A Home Away From Home

Pete Dunne

Quick: What do a Minnesota mother of three; a short-order cook in Socorro, New Mexico; a Texas duck hunter; and an Argentinean gaucho have in common? Aside from a shared planet, common ancestry with apes, and a passion for basketball, all four are regularly engaged by envoys from the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and other Alaskan lands.

These are birds.

Long celebrated for its caribou, muskoxen, and polar and grizzly bears, the Arctic Refuge is also, and very much, a 19.3-million-acre bird nesting area and nursery. Every spring and summer, millions of birds of approximately 134 species breed on the refuge, and their courtship displays and vocalizations figure prominently in the tapestry of life that is summer in the Arctic. But while relatively few people will ever travel to the Arctic, virtually all North American residents are visited, annually, by the birds that call the refuge their summer home.

Take our Minnesota homemaker. Like many people, she enjoys feeding birds in winter. They enliven her day and add a dash of color to the winter landscape. Among her feathered minions is a small, nimble, frost-tinged finch bedecked with a jaunty red cap, called the common redpoll. In winter they are widely scattered across Canada and the northern United States. But in summer, they nest in northern boreal forests and willow thickets in arctic regions, including thickets that bracket the rivers of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge—the Kongakut, the Hulahula, the Sheenjek, and others.

The short-order cook? He’s filling breakfast orders for people attending the annual Festival of Cranes in Socorro, which draws birders from across North America. The stately, shadow-colored birds that are the festival’s main attraction spend the winter in nearby Bosque del Apache National Wildlife Refuge. Come summer, the croaking cries of lesser sandhill cranes echo across northern marshes, muskeg, and tundra clear to the Arctic.

The Texas waterfowler is sitting in his duck blind near Aransas National Wildlife Refuge, watching a pair of Arctic-bred pintails that he’s turned with his calling and that are, with every accelerating beat of his heart, descending closer to his decoys. And the gaucho? He’s riding herd, checking on the cattle that share the pampas grasslands with the Chorlo pampa (a.k.a. American golden-plover) that forage at the edges of the herd. These celebrated long-distance migrants winter in Argentina. But they breed throughout the Arctic coastal plain.

A week before this writing, I was watching several adult plovers with chicks in the elevated and drier portions of tundra southwest of Icy Reef and the Beaufort Sea. While it’s true that few North American residents visit the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, I do so fairly regularly.

How often is that?

Every chance I get.

My first trip to the refuge was in June of 1989, a backpacking adventure that started from a gravel bar airstrip beside the Kongakut River, made its way across the foothills of the Brooks Range, then wandered out across the coastal plain to Demarcation Bay (on the U.S./Canadian border). I wrote about the trip in a book entitled The Feather Quest and while many memories linger, one stands out.

While taking a short breather on the crest of a flinty ridge, we spied the shaggy form of a muskox feeding in the willows below. At almost the same instant I realized that an American robin was foraging on open tundra a stone’s throw away.

I was struck by the realization that a shaggy, Pleistocene relic that I had never seen before and a bird that I have seen almost every day of my suburban life could be neighbors. Reason dictated that I should have spent my time observing the muskox. I didn’t. I watched the robin instead. But I watched it with new eyes born of a new respect and elevated insight.

The winter range of this hardy thrush covers most of North America (including the south coast of Alaska and portions of southern Canada). Fact is, in coastal New Jersey where I live, there are tens of thousands of wintering robins—far more robins than nest locally. These wintering birds feast on holly berries. In the evening they gather in woodland thickets and white cedar forests, where their bleating calls are almost a din.

Where do these wintering robins come from? Somewhere farther north we can presume—somewhere between Delaware Bay and the Arctic seas. So next spring, when you see that first robin redbreast striding across your lawn, don’t just presume it’s one of the pair nesting in the ornamental tree next door. Its closest summer neighbor might, in fact, be a muskox, a caribou, or a wolf.

That robin might share a willow thicket in the Arctic with the white-crowned sparrow that foraged in your shrubbery all winter and the migrating yellow warbler that’s worked the blossoms of your apple tree for insects the last three spring migrations running. I’ll bet the realtor who sold you your property never mentioned the right of way going right through the center of it. It leads to the Arctic.

Of the 134 species of birds that nest in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, all but five leave before the harsh Arctic winter closes in: gyrfalcon, common raven, rock ptarmigan, willow ptarmigan, and dipper. Some, like the common eider and snowy owl, may travel only a few hundred miles from their breeding territories, to ice-free coastal areas or patches of open water on the frozen Bering Sea. Others, like the long-tailed jaeger and Arctic tern, vault hemispheres, wintering in the southern ocean. One, the northern wheatear, winters in Africa.

Why do birds choose to migrate to the literal end of the Earth in the first place? Two reasons. First, because in summer, beneath the incubating glow of a sun that never sets, the Arctic teems with life. For a few short weeks between June and August, insects abound, snow-bound rodents burst to the surface, and hormonally fueled birds throw caution to the wind. The hunting is good and growing kids—from cliff swallows to peregrine falcons—need protein.

The second answer is: because they can. Many Arctic-nesting birds are long-distance specialists, some able to fly thousands of miles nonstop. The golden-plover that shares the pampas with cattle and gauchos is a virtual flying machine, covering up to 20,000 miles on its round-trip.

Between 2002 and 2005 wife Linda and I traveled across North America working on a book identifying North American birds. We got to see a lot of country. What I remember best was the great concentrations of staging and wintering birds. Great flocks of Lapland longspurs in the skies over Texas. Massed rafts of red-necked phalaropes bobbing in the briny waters of the Great Salt Lake. Great skeins of cranes and snow geese vying for airspace over assorted national wildlife refuges. Shorebird flocks along the Atlantic and Gulf Coasts that blanketed mudflats and writhed like smoke in response to the movements of hunting falcons. All of these are Arctic-nesting birds, and without the Arctic, we wouldn’t have found them there, or anywhere. Without their Arctic nesting grounds, many of these species wouldn’t be.

The Arctic National Wildlife Refuge has been regarded differently by different people. To some it represents “the Serengeti of the North,” to others, “a Frozen Wasteland.” One thing alone is certain: Nothing happens up there that doesn’t have an impact down here. The birds that are the Arctic’s ambassadors carry this message every year. They’re on their way, hoping you’ll receive their credentials. Arriving soon, at a refuge, mud flat, or a backyard near you.

Pete Dunne is Vice President for Natural History Information for the New Jersey Audubon Society and author of a number of books on birds and bird watching, including Pete Dunne’s Essential Field Guide Companion and Pete Dunne on Bird Watching.