Karen's Aura

Karen connects with critters.  Encountering virtually any pooch during her frequent walks, it will "melt" in her presence.  She constantly hears "Grizz," or whatever the usually wary or shy dog's name is, "never does that for anyone.  Never!"  Karen's an "animal whisperer" and their 6th sense "reads" it.  That's why she gets such natural photos of everything from bears to slugs to, well, greater yellowlegs.

And so, during a recent outing, Karen heard a racket.  The source: a raucous handful of crows, the creaky door-hinge screech of a bald eagle and frantic alarm cries from two greater yellowlegs, a shorebird that nests in our local muskegs.  Aha, thought Karen, a photo op.  

Slogging towards the sound through the muskeg she discovered the three vocal species in trees bordering a small pond while three naive fledgling yellowlegs set about their daily chores among the sedges surrounding the pond.  This scenario's natural progression might have been the eagle would swoop down to kidnap one of the young yellowlegs.  With dinner secure in the eagle's talons, the crows would charge forth in a well orchestrated attempt to appropriate the raptor's feast for their own dining pleasure while the adult yellowlegs vocalized extreme displeasure as they pursued in a futile rescue mission. 

But a guardian angel arrived to change the narrative.  And that angel, Karen, had neared the yellowlegs family.  In such situations frantic yellowlegs, being vigorous defenders of their nests and fledglings, dive bomb to within inches of we humans with incessant no trespassing warnings that make us duck or perhaps consider donning a World War I helmet for safety.  Always.

Instead, these adult yellowlegs quieted down, surveying the action from trees as the crows and eagles lingered in "theirs."  Somehow those extremely protective shore birds sensed Karen was an ally.  I can be the distance of three end to end football fields (with the end zones tacked on) from a yellowlegs nest or chick and I'm going to be under siege.

Karen stealthily inched forward to where she could clearly see the entire family.  Reaching perhaps the length of a bowling alley from the birds, she sank down into the muskeg with sundew practically towering above her, and paused.  Wait a minute!  There are no bowling alleys in muskegs or football fields nor can Karen hide behind a sundew plant.  Sorry about that!

There she waited next to the yellowlegs brood while no warning calls, no threatening dive bombing -- just silence prevailed.  Soon one of the birds waded towards Karen and the frustrated predators exited stage left while Karen, now adopted by the family, seemed no more threatening than a blueberry. 

Karen writes, "It was an experience I will never forget, watching the interactions of three fledglings splash with great abandon, water droplets flying everywhere.  They dunked their whole body under and bobbed to the surface, only to repeat, shimmering in the golden sunlight, paddling close to one another while the third bird preened and closed it's eyes." 

Yes Karen's "aura" once again reigned and something that "never happens," happened -- or doesn't it?  Today she reflects on the time when a mother hoary marmot on a wild ridge in the Yukon left Karen to babysit her playful pups while mama scampered off to another ridge to gather "hay."   But, that's another story.

The pond

A watchful parent

There's no way Karen can hide behind this long leaf sundew!

Is this what pecking order means?

That lady looks pretty funny from this point of view

A bird needs to be careful when stretching because...

A lesson in health care:  Remember that blade of sedge from the last photo?

Wait a minute!  How can a bird have such long legs?

Better look again.

Bath time.  Karen wanted to join in.

Is this nap time or are "we" preening?

Or could this be nap time with the ultimate feather pillow?

What! Is this fledgling scratching with its wing?

And so we'll end with this image of two innocents that 

never knew how their Guardian Angel saved them.

End of the Age of Innocence

We were officially welcomed to the New Age by an algorithm.  No humans are necessary in this new world.  For several days I had been deleting admonishments from some outfit I had never heard of called Meta -- that I was supposed to do something with a number Mr. Meta sent. Having been repeatedly warned about scams, there was no way I was going to respond to this Meta guy.  I deleted all of them as they arrived.  But on the last one, just as it faded from my computer screen I noticed something about accessing Facebook from Houston and then it was gone.  Ooh, what was that about?  Better check our Facebook page, maybe change the password.

Too late!  It turns out we had been booted from Facebook for “not following their community standards.”  What?  Maybe three months before I had posted some photos of birds Karen had taken on a local birders website.  That’s it.  Period!  Oh my, Facebook has weird standards — or — had we been hacked?

OK, just to be safe, I attempted to change our password and appealed getting booted off. Mr. Meta only responded that that I could appeal.  Wait — that’s what I was doing.  So I appealed once more and again, Mr. Meta informed I could appeal. I soon discovered after more attempts with the identical result, when you correspond with Facebook you aren’t dealing with a living being — only an algorithm.  Welcome to the New Age.

And if a Facebook algorithm decides you’re guilty, you are guilty.  End of discussion.  For a month the algorithm advised me that I had 30 days to appeal.  So I wrote a heartfelt description of the sum of Karen’s and my mostly inactivity on Facebook in modern history and sent it off.  It was so heartfelt I was sure it would bring tears to Mark Zuckerberg’s eyes.  Immediately the algorithm responded that I needed to condense my protest into the words which it supplied: “appeal decision” and press enter.   Mr. Zuckerberg wasn’t interested in my reasons.  If I didn’t hear back, his algorithm judged me guilty with no further appeal process.  An internet search suggested ways to find a real human that must be on Facebook’s payroll, but each one lead to the same algorithm.  A hacker had shot me out of the proverbial saddle and I can’t even ride a horse.

But, I’ve digressed from my intent in this blog.  Within a couple of days, an email, perhaps related to the above described hack, arrived.  Someone wanted what amounted to millions of dollars from me in bitcoins in exchange for removing something from the internet.  Nonsense of course, but wait — to prove it was real, the hacker provided the password for our email account — a password which I had just changed two days earlier when we realized our Facebook account had been hacked.  Whoa.  Somebody was seriously into our internet presence.  He also claimed to have all sorts of bogus info and pictures of Karen and me that didn’t exist.  However, knowing how pictures can be altered on computers, that didn’t matter.  My body could be made to look like a donkey in a clown suit and some people would believe it.   

I deleted the email without even reading the entire thing.

From that day on, internet life became somewhat of a time-consuming enemy to be reckoned with on a daily basis.  First I began changing our passwords and removed the list of them I kept on our computers.  We took our computers to Homeport Electronics (the good guys in my tales of woe) to be checked for malware and viruses.  Clean — except for the fingerprints on the screen.

It seems we’re getting scam and phishing emails on a more frequent basis including on my cell phone. Now they feel more invasive, more dangerous.  I notice they seem to be more cleverly disguised and now most are coming on our cell phone.

So, here we are.  In the past year someone supposedly got our credit card, took out a $200 loan at an ATM in Petersburg and the bank claims it has no record of it while our credit card company claims it’s real and the tab’s on us.

We have cell phone service with Tracfone and when I thought I was signing up for automatic renewal on our iPhone, the ad was for a second plan so I ended up getting billed for two phone plans when Karen hadn’t made a dozen calls in five months.  Tracfone refused to refund our money.  Can’t wait for our one year contract with them to end.  I’m still working on that one.

The internet, with email and formerly, Facebook, that lets us keep in touch so easily with friends and family has taken on a sinister shadow.  We mourn the loss of the age of innocence in our daily lives.   

The lesson should be, get away from this addiction with technology and get back to those activities I, so enjoyed before this invasion in our lives.  Yes, for sure.  Just as soon as I track our last order from Amazon.

Perhaps a few of Karen's photos that didn't make it in our 2024 calendar will relieve the stress reading the above induces.

Courting Barrow's goldeneye drakes doesn't seem to impress his "lady."

'

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Song Sparrow with feast of wild celery seeds.

Well-fed young raven begs for more.

Gulls "chilling" on iceberg

Pacific wren chick

Wild Celery:  Careful, it can burn when touched.

One glance from this critter and Karen turns to jelly.

The Lady and the Sea Lion

The arrival of our helicopter on Seal Rock, a naked pile of stones on bedrock off the southern entrance to Prince William Sound, scattered the adult sea lions like dandelion seeds in a gust of wind.  It was the early 1970s and we were on a mission to brand their new-born pups, innocents born far from the presence of man -- until we showed up.  This Steller’s sea lion natal rookery lays along the route the Exon Valdez would have taken had it not encountered Blye Reef.   The research project goal -- to learn about the movements of these Sea Lions.  After they matured,  branded sea lions could be tracked as they roamed about the Gulf of Alaska.  No one knew if populations from different rookeries moved about or remained faithful to their “rock of birth.”  Armored with hip boots and heavy rain gear, we would wade into tide pools where the temporarily abandoned pups congregated.  With the brands each one received it’s personal identity  - kind of like it’s own social security number. 

If you’re envisioning clear pools of sea water, the substrate covered with flowing strands of green kelp, red and green sea stars decorating outcroppings and sea anemones waving their tentacles hoping to snare a passing tidbit of plankton, you haven’t been to a tide pool on Seal Rock.  Sea lions are not house broken.  When the mother gives birth, no mid wife cleans up the remnants.  When a pup dies, there is no funeral procession to remove the last remains.  These pools are opaque brown, the surrounding air fouled with their stench.  Our job -- to wade into these septic messes and grab the pups in a frenzy of splashes in their attempt to get away.

In the early 1970s the Alaska Department of Fish and Game was an undemocratic organization.  Female biologists were not welcome beyond the office.  Statements like “could you imagine how wives would feel if their husbands went into the field with a woman,” prevailed.  Eventually a few courageous women braved that prejudice to be hired by the Division to work in the lab.  The Lady was the first woman in the Anchorage office to finally break the ultimate shatter-proof glass ceiling and go into the field.  Her first assignment -- a helicopter ride to Seal Rock. 

The project coordinator assigned her what seemed like a somewhat benign task.  At the head of a large elongated tide pool, where most of our quarry congregated, a gray rock ridge separated the “pond” from the swells rolling in from the Gulf of Alaska.  At low tide, the restless surface of the Gulf waters lay many feet below the level of the tide pool, but incoming swells swept high up the ridge.  On the Gulf side a bull sea lion weighing as much as a Volkswagen Beetle seemed particularly intent with reclaiming his territory.  The Lady’ job -- Persuade him it was now hers.  While she had a gun, the idea was that just by standing on the narrow rock outcrop, perhaps 10-feet above the pool and twice as far above the open ocean, he would agree.  Wrong.  As each swell surged up the rock face, the bull would rise with it, lunging towards The Lady in an effort to show her who really owned that slab of real estate.  

With each surge the bull became more and more brazen until on one huge ocean wave he rose almost eye to eye with her.  Reflexively she stepped backwards, lost her footing and plunged backward into the tide pool’s primordial soup.  I can still envision the brown geyser that gushed out of her mouth as she emerged from beneath that “goo.”  The Lady did not enjoy the remainder of the field excursion nor the mysterious side effects that haunted her the rest of her life..   In hindsight, I'm sure she regretted her "good fortune" at the becoming the first woman to be a Game Division field biologist that day.

Of course I packed my camera during these tagging operations and exposed more than a few rolls of 35 mm film.  One head shot of a pup caught Karen’s attention.  She wanted to paint it.  It is Karen’s only oil painting, but demonstrates the versatility of this watercolorist recently turned acrylic artist. 

                                 Waiting for Mama  16 x 20 inches  Oil on Canvas

The Mermaid

Karen misses swimming in 4-Mile Lake, Wisconsin, where she spent summers during her childhood years.  She misses it a lot.  And so, this past August, on a muggy (mid-60s) afternoon during a visit by her cousin Connie from Iowa, Karen, Connie and Don hiked up an alder-lined, barricaded gravel road ending at Petersburg's back-up water reservoir.  Karen, her brow revealing beads of moisture, lamented how she wished she could plunge in that lake like she did back at 4 Mile.  "Oh how I wish."    

Reaching the end of the road, Karen disappeared, wandering down to the shore of this wild lake surrounded by virgin spruce and hemlock forest and subalpine mountains.   Not a soul appeared in sight...no one...just the lake, the forested mountains and us.  There, ignoring the no trespassing signs, like the uninhibited child that still lives within, Karen succumbed.  She stripped and plunged in -- Yes, skinny dipping in the town's back-up drinking water supply while Connie and Don, still on the road, thought she was off taking photos.  Finally, refreshed, Karen emerged to bask on a rock and let the sun perform the duties of a plush cotton towel.

And that's when the entire Petersburg high school cross-country track team on a training run crested the last rise in the road above the reservoir to view a 76-year-old version of a scene reminiscent of Denmark's mermaid on a rock.  Karen knew she had been caught when shortly afterwards the cross-country coach came breathlessly running up to ask, "is everything OK?"  Then, spying Karen, dressed by that time except for her dripping hair and sans socks, shoes, and appearing quite refreshed, he grinned.

Now the other character in this saga, Cousin Connie, delights in the variety of trails  around Petersburg, but not the lack of rest room facilities.  She asked. "Would it be safe to pee in the woods?"  "Sure," I assured her, "as long as you get well off the trail and behind a tree."  And so, the day before Connie's visit ended, sure enough, the urge struck.  Checking up and down the trail she determined she was alone,  like at the reservoir, not a soul in sight or within earshot.  Connie stepped off the trail but failed to fully heed the terms of my advice -- well off the trail, behind a tree.  Need I tell you what happened next?  Remember that high school cross-country team and their training runs?  Yep!

That team had quite a summer.

Alas, Karen accidentally deleted her photos of the reservoir that day so instead I'm including some of her favorite images from the past.  Also, included are a couple of photos Karen took of other swimmers in the reservoir.  

The scene of the "crime"

A Sitka black-tailed deer "guards" the entrance gate

 of the road leading to the reservoir.

Alders line the access road to the reservoir...

as well as lupine, here seen blooming in the spring.

Another view of the reservoir in the spring.

Other swimmers in the reservoir, ring-neck ducks with the drake

revealing how the species got it's name.  

I still wonder why they weren't called ring-billed ducks.

Another shot of the drake ring-neck duck.

Oh dear, a Vancouver Canada Goose on the reservoir needs some grooming.

Away from the reservoir, surely no one would see someone off the trail here.

Other walkers on Petersburg's trail system.

Fluff

Petersburg's Clausen Memorial Museum's annual Christmas celebration included a Christmas ornament silent auction fundraiser.  So when the call came out I decided to rise to the occasion.  But what to do?  Ah -- I'd needle felt a sheep and forget hanging it.  My sheep would be a candidate for the lucky high-bidder's Christmas manger scene.

I must say, the project provided more enjoyment than Christmas shopping, wrapping gifts, mailing letters (still not finished) and the other "have tos" that add stress to the holiday season.  But, as for my sheep -- well Fluff, as he transed into a she, also proved that my idea of a sheep looked more like...well, a canine.  Yes, evolution in real time.  So, instead of fighting it, I went with the flow.  

After photographing her in the wild Karen delivered Fluff to the Museum.  That's when I noticed in an image the museum posted on their website that Fluff looked a bit disheveled and had collected a bit of debris during her adventures with Karen.  Off I trotted to collect Fluff for grooming only to discover she had been designated to hang via a paper clip attached to her collar.  Surely I could rig up a harness for her -- no problem.  Umm..er...dang...whoops...oh no...yikes...help...and so Karen did.

Without further ado, I present you with Fluff, Alaska' almost forgotten Iditarod Trail lead sled dog.

The original Fluff off on and adventure

Gaining altitude for a better view

Meeting the neighbors

I present you with Fluff in her new harness

Good dog, Fluff.  Now...Mush!

Of course now you probably want to know a little of Fluff's background so I did a background search and here's what I discovered.

Excerpt from Wackopedia

Many people know delivery of a canister of diphtheria antitoxin saved Nome in January, 1925, and there, the story seemed to end.  

But, did it?  No!  That 20 pound canister of serum was sent off from Anchorage with a 5 cent deposit so it would be returned to be recycled.  And as we all learned from Robert W. Service, "a promise made, is a debt unpaid."  

However, after delivery of the antitoxin, NOAA predicted nothing but intense blizzards for the rest of winter.  While there were plenty of willing mushers, no dogs could be found able to navigate the Iditarod Trail through all that blowing snow.  Could a disaster be averted? 

Yes!  Up barked Fluff with her nose so bright.  Fluff could bring that canister back to the recycling site.

So now you know.  Fluff, the almost forgotten lead sled dog from Nome, Alaska, led the dog team through endless blizzards to return that valued Diphtheria serum canister.   Alas, no epic story appeared in the New York Times or even got a single Tweet.  All that remains is this replica of Fluff needle felted down to the exact detail of that remarkable dog.  

Don Cornelius

The Biggest Bear

 Virtually every Alaskan or visitor to Alaska, who has spent more than 40 seconds out-of-doors, has a bear story.  And while the settings and species vary, every story has two things in common:

1.  Each bear — black, brown aka grizzly, or polar — is the largest of it’s species ever encountered by any human being.

2.  Every adventurer, be it a housewife picking peas in her garden, a motorist driving down the highway in an 80-foot Winnebago, a passenger in the bar of a Princess cruise ship, or wilderness camper in a rain-filled tent, comes within the width of mosquito’s antenna from ... well, that's why it's their story.  

Those are simple facts of every bear encounter that cannot be disputed.  Period.  Other details can vary in infinite directions as long as bears play a central role.  Karen and I are no exception to the rule.

One of our adventures began with a two-week planned (note planned) kayak trip to a seabird rookery on a Pacific Ocean island south of Cold Bay, Alaska.  That’s the last you’ll hear about the seabirds where I, as an aspiring wildlife photographer, planned great things.  

Kayaking down the salty Cold Bay as differentiated from the urban Cold Bay, we encountered Thin Point, a sandy spit laced with bear trails and vegetated with nothing taller than waving blades of grass.  Beyond lay the rolling Pacific.   There, Karen and I paused.  Umm, we could get a bit damp launching our kayak in those waves.  Could we land on the island?  Could we get back off?  My camera equipment costs $$.  Lots of $$.  Could there be a hole in our plan?  Maybe two.

We pitched our dome shaped tent “camouflaged” in the color of a grizzly and cached all our food plus anything that might have an odor in the tallest tree.  Oops, there weren’t any trees.  There weren’t any bushes.  So we wrapped it all in multiple layers of plastic plus one more and stashed it in a low spot in the sand dunes well away from our tent.  Safe!

The wind blew.

A night passed.  We took a hike.  Wow, bears.  So many!  I stood guard while Karen bathed in an icy pool of water in a creek draining Frosty Peak as a sow and cub brown bear grazed in a distant meadow above her -- an idylic Sierra Club calendar shot. 

Another day, more wind and I noticed the blowing sand and my shotgun had become good companions.  It felt gritty..  Time to clean it.  I unloaded the gun and laid the shells on my sleeping bag.  I took the gun apart and searched for the cleaning supplies.  Oh dear, the oily and thus smelly gun cleaning equipment nestled among the freeze-dried food in the food cache.  

I strode out into the dunes with the two section of the disassembled shotgun, peeled away the plastic, and found the oil and a rag.  That’s when I glanced towards the tent.  

There a rangy Volkswagen-sized brown bear, not a pleasant-looking creature, stood, it’s nose to the tent door with Karen, totally unaware, engrossed in a book inside.  Now the bear had possession of my wife and worse, my ammo.  Or should it be vice versa?  

What to do?

I had no choice.  

I charged the bear — okay slowly, but a meaningful charge, a noisy charge probably registering on the Richter scale, waving the two halves of the gun over my head, never considering that the bear may have dined on a creature or two with big thingies over its head — caribou antlers.  But, I had no plan B.  Actually I had no plan A either.  

And with a calm glance, with no malice, the bear looked up and simply exited stage left.  

The wind blew.

We moved stage right as we packed the tent the other direction down the beach to a place where there must have been an old cabin because some weathered gray boards lay scattered on the sand.  We re-pitched the tent so the boards lay in front of the tent.  We propped the kayak paddles on two sides and the kayak on the other as a defense warning system.  Safe.  Sort of.

That evening our bear “friend” cornered a sow brown bear with a watermelon-sized cub on top of a nearby bluff.  His apparent plan — dine on her cub.  We fell asleep that night to the sound of the two bears bellowing at one another as darkness enveloped Cold Bay.

Sometime in the night a paddle crashed to the sand.  I leaped out of my sleeping bag to peer in the darkness out the two tent portholes, the door.  Nada.  Surely the wind.  We returned to peaceful slumber.

The scenario repeated as the other paddle crashed to the sand and again, nada.  Wow, some “wind.”  Back to those dreams.

Then … Creak.  something large, something heavy stepped on a board.  That wasn’t the wind.  In dawns early light I peered out the tent door straight into the amber eyes of that Volkswagen-sized brown bear.  I yelled.  The bear, that creature ten times my size, with jaws that could crush a jar of peanut butter, simply turned, and once again, never displaying the loss of a shred of dignity, waddled back down the beach.

With adrenalin flooding every cell in my body I emerged from the tent to find a well-worn bear trail circumventing it.  A sandy bear paw print that dwarfed the size of my hand showed proof he had tested the nature of the fabric.  Just once.  He had bitten our Klepper kayak so the hole punctured the air chamber.  Just once.  We peacefully slept through all that — the repeated walking around the tent, the testing the tent, the chomping on the kayak.  And I claim to be a light sleeper.

Our food cache?  Down the beach I found piles and piles of bear scat full of freeze-dried foods, peas, lentils, beans, carrots, shredded plastic, in fact all of our food and wrappers except half a jar of peanut butter and a packet of instant cocoa.  Everything.  The freeze-dried food had shot through the bear’s digestive system virtually unscathed.  In truth we really could have salvaged it.  We didn’t.  He must have had quite some night.  Oh, for the record, the bear didn’t eat the gun cleaning rag and oil either. 

The wind stopped blowing as we gathered up the remnants of our food cache and lit a bon fire.  It stopped blowing as we patched our kayak with the ubiquitous duct tape.  And it stopped blowing as we launched our kayak to retreat to Cold Bay paddling all evening and night to arrive in time to see the most glorious crimson sunrise over Pavlov Volcano, a sunrise that quickly yielded to a horrendous storm, a storm with horizontal sheets of rain that flattened our tent into our faces and defied all our illusions that it could repel water — a storm that would have pinned us on Thin Point with no food, soaking wet and that Volkswagen-sized bear had we not retreated the previous evening.

By the way, for the record, it was the biggest bear we’ve ever seen.  Just say’n.

Now Karen wonders what that bear tells his grandchildren about those odd two-legged kayakers.

Lacking any photos of any of the bears we saw on that trip (three were too close and the rest, not close enough) and those were the days before digital photography, I'm including a painting of a smaller brown bear on Chichagof Island I did a few years ago.

                                   Termination  18 x 24 inches  Alkyd on Canvas