short distance like an Ammodramus sparrow. Sparrows in this genus typically are weak flyers so when they land they scramble like mice through the weeds to avoid detection. This bunting’s streaky dark brown and gray plumage provided camouflage against the weeds of the same colors.  Eventually we all got decent views of this vagrant Rustic Bunting (700). 

After a lunch break, we searched another “bone yard” and re-found a Dark-eyed Junco, a vagrant from mainland Alaska. From there it was a short hike to the sea watch point along the beach where another group of birders traveling with Victor Emmanuel Nature Tours (VENT) had assembled. As we walked towards them, a message came across Aaron’s two-way radio. It was from Kevin Zimmer, one of the VENT leaders. “Just had a flyby Ross’s Gull headed in your direction.” There were birds flying by us towards them but nothing in the air moving towards us. Had it landed? Yes! There it was, about 100 feet away resting with a pair of Black-legged Kittiwake which towered over the diminutive gull. Ross’s Gull (701) is a tiny gull from the Arctic Ocean that rarely turns up at Gambell or anywhere else south of the Arctic Circle. It has long narrow wings that allow it to move gracefully like a tern. But instead of a tern’s long forked tail it has a long diamond or wedge-shaped tail which it uses as a rudder to make acrobatic flight manouvers down to the water surface to pick up a tasty food morsel with its dainty black bill which resembles the tiny bill of a bluebird rather than the big heavy beak of a large gull or long beak of a tern. This bird was a year old so it featured plumage characteristics of both a juvenile and an adult. It’s wings portrayed the heavy black M pattern over a light gray background typical of a juvenile and its breast was bright pink like an adult. It’s head was encircled by a thin black line like a necklace which gives the adult Ross’s Gull such a unique appearance. 

Ross’s Gull was my most wanted bird for most of my life, ever since I missed seeing the famous bird at Newburyport Harbor (Massachusetts) in 1975 by a few seconds. I finally caught up to one in Colorado in 2010 that was in non-breeding plumage. This individual was even more beautiful. I was so excited to see the pink Ross’s Gull that my arms were shaking which made photography quite difficult. I had to get on my belly and prop up my camera with my elbows firmly planted in the pebbles of the beach. Fortunately the gull was in no rush to leave and I was able to get decent photographs and video of the bird in flight as it foraged in the wave line just offshore. I took a brief break to photograph a drake and two hen Steller’s Eider (702) floating by. The Steller’s Eider was a life bird for me but I was mesmerized by the Ross’s Gull. After about 30 minutes, the gull moved on down the beach and I turned my attention to other birds flying by. A good variety of species were on the move. I added King Eider (703) and Least Auklet (704) and Black Guillemot (705). 

Later that day, we returned to the circular boneyard hoping to find a Pipit that Aaron had glimpsed earlier. Oliver pointed out a dark-backed Gull flying over the north beach. He yelled out “Slaty-backed Gull!” Sure enough his photos confirmed the identification.  Slaty-backed Gull (706) is uncommon but not unexpected at Gambell. It normally nests in Siberia and winters in Korea and Japan. That evening at the lodge we were all in a good mood retelling our stories from that day. Brian Gibbons, the Vent tour co-leader who had first spotted the Ross’s Gull, described a second one he saw later in the day. 

Most of the excitement (Asian vagrants and other new year birds) occurred that first day in Gambell. During the next five days there, we did find some additional North American vagrants including Golden-crowned Sparrow, Yellow-rumped Warbler and Hermit Thrush. Viewing the array of auklets perched on the steep slopes and  rock ledges of the mountain in Gambell was a fabulous experience. Many thousands of pairs of Least, Crested and Parakeet Auklets along with Tufted and Horned Puffins and Pigeon Guillemot was an amazing site. Unfortunately we could not find any Dovekie along with them, although a small population of this North Atlantic alcid seems to persist near Gambell. A foraging Arctic Fox prowling the mountainside above us made it even more interesting. 

On June 7, during a walk through the boneyards near the airstrip, a plover snuck by us overhead, detected only by its flight call. Steve and Aaron agreed that the call was from a Common Ringed-Plover  (707). This Asian stray actually has nested at Gambell and we wondered if it might have a nesting territory nearby. A couple of searches beyond the airstrip failed to find anything other than Semipalmated Plover, a common North American species that appears similar to its Asian cousin. 

During most of our time at Gambell, loons were absent. On June 8, the day before our departure, the floodgates for loons finally opened. Over 250 Pacific Loon and 25 Arctic Loon (708) flew by us at the sea watch that afternoon.  

on the morning of our departure June 9, 2023, we hoped for a surprise at the sea watch. We were not disappointed although the surprise was not a bird but rather a mammal. Aaron was trying to get us onto a high flying Yellow-billed Loon but simultaneously Oliver yelled out “Walrus!” A bull Walrus with long pearly tusks was playing in the waves as the loon flew over. Later Aaron spotted a cow walrus with a pup. In 25 trips to Gambell, Aaron had never seen a Walrus there. 

I had one final score to settle before leaving  Gambell. I wanted to find that Common Ringed Plover. Oliver and Sandy joined me in the search while waiting for the Bering Air flight that would ferry us back to Nome. I speculated that the location we first heard the plover fly over two days earlier was indeed its territory and that the flyover was defensive behavior in response to our presence. So we retraced our steps and bingo the same calling plover came flying by. This time we were better prepared. We got eyes on the bird and I was able to record the call using my Merlin app, which also corroborated the identification. I uploaded the sound file to the eBird checklist. Photos, sound files and checklists can be viewed through the trip report here: https://ebird.org/tripreport/142935. 

Looking back, the trip to Gambell added 10 species for my USA and Territories Big Year and launched me back to first place in the ABA area top 100 list for 2023 in eBird, albeit only temporarily. I’d say that the gamble on Gambell paid off.