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Nanook Nook: Birds of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta By Frank Keim ’66, ’73

Illustration above: Frank Keim’s drawing of a tufted puffin. All drawings by Frank Keim.

I’ll blame my dad, whose name was also Frank, for kindling my fascination with birds and bird behavior.

He was a weekend birder, but, from the time I could walk, he often took me birding with him in the woods and fields near our house in Ontario, Canada. After I graduated from high school in 1961 and hitchhiked to Alaska, this rudimentary interest became more earnest. I graduated from UAF in 1966 and joined the Peace Corps in Bolivia, where I began learning the Aymara Indian names of the birds and their importance to the Native people I worked with there. I found this was a good way to get to know the people better so I could work with them more comfortably.

Many years later, after four years of teaching and field work in Ecuador as an anthropologist, I returned home to Alaska and brought this approach of learning Native bird names to my teaching experience among the Yup’ik Eskimo people of the Yukon Delta. Over 21 years, it allowed me to develop a closer relationship with the Yup’ik parents of my students in the four villages where my wife and I taught.

Frank Keim, center, with Byron Ulak and wife Darlene Kaganak. Frank was their high school teacher during the mid-1980s.

In the 1990s, while teaching in the Yukon River village of Marshall, this led to articles and primitive illustrations of the birds, which I sent to the Bethel regional newspaper, the Delta Discovery. I’ve continued to do this every month up to the present as a way to give something back to the people who gave me so much and, since travel distances are so far, to keep an active channel of communication open between us.

What was originally just a small idea has become a bigger plan of converting the 165 or so individual articles and drawings I’ve done into a personalized online book about the Yup’ik birds of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. The drawings and articles that follow feature some of those birds — in this case, a few members of the auk family that nest in the Bering Sea.

Illustration: Frank's drawing of a pigeon guillemot.

Pigeon guillemot | Qayagpagyuli

While teaching in Hooper Bay in the early 1980s, I would often ski out to the edge of the pack ice during late winter and early spring to photograph seal hunters in their kayaks. That’s where I saw my first pigeon guillemots foraging, and I wondered “Why there?” Later, I learned it was because the algal blooms under the pack ice were hosts to billions and billions of small crustaceans, small fish and other marine critters that fed on each other in what is called the marine food web. So, it was for the same reason that seals hunted there too. And therefore, seal hunters.

Like common murres, pigeon guillemots are in the auk or puffin family and can be seen in the Bering Sea at the edge of the pack ice or fairly close to shore, where they prefer feeding in the shallower waters. They have been known to dive to depths greater than 150 feet but prefer near-shore waters 30-90 feet deep. They walk better than most other auks and have an upright posture like murres, but their wings are shorter and rounder than those of other auks, allowing them to dive better than they can fly. When diving, they propel themselves not only with their short wings but also with their webbed feet, which is different from most auks that primarily use their wings to dive. They are also powerful surface swimmers and fast fliers. Once they get into the air, they have been recorded flying at nearly 50 mph.

When they hunt, they search mostly on the sea bottom or near the pack ice, where they probe rock and ice recesses and vegetation (including algal blooms) with their bills for small fish and crustaceans (including shrimp and crabs), sea worms, shellfish, snails and small octopus.

They start breeding when they are 3-5 years old, and sometime in April or May the male chooses a nest site, usually in a colony of other birds on a rocky cliff in a crevice or shallow cave among boulders, or in an abandoned burrow, or under driftwood or shore debris. Before bonding by a female with her potential mate, courtship displays by the pair include mutual circling, bill-touching and rapid zigzag chases on the water near their colony.

Once they get into the air, they have been recorded flying at nearly 50 mph.

After the female settles on her mate, she makes a shallow scrape on the soil or mixed sand and gravel in or under her mate’s chosen nest site, which may be used over and over for several years. The pigeon guillemot is one of the few members of the auk family that lays two eggs rather than just one. The eggs are creamy to pale blue-green with brown blotches near the large end. Incubation is by both mother and father birds for 26-32 days, which is a long time for so-called altricial birds that are covered only with a little black down when they hatch and must remain in their nest area for another 29-54 days while they are fed by both parents, who bring them small fish during all hours of the day. But finally, after that period they leave the nest, usually in the cover of darkness, scrambling or fluttering down to the water below. They start swimming and diving immediately, but are not capable of strong flight for another two to three weeks. During this time, they follow the example of their parents and begin to learn both how to forage and what to eat.

Although pigeon guillemots are vulnerable to local threats such as oil pollution, gill-netting and mammalian predators, their widespread distribution along the northern Pacific Ocean coastlines of North America and Asia decreases this vulnerability at the population level. That said, with continuing climate change and warmer air and water temperatures and the dwindling of the birds’ food stocks from the coastal areas where they feed, their populations will continue to decrease into the future.

Their Yup’ik name, qayagpagayuli, translates as “one who is good at calling loudly.” In this case, it means whistling or peeping shrilly. Listen to them sometime, and you’ll hear what I mean. Their scientific name, Cepphus columba, derives from the Greek kepphos, referring to a family of seabirds mentioned by the classical Greek scientist Aristotle that now includes auks and gannets. The species name, columba, is Latin for “dove” and was so named because the bird looks a little like a dove. The second part of their common name, guillemot, derives from the French name Guillaume, meaning William, who probably was connected with the bird’s early description.

Read more of Frank’s bird stories.

From left to right: crested auklet, common murre and parakeet auklet.

Frank Keim is an educator, nature writer and environmental activist. He has published three poetry books, “Voices on the Wind” (2011), “Today I Caught Your Spirit” (2014) and “Trails Taken … so many still to take” (2018). In 2012, he published “White Water Blue, Paddling and Trekking Alaskas Wild Rivers,” and in 2021 he published his second rivers book, “Down Alaska’s Wild Rivers, Journals of an Alaskan Naturalist.” He enjoys canoeing, wood carving and drawing birds for an ongoing online book entitled “Yupik Bird Book.” He lives in an octagon that he and his wife Jennifer built themselves north of Fairbanks, Alaska.

The Nanook Nook showcases the talent of our alumni and students. If you have an original poem, essay, short story, artwork or photograph(s) you would like to share with our readers, contact aurora.magazine@alaska.edu for submission guidelines.