Nomads of Spring
By Jessica Shepherd
While the calendar promises spring, winter is still hard upon us. Four inches of snow fell overnight to grace the alders and freshen the eclipsed landscape. At first light, the nuthatch and chickadees come looking for food. I step into boots and trudge outside to spill sunflower seeds into the feeders and on the ground while they watch from a safe distance. Soon, the pine siskins swoop in, making the feeders sway under their slight weight even before I reach the door.
The theatre of birds is a welcome distraction when I feel trapped inside by arctic winds and icy roads. The feeders hang beyond my office windows, allowing me to note the rare visit from a hairy woodpecker or the swirl of birds spooked by the slow-moving shadow of an eagle.
While the food lasts, our yard will be awash in birds. Pine siskins top the list in terms of numbers, with upwards of a hundred of them eating or waiting their turn. The woods around our cabin ring with the “zeet-zeeeet” of their calls. Despite their small size, a single sisken will lay claim to a feeder with wings spread and bill ready to drive away the less aggressive red poles, which are shy by comparison. Chickadees and nuthatch rely on stealth, darting in to snatch a seed before flitting off to eat in the nearby alders.
Recently, I caught glimpses of a red-bodied bird with black wings, cryptic amid the trees. The next day, a trio of them gathered under a spruce stand outside my kitchen window, allowing me the chance to study them with binoculars. While they resembled pine grosbeaks, which we see throughout the year, they were much smaller. With a scissor-like action, they worked their longer top bill crosswise against the lower bill, deftly picking seeds from cones cluttering the forest floor. Their name, white-winged crossbill, undersells their appeal. The adult males are brilliant red, with a small white bar on their black wings. The immature males are a vibrant orange, while the females maintain a muted yellow.
Curious about this population boom in both the siskins and crossbills, I queried Homer birder extraordinaire, George Matts. He emailed back, “These are nomadic species that overwinter where there is an abundance of seed. The big spruce cone crop we had last spring, which was triggered by the drought the previous spring, has served that purpose.”
Like the birds, I too have a nomadic spirit. Every year, in February or March, I feel the pull of warmer weather. This year, I responded with a snowbird trip south to visit friends in Juneau and seek the first flowers of spring.
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While Juneau is 100 miles south of Homer by latitude, it has a strong maritime influence and enjoys an earlier (all-be-it wetter) spring. What we experience as snow is more likely to fall as rain in their temperate forest.
Built upon the alluvial outflow of eight-thousand-foot peaks, Juneau has a small-town feel. Constrained by mountains, ice, and water, Juneau is only accessible by air or boat. Our state capitol building, all brick and windows, rises up among quaint turn-of-the-century homes with clapboard siding and pocket lawns. Below the city, the narrow Gastineau Channel is dotted with low, green islands and reflects yet more towering mountains to the south-west, white now with the remains of winter. Landslides and floods are the price Juneau pays for such beauty.
This was my third visit with my friend Ginger Hudson since she became the manager of the Jensen-Olson Arboretum. The arboretum, known for its manicured grounds and extensive collection of primroses, is 23 sinuous miles north of town through towering spruce and hemlock. Auke Bay flashing blue to the left while mountains crowd in from the right.
Ginger and I met during graduate school, both of us working toward a degree in creative writing at the University of Alaska, Anchorage. We graduated in December 2019, just weeks before COVID became a household word. In the process of obtaining our degrees, we worked under the guidance of writer and educator Jan DeBlieu. The students in our non-fiction group formed a supportive network that persists to this day, but with the added focus on ecology and climate science, Ginger, Jan, and I quickly transitioned from colleagues to friends.
Jan flew to Anchorage each July for four summers to teach at the low residency program. Her visits north fostered a desire to explore Alaska during the winter and hopefully see the aurora. Then, the State cut the writing program as part of a cost-savings measure (while continuing to give away large subsidies to the oil and gas industry), COVID put travel on hold, and time passed. Then, on a whim, she booked a trip for this March. She had only traveled to attend funerals since COVID, and she needed a restorative adventure. A girlfriend in Skagway had invited her to visit - they could drive north into Canada’s Yukon Territory and stay in a dry cabin she owned. The cabin, on a lake ringed by mountains, would be Jan’s ultimate destination. She arranged to visit Ginger on her return trip before heading home. Could others come too? I answered the call.
Jan’s Skagway adventure delivered, with 25-degree below-zero temperatures, a bone-cold cabin with a wood stove to cook on, and hours of skiing on the frozen lake, but no aurora. Back in Skagway, she boarded the MV Hubbard, the newest ferry in the aging Alaska Marine Ferry fleet and headed for Juneau. The four-hour passage was slowed by a headwind with waves and spray power washing the windows.
At the same time Jan was sailing south, I was on a flight from Anchorage, looking out at 18,000-foot St. Elias poking through the clouds. We were independently crossing some of the most remote and pristine landscapes on Earth. I bump-landed in the same headwind, wondering if I’d packed enough winter clothes, before jumping into Ginger’s warm car. Soon after, we greeted Jan as she walked to the top of the ferry ramp.
Juneau was kind to us during our long weekend. The sea winds calmed, and the sun even made furtive visits as we hiked along rapidly receding Mendenhall Lake to the churning, misty base of Nugget Creek Falls. The raging falls are fed by glacial melt - surely among the purest water in the world. Later, we warmed up at a café before wandering through the Alaska State Museum in awe of the local Native art and David Rosenthal paintings. COVID had shut us down four years ago this month, and we still felt naked in a crowd without masks. Happily, the slam of tourist season was still several weeks away, and everything felt fresh and possible.
Though snow lingered from a storm a few days earlier, we walked around the arboretum together. Ginger pointed to signs of spring - red rhubarb nubs and swollen buds on the maples. Then she led us along a brick walkway before pointing out the delicate blooms of snowdrops nodding along an exposed berm of soil amid the raised beds - the first beauties of spring.
Nights were spent under a warm light at a kitchen table, laughing, questioning, and reaching for our deepest thoughts to share among friends. It was a rare time without husbands (with the exception of Ginger’s husband, Ken, who knew when to step away), so we could banter like hens over literary seeds. We spent three days talking about writing and the writing life, but also our concerns with health and aging, losing parents. Losing siblings. Jan came north in search of a winter tonic, while I came south looking for spring, and Ginger reached out to embrace us. Such good fortune to be among other women who understand the pull to write and encourage us to reach higher, stick with our projects a little longer, and cheer our hopes of literary transcendence.
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Fresh snowfall heralded my homecoming. Hal doesn’t generally replenish the bird feeders, but he’s a good backup when I’m gone, and the great swell of birds had not diminished. The redpolls still held out for hope amid the greedy siskins while crossbills congregated in a large spruce that resonated with their cheery “veet-veet, veet-veet-veet.”
Given a choice, I’ve long supposed I would reincarnate as a peregrine falcon. I imagine their keen vision and diving at a heart-skipping 200 miles an hour in pursuit of swallows. I would nest amid the south-facing cliffs along a remote river in Alaska, then journey south over forests awash in fall colors, to winter in Arizona’s Sonoran Desert. Like the peregrines, I want as much warmth and sun as I can manage.
But as the days grow longer, with sun enough to warm my face and the expectation of varied thrush and robins any day, there’s no place I’d rather be than here. Maybe it is the nature of women and birds to respond to that pull for seasonal flight. Once our wanderlust is sated, we’re content to return to the flock and ready our nests for the coming season.