The reason today was unexpected has nothing to do with birds. It was unexpected – and bad – because Mike, our botanizing good friend from North Carolina who has been exploring Alaskan wilderness places for nearly a month called me early this morning with bad news. He was not calling from the southwestern part of Alaska where he had planned to be until the coming weekend – he was calling me from an Anchorage hospital! It turns out that yesterday while he was hiking across a boulder field, a huge boulder rolled on to his foot and crushed it. After hours of agony, he was eventually found by emergency people due to his personal locator beacon and finally after much effort they managed to get the boulder off his foot and get him across a lot of boulders to a plane and then out of there to Anchorage. They got him here but not his belongings and not his ID nor insurance information. So getting him medical help turned out to be a problem but not impossible. The medical specialist consulted this afternoon apparently says things are not as serious as they could have been and we are very thankful for that! Many details remain about how to get him sufficient documents to enable him to fly home again. He will of course be unable to finish the rest of his planned explorations of Alaska, at least for now.
Meanwhile, I did not go out birding today. I did try to bird in our yard periodically, and it was quite birdy there. Birds seen included Yellow-rumped Warbler, Downy Woodpecker, Steller’s Jay, and a fly-over White-winged Crossbill, plus those shown in the pictures below: Black-capped Chickadee, Dark-eyed Junco, Black-billed Magpie (pictured on neighbor’s antenna) and American Robin youngster (not a very common species in our yard).
288 species so far
Lynn Barber's Birding Blog 