The. Perfect. Ice Cream Float!

Posted on July 1, 2026 by Jack & Barbra Donachy

A new Alaskan favorite – Spruce Tip Syrup Floats

Growing up in Clarion, Pennsylvania, there was one, and only one, place I knew of where I could find my favorite pop – birch beer. Lighter, less sweet and crisper than its more popular root beer cousin, birch beer was the lure that made accompanying my mom to the downtown laundromat worthwhile in those days before our household owned a modern washer and dryer. Unfortunately, by the time I was old enough to go into town on my own, the laundromat had been torn down and replaced by a gas station. The birch beer, too, was gone. Thus a handful of decades passed before I’d have another taste of what I always remembered as the perfect pop.

Four years ago while attending a food and writing retreat up here in Alaska, we were introduced to the practice of collecting spruce tips and processing them into syrup. While the uses for this syrup range from topping waffles, glazing grilled salmon fillets, drizzling atop warm brie, to adding a little je ne sais quoi to mixed drinks or a glass of beer, one of our favorite ways to use our syrup is to mix it with ice-cold sparkling water. In the right proportions, the beverage has a crispness reminiscent of birch beer with a subtle hint of lemon shining through where birch beer is a bit more minty.

I don’t know why it took us so long to stumble onto the idea of using the sparkling spruce tip beverage as the base for ice cream floats. But here it is: Spruce Tip Syrup Floats. Barbra added a drizzle of a caramel-fudge-spruce syrup topping she came up with, and on this July morning we served them in modestly-sized four-ounce glasses. Perfect!

We are often fascinated by the way foods run through our lives, linking past memories with present experiences. What is a food experience that brings a piece of your past into the present?

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Worth the Wait – A Taste of Spring

Posted on June 8, 2026 by Jack & Barbra Donachy

We relish warming spring days, meals on our deck once again pleasant. Here charcoal-grilled fillets of the year’s very first Copper River Sockeye Salmon served with gemelli pasta tossed in devil’s club bud pesto and topped with a wild spring mix of sautéed twisted stalk, devil’s club buds, fiddle heads and fireweed shoots… an evening ray of sun catching the left side of the plate.
* * *

We’ve been waiting for it. And waiting. Day upon day, gray, cold rain. Buckets of the stuff. Birds late. Leaves late. Garden late. Everything late. And then a sudden two days of glorious sunshine and warmth, birds singing, plants waking up, all in agreement spring has officially sprung. Almost overnight lupine, fireweed, chocolate lily, iris and other flowering plants pushed through damp soil. Bursting buds on jostaberry and gooseberry bushes and cherry and apple trees we planted last year provided happy testimony that they had survived an especially cold winter.

Last summer’s berry season was on for the ages – salmonberries, blueberries, wine berries and wild strawberries in astonishing size and abundance. Of course, each summer is different. Here’s to hoping these spring blueberry flowers are a promise of summer fruit.
* * *

Late spring, coinciding with the return of salmon to local rivers, marks the beginning of our foraging and gathering season. Thrush song and morning sunshine beckoned us out to a favorite trail that winds through a diversity of biomes from sopping wet muskeg to a dark, moss-covered mixed cedar, hemlock and spruce forest. In boggy areas tiny sun dew plants were beginning new cycles of growth while pinhead-sized magenta bog rosemary blooms called attention to some of the year’s very first flowers, Along the forest edge, we noticed salmonberry plants sprouting new leaves and blueberry bushes covered with a promising profusion of delicate pink blooms. Here and there groggy bumblebees buzzed in and out of foliage.

Still tender and thornless, a devil’s club bud perfect for the kitchen. Note the thorns at the base.

Deeper into the forest the songs and trills of Varied Thrushes, Hermit Thrushes, Ruby-crowned Kinglets and Pacific Wrens filled the air. Suddenly we were happily startled by the eerie but unmistakable too-too-too-too call of a male Saw-whet Owl! A territorial call, we didn’t have to say anything to know that each of us was rooting for a nest of North America’s cutest owl. What a morning!

To celebrate, we collected a few greens to go along with a fillet of the year’s first Copper River Sockeye Salmon. Fireweed shoots (sometimes referred to as Alaska Asparagus), tender young twisted stalk, fiddle heads and delicately flavored devil’s club buds. Some people harvest these items, blanch them, and keep them in their freezer for later. It has been our tradition to harvest enough for the first celebratory meal and serve them sautéed with the first wild-caught salmon of the year. Every bite of this meal is in celebration and gratitude for the season to come.

A toast to the spring view from the deck. Still plenty of snow to on the mountains to ensure our rivers flow cool and full for returning salmon.
* * *

Cordova, Alaska – Belle Epoch

Posted on March 28, 2026 by Jack & Barbra Donachy

We thought Cutterlight fans might be interested in seeing a short (three minute) video that captures life in this small coastal Alaska town – as well as the community’s commitment to sustainable energy.

Of interest to us is that with a population of just over 2,000 inhabitants, Cordova is nearly identical in size to Henry Thoreau’s Concord, Massachusetts of 1860. The similarities between the two towns don’t end with size. With no roads connecting Cordova to the world beyond, it requires intention to reach our community. This relative isolation creates a balance of independence and tight-knittedness that formerly marked most U.S. small towns.

With Copper River salmon runs still strong enough to fuel a fairly healthy economy, most of our electricity generated from local rivers that continue to flow with nearly pristine purity, full of spawning salmon each year, and a downtown replete with library, art gallery, hardware store, grocer and other shops and restaurants within pleasant walking distance, we seem to have arrived in Cordova at its belle epoch.

Life here is… serene. Police and emergency sirens are few and far between; common courtesies are many. Sidewalks are clean and it is uncommon to encounter a line at any of our shops or the post office. So many of the things that “made America great” – things we remember from our youths of decades past – still thrive in this community where people of European, Asian, Native American and other heritages mix together seamlessly. Although March nights still get cold, already the afternoon sun warms our deck into the 70s so that outdoors reading and dining are thoroughly comfortable. We’ve had hummingbirds at our feeders all winter long…

It would seem that a crystal ball isn’t required to see that in the not-so-distant future, people will leave places that are either too hot, too dry (Colorado is currently experiencing a nearly state-wide water shortage), or too vulnerable to coastal flooding. Calling it a “hoax” won’t make it go away, and I think we all know what is meant by “it.”

So where will these people go? Alaska is warming at a faster rate than places further south. Climate models predict that by 2050, average temperatures up here will be eight degrees warmer. With slightly fewer than three-quarters of a million residents and enough land to fit Texas, California and Montana with room to spare…

The Cali Girl is No Longer

Posted on October 27, 2025 by Jack & Barbra Donachy

I dreamed about living in the forest.

A place where the mountains meet the sea.

Where quiet paths allow for reflective solitude.

The dream is reality.

The Cali girl is no longer.

Hawk Chicks

Posted on June 12, 2024 by Jack & Barbra Donachy

When I had the opportunity to make images of the Rough-legged Hawk nest at the cliffs along the lower Chignik River, I was still thinking of myself as primarily a documentarian. Additionally, human proximity to the nest was clearly upsetting to the chicks as well as to the parents. And so, a couple of times I waded into the river, made quick photographs, and left. Documentation accomplished.

In hindsight, it might have been worthwhile to construct a blind at a respectful distance and to thereby more thoroughly record the nesting events that occurred every summer until recently at this little ledge about 60 feet up from the surface of the river. A regret is that I never made a video of the birds. Unfortunately, in July 2021, a magnitude 8.2 earthquake rocked the Chignik area and in so doing deposited a volleyball-sized boulder squarely in the center of the nest. The little ledge had always been a precarious site – exposed at times to high winds, vulnerable to potential predation by our resident Great Horned Owls, and subject to regular skiff traffic (and associated engine noise) – and in fact the summer of the big quake after laying just one egg, for unknown reasons the hawks abandoned the nest, before the earthquake struck.

After the big earthquake, with a large rock left in the middle of the nest, the site was no longer usable. We think we discovered a new nest further up the drainage, so hopefully Rough-legged Hawks will continue to be a part of Chignik fauna.

Paired Bluebills in Spring Rain

Posted on June 11, 2024 by Jack & Barbra Donachy

It hasn’t been until fairly recently, perhaps coinciding with a general interest in birding rather than mainly hunters looking closely at waterfowl, that the term Scaup has begun to supplant Bluebill when referring to the ducks in the above photo. These are Greater Scaup, a mated pair that paused at the lake along with several others of their kind for a little while in early June before heading off to find their own kettle pond nesting sight. There are also Lesser Scaup, very similar in appearance though slightly smaller and with a less rounded head. Though Greater Scaup were often abundant on the lake and in the river’s largest pools in winter and spring, I never encounter a Lesser there.

The term Scaup may be derived from the Scottish scalp which refers to bivalves such as clams and mussels, preferred food items for these diving ducks, though they also eat various types of aquatic vegetation. Interestingly, they are the only circumpolar diving duck – hence the European origin of their vernacular name. Their “quack” is a bit more hoarse or nasal than that of the familiar Mallard, and is often comparatively quiet. But at The Lake, it was a music we associated with spring, and we find now that we miss it.

Watchful Dad

Posted on June 9, 2024 by Jack & Barbra Donachy

I’d always wanted to live where owls were my neighbors.

It was widely known that the village had owls. In fact, the village had always had owls. David Narver reported their presence in his study of the Chignik River Drainage in the early 1960’s. But no one knew, precisely, where the owls nested and roosted. I managed to unravel the mystery once and for all during our first winter at The Lake. After that, Barbra and I could fairly reliably locate at least one of our two resident owls on any given day.

But that didn’t make photographing them much easier. During daylight hours, the owls typically secreted themselves in the very thickest parts of an exceptionally healthy and dense copse of Sitka Spruce trees. Many times, only a hint of the large birds was visible – a patch of breast feathers, a vigilant eye, an alert ear tuft. In addition to the challenges presented by the dense spruce boughs, the copse of trees was situated in a hollow where the light was almost never what a photographer might call “good.” Not only did the owls bury themselves in the boughs of those trees, their favored roosts were fairly high up. And although I am fairly certain that I knew more or less exactly where the nest was, I was never able to put my eyes on it.

For awhile, I contemplated a variety of strategies to facilitate photographing the owls, but all of them involved bothering them in one fashion or another. I didn’t think I’d permanently spook them out of the grove, but I didn’t want to press them. Making a living in the wilderness by talon, hooked bill, eye and wit is tough enough without some human invading one’s personal space. Biologists (generally) no longer shoot specimens in order to “study” them, but I have to wonder about the merit of constant nest-watching and other practices involving invasive viewing of wildlife that are now in vogue.

And so although I regularly checked on our owls (they were along the way to one of our favorite fishing spots), I did my best not to disturb them. Every once in a while, they presented themselves, and when those times coincided with my having my camera along, I did my best to record an image.

Three Thousand Five Hundred Feathers

Posted on June 8, 2024 by Jack & Barbra Donachy

***Hidden – Female Pine Grosbeak***
*Chignik Lake, Alaska Peninsula, June 7, 2020*

To the best of my knowledge, no one has counted the number of feathers on Pinicola enucleator, – or if they have, they haven’t made their findings readily available via a Google search. At eight to 10 inches from bill tip to tail tip, Pine Grosbeaks are large as songbirds go. The smallest species of hummingbirds have slightly less than a thousand feathers; Emperor Penguins, which have huge numbers of tiny feathers to insulate them from the cold sport something like 80,000 feathers. In between these extremes, counts and estimates vary, but based on reports for specific species, something over three thousand is probably a good approximation of the total feather count for our friend in the above photograph.

Mosquito Falcon

Posted on June 7, 2024 by Jack & Barbra Donachy

**Male Tree Swallow**
*Chignik Lake, Alaska Peninsula, May 23, 2020*

I was surprised this morning when I checked the Cornell Lab of Ornithology’s All About Birds site to note the absence of Tree Swallows on the Alaska Peninsula on Cornell’s range map. In fact these birds are common at least as far Southwest on the peninsula as the Chignik River drainage, particularly near settlements where nesting boxes have been established. Further down the peninsula they are listed as “uncommon,” their presence probably limited due to the lack of suitable hollow trees for nesting.

In villages throughout the peninsula the return of swallows each spring is widely anticipated as a true sign of spring. It is reported that one swallow consumes roughly 2,000 small insects (such as mosquitoes and midges) every day. Thus, a nesting box or two installed around one’s home can have a measurable impact on the population of bothersome bugs.

It’s Spring! Everybody’s an Insectivore

Posted on June 4, 2024 by Jack & Barbra Donachy

**Male Golden-crowned Sparrow** ***on his way to his mate and their babies***
*Chignik Lake, Alaska Peninsula, June 19, 2019*

Golf Courses laced with poisons, mosquito traps, bug zappers, Rotenone and other toxins used to remove undesired fish species (and incidentally aquatic insects) from streams, the biological desserts called lawns, industrial agriculture and that “little bit” of whatever “cide” sprayed on the family garden – and all the additional instances in which invertebrate populations are suppressed with toxins and by other means…

…also suppress bird populations.

Even among avian species that typically consume mostly seeds, nuts or nectar, in order for the mother to create viable eggs and for the babies to develop into healthy adults, the rich supply of nutrients insects provide are critical.