Thousands and thousands of photos either culled and discarded or key-worded, retouched and placed year by year, month by month into digital folders. Still lots to go. Now into late October and early November of 2017, I hadn’t remembered that I got some nice captures of Red Crossbills and Pine Siskins that fall – finch species that generally do not appear on range maps for the Alaska Peninsula and which David Narver did not observe in his Chignik River Drainage study conducted in the early 1960’s.
With the exception of Pine Grosbeaks, Alaska’s finches – which also include White-winged and Red Crossbills, Hoary and Common Redpolls and Pine Siskins – depend heavily on cone seeds. The siskin in this photo would probably not be at The Lake were it nor for the Sitka Spruce trees transplanted as seedlings from Kodiak Island back in the 1950’s. Now mature and beginning to reproduce on their own, these spruces provide shelter and seeds for chickadees, sparrows, finches and magpies as well as a diverse array of invertebrates for all the above along with woodpeckers, wrens, kinglets and warblers. These passerines in turn provide a source of food for owls, falcons and shrikes. Want to change the world? Well, you could try yelling at the evening news on TV… or you could plant a few trees.
CutterLight 