Every autumn coinciding with the peak of the Coho run on the Chignik River, we’d begin to hear a new voice as we pushed through thick stands of alders or walked by the village’s scattered spruce trees. By this time, there weren’t many other passerines around, and so there was no mistaking the high, almost cricket-like call of returning Golden-crowned Kinglets. They were a new species for for us, always in motion, difficult to locate in the dense alders and dark spruce boughs they prefer, and they are not indicated on the Alaska Peninsula on any of the range maps we checked – Cornell, Audubon, Sibley – so we were very happy when we finally got binoculars on them and could make positive identification. Kinglets tended to remain at The Lake throughout winter. At some point, they presumably had cleaned all the invertebrate eggs and dormant insects they could find and moved on to other grounds, but they were there every year in those fall and winter months and should be added to peninsular checklists and range maps.