Glacier Bay National Park
Glacier Bay National Park is a spectacular place. As naturalists, we are privileged to visit this Park weekly during the Southeast Alaska summer season. You might think that it could become old hat. Not so! Although we travel more or less the same path each time we come here, the experience is always different: different weather, different wildlife and different guests. This morning the light came gently through strata of soft clouds with small glints of sunshine as we approached South Marble Island. We always pass close by South Marble Island because of the incredible concentration of wildlife we find there and this day was no exception.
First came the roaring of hundreds of Steller’s sea lions that were hauled out on rock ledges and cruising along in the water. Although we have seen a few pups born here over the past few years (including one last week), this is primarily a men’s club with adult females involved in pupping and breeding activities in rookeries outside the bay. Some of the Glacier Bay males are breeding size and age (and that means huge…males reaching weights of just over a ton), but not yet tough enough to be one of the privileged 10% that are ever able to participate in holding territories in the breeding colonies. Others were just young ones learning the ropes and vaguely dreaming of life as a breeder.
Next, we came to a rock face plastered with birds: black-legged kittiwakes, glaucous-winged gulls, common murres and most impressively, tufted puffins. These puffins are related to the Atlantic puffins, which most people know, but have beautiful, long tufts of yellow feathers gracing each side of their head that appear combed back like some creative young punker hairstylist gone wild. They spend ¾ of the year offshore from the Gulf of Alaska to central California and come here to Glacier Bay for the brief summer to breed and raise their young. In addition to the birds on the cliffs, we saw black oystercatchers, pigeon guillemots, pelagic cormorants and bald eagles flying all around us or sitting on the calm surface of the sea. Throw in a few sea otters and you have a picture of how our day went…and all this before 9:30 a.m.!
The remainder of the day followed suit with sightings of 8 brown bears, mountain goats, humpback whales and calving glaciers. Sharing all these experiences with our shipmates was the “frosting on the cake” to our journey 65 miles up Glacier Bay into the heart of this spectacular, protected, wild landscape.
