Wednesday, March 18, 2020

Counting Birds at the End of the World
Flying biologist Heather Wilson’s unique skills take her to the Alaskan skies



A PHOTO ESSAY BY ERINN SPRINGER VOGUE March 13, 2020


AN EXCERPT

“Do you do well in small planes?”

I don’t fully understand the question until the horizon tilts to 45 degrees, and the plane cabin hops over the wake of our jet stream. I’m in the jump seat of Heather Wilson’s Cessna 206, and until today, the smallest plane I’d been in was the commercial 40-seat Ravn Air flight that brought me here to Alaska’s Cold Bay.



Behind the yoke is Wilson, a biologist pilot for the United States Fish and Wildlife Service. She’s not your typical cruising-above-cloudline flier: With wings at 500 feet, Wilson skillfully and swiftly banks the plane towards the lagoon below, locking her eyes on a blur of flying Pacific black brant geese while she recites what she sees into the helmet-wired audio recorder.

We are here to count birds—thousands of them.



A persistent gray sky hangs heavy and low, blanketing everything beyond an arm’s length above my head.



Cold Bay has a small tangle of dirt roads connecting a few dozen free-standing houses and community centers, adorned with caribou antlers and parked ATVs. The old church, previously a military pre-fab Quonset hut with a DIY board-and-nail steeple, held its final mass in 2008 and is now used for storage.



Wilson transcribes her audio recordings in a corner table at the Izembek NWR headquarters.



After checking the weather and waiting for the 8:30 a.m. sunrise, Wilson drives Ol’ Red, a much beloved Ford, to the USFWS hangar to begin the pre-flight protocol.



“I think of the Cessna 206 as a Swiss army knife. It can do so many things well...and that makes it a very useful plane for aerial survey work,” says Wilson.

At the tip of the Alaskan peninsula, Cold Bay occupies a strip of land hugged by two tides emanating from the Pacific Ocean to the south and Bering Sea to the north. Cold Bay is 768 miles south of the Arctic Circle and 335 miles west of Honolulu: a place so remote that its permanent residents include 38 households and a rotating cast of brown bears, wolves, foxes, caribou, and lots of birds (at this time of year, about a quarter of a million).

Every fall, thousands of migratory waterfowl take refuge in the lagoons of the nearby Izembek National Wildlife Refuge (NWR) and State Game Refuge, including the entire population (roughly 160,000) of Pacific black brant geese. Peppered amongst Emperor geese, Canada geese, and Steller’s eiders, brant annually reunite with their relatives to stage, or fatten up, on the world’s largest eelgrass beds before setting forth to their respective wintering grounds. Some will travel to protected bays along the Pacific coast of the U.S., though most are headed for Mexico’s Baja Peninsula, and an ever-growing portion—about 30%—remain in Izembek due to the warming winters.


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