Tundra Sunrise
I was up for sunrise in Deadhorse last week. That’s not too hard, it’s coming up around 8:00 am or so now. The days are getting much shorter. Hey is that snow? Umm, yep. It’s winter up here. Wasn’t too cold though, high 20s right now. The arctic foxes are in whiteout and I thought the vast majority of birds had left. Caught some scoters in the slush though, they looked like they were having fun. The Arctic ocean is freezing up quickly.
The King Eider
Somateria spectabilis, The King Eider is a large, ornately plumaged duck that spends the predominate portion of its life in the very far north. Its breeding grounds in the Americas are in the Arctic and the North West Territories and it winters mostly no farther south than the Aleutian Islands. In addition it spends the predominate portion of its life out on the remote northern waters and therefore is not easily observable.
The King Eider population migrates very early, sometimes to their own detriment, flying across the tundra in flocks reported at up to 113,000 in one half hour period. Now these birds fly at about 60 km/hr at less than 100 meters off the ground. Imagine yourself on the Arctic tundra with over one hundred thousand birds, flying less than three hundred feet over your head, at forty miles an hour. Wow. And these migrations can fill the sky for hours, ten hours in the case of this particular report.