Boneyards

When you read about people birding Gambell (and that is the only reason for someone to visit this village) they write about birding the bone yards. I had trouble picturing what this might mean. But the first thing you see when you get off a flight into Gambell is a bone yard. It is (no surprise here) a mess of bones--whale, walrus, seal--as well as garbage. What this creates is a texture to the earth not like the rest of the village, which is all gravel. Thousands of years of decomposed animal bones and flesh make a dirt-like compost that support some plants--Arctic sage, for instance. But deep in these bone yards lie hidden treasures: fossilized bones, and sometimes fossilized ivory. The locals dig into the rich material looking for these scraps that they then carve and sell.
What birders love about this is that birds--migrants often blown off course, often pushed over from Russia--take cover in these pits. So we walk through and around these pits, hoping to flush up an unsuspecting, disoriented bird. Walking through a bone yard is a remarkable experience. I was intent on searching for the movement of a bird but more often found the flutter of a plastic bag. Modern "bones" are left here as well.
The mixture of bones and human created garbage was at first unsettling--the past is not concealed or tidied away. But as I became used to it, I found it beautiful because of the possibilities. Skulls of walrus, the rib from a whale--I could see pieces of animal lives here. The ground felt alive in all of the death.
I walked the bone yards many times while in Gambell. Peter and I spent a lot of time trying to find a Yellow Wagtail amidst the pits, with no luck. But we never came across anything but marvelous black and white Snow Buntings (photo above by Peter Schoenberger) and Lapland Longspur with brilliant brown collars. Nothing came close to a rarity.
And then on our final evening in Gambell the radio crackled on at 9:30 in the evening. We had just returned from chasing down a Red-Neck Stint at the far end of the runway, near watery flats. We were all a little high from too much sun and too much wind and the excitement of seeing lots of wonderful birds.
"A Siberian Chiffchaff," was what Peter said as he grabbed his binoculars and ran out the door. The stampede was on. We moved down the dirt road (we is 12 of us on this tour, plus five guides--two from our tour, and three hanging on after their tours--the cook, and a young many staying at the lodge who isn't a birder) and into the bone yard. The tiny bird bounced from one pit to the next seeking cover from such an enthusiastic mob. The truth is, this little bird is pretty nondescript ("no wing bars, gray over all, whitish underneath" we were told) so the chances are it wasn't used to being a celebrity bird. But it was game after making it's flight across the Bering Sea to land on this isolated bit of land. We stalked it for some time under sun still high in the sky at 10 at night. Native people came and looked, used to the antics of birders but wondering what we were up to. As we got quick looks at this super rare bird (if confirmed, this is the first North American sighting), a Yellow Wagtail vaulted into the air and soared to the ground. I looked at its glorious yellow belly, a more welcome sight to this new birder than the small bird with no wingbars.
Back at the inn, photos of the bird were downloaded, analyzed, sent to others to analyze. We went to sleep at midnight, the sun still high. While we slept, the words of experts trickled in. Not a Chiffchaff, but a Willow Warbler. This is the ninth time it has been seen in North America and the first time in spring. And I was lucky to see it; even more so, I was lucky to walk in that boneyard in the late evening, the bones reminding me of the past of humans and animals and all of the complicated ways that we need each other.

For photos of the Willow Warbler and other Gambell birds, visit: http://www.flickr.com/photos/peterschoenberger/