Here we go again…

No birds from Adak today!

Why? Because I’m still in Anchorage!

The flight was canceled due to the crew being stranded elsewhere.

Luckily, I was able to get a new reservation at the Holiday Inn Express and even got a rental car!

This is when I would usually report the birds I had in Anchorage on Friday afternoon and Saturday morning. Well, not much to report.

Let’s go back a day. Thursday night, I went to bed at 9 pm, planning to get up at 2 am for the car ride to the airport at 3 am.

Well… at 9:30 pm, the power went out! (I know, I know, too many exclamation points!) Over the previous two days, I had 4 power outages due to Ida. They generally lasted 5 to 10 minutes and no problems for me, as I have a whole-house generator that kicks in automatically.

So, I assumed this would be the same scenario. No such luck. It lasted two hours. That would not have been a problem except the generator is located just below my bedroom window! So no sleep that night. Maybe 2 hours.

So by the time I got to Anchorage on Friday and did my food shopping I was way too tired to go back out for birding. So no birds on Friday.

Jump up to today.

By the time I got my luggage back (the flight was cancelled after I had already checked in) and got a car, it was 11:30 am.

I decided to go back down to Girdwood and see if I could rustle up a Chestnut-backed Chickadee (which I need for my Alaska list). No such luck. The birding was poor. My entire list for that area was 2 robins, 1 Varied Thrush and a magpie.

I stopped at Potter marsh on the way back and got the usual suspects along with a flock of Greater Yellowlegs. At Ship Creek, there was a nice flock of Bonaparte’s Gulls (and the usual other stuff).

A make-up flight has been scheduled for tomorrow and I am booked on it.

By the way, there is a group of four other birders also going out on that flight, so I won’t be the lone birder out there.

So try again tomorrow…

Frank