Alaskan Dinosaur Expedition

July 17 update: Gulls, puffins and sea otters in Homer

I've now met some people at the tiny Pratt Museum of natural history in Homer. The two curators that I've met are refugees from elsewhere. Carol Harding spent some fifteen years at the Milwaukee Public Museum, and Betsy Webb spent twenty-some years at the Denver Museum of Natural History. I think the Pratt has greatly benefited from their collective experiences.

Of course, Homer is in a rich area for natural history discussion, and the museum does a very nice job of maximizing the visitor experience. They've set up a prototype of an exhibit that includes interactive live cameras on a gull rookery on an island in the bay. There are four cameras set up in the rookery, and with a joystick you can switch the view to whatever camera you want. Suddenly there will be a gull looking right into the camera lens; you'd think it could poke you in the eye.

In the new age of electronics, it appears that one does not have to be a pretentious large museum to be at the edge of museology.

Davis Webb of Magic Canyon Ranch offered to take me out on the bay in his boat. I happened to ask him at breakfast if there was a place to see puffins around here. I had hoped for a place I could walk to; instead he offered the boat, and off we headed for the gull island. This is a major nesting spot for herring gulls and common murres. In addition, the island is home to tufted puffins. I'm not sure why, but seeing puffins in the wild has always been high on my list of things to do. Now, thanks to Davis, I have.

I'm not sure I have ever seen such a mass of birds before. And what a racket! I'm sure to all the birds it made perfect sense, but from my perspective the activity I observed appeared as total chaos. Given that many birds, I expected a certain overpowering smell, but I never detected one. We circled the island so being downwind would have mattered, but it didn't. We also headed over to a huge rock and saw more birds, sea lions and dozens of sea otters. It was like a Mutual of Omaha wildlife experience.

I was told an interesting story about these gulls. Apparently a well-meaning woman in town started feeding the eagles. By artificially increasing the food resources, she increased the eagle population -- which in turn affected these gulls and auks. She had to be ordered by somebody to stop

Balance. I marvel at the balance in nature. Frank Herbert had a planet ecologist in his classic novel Dune describe ecology as the study of consequences. Perhaps this woman should have read Herbert's story....

If there is one thing that could possibly distract me from what I'm about to do, it's that the weather cleared over the last couple of days. There are crystal-clear blue skies, and I can see the Alaskan peninsula from here. The weather is beautifully clear so Iliamna, a 10,000-foot volcanic peak, is visible across the water.

Seeing the birds at the rookery made me stop and think about the work ahead of me. Small dinosaurs are known from the Colville River. What if this turns out to be a nesting site? And instead of these thousands of gulls, there were thousands of 30-foot-long dinosaurs? The potential noise and chaos then must have been magnitudes greater than what I have just witnessed. What a thought to entertain!

...After two great clear days, it is overcast with sporadic drizzling. Even these conditions are beautiful here. I believe I have new friends here in Homer so leaving now, to drive back to Anchorage, has an element of sadness to it.