Ecologist Susan Harrison has graced us with her third batch of photos from Alaska. Her captions and IDs are indented, and you can enlarge her photos by clicking on them.
Alaska part 3: Kenai Peninsula
This post is the third in a series from a recent bird and wildlife trip to Alaska. Unlike part 1 (Nome) and part 2 (Utqiakvik), part 3 takes place well below the Arctic Circle, along the Kenai Peninsula south of Anchorage. The photos are from two boat trips, one that explored the rugged Kenai Fjords and another that meandered across Kachemak Bay. Please bear with the less-than-perfect results of wielding my camera on moving boats in mixed weather.
Raft of Common Murres (Uria aalge) in front of a seabird nesting island:
Common Murre closeup:
Mixture of Common Murres and Thick-billed Murres (Uria lomvia; also known as Brünnich’s Guillemot) on a nesting cliff. Jerry recently showed us photos of the latter species in Iceland. It’s distinguished from Common Murres by the thin white line along the mouth:
Tufted Puffins (Fratercula cirrhata):
Horned Puffins (Fratercula corniculata) at their nest burrow:
Red-faced Cormorant (Urile urile), a rare and perhaps slightly misnamed North Pacific species:
Pelagic Cormorants (Urile pelagicus) at their nests; they are much more widespread than the Red-faced Cormorant, as well as seemingly redder-faced:
Rhinoceros Auklets (Cerorhincha monocerata):
Parakeet Auklets (Aethia psittacula):
Kittlitz’s Murrelets (Brachyramphus brevirostris), a rare seabird considered the “poster bird for global warming” because it breeds next to tidewater glaciers in the North Pacific and Arctic Oceans:
Black Oystercatchers (Haematopus bachmani) and Surfbirds (Calidris virgata) enjoying a rich rocky intertidal zone:
Starfish (or sea stars; Pisaster ochraceus and others) looking healthy and abundant, a welcome sight since their relatives farther south have been decimated by a wasting disease:
Steller Sea Lions (Eumetopias jubatus), a beast in which the male weighs about one ton, twice the size of the female:
Harbor Seals (Phoca vitulina):
Sea Otters (Enhydra lutris) in Kachemak Bay with the town of Homer in the background:
Mountain Goats (Oreamnos americanus) in the Kenai Fjords, where they are most easily seen from a boat. This is the only part of the US where they still occur naturally rather than being reintroduced:
Thank you Susan. By the dark coloring on the Starfish rocks, it looks like they may be confined to within the tideline or waveline. Do you know if they have been left in these locations above current water level by higher water or can they climb dry rocks?
Thanks for the fun question! My guess is that the whole photo is within the intertidal zone, since there’s algae visible at the top. The dark and light coloring could be barnacles or other creatures. Starfish stay below the upper tide line and also where the wave action is not too strong. As a top predator, they have a strong influence on what else grows there. One of my trip companions was a friend who did his PhD on them.
A very fine set!
I just saw a mini-documentary about the wasting disease that is crashing starfish populations to the south. At the moment, the chief suspect is a species of Vibrio bacteria. I have no idea if this information will lead to measures to put a stop to the problem.
Oops. Just saw your post. Here’s a link to the Vibrio article from two days ago: https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-025-02797-2.
Nice photos! Thanks!
Beautiful!
Super shots! I noted the beautiful Pisaster picture. A new article in Nature (https://www.nature.com/articles/s41559-025-02797-2) reports that a strain of the Vibrio pectenicida bacterium is a causative agent in the disease, at least in the Sun Star Pycnopodia helianthoides. These starfish used to be ubiquitous on dock pilings, on rocks, everywhere among the rocky tide pools of Puget Sound. I can’t visit the seashore without missing them terribly.
Thank you very much for sharing your Alaskan adventure. It’s so nice to get this personalized overview of the region and its wildlife.
Mountain goats have always been present naturally in the Washington Cascades. See Rolf Johnson, Mountain Goats and Mountain Sheep of Washington (1983).
Thanks for that correction! From a quick search, it looks like both locally-native and introduced (from the Olympic Peninsula, to replenish the declining population) mountain goats are present there.
The goats in the Olympics were introduced where they were non-native, and did a great deal of damage. When NPS removed all Olympics goats they moved them to the Cascades where goats are native. The Cascades goat population was doing fine. The reason for the relocation was simply to get them out of the Olympics without having to kill them.
Alaska fans might also enjoy Tony Fleming’s series of YouTube videos. He is the founder of Fleming Yachts, and an excellent videographer. If you search out
“https://www.youtube.com/@FlemingYachts/playlists” and go to “Tony’s Adventures” there is a lot to choose from. The videos are not particularly marketing centric, as the website has other sections for that.
I should mention that he has also travelled to the Galapagos, the Faroe Islands, Iceland, and much more.
Looks like a fun adventure. Great shots, thanks! The Kenai peninsula is most beautiful, I’ve been there many times, but never for birding! My loss.
Great photos, thanks for sharing these! And: Lucky you!
A friend once visited the museum at Telegraph Cove (far north of Vancouver Island). They had a display of two skulls: Steller’s Sea Lion and Grizzly Bear. He said that you could hardly tell them apart. So: A 2000-pound sea-going grizzly bear!
He has kayaked, solo, around the northern end of Vancouver Island. He encountered many Steller’s Sealions and found them aggressive and very intimidating.
One ton seals! Wow!
Great photos.
Thanks, all, for your interesting and kind comments!
Excellent photos. Thanks!
Love these sets of photos from Alaska. Thanks!
Beautiful! It seems to me that at least in the Santa Cruz, CA area, Pisaster ochraceus is making a good strong comeback now. In very small boats, I’ve always found big male Steller’s sea lions quite intimidating. The common murre photos reminded me of when I used to tease undergrads in a field class. They’d come in and tell me they’d seen a penguin on the beach and I’d feign excitement and say we had to go back out and photograph it, unless… and then I’d show them a picture of a common murre.