Alaskan Adventures of Mareth Griffith.
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Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007
| Hello to Friends, Family, Theater
People, Birding People, Smith People and Wine Shop People, Due to a complete lack of time on my part for sending out individual emails, I'm sending out a mass email update on what I've been up to the past couple weeks. I'm in Alaska right now, working as a tour guide/ask-questions-of person for a research aquarium, and I'll probably be here in Alaska for about six months. I'm having a great time, and I would love to know what all of my friends in more civilized parts of the world are up to. Mareth Date: Thu, 5 Apr 2007 The moose made it very apparent that I wasn't in West Virginia any longer. I flew into Denver around 3pm local time, and was a little surprised at the complete absence of anything resembling the Rocky Mountains. A little disappointing at first - and then the plane turned around a bit as it taxied, and there they were. Yep, they're big. And probably at least ten miles away. And the ground between me and the mountains was very, very flat. Well, Colorado does border the great plains, after all. The flight up to Anchorage was pretty uneventful, which is always a good thing in air travel. I saw some of the scenery the last hour of the flight, and all I could think was 'That's a lot of snow." And what isn't snow is this very hard, black rock. Right now, the mountains look like a pen and ink drawing. It reminds me of Glencoe, Scotland. The airport in Anchorage is probably the most beautiful airport I've ever seen. Architecture, I've learned, comes in two general types here in Alaska - the beautiful, Native-inspired, pine-wood and glass buildings for the visitors to look at, and the more practical, insulated pre-fab concrete boxes that seem to comprise most of the buildings in the state. The SeaLife Center, where I'm interning, is a bit of a mix - the visitors get the big glass windows and the art deco lobby - and the staff back in the research corridor get the insulated boxes. (The building really is made of two almost completely separate buildings, as an earthquake safety measure. Of course, if another big earthquake did hit here, the safety precautions will probably mean that the pieces of rubble will be big enough that the resulting tidal wave will only throw them partway up the cliff...) Anyway, back to the moose... I took a taxi to my hostel, pay the driver and heave my rucksack onto my back. Someone pops their hear round the hostel gate and yells something completely incomprehensible in a pretty thick Polish accent. I make my way over the skating rink that doubles as the hostel parking lot, and go through the gate myself... and see the biggest deer I have ever seen in my life, literally fifteen feet from where I was standing. I freeze - thinking that within the next five seconds either it will be running from me... or I will be running from it. The moose didn't even bat an eye. She continued eating the trees along the back fence, and I follow the Polish guy into the hostel. I took some pictures later from the back porch. The hostel owner told me that she's a young female, who's spent most of the winter browsing around this area of Anchorage. I saw her again the following morning a few houses away, and I saw a second urban moose in another part of Anchorage later on. Moose are pretty unflappable, and bull moose and mothers with calves can be pretty aggressive at certain times of the year. It is legal here to shoot a moose or bear that is threatening a person (or someone's house, or car, or dog, etc). They're called defense of life and property shootings, and where I am now (Seward) had the most such shootings anywhere in Alaska last year. Comforting thoughts... I bought a bear bell the other day, and am now jingling my way about the town. There's a good variety of interesting birds here, considering that it's still the middle of winter. Ravens are the most common bird in town, along with Northwestern Crows, indistinguishable from their more southerly cousins except by their call, which is rather squeakier. There are a few Herring Gulls hanging about the harbor, but the most common large gull here is the Glaucous-Winged Gull. These guys spend a lot of their time cruising across town between the small boat harbor on one end, and the fish processing plant on the other. Their big roost is on a row of apartment buildings across from where I'm staying - the roof has a rather good layer of guano just at the moment. Kittiwakes and Mew Gulls tend to hang out at the fish processing plant, and on top of the harbor's sea wall, but if the plant isn't actually cutting up fish just then, the gulls generally find other places to be. The most common sea duck here are Common Mergansers, and we also have a good number of Barrow's Goldeneye and some gorgeous Harlequin Ducks. My Guilliemots (called Common Murres here) can be seen in small groups hanging about offshore, waiting to moult into their spiffier breeding plumage and head to their cliffs. By the end of the month, there will probably be more species of auks coming closer to shore, but right now the it's just the Guilliemots, and a few dozen Red-Faced Cormorants. And yep, there are quite a few bald eagles in the area. I saw two my first morning, and I was all prepared to be really impressed. But I suppose I've seen too many images of bald eagles already, usually adorning something that is supposed to be stirring and patriotic. Or in an ad that's trying to sell you a car. Or a washing machine. Or a war. Fortunately all this nonsense doesn't bother the bird, although it does bother this birdwatcher. I have been working at the Alaska SeaLife Center for two weeks now, and I'm splitting my time between being on the floor of the aquarium, talking to visitors and answering questions, and training to give tours and talks later on in the season. We also have a touch tank here, and I get to show people starfish and anemonies. Who knew I would ever become so fond of invertebrates? Right now there's not very many visitors - but I'm told it will get really busy around the beginning of May. I'll try to send an update out in a week or so to let everyone know what I've actually been doing at the SeaLife Center. Cheers, everyone, and write and let me know what you're up to. Love, Mareth |