The town of Deadhorse (Prudhoe Bay) Alaska is the biggest industrial area you've ever seen. There are no homes, no shopping, not much of anything except machines and shops and trucks associated with oil drilling here at the start of the Alyeska Pipeline.
The people who work for the various drilling and trucking companies live in barracks called "Man Camps," where they eat, sleep, and, I guess, play if they have any time. They work for varying lengths of time (three weeks or longer) and when the time they signed up for is over, the company flies them back and forth at no cost to Anchorage or Fairbanks for their equal time off . There are no parks or outdoor recreation areas or amenities at all.
So, you wouldn't usually go birding in the industrial area of town. But Deadhorse sits smack on the edge of the Arctic tundra, which is the breeding grounds for several species. We hadn't really thought of that though and so we didn't really give ourselves the time to really GO birding here. But, without really trying we saw quite a few wonderful ones anyway.
There were several families of Greater White Fronted Geese. This was a first-time sighting for us.
And tons of Snow Geese — both the blue phase and the white. We had seen flocks and flocks of the white ones in New Mexico one Fall several years ago. That might even be where these very ones will end up, since they leave the Arctic sometime in October.
The blue ones were new to us. When we took the security bus to the Arctic Ocean, there was a hand-made sign out on the tundra (near the oil rigs) that said "Slow Please. Snow Goose Flight-Training Area." It made me happy to know that the workers cared. (I wish I could have gotten a picture of the sign. But the driver had his timing down to the second, so I couldn't even ask.) (Here is a link to an earlier post about this area.)
Another shot of the white-fronted goose family.
These look like Snow Geese, but their billls look black. Maybe it's a trick of the light. Otherwise, I'm not sure what these guys are.
Sharing these Arctic Ocean sightings with WILD BIRD WEDNESDAY. Thank you Stewart.
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