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Skip's Corner  03/05/2018

3/5/2018

2 Comments

 
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Skip

                               Dance of the Halibut Spirit 4  (Final) ​

                                  "Saloons to studio"   
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​                                       
R T Wallen © 2018​                     

A cold night in Juneau, not raining but raw and wet.  Several burned-out streetlights downtown didn’t help, nor the Southeast wind buffeting the working lights, expanding and shrinking a spidery web of phone wire shadows crawling on South Franklin Street. Spots of winking light flashed weakly from puddles. The old man couldn’t be far off.  Half an hour earlier the butcher closing up 20th Century Grocery Store, said he’d given him a handful of shrimp. So the trail is hot--warm at least.   “He go between the places.” Pop said, meaning we would find him in one of the bars on South Franklin. Beyond the lights at the south end of town I parked the truck in the dark and looked back into town toward the storefront marquees.  Not much traffic on the sidewalks, and few cars.   Coming around to the bed of the pick-up I grabbed a wooden box and set it on the curb.  The box made it easier for the old folks to get in and out of the high-suspension Ford, so I always carried it.  As I opened the passenger door Pop pushed it wide with his cane, swung his legs around, set his cane tip on the curb and, bracing himself, slid down the short distance to the box.   We’d go on foot up Franklin Street searching all the bars along the couple blocks to where Front Street forks off just below the hill, and we’d check the three bars in that block.  If we hadn’t found him, he wasn’t downtown. He’d already gotten to the village.   I tossed the stepping box back in the truck and caught up with Pop, who was already shambling along half way to Sweeney’s, the first bar. 

Pop opened the door with me on his heels and stopped abruptly just inside. As the door slammed shut behind us he banged his cane on the floor three times with authority.  Pow! Thump! Thump!  All ten or twelve patrons leaned back on the barstools, the farthest down the line leaning back the most, all craning to see who had arrived and what the deal was. The bartender too, rag in hand, paused to stare as the beery laughter and chatter died away to quiet.  Our entry wouldn’t have commanded much more attention with highland bagpipers accompanying. One after another Pop studied the flushed, boozy faces contentedly glowing in the back-bar lights. Tseexwáa’s shock of white hair would have been easy to spot.  “Not here!”  Pop confirmed. We exited. 

And so on up South Franklin, stopping at all of them, the Arctic, the Triangle, the Imperial and the others including the Red Dog.  At the Red Dog, Pop shuffled though the overlay of sawdust and shavings on the floor, moving from patron to patron to a dimly lit table in a back corner where a white-haired man slouched, facing away from us.  Pop tapped him on the shoulder with his cane.  The man turned about, recognized Pop, and almost knocking his chair over, stood respectfully.  He was Tlingit, but not Tseexwáa.  “Hah!”, Pop said while the man hunched and bobbed deferentially. Pop turned to me speaking about the fellow in the third person, as though he were not present, giving me his name and a brief sketch of his tribal connections.  “Dat one name so and so, he b’long such and such, way back, Klukwan, Haines, maybe other place….”  The man reached out and we shook hands.  To be polite I started to say something but Pop intervened.  “We go,” He said, and then, as we left the Red Dog he spoke to me confidentially: “It’s no use of being too nice to him.  He come from slave.”   (Meaning his parents or more likely his grandparents—someone  in his ancestry—had been slave to a Tlingit family.)

Few people know that the Civil War directly affected the native people of Alaska, especially the Tlingit, some of whom held slaves, often captured Aleutiq or Athabascan people. There were great differences from the institutionalized commercial system of African slavery in the Old South.  In Alaska, for example, captured and enslaved people could sometimes earn their freedom by trapping and fishing.  But it was still slavery, and after the U.S. purchase of Alaska from Russia in 1867 the Emancipation Proclamation impacted Southeast Alaska.  The slaves had to be set free. I remember Pop asking me.

“Son, who’s the one freed them slaves, Washi’ton, or Linkom?”
(We were sitting in the Purity Bakery having coffee.)  
“It was Lincoln, Pop.  Abraham Lincoln.”  
“Oh!” 
Pop thought about this for a moment.
“Smart man.   How he figure that out?” 
 Another pause, longer this time.  Pop, still mulling things over.  Then, 
“Still, I think it’s no use to let them slaves go.”  


A locally famous likeness of Abraham Lincoln carved on a totem in Tongass Village near Ketchikan, circa 1870s, testified to the importance of the Emancipation Proclamation in this part of the world, a world at that time culturally remote and foreign to actions taken in Washington, DC.    Known as the Lincoln Totem, a portion of the original, much weathered and deteriorated from more than half a century in the rain forest, with seedling hemlocks growing out it, was rescued in 1938 just in time from total loss, and is now in the Alaska State Museum, while a replica stands in Saxman Village, Ketchikan. 
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Fragment of original Lincoln Totem. Photo credit: Alaska State Museum.
Coming back to the search.  We’d not found Tseexwáa in any of the likely places so, leaving Pop, I walked back through town to the truck, drove around and picked up Pop who waited in the drizzle at the bottom of Franklin Street Hill. We drove the short distance to the Village. My headlights flashed over ruts and potholes as we turned down the single unpaved road that ran the length of the Village.  With few lights from the tribal houses, the place looked deserted. A cat scuttled across the road and dodged under the Dipper House. Beyond, at the extreme reach of the headlights near the Thunderbird House, something moved.  A small figure shuffled along, heading away from us.  I flipped on the high beams.  It was Tseexwáa! “Turn off the lights!” Pop said.  I turned them off and we moved slowly forward in the dark, lurching and pitching through potholes and muddy ruts, throwing water to either side. Never mind that we were barely creeping along, we were overtaking the old man and I didn’t want to slosh mud on him. As we drew alongside, Pop slid out and seized Tseexwáa by the arm.  “Get in!”  Before I could get around back to the bed to set up the step stool, Pop boosted and pushed Tseexwáa helping him into the high truck, then climbed in himself. Tseexwáa sat in the middle staring straight ahead, probably wondering what the hell was happening this time.  Sniffing Tseexwáa’s breath for evidence of drink, Pop leaned forward: “Not Bad.”  
​

Turning around we drove back into town to the Valentine Building. This venerable old frontier-commercial style building has wrapped around the shallow angle at the corner of Front and Seward Streets since 1913 and, with its fussy exterior of cornices and filigrees, remains a landmark in town.  The entrance, on Seward Street, leads up a flight of well-worn and creaky wooden stairs to the second floor, where, along a high-ceilinged corridor of lawerly-looking offices with glass louvers over five-paneled doors, I had my art studio.


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Valentine Building

This, unfortunately, is as far as my notes go, at least the ones that have been retrieved.  They were written in 1975 and reflect my thinking and first-hand observations at the time, some jotted down on any handy scrap of paper when things were happening, some written later. In the mountain of paper and records brought back to Wisconsin from Alaska, the concluding notes that would tie up the loose threads and finish this narrative lie buried. It’s over fifty year’s worth of Alaska material and was in fairly good order before we moved, but the good order and organization exist no longer. 

The material will include a recording of Tseexwáa singing and performing Halibut Spirit Dance, while Pop Dalton drums.  Tseexwáa wore a Chilkat robe and a carved headpiece called a Shakee.àt  (headdress with carved frontlet above the forehead) crested with sea lion whiskers and yellow-shafted flicker feathers and draped over the back of the head with ermine skins.  Had the dance been performed under normal circumstances, with the Wooshkeetaan clan in attendance, this regalia would have displayed the Wooshkeetaan’s halibut motif. In this case, the Chilkat robe belonged to Pop’s clan and bore a Kaagwaantaan crest, and the borrowed Shakee.àt bore another, unrelated crest.    Keep in mind that this dance was performed at my behest, with Pop Dalton acting as intermediary, and not in the proper context of a Potlatch or relevant social event.   The fact that the crests were wrong for Tseexwáa’s clan was alright for my purpose since I merely wanted to experience the essence of the performance as inspiration for a stone lithograph. Details such as the clan motifs would be corrected in the stone drawing.  The witnessing of this performance was unusually privileged; the Halibut Spirit Dance, Cháatl Kuyéik was normally performed behind a Chilkat robe or blanket.  

If Pop Dalton were right in thinking that Tseexwáa was the sole surviving Wooshkeetaan holding the memory of the dance, the performance in my studio 43 years ago may have been the last ever, and the recording will be of value to the clan, to whom it will be presented when found. 

I’ll conclude the narrative with a photo of Pop Dalton and Tseexwáa preparing to perform the Halibut Spirit Dance, along with photos of a Chilkat robe and a Shakee.àt.  There are also additional remarks. While not part of the original 1975 notes, they are related to the subject and may be of interest.  

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Pop Dalton, using the back of my guitar as a drum, and Tseexwáa rehearsing a gesture for Halibut Spirit Dance.
                                                                                    R T Wallen Studio, Valentine Bldg,  Juneau Alaska, circa 1975
​The design of Tlingit halibut hooks enables two slender pieces of wood and a piece of bone to catch a fish.  This fish might weigh as much as a man, or twice that, and would be capable of breaking either of the arms of the hook if only it could get an advantageous purchase on it.  However, since the halibut must power forward, and since the hook is in its mouth with its long axis aligned with the long axis of the fish’s body, the halibut can never pull on the wood cross ways. If it could, the device would break freeing the fish.    Put another way, imagine grabbing the arms of a slender wooden slingshot, one in each hand, and pulling the arms apart sideways.  Chances are the slingshot would break.  The slingshot will never be broken however, by hanging on to one of its arms and pushing it around.  Furthermore, as the halibut pushes the hook around, the whole system is cushioned by the rock sinker.  Depending upon its size, the halibut can move the rock within limits, tiring itself out with the effort, but the sinker is not so light-weight that the fish can swim away with it. 
 
I puzzle how the people of this coast conceived and designed a device to catch halibut. Maybe there was a Tlingit Steve Jobs way back in history working on such problems, but the problem was that halibut were rarely seen. Not wild, un-captured halibut.   Salmon, by contrast, are seen during the times of year they arrive in these seas.   Glance out over the water and there they are, leaping clear of the surface jump after jump, sometimes five or six in succession by a single fish, sometimes multiple fish in the air.  Even if you’ve tuned out Southeast Alaska in favor of clamping your ears in headphones and riveting your eyes to electronic devices, it’s hard to miss salmon.  They make their presence known by jumping, and then they gather at the mouths of streams. With a boost from a high tide, they mob these streams, ascending to spawn, essentially climbing onto the continent and delivering themselves within reach of fishermen. 

Not halibut. Halibut spawn out of sight on the edge of the continental shelf a third to half a mile deep.  Nobody witnesses it.  In the summer they move into shallower waters in Southeast to feed but still do not invite capture by jumping or running up streams or presenting themselves in any way.   Instead, they spend their well-camouflaged lives out of sight on or near the ocean bottom even when in relatively shallow water.  I caught one using a jig of my Uncle Bjarne’s design just off Nikolski Reef on Umnak Island in water only about 15-20 feet deep. But, with fifty years in Alaska and much time in boats, I don’t recall ever spotting a wild halibut at sea or even the carcass on a beach of a halibut that had not first been caught and its skeleton or other parts discarded.   It’s not like today, with Scuba gear and underwater cameras enabling us to witness life in the deep.  In days gone by, the ocean’s floor seaward of a minus tide run-out was mystery. 

This is not to say that people never saw a wild halibut or were unaware of them.   For example, there is the Wooshkeetaan story earlier cited of a shark-killed halibut in Amalga Harbor.  In addition to sharks, sea lions are predators on halibut, as are orcas, and any of these might have injured a halibut that escaped and later died and washed ashore.  A carcass might wash up on a beach if not first consumed by crabs and other sea life. But I think it’s more likely that among the first halibut seen were those caught on other kinds of baited fishing gear without halibut having been specifically targeted, perhaps on bait wrapped around bone elements. With the fortuitous capture and beaching of a monster halibut, effort would certainly be devoted to catching others.  Once caught and its size and anatomy observed, more efficient devices like wooden hooks designed for these fish would have been developed and improved over time. This is mere speculation on my part.  
It’s probably worth noting also that a big halibut would provide as much or more sustenance than a deer, and so was well worth the effort undertaken to catch one.  As was the American bison to tribes of the Great Plains, such are salmon and halibut to the tribes of the Northwest Pacific coast, so critical to sustaining the people that the threads of their inherent natures and qualities are woven into the folklore of the cultures. One aspect of the lore of the halibut, was the unknown, the realm of this species existing as it did in the unfathomable deep. Then too, when a halibut was brought ashore, even after it had been knocked on the head and was presumed dead, its skin, like that of an octopus, could twitch and crawl, compounding its mystery and, perhaps, generating a little discomfort among observers.   The nature of the halibut has inspired stories, songs and dance, and such mysteries may have contributed.   On the other hand there was, and is, mystery attached to all species.   I remember Pop Dalton remarking, “Salmon way smarter’n me.  How he find his way ‘round the ocean, Japan and come home?  I can’t do it!”

These days of course, with halibut delivered into towns from commercial fishing vessels and sport fishermen catching them with steel hooks, they are commonly seen. Through science, their life cycle is better understood, and many of the unknowns resolved.  But there are still surprises:  One day a halibut head fell out of the sky and landed on our house!  The crash brought Lynn and me running outside, but there was nobody and nothing around and nothing unusual to behold except a big halibut head laying mutely on the roof, blindly staring goggle-eyed.  A Steller’s jay arrived and, after scolding us, cocked its head with interest toward the delivery on the roof.  What had happened?   No raven, crow, gull or any other bird for which fish was on the menu was capable of lifting a halibut head off the beach.  Only an eagle had the power and the means.  Having frequently witnessed eagles contesting for fish and other morsels, we were able to reconstruct the event. Eagles are tolerably good fishers, though not in the same league as ospreys, but why make the effort to catch a fish when you can scavenge it or steal one from an osprey or another eagle?  

Here’s what happened: The head had been discarded on the beach, probably off the Cold Storage dock.   Such a morsel did not go long unnoticed with lots of hungry, sharp-eyed eagles around.  The first one on the scene swooped down without landing, snatched the head off the beach and, with the prize in its talons worked to gain altitude, meanwhile bee-lining it for the nearest landing where it could have lunch. With nothing closer it headed across the water toward the big spruces behind our place. Another eagle, or likely other eagles, arriving seconds too late to get the head, disputed ownership with much screaming and a hot pursuit. The head may have changed ownership several times.  Here’s the reason that the first eagle carrying the fish worked so hard to gain altitude.  It doesn’t want any other eagle higher than it.  In the same way that a perched eagle has to surrender its perch to a sharp taloned eagle arriving from above, so, in flight, does an eagle carrying a fish have to drop the cargo in order to roll upside down and present its own talons to ward off an attacker swooping down from above. The attacking eagle, or another eagle in pursuit, often grabs the prize before it hits the water or falls into a forest. In this case the contesting eagles reached the area above our house with the aerial melee still in session. The final time the prized head got dropped must have been from considerable altitude.   Accelerating at 32 feet/second/second, it whomped onto the roof and bought the occupants out on a run.  Perhaps our sudden appearance caused the eagles to think twice about attempting a grab off the house and they scattered. The head remained where it landed.  Happily, it missed the glass skylight as otherwise it might have been delivered directly into the kitchen sink.  

Mom Dalton—Jessie Starr Dalton—recalled an event from her childhood when she and her friends, playing along the shore at the forest’s edge, noticed movement of a halibut float that the elders had set not far out.  As mentioned, these floats are often carved to resemble a cormorant, a bird that has a long neck.  The line running down to the hooks is tied to the cormorant’s feet at the opposite end of the float from the head, so with any disturbance on the line from below, the head and neck of the cormorant lifts from the surface.  The float also had a line attached leading to shore and across the beach where it was tied to a tree. The kids, thrilled with the prospect of taking on a grown-up’s role in this important development, abandoned their games, untied the line, tried to pull the slack out of it and rewind it around the tree to keep the halibut from dragging hook, line and sinker any farther out to sea.  Somehow, in the excited chaos, shouted commands, and conflicting ideas, and the kids managed to get Jessie tangled in the shoreline and tied to the tree trunk.  ​



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A magnificent Chilkat Robe, woven of cedar bark and mountain goat wool. Colors would be black, white, pale yellow and pale turquoise.
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A Shakee.àt or frontlet headdress. The frontlet itself is carved of cedar and inlaid with abalone shell. Ermine skins cover the back of the head. The frontlet is crested with sea lion whiskers and yellow-shafted flicker feathers. Tlingit word for flicker, translated to English: Mountain bird.
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Skip's Corner  02/26/2018

2/26/2018

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Skip Wallen

                         Dance of the Halibut Spirit 3

                                           "Fish & Cut Bait"  
​                       
             (
Part 3 of A four part series)


                                        
      R T Wallen © 2018​ 

Some weeks later found me in at the Dalton’s house in Hoonah, the Raven Nest House, Yeil Kudi Hit, along with my sister Katy and friend, Jerry.  Pop had finished several hooks and to use them we were going to cross Icy Strait to Glacier Bay in Pop’s boat, an 18 foot runabout called Teet-kut-ah, (“Ocean Breaker”, after a story about sea otter hunting off the outside coast).   We would continue well up into Muir Inlet, the eastern arm of the Bay where Pop had a ten-acre island and cabin.  We would set the hooks there in several eets (fishing spots) and catch a halibut.    We started out on a low tide and stopped at Point Adolphus to catch octopus for bait.  Pop called them devilfish, and caught them by jabbing his cane into crevices and holes under boulders until a “debblefish grab hol’ of it”.

Pop’s island in the middle of Glacier Bay National Monument was his in his mind and the minds of his family, but probably not in the minds of the officials of Glacier Bay National Monument.  As far as I know he did not have any document title to it.  However, his family had been using it since before the establishment of Glacier Bay National Monument in 1926 as attested to by Pop, letters, family stories, and notes tacked up in the cabin dating back many years.   There seemed to exist a tacit understanding:  The rangers did not interfere with Pop’s use of the island and did not disturb the cabin and Pop did not assert his claim officially.
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The Tlingit name for this island was Watsix, the word for caribou, but which Pop told me in this case referred to a cow. Back in the 1920s a steamship with tourists aboard made its way up the bay. The ship was also carrying a few cattle and one of the cows died, was dumped overboard and drifted onto the island. In those days many Tlingits had never seen a cow and were unfamiliar with domestic cattle. Whoever was camping on the island, after seeing the dead cow referred to it as watsix since the strange carcass on the beach bore at least a vague resemblance to a caribou.
A powerful ambiance pervades the island, a breathing presence, a silence that is not quite silent.   It may be the chill flowing off Muir Glacier and other nearby glaciers or the smooth hiss of the glaucous tide sliding by. Certainly one feels the grandeur of the surroundings and the brooding, lingering presence of the Ice Age.   I think it’s something one can’t determine. But, whatever it was, I couldn’t put my finger on it.  On this day all was roofed over with a drifting cloud ceiling.
Picture“Wild strawberries from Pop’s island, small, and incomparably sweet.
The low, ten-acre island supports a growth of small willows and alders at the south end, seemingly not enough to conceal much of anything. It’s surprising that one can miss a bear until it stands on its hind legs.  They swim out occasionally for a soapberry treat.     Also, tucked down in these trees Pop’s cabin hides itself well.  Never mind that the rusty corrugated metal roof contrasts with the vegetation, one does not see the cabin from the water. Vertical boards and bats all bleached silver-gray, side the little building.  A narrow five-panel door, certainly salvaged from a more pretentious building,  provides access to the single 12 x 16 foot gravel-floored room.  Pop kindles a fire in the pot-bellied drum in the middle of the room.  It’s set on end, the stove pipe running straight up through the cabin roof.  Within a few minutes a fire snaps and crackles, throwing heat.  The walls are lined with cut-up cardboard boxes and it’s not long before the room is more than comfortably warm.  Daylight passes through a sheet of translucent corrugated plastic in one section of the roof, producing a slightly greenish tint inside.    We’ve picked wild strawberries and soapberries from the north end of the island and now set to work cleaning and sorting them.  Two small icebergs have stranded themselves on the beach at that end.  We chop off a few bucket-size chunks of ice and melt them in  a kettle on the stove.  We entertain ourselves reading notes tacked up by various Daltons, some dating back to the 1940s.

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Packing gear down the beach
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Close up of baited hooks
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Preparing a devilfish for use as bait
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Making a set near Pop’s island from a small dinghy. It would be much too dangerous to try to drag a big halibut into so tiny a vessel so a large one would have to be beached
Pop rigged the several halibut hooks, stabbing the octopus ‘fingers’ on the barbs and tying the bait to the arm of the hook with the ‘buttons” facing away from the arm.  The tough buttons resist smaller fish from pulling the bait off sideways.   He baited another hook with a fillet of Dolly Varden char (trout) (light pink in color) and others with sockeye salmon (deep red in color) tying splints of cedar around these softer fish to keep sculpins from stealing the bait.  (splints not pictured)  Using rocks of two or three pounds as sinkers, and fastening halibut ganion around the rock, he tied the short line previously attached to a hook two or three feet above the sinker.  We had a little trouble finding suitable rocks.  Most of the rocks at hand were rounded, worn by the glacier or swift streams. We wanted angular fractured rock, or a rock like the Tlingits used to fashion, with a furrow worked around the middle so that the line would not slip off.  Raising the hooks to the sky Pop chanted to them in Tlingit, admonishing them, in part,  to “Go down and fight with the ‘Big Honor’
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I came across my diagram of a Tlingit halibut hook set while searching through my notes. The water column is much compressed in the drawing. More likely the hooks would be set in 10 fathoms of water, or deeper. Pop Dalton’s labored signature is on the diagram.
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A first attempt at a wood engraving: A halibut rising to eye a carving of the Hat Owner on one of Pop’s hooks. My print is backward, although the original plates were correct. Halibut are “right handed”, that is, both eyes are on the fish’s right side, not the left as in this print. The reversal results when pulling a print directly from the plate as can be demonstrated by pressing the palms of your hands together and then spreading them open with the thumbs facing out. An artist should anticipate this when starting a print. Notice the diagonal line crossing the print under the halibut. Down to the left it would be attached to a rock sinker, while up and to the right it would lead to the surface and a float.
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During the halibuts’ larval stage their left eye migrates to the fishes’ right side and they develop into flatfish designed to spend their lives on or near the ocean bottom. Their left side remains white and eyeless while their right side, now featuring two eyes, turns a dark mottled brown. In this way they benefit from their color scheme, becoming mostly invisible when laying on the bottom, especially with sand scattered over their bodies, and harder to see against the surface light when viewed from below. Also, the left eye, which would be purposeless pressed against the bottom, now on the topside, is positioned to be useful. I mentioned in the caption beneath the wood engraving that halibut are right “handed”, or, more accurately termed, right “eyed” as can be seen in the photo above and contrasted with my wood engraving. ​
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Pop makes some adjustments on the Dolly Varden bait before “talking to the wood” and making the set.
One of our floats had been roughly carved and painted by Pop in the form of a cormorant, which Pop referred to as a ‘black duck’.  There was something in the Tlingit old-timers, talented artists or not, that demanded art in the everyday objects they fashioned and used.  I think the wooden float would have served without ornamentation.  But Pop had troubled to carve a beak, which he later painted red, and fashioned a body and legs which he painted black and which, using ones imagination, could be seen to somewhat resemble his subject, a black duck.  After all, cormorants catch fish.  The other two floats were an inflated seal stomach and a commercial hard plastic net float. Pop raised the hooks toward the sky and spoke or chanted in Tlingit, asking the hooks to go down and fight the “Big Honor”, which is what he called the halibut under circumstances that demanded respectful protocol.
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Pop, about to “talk to the wood” before making a set
​The hooks were lowered to a depth of about ten fathoms.  Then we waited.  From the beach we watched for movement from the floats.  As the hours passed by without any action, Pop moved them to another spot.   The baits had not been touched.   “All fish up.” Pop complained after another couple of hours, meaning that commercial halibut fishing had taken most of the halibut, and that his hooks were helpless to do their work.    As we had to return to Hoonah and with a long run facing us out of upper Glacier Bay and across Icy Strait we did not set the hooks again that day and it wasn’t until a subsequent trip that halibut were caught on Pop’s hooks. 
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Skip's Corner  02/19/2018

2/19/2018

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Picture
Skip Wallen

                                   Dance of the Halibut Spirit 2

                                                    "Roots"  
​                                     
{Part 2 of A four part series)

                                              R T Wallen © 2018​ ​
We had already collected the alder and the cedar but neither Pop nor I had a brown bear tibia on hand from which to carve the bone barbs, nor did we have the spruce roots to bind the arms of the hooks together.  The butcher at 20th Century Grocery Store on the corner of Seward and Front Streets solved the first problem by coming up with the same bone element, a tibia, albeit from a cow.  So once we had spruce roots for lashings, the hooks could be completed.  Pop said we had to find spruces growing “in the open, so the roots go straight, not mix up with others”.  We knew of such a place at the mouth of Eagle River, twenty-five miles north of Juneau along the coast.  Here several copses of Sitka spruce stood removed some distance from the greater forest on a grassy point formed of glacial silt deposited by Eagle River. We could drive out the road almost to its end as far as Amalga Harbor and, to save a hike through the woods, paddle the remaining two miles along the coast in my canoe

It happened that I had an Island in Amalga Harbor and had been asking Pop about its Tlingit name and history.   Pop said, “We ask yo’ uncle, Tsee Xwaa. He know.” Johnny Fawcett, Tsee Xwaa, of the Woosh-ke-taan clan was older than Pop by five or ten years. Pop respected him and esteemed his knowledge. He was one of a few people to whom Pop deferred in this area. Moreover, the Woosh-ke-taans had a history in Berner’s Bay, a large bay and river estuary some miles north of Amalga Harbor. Even better, the Woosh-ke-taans claimed the halibut as a clan crest.  If anyone knew about the island, Tsee Xwaa would know.  He was living in the Native Village, a group of tribal houses in line on both sides of a single road in a section of Juneau that a hundred years ago had been on the waterfront.  Now the old beach was buried with fill and development leaving the Village land-locked and a block or so from the sea.   I think Tsee Xwaa, up in years, and sometimes a little befuddled, was not completely sure why he got dragged out on an expedition that morning.  Pop went into the Thunderbird House and emerged a moment later gripping the old man by one arm.   Tsee Xwaa, jacket half on, clutched his cane in the other hand while trying to straighten his fur hat as he got hustled out and loaded into my pick-up truck.   Once aboard, he smiled at me blankly, whistled tuneless notes through pursed lips and stared straight ahead as though this sort of thing happened all the time.

In due time we arrived at Amalga Harbor and I launched the canoe while Pop found a crab apple tree and cut a forked limb for use as root digging tool.  Two natural features here vie for place in my mind as ​

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Pop Dalton hefts the freshly cut crotch of a crabapple tree before peeling the bark and sharpening the short limb.
the most enchantingly beautiful on the limited Juneau road system: Amalga Harbor and its neighboring Salt Chuck. The harbor itself, unmarred in those days with paved launch ramps and parking areas, held me in thrall on every visit.  Three forested islets surrounded the little cove, replicating themselves into six on a tranquil day like this as they mirrored on the undisturbed surface.  Through the passageways between the islets one glimpsed the wide reach of Lynn Fjord and beyond it the Chilkat Mountain Range, blue and white in the atmosphere and about 10 miles off.  Within the cove, the hooting conversations of ravens lingered in the air. A few minutes wait and a kingfisher was certain to burst onto the scene and settle on an overhanging limb.  All the while, with loud impatience, it would rattle out its complaints, raising and lowering its unruly crest and spying down through its reflection to abundant schools of salmon fingerlings and other minnows.  Irascible and tough, kingfishers spend the winters here.  How they keep from freezing the toes on their little naked, fleshy feet is a wonder.  There are lots of wonders about kingfishers.  How can their beaks hang on to a slippery minnow, for example, while energetically swinging it right and left as they bludgeon it to death with sweeping blows on a limb or piling?  For that matter, how can they bust out of the sea after an aerial dive, yelling the whole time with a minnow in their beak?  And why does the female wear two belts, one blue and one reddish brown, while the male contents himself with only a blue belt?
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The grandeur and beauty of Amalga Harbor, from a hill to the Northwest looking along the Southeast Alaska mainland. The island under discussion is centered in the view. The salt chuck is just out of the frame to the left.
​Then there was the Salt Chuck, a short walk along the shore to the north.  Salt chucks, or tidal lakes, are periodically breached by high tides, so their waters are brackish. This one, separated from the sea by a narrow rocky isthmus, collected the dark waters of Peterson Creek draining the mountain valley immediately inland.  Most hours of the day and night the creek tumbled over the isthmus into Lynn Fjord, but the highest tides reversed the flow, replenishing the lake with charges of seawater.  It was, and is, a beauty. Steelhead trout ascend the creek as far as a waterfall a mile or so inland.  One can count on a great blue heron stalking its green margins, and sometimes a flotilla of mergansers, trim and racy, their faces submerged like snorkelers as they paddle along scanning underwater for prey. And there are always black bears.

The island about which I had questions is the main geographic feature sheltering the cove from the seaward side.   Entirely forested, with a mostly sheer margin that drops directly into the sea, it lies less than a quarter mile from the mainland, with a beach of fractured blue mussel shells on the inshore side, the only good landing place.  The outer side of the island drops immediately into deep water, deep enough that whales steam by within a pebble’s toss. Each year at least one, sometimes two, nesting pairs of bald eagles make their home on it.  A couple times each year, on extremely low tides, minus five footers, much of the harbor bottom directly inshore of the island lies exposed and strewn about with starfish of many colors, sea anemones, and, sometimes, hundreds of baby king crabs, perfect little miniatures of their giant parents.

This morning we were on an average low tide with lots of water in the harbor and since the sunny, windless weather promised an easy paddle to Eagle River I took time to circumnavigate  the island with the two elders. Pop translated the questions I had about the island to Tsee Xwaa.  “They call that island  “Kaan xat’ a gook“, Tsee Xwaa said in Tlingit.”  He added two stories one of which I recount here briefly, paraphrasing:  Before white people, Tlingits from Auke Bay had been camped at this spot and were very hungry, even starving.  A shark killed a halibut in the cove, thrashing about and chopping out big bites and when the tide went out exposing the bottom, people salvaged the large chunks of the fish left behind.  The second story I heard years later when Pop retold it in a somewhat disjointed way in the office of an opthomologist.  The story was somewhat similar in that it had to do with a rescue of people, but this time by a killer whale which drove Dall Porpoises up onto the sandy beach, possibly behind my island or possibly onto the sandy beach at Eagle River toward which we were now bound.  I’ve recorded what I have of it as a footnote at the end of this story. **

Tsee Xwaa did not say what time of year these events took place or why people were starving.

Paddling around the shadowed side of the five-acre island and coming out into the sun I looked up to see a mature bald eagle perched on a high snag, a bleached and twisted spire that leaned out over the sea, its tip maybe two hundred feet above us.  Resplendent in the morning sunshine cresting the island, white head and tail shining, the eagle preened itself, throwing tufts of downy white feathers into the air, one after another into a cloud of little diadems that glinted around her briefly and floated down like dandelion fluff.  I had stopped paddling and Pop, in the bow twisted around to see why.  On spotting the eagle he remarked,  “Your Uncle taking his bath”  (“Uncle” meaning the eagle and signifying a kinship relation in Tlingit social structure between the bird and me.) One of the down feathers wafted over the canoe and without thinking about it, I reached out and plucked it from the air.   Pop witnessed this. “Now sometin’ going to happen!”  he said.  “Put in your pocket, don’t say anything.”  Pop was thinking about Gowakaans, Peace Dancers, and the significance of taking eagle down from the air.  But that’s another story.  Just now, we’re on our way to Eagle Beach.

The wide sandy beaches of the Eagle River delta, rising from a mill-pond calm sea, simmered brightly in the light.  Flounders, startled from their half-buried hiding places on the bottom by the shadow of the canoe passing over them, rocketed away through the clear shallows leaving little contrails of sand behind them.  A black oystercatcher let loose a spiky-voiced protest at our arrival, stared for a moment with yellow, unflinching eyes, then flew off down the beach. The oystercatcher, called in Tlingit  tloo gun’ (fire nose) referring to its fiery red-orange beak, had no grounds for complaint, anyway.  I knew it didn’t belong here because it had a nest on a rocky island half mile away. As we glided to the beach, the bow crunched softly on the bottom.  No worry about rocks and barnacles lacerating the canvas canoe here.  Canoe-friendly beaches like this being a rarity in Southeast, I took pleasure in the easy landing and disembarking.
PictureGeorge Dalton Sr. “Pop” as he wanted me to call him, and the author, out to collect spruce roots.

Pop and Tsee Xwaa, both about the same height and stature and each with a cane hooked over an arm, stood like twins looking up the slope of the wide beach to the goose tongue and grassy cover above the intertidal.   Tsee Xwaa wore his fur hat and Pop his ever-present short-brimmed fedora.   We had arrived on a low tide and so had a gentle climb of sixteen or eighteen feet over the expanse of sloping beach to the grasslands above. Mindful of my friend Amos Burg’s admonition to tie down your canoe even if its in the middle of an Iowa cornfield, I carried the canoe and stashed it out of the reach of the flooding tide hitching the bowline around a driftwood root, not that we expected to be here that long.  From the top of the beach we could look out ​​​across the level grassy plain to the dark islands of spruce ​a hundred yards or so distant. ​

Song sparrows and Lincoln sparrows flushed in short, low altitude flights fluttering back into the waist-high verdure ahead only to take flight again as we waded through. Pop, in the lead used his cane machete-fashion every once in a while to slash a wild celery plant, ee yana aet, from our path.   We’d not gone very far before the warming day started to exact a toll, reminding us to stop and remove jackets.

Reaching the first spruce copse and ducking into the shade was like entering the shadowed chill of a stone cathedral.  Tsee Xwaa found a comfortable depression on the mossy ground and stretched out, using a spruce bole for a backrest. Whistling without sound he began picking up twigs, cones and needles, rearranging the forest floor within his reach.   
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George Dalton Sr. gets hold of a spruce root and will try to extract as much of its length as possible.
Pop pulled his root digger, now stripped of bark and sharpened, out of the pack and began work.  The crab apple had been cut just below a forking branch and again above the crook so that the long part could be used as a handle with the crook angling back, something like a hoe or an adz. This would be the ‘hook’ and was cut eight or ten inches long, its end sharpened to a point.  Pop chose a spot near the edge of the copse and chopped the hook of his digger into the earth three or four paces from the tree, snagging and drawing up a root about 3/8 inch thick from a few inches under the surface.  
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Pulling a good Sitka spruce root from the duff and moss at Eagle River
As he pulled on this root in the direction away from the tree it came free of the earth with a ripping, popping sound, breaking through lesser roots above it. Pop had exposed about 10 feet of its length when it snagged under a larger root that crossed over it. In the forest proper, this kind of entanglement would make it difficult to extract roots at all, much less the long straight kind desired for lashings.  Pop cut the larger root with an axe and continued drawing up the prize until it forked and diminished to less than ​​¼ inch in diameter.  Cutting it free at both ends he had a mostly straight run of root about 25 feet long which he coiled neatly and tied off.  We repeated this effort until we’d filled the backpack with roots.  Mom Dalton would later soak them in water, strip away the outer sheath, and split the roots in half lengthwise. ​
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Pop Dalton and Tsee Xwaa wait for their ride back to Amalga Harbor as the canoe is readied for the trip
PictureThe Tlingit elders make their way arm in arm down the Eagle River beach with me behind them portaging our canoe to the shore. An earlier tideline is visible behind the canoe, running around the point. The Chilkat Mountains lie across Lynn Fjord in the distance. Beyond them lies Glacier Bay, and beyond it, the wide Pacific. The only human tracks between the tides on this wild, mile-long beach, are those we made, coming and going. They will be wiped clean in a few hours by the next tide

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Skip's Corner 11/13/2017

11/15/2017

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Skip Wallen

                         Dance of the Halibut Spirit  1
                                ​    © R T Wallen 2018
                                   Cháatl kuyéil


                                       (A four part series)

​It should be stated at the outset that my title is misleading.  These notes re-captured my attention immediately when I recently happened upon them 43 years after they were written. They may even be important from the perspective of cultural anthropology. The dance was my intended purpose in writing them, but the notes stop short of the denouement suggested by the title. The title remains because the notes to complete the story exist somewhere in the mountain of writings accumulated during my fifty years in Alaska. I hope to finish the story when they are found. For now, I’ve not tried to finish it from memory. 
​​

​The tape recording I made of Tseexwáa singing and performing the dance, also loose in my papers and records, is another matter.  Remarks about that can be found at the end of the narrative. ​

Meanwhile, there’s much here on halibut, on the making of traditional halibut hooks, on fishing for halibut in Glacier Bay, and twice “abducting” an old man, a respected Tlingit elder, possibly, if Pop Dalton was right, the surviving Wooshkeetaan who knew the words to the dance and the dance. “Pop” in these notes is George Dalton, Sr., the head of the Tlingit family into which I, and later my wife Lynn, were adopted and with whom we participated in family events, potlatches, subsistence hunting, fishing and gathering, and most everything to do with Tlingit culture for over 45 years.  He and Mom Dalton passed years ago. The notes stir fond memories of a bygone world and of life in Juneau, Hoonah, and Glacier Bay, Alaska, in the 1960s and 70s.

[Tlingit words are included for the record, using spellings created by linguists where possible. 
Pronunciation of these words requires a knowledge of the phonemes represented in the spellings.  Failing that I’ve spelled them the best I can after listening to Tlingit speakers. Tlingit words are in italics in the following story.]


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Raven Nest House. The Dalton house on the beach in Hoonah.
This whole thing about the halibut started under Pop’s house in Hoonah.  Like every waterfront building in Southeast, the house stood on pilings and reached out over the beach or the sea, depending upon the tide. The rickety deck at the seaward end supported an outhouse in one corner.  Drying sealskins, deerskins, nets, wire, firewood, sawhorses, splitting maul, inflated seal stomach floats, fishing tackle and more, covered much of the remainder. In the summertime amidst all this stuff, a few potted plants belonging to Mom Dalton perked up their flowering colors just outside the back door.  The other end of the house faced a narrow gravel road, narrow enough in places that when cars met going opposite directions, there followed either a courteous ‘you first’ or an argument and test of wills. The road ran just above the reach of tides the half mile or so from the Point into town.  The front door stoop, dusty when the sun shone or muddy when rain fell, so most-times muddy, angled up close to and almost level with the thoroughfare.  A person stepped out of the house with caution in case a car was trundling by. It was never very busy, though.  When a ferry from Juneau or Sitka tied up, a few cars, some arriving, some leaving, would come by both ways, rattling the windows of the house.  The beach, sloping away at a moderate angle from the edge of the road, put the floor of the house ten or twelve feet high at the seaward end, way too high to reach from the beach, and high enough to keep the highest tides from flooding in. But upslope, closer to the road, one could stand under the house and easily reach among the floor joists.  That’s where Pop cached more things needed for wresting a subsistence living from the surroundings.  Whatever he did not have cached here or on the deck above or in the house he had hidden in several secret wilderness caches, near and far within the range of his skiff, which pretty much included the northern half of the Alaska panhandle.

Pop didn’t build this house.  He acquired it in the early 1940s from a defunct cannery in Excursion Inlet where German prisoners of war had been conscripted to dismantle a forward military installation following the Aleutian Campaign. Its wainscoting, wooden floors, wood stove, and other details spoke of the era of early canneries and frame houses in Alaska.   It stood on pilings partly in the woods at Excursion, and Pop told me he sat and planned for weeks over how he was going to lower it onto float logs and get across the twenty miles of treacherous tide and wind-driven waters of Icy Strait between Excursion and Hoonah. Gambling on an opportunity of favorable conditions, he left the sheltered inlet with the house on float logs in tow behind his seiner Washington, risking everthing!  There must have been heart-stopping moments midway in the Strait, but safely across, he and the house arrived off Hoonah’s Cannery Point to the throb of welcoming drums and the singing and cheers of the villagers. The house was beached at a temporary location and eventually jacked up onto pilings at its final site.

Celebrated highliner fisherman George Dalton Sr.’s name, coupled with that of his vessel inevitably prompted the obvious joke: George Washington! Mom Dalton remembered a time when the Washington, after a fabulous series of successful seines, approached Hoonah so loaded to the gunwales with salmon that bets were being placed on whether or not she could reach the cannery. Even the wake of a carelessly passing vessel might sink her. Fellow fishermen (all knew one another in the small village) came to the rescue. Slowly and cautiously they approached to port and starboard, tied their vessels alongside, and escorted George Washington the last distance to safe harbor.

But coming back to the occasion under discussion, we were on the beach near the house, ahead of a rising tide, pulling in his skiff.  Pop, leaning on the skiff for a breather, said, “We let the tide do the res’ of the work.”  Within a couple hours the tide would be high, floating the skiff in to where he wanted to work on it.  In order to secure the boat meantime, I ducked under the house to grab a length of mooring line, a loop of which snagged on a wooden peg.  When I went to free it, something atop a slat between the joists caught my eye: a little piece of weathered carving sticking out. Reaching up, I pulled out museum-worthy artifacts: two old traditional wooden halibut hooks.  I knew what they were but had never held one.

The thrill of this discovery gave me in a minor way, a sense of the emotion archaeologist Howard Carter must have felt at the bottom of his excavation peering at artifacts through the first crack knocked into Tutankhamun’s tomb chambers. “What do you see, Carter?”  “I see things.  Wonderful Things.”  Turning the new found treasures over in my hands, I noticed tooth marks along their shafts.  These were working hooks, battle tested veterans, chewed and frayed by the teeth of big fish.  I recalled having seen a halibut caught on a similar device at Nikolski Harbor on Umnak Island in the eastern Aleutians and was thinking about this when Pop called, “Son, bring a line!”  I stuck the hooks back and returned to work.   Later, when I mentioned them, Pop said, “Aha!  Now you find sumpthin!   You got to claim dem!  That gonna bring you luck!”


The find prompted me to a deeper investigation of traditional Tlingit halibut hooks.  I call them “Tlingit halibut hooks” because that was my direct experience with them, but they weren’t unique to the Tlingit.  Hooks of similar design, though with local variations, were made and used by tribes along the Northwest Coast from Oregon to Alaska.  They would more accurately be called Northwest Coast Halibut Hooks. In fact their use was not even limited to the Northwest Coast.  As mentioned earlier, a few of the devices, although rare in the Aleutian Islands, also show up there, a thousand miles west of Tlingit Anee’ –Tlingit land—recognizably northwest coast in design and shape but with Aleut figures carved in them. They must also have been used by people inhabiting the coast between the Aleutians and Southeast Alaska.

These hooks favor big fish.  Small halibut, “chicken” halibut, are not as able physically to be caught in them as large halibut.   Hundred pounders and larger halibut called “soakers” or or “barn doors” or “shooters” (so big they have to be shot before safely bringing on board), whose mouths are large enough to take them in, are more often caught. As evidence of their ability to select big fish, Pop told me that years ago, when more of the old wooden hooks were still around, during commercial long lining for halibut in the Gulf of Alaska (long lining employs a main line, or skate, to which shorter lines-gangens-are attached at intervals, each with a baited steel hook) Tlingit fishermen would substitute some of the traditional hooks and then later, when hauling gear aboard, bet on which kind of hook—the old or the new—had  caught the next soaker coming up the line, often winning when bone, alder and yellow cedar out performed steel.



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Three of George Dalton Sr.’s halibut hooks. The one on the right depicts the legendary Strong Man, Dukt-Ootl.
It’s time to take a minute for a general description of one of these hooks in order that the details that follow make sense to my reader.  Forget about the ubiquitous and familiar bent wire hook with a barb on one end and an eye on the other. This is a different approach to fishing tackle, something between a hook and a trap.  Their specific construction varies up and down the coast.  The ones I know are from Southeast Alaska. In Tlingit, the hook is called náakw. Pop made them out of two pieces of wood, one alder and one yellow cedar, as was the custom in this area, each about 12 inches long.  He carefully carved each piece so that when the two were lashed together at one end they would form a kind of lop-sided “у” shape, the lashed joint being around the ‘stem’ of the “у.”  The alder piece or ‘arm’ was straight, had a figure carved on one side, and was pierced midway with a hole through which a line would be attached.  The cedar arm was shaped with a crook so that when joined to its companion, it angled away from the alder arm by 25 to 35 degrees.   This arm bore a bone or metal barb at the end distant to the lashed joint.   The barb pointed back at an angle toward the crook in the “у.” All three lashings, the two joining the arms and the one fastening the barb, were originally made of spruce roots, substituted in later versions by rope or line.  The baiting and deployment of this gear will be described later, and the ingenuity of the design will become apparent as we go along.

I didn’t want to risk losing the old-timer antique hooks from under the Hoonah house on a fishing expedition, so I asked Pop if he would make a new one with which to catch a halibut.  (The two hooks found under the Dalton house are now in the Alaska State Museum) He hadn’t made hooks for years, and I think the two I found were the last of them.  But that spring on one of his trips into Juneau, Pop began the project.  With snow melting but still heavy on the ground in Perseverance Basin, the mountain valley above Juneau, we cut small alders, three to four inches in diameter, on the banks of Gold Creek.   We bucked these trunks into 12 and 14-inch lengths and split each in half lengthways to produce the blanks from which one of the hook’s arms would be carved.  For the other arm, Pop had a couple chunks of yellow cedar (Alaska cedar which he split with a froe to produce the blanks.

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Pop and my friend, Jerry, bucking alder into suitable lengths for making hooks.
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George Dalton Sr. inspects split-in-half alder sections
Pop did not have the artistic talent of the great Tlingit carvers, either past or present, but that didn’t stop him from setting up a stump workbench in the house and going to work. Using a jackknife, file, and piece of heated metal, he fashioned the hooks and carved and burned the designs into them. Once started, he got hold of the idea that he could readily sell extra hooks in my small gallery in Juneau, thus “scratching up” subsistence money when commercial fishing season was closed.  With this in mind, he went into full production.  The designs carved into the alder arm would face downward when the hook was deployed so that the halibut could see them. They were not merely decorative nor did they suggest prey, as is the case in a modern fishing lure.  Their purpose was symbolic and/or spiritual.  As Pop put it, “To bring a luck.”   Pop’s favorite designs included two heroic figures of Tlingit legend, Dukt Ootl, the “Strong Man” (born with puny physique, he rolled in embers to toughen himself, turning black in the process but eventually enabling himself to wrestle with and triumph over sea lions that competed with his people for fish), and Saakw saa ti, the “Hat Owner”.  Other designs were of a shark and halibut, based on a story from Amalga Harbor, Alaska. Other designs included a killer whale fin, a series of mysterious circles, and one called Raven Backbone, Yeil du dikei.     

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Daltons making halibut hooks in my Juneau Gallery. Mom Dalton is splitting spruce roots.
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Skip's Corner  10/13/2017

11/13/2017

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PictureCarol Wergin
Hello Friends,

The Spirit of the River’s statues have left the studio, but artist, R.T. “Skip” Wallen has not.   While the statues are being cast in bronze, Wallen is busy in the studio sculpting a mama Black Bear and her two cubs jaunting atop a fallen log. 

The art studio (922 Franklin Street, Manitowoc) will be open to the public once again on Saturday, November 11 from 10:00 to noon.  Visitors can see the nearly completed larger than life sized statues as well as meet with the artist.  Named the “Family Outing”, the project is a private commission to be located in Jackson Hole, Wyoming. 
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Spirit of the Rivers
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Family Outing
​Visitors can also see a set of maquettes (small bronze models) of the Spirit of the Rivers, as well as posters and articles from the project.  In addition, posters of Wallens’ other projects and examples of the lost wax bronze process are also available.

The Spirit of the Rivers, a 13ft. tall sculpture of three Native Americans portaging a birch bark canoe, is expected to be completely cast in bronze by the spring of 2018.  The actual dedication of this unique and beautiful monument will take place in the fall of 2018.
Carol Wergin ​


Hi Carol!  
​
Looks like a few Coachmen members came in for a peek a bit early.  Hope you don't mind!
​Harv
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Left to Right: Sharon (Heise) Magnusson, Skip Wallen, Dick Neuses, Lynn Wallen, Marie, Neuses, John Harvey, Joan Harvey, Del Torrison, John Torrison
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Skip's Corner  10/30/2017

10/30/2017

1 Comment

 
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 Sasquatch on Admiralty Island?



​   R.T. Wallen


​At least one person from the village of Angoon had seen tracks in the mossy forest near town, enormous tracks, two feet long. "Bigfoot" tracks!  Evidence of the legendary Sasquatch prowling the wilderness around the village of Angoon.  He had called the Alaska Department of Fish and Game reporting his discovery and, in doing so, more or less raised the topic, once again, for public debate.  The claim might have been dismissed, but coming from Angoon, where people have a long history and are well acquainted with the fauna surrounding them, a response from the Department was appropriate.  If they were "Sasquatch" tracks, the range of this still-mythical creature would have had its mythical range extended hundreds of miles to the north. So the claim needed investigation. I, the newest and lowest-ranking wildlife biologist in the Juneau office and therefore, as usual, most expendable for such missions, got delegated.
​
Angoon, a Tlingit village on the west side of 100 mile long Admiralty Island, is not far, as the raven flies, from Fish & Game headquarters in Juneau on the mainland. In fact, the north end of the island is visible from places along the local Juneau road system. (Juneau is one of two state capitals that can’t be reached by road, the other being Honolulu.) When a person needs to get around in the wilderness of Southeast Alaska, with no roads or bridges connecting islands and communities, one does not jump in a car. One jumps in a boat or an airplane.   In this case, using a boat and outboard engine would mean circumnavigating almost halfway around the island, too long and time-consuming a trip to get to Angoon, find and investigate the tracks, and get back the same day.  No matter how low on the biologist totem pole, I too, had other duties and commitments.   So, after first inviting my good friend Karl 
Lane to accompany me, we both jumped in a floatplane.  Karl had years of experience on Admiralty Island, whereas, in the mid 1960s, I was almost a newcomer, a Cheechako.

A few words about Karl Lane: Much of his youth was spent in the Okefenokee Swamp in southern Georgia where he knew alligators and water moccasins and knew about carefully secreted moonshine stills hidden on hammocks deep in the swamp.  He shared a swimming hole with an unusually large gator which he and his friends called Uncle Tom and on whom they kept a watchful eye.  Karl was a woodsman, an outdoorsman, and had ventured north, eventually setting himself up guiding bear hunts and becoming a much respected and sought after master guide.  When I knew him, he was growing tired of the business of taking people out to kill bears and was encouraging his many prospective clients to hunt with camera rather than rifle.  A budding environmentalist!  Later, his critical testimony in court helped avert the clear cut logging of his beloved island.  After many challenges by the Sierra Club and the Village of Angoon, in which Karl took part, the U.S. Forest Service and U.S. Champion Plywood cancelled the 8.4 billion board feet logging sale centered on the island. Today Admiralty Island is protected as a National Monument, its forests standing un-felled as they have for centuries.

I count myself lucky and privileged to have made trips to Admiralty Island with Karl, winter and summer trips, usually aboard his vessel the Heron.  On one particular trip we took a small floatplane, landing on Jim’s Lake in the center of the island.  From the lake we made the steep climb up the forested slope of Yellow Bear Mountain, and on top, above timberline, we camped for several days. Over the years Karl had made equipment stashes here and there around SE Alaska.   One of them, hidden in the alpine meadow on Yellow Bear Mountain, containing ground sheets, visqueen, axe, rope, lantern, bug repellant and so on, meant that we were less burdened with gear for the climb.

It’s difficult to share the experience of the unique beauty of the high country meadows of Admiralty Island with those who have not been there.  One breathes the perfume of the heather-carpeted world, a world interrupted here and there by copses of small, snow-tortured mountain hemlock, their tangled trunks all bent downslope. Robins nest in these hemlocks, seemingly as much at home in this unpeopled wilderness as they are in a city park.  Their sweet songs floats down the mountainsides, mostly unheard by human ears.  One looks down on the mighty forests and on eagles soaring below.  Sitka deer graze and browse the meadows.  From our simple campsite we could see Angoon and Mitchell Bay to the west, the high country spine of the island to the north and south, and the snow-covered mainland mountains to the east.  Our thin, translucent plastic shelter, supported by a ridge rope and a couple tent poles offered some protection against rain, but not from anything else.  Mosquitoes and  "Sasquatches", had easy access though the two open ends.
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View from Yellow Bear Mountain, looking west toward the village of Angoon and Mitchell Bay. Chichagof Island is in the distant background.
However, Bigfoot did not put in an appearance during the three nights we camped there, at least not while we were awake to know about it.  But since Admiralty Island has a population of brown bears, estimated to be about one bear for each of the island’s 1500 square miles,  it would have been unusual not to have some bears showing up, especially since this particular mountain lay in one of the routes that bears use when crossing from one side of the island to the other.  One morning a large male bear emerged from timber some distance below. Seeing our movements on the ridge, it immediately crouched down and began sneaking toward us, cat-like, to investigate.  With no cover to shield it from sight, it continued in its crouching crawl out in the open, working back and forth up the slope closer and closer.   Finally Karl whispered to me, “That’s close enough, don’t’ you think?” Close enough for Karl Lane was more than close enough for me.  Karl fired his rifle over the bear, and I was happy to see its butt as the grizzly galumphed back downhill and into the timber.

Several well-traveled brown bear routes passed over Yellow Bear Mountain and in them lay the secret of "Sasquatch" tracks.     Here’s how the giant tracks form.  Bears, for some reason, like to place their feet where other bears have placed their feet.  Over time this enlarges tracks. Add to it the fact that a bear going at its usual pace places its hind foot on, or somewhat overlapping, the same track that the forefoot has just vacated. In mud or snow, where clear impressions of the bears’ footpads and claws have been imprinted, this pattern is easily discerned.    However, in heath and moss, only depressions, are formed. These facts alone account for the generations of giant impressions in some situations.  But there’s still another factor. Such impressions can fill with water that freezes and thaws through the seasons, enlarging the long-lasting impressions.  
​
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“Aha!” An observer might think as he regards such giant impressions. “Sasquatch!”
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Karl Lane measures the stride of “Sasquatch” tracks on Yellow Bear Mountain.
Some years ago my wife Lynn was invited to curate a show on Alaska Eskimo Masks in Calgary, Alberta.  I tagged along and, while Lynn and the museum staff set up their collection of masks, found myself at the Calgary Zoo wandering around. It had rained several days previously, and I happened to be there when a kind of crusty ground had formed in the bear enclosure.  And there was the culprit in the act!  A grizzly making "Sasquatch" tracks!
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THE CULPRIT
This brings us back to Angoon and the discoverer of the "Bigfoot" tracks.  Excited by his find and eager to show it off, he ferried Karl and me to the discovery site across Mitchell Bay in his skiff.

Now, as mentioned, Angoon people are very familiar with the bears of their island.  
They know bear tracks.  But somehow the fellow who called Fish and Game had missed out on a bit of Admiralty Island natural history.  Anyway, there were the tracks threading their way through the tall timber, giant impressions, leading now under the thorny Devil’s club, now around and across moss-covered roots and over enormous moss-covered Sitka spruce logs. This evidence, not far from the village, showed where the "Sasquatch" had moved through the understory.  Where had it come from?  Where was it going? Confronting such tracks without knowing the identity of the track-maker could raise the hair on the nape of one’s neck as one imagined an ape-thing hulking through the shadowy forest.  

We tried to let the disappointed Fish and Game caller down easy, but I think he was reluctant to believe us And  he was a bit irritated. He insisted these tracks were different from bear tracks. He had seen bear tracks, but nothing this BIG.   And they were big and different—but only in form, not in maker.  It was hard for him to accept that such huge impressions had been made by such a familiar creature.  In any case, he did not get the imprimatur of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game on his discovery. Perhaps, as far as he is concerned, hairy ape-things still prowl the island. Nobody likes to have a good ghost story--or "Sasquatch" story--spoiled.

​
R T WALLEN


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Skip's Corner  08/21/2017

8/21/2017

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               Barn Swallows on the Mink Farm.
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​Down the road on Mitkof Highway, which in those days was a dusty gravel affair, about 10 miles south of Petersburg, Alaska,  between the road and Wrangell Narrows, stood the University of Alaska’s Experimental Fur Farm.  In the spring of 1964 I had finished my degree at the University of Wisconsin.  Without a clear idea of what to do with my life except that it would be lived in Alaska, I’d taken a summer job at the Fur Farm. My feelings about fur farming aside, the grand surroundings of the farm suited me for above the Mitkof highway lay wilderness.  The land rose steeply into the small forested mountains—some would say large forested hills—of Mitkof Island. If you love wild places., think of this: MItkof Island in the middle of the largest national forest in the nation, is only a small part of it.  The 17 million acre Tongass National Forest occupies nearly the entirety of Southeast Alaska. All of the creatures of forest and sea that you can imagine in this unpaved and unpolluted corner of the world,  live here in abundance.

The fur arm was a state inholding and it sloped gently downhill from the road to the Narrows.  I remember its layout something like this, starting from the top:  road, lawn, directors house and office, more lawn, mink and marten sheds, fox pens, semi-wild untended area, intertidal area, Wrangell Narrows.  A narrow dirt access drive ran straight down from the road.  Facing the mink sheds across this drive a row of two or three maintenance buildings strung out down the slope and just above them, buried in salmon berry bushes, a small shaded house trailer hid beneath a sheltering roof.  That’s where I lived.

Fur farms by their nature attract flies and other insects.  Two dozen or more barn swallows knew about the flies and had established residency on the farm.

These swallows, swift, and maneuverable, swooped and dodged and darted among the mink sheds in marvelous displays of flight mastery for anyone who cared to notice. In addition to their flyways among the sheds, the swallows favored the patch of lawn, 150 feet square, above the directors house. It generated mosquitos and, being the only flat area around, offered no obstacles to flight, not counting three foot high berms at the upper and lower edges. Shooting across the lawn at lightning speed, the swallows, following the terrain, rose at the berms in graceful chandelles, reversing course at the apex of their rise and rushed back over the lawn in the opposite direction, snatching up insects on the way.

The mink sheds, and there were three or four of them, long, narrow, gable roofed, open-sided buildings, had a walkway down the center and mink cages on either side.  The entryway to each shed was enclosed, not open-sided, and a person passed through this short, walled enclosure before getting to the mink cages. The enclosed entry had a doorway, no actual door but a doorway, and on the inside of every front wall, above this doorway, one or more swallow nests were mud-plastered to the boards.  Some of the nests were old, leftovers from previous years. Mud scars marked places where old nests had fallen away.  New nests with fresh, moist mud, were darker.

Every mud puddle on the farm became a Home Depot to the swallows, a source of building material, so much the better if any sprigs of straw, wafted from the sheds, were scattered about.  Multiple trips were made to the edges of the puddles and the swallows landed so lightly on the soft mud that I never saw a soiled wingtip or breast feather.  With birds from different couples arriving at a puddle simultaneously, shopping trips for nest materials became social occasions, chances to bump into neighbors, and much twittering gossip carried on. But nest building was serious, time driven work. Beak-full by beak-full mud was flown to the nest site and added to the growing structure.  Sprigs of straw appeared to be coveted treasures and  disagreements about ownership of particular scraps of straw sometimes broke out.  Straw got incorporated into the mud as a binder, a strengthening addition, functioning not unlike the straw used in building wattle huts.  Mud did not seem to me a trustworthy adhesive for gluing to walls but it served the needs of the feather-weight swallows .

Three good men, each with interesting backgrounds, saw to the day-to-day operation of the farm.  I liked them all, but they did not sufficiently appreciate the free winged insect control operating on the premises.  Whenever they spotted a nest being constructed over an entryway, they knocked it down,  thus avoiding the mess  of bird droppings on the floor below.
I nailed platforms below the offending nests and that solved the swallow nest issue.   The resident Steller’s jays were also indicted by the staff for stealing mink food, but that’s another story.

I made it part of my summer project to band nestling barn swallows.  To reach the nests and check on the growth of the young birds I’d haul a ladder around from shed to shed every few days and climb to the nest sites.   The parent birds, busy hunting insects,  carried their catches to their nests. They grew so accustomed to me sticking my nose into their business that they soon ignored me, hovering so close that I could feel the draft of their wing beats on the sides of my face.  Some were bold enough and impatient enough to zip in and land on the rim of their nest even with my intruding face mere inches away. As a result I discovered that the swallows were not returning with a single mosquito each trip but with a dozen or more!  The still living mosquitos were stuck to the edges of the beak by one or several of their legs and hung outside the beak, some with their wings still buzzing!  So, how the swallows do that?  How could they open their beaks to capture a mosquito without allowing the ones already captured to escape? True, there was moisture around the edges of their beaks particularly on the lips at the angle or corner of the mouth so the insects were more or less glued in place.  But how did the delicate mosquitos stay stuck and how did their thin legs stay unbroken while being carried at speed?  And how did they get distributed so neatly around a swallow’s beak?  The action was too fast for my eyes, but modern cameras could probably reveal the secrets.

Here’s another amazing ability of these swallows.  When the fledglings, born and raised in nests on the inside walls of a mink shed, took their maiden flights they fluttered about and generally passed through the entry to end up outside the shed, with their parents hovering about them twittering excitedly the whole time. When the last of a brood took this first flight I would witness an empty nest.  All of the young were outside, with the first time flyer sometimes on the ground but mostly teetering on a wire or ledge or twig.

!’d think, ‘well that nest is abandoned.  It has served its purpose.” But then, making my rounds in the late evening, I was astonished to find the nest fully occupied!  There were the swallowlets, eyes half closed, perched contentedly around the rim, cheek by jowl, facing out, ready for a night’s sleep.  Somehow, every day toward evening, the parents managed to get them all back into the nest, even the ones that had made their first flights that very day.  The parents seemed to be able to guide those first flights to some extent by hovering around or in front of first fliers, sometimes blocking them in the air, forcing or encouraging them in certain directions.  Still, getting the kid, the novice, brand new new and weak flyer, to pass through the entry and, once inside, guide them upward to the nest above—that’s a feat worthy of note and wonder.

One day I was walking back up from the mink sheds to my trailer.  A maintenance shed right next to my trailer, taller than the rest had two stories and was painted barn red, while all the rest were white. A pair of swallows had built their nest on the side of this building just under the eaves, as is their way.  Rain fell hard that day, a downpour, not the usual Southeast Alaska misty drizzle. A swallow flying back and forth in the rain around nest site in an unusual manner drew my attention to the spot. Its flight was hovering and frantic and I expected to see a raider such as a raven or crow or jay.   But there were no raiders--and no nest!  The nest was gone!  A few remaining clumps of mud still plastered to the wall reassured me that the nest had been there. My eyes went quickly to the ground directly below.  Sure enough, there it lay, wet and broken, with three naked wet baby barn swallows squirming feebly in the weeds.  The still-alive babies and the parents fluttering around told the story.  A nest failure had just occurred.

Quickly gathering up the babies and some of the mud and straw nest remains, I rushed to the trailer, stuffed a rag in a cereal bowl, put the swallows in the bowl, put the bowl, along with the swallow babies and nest scraps in the oven and turned on the heat.  Leaving the temperature set as low as possible, and leaving the oven door open, I rushed to the carpenter shed and cut a nest-size half moon platform on the band saw out of 2 x 4.  Hurriedly nailing a strip of hardware cloth around the curved portion of the wood and letting the metal mesh protrude an inch and a half above the wood to form a rim, and drilling a hole for a spike through the wood I ran back to the trailer to check on things.  No smell of roasting birds greeted me at the door and, in fact, the little swallows were dry, warm, and much livelier than before. Leaving everything the way it was except for turning off the heat, I raced to find an 18 foot extension ladder, set it up against the shed, and carrying hammer, spike and the recently fashioned nest platform, climbed to the top of the ladder and nailed the faux nest right over the spot where the original had been.

Back to the trailer! The nest scraps were warm and mostly dry and the swallow-lets, even more lively than before, were weakly holding up their heads, mouths agape, seeking food.

Back to the shed.   With mud and straw and baby birds clasped against my chest in one hand, the other hand free to keep me from pitching off backwards, I climbed the ladder.  Both parents fluttered on either side of me twittering excitedly as I climbed.  Reaching the top, I stuffed mud and straw onto the half moon platform, forming a very crude nest.  So eager were the parents for me to get lost and leave them to their children that one was landing briefly on my head! Maybe the little ingrates thought I had wrecked their nest.  Had they seen me put their kids in the oven?  Whatever, I squashed a hole in the mud to form a depression, dumped the swallow-lets in and leaned away to give the parents room.  Before I get down even a single rung Mama Swallow was on the platform, sheltering wings slightly extended, wriggling around to fit herself to the new nest. The rain, meanwhile, had eased and Dad
Swallow flew off, perhaps on a mosquito hunt.

Early next morning with sunshine beating on the mink farm, I checked the shed wall.  Way up, under the shadow of the eave, tail feathers of a parent swallow extended over the hardware cloth rim of the nest.   

All was well.

​
R T WALLEN




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Skip's Corner  07/10/2017

7/10/2017

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​      Pelicans in Manitowoc?


​They have been in some of the northern states and parts of southern Canada for a while, and in Wisconsin for at least a decade, nesting, for example, in Horicon Marsh and on Cat Island in Green Bay.  But seeing 500 WHITE PELICANS near the mouth of the Manitowoc River last week, had me blinking repeatedly to clear my disbelieving eyes. Indeed, even with vision cleared, there they stood, more than five hundred, packed into a jostling, preening mob on the mud flats at the edge of the containment lake next to the North Breakwater. I’ve read that white pelicans occurred in Wisconsin in the summertime 100 years ago but that they were hunted to extirpation in the state.  Why would anyone want to shoot a pelican?  ​
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My estimate, counting by 20s, of over 500 birds, was about 7:00 PM, June 17th.  The birds standing around had retired from the day’s fishing with plans to spend the night on dry land, comfortably digesting the alewives in their bellies.  Still more were arriving every minute, much to the inconvenience of those already on the ground.  There is a rule of flight among birds, especially those with talons: The bird on a perch or on the ground, must yield, however disagreeably, to the airborne arriver who wants their particular place. Even talon-less, paddle footed but weighty white pelicans respect this rule and make way for arrivals. In a congested area, however, the rule may be difficult to honor.  At the last moment, say, with six, maybe eight ponderous 17 pound late-comers on final approach, air brakes dropped, gliding at speed for the very spot upon which he or she is standing, what is a pelican to do? Forget the rule? Stay put? No!  It panics, yielding space, getting out of the damn way, as best it can, shoving the neighbors aside if necessary.
​

In addition to the pelicans in the containment area, hundreds of gulls and terns, also sharing space on the flats, frequently take  flight, as these birds do, wheeling about screaming and yelling, only to land again more or less exactly where they just left, creating a lively and noisy spectacle.

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​White pelicans are related to brown pelicans, a species that inhabits both Atlantic and Pacific coasts. Brown pelicans are well-known for their spectacular air to sea missile dives after fish.  White pelicans prefer fresh water.  White pelicans are not quite as much fun to watch as they don’t engage in such showy aeronautics, instead catching fish while swimming along on the surface and plunging their heads underwater to snatch them in their long bills.  Sometimes they do this cooperatively, paddling along line abreast, concentrating fish ahead of them, or cornering them against a shoreline, whereupon they all jab into the school. 

​Still, white pelicans are good flyers and, with their nine foot wing spans can be seen soaring along in formations, their black primaries and secondaries contrasting sharply with their white bodies, making them easy to identify, in flight, even from a distance.
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When their wings are folded the black feathers are not visible and they appear to be all white. A stately group of six of them flew over the house at 1222 So 15th Street a couple days ago, something I’ve never seen before in this place. For Wisconsinites these birds are a fairly new phenomenon.   
I think they are making a living here on alewives, small silvery fish that inhabit the great lakes to which they probably gained access through the St. Lawrence Seaway.   Schools of them could be seen this week along the breakwater, and thousands, if not millions of these fish sometimes wash up dead on Lake Michigan beaches.   So, maybe the pelicans, in growing numbers, have recently discovered and are exploiting this food source.

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My count of pelicans in the containment area at 7:00 PM July 3, was 360.  I don’t know how long these birds will be around Manitowoc, but if you visit here this summer it might be worth checking out the birding at the North Side Breakwater.  The number of species to be seen is high and the area now has an official name: The Charles Sontag Birding Area, in honor of our most prominent local birder.  If you are not interested in pelicans there are other birds, including waterfowl, to see.  And even if you are not interested in birds at all and are perhaps listening to canned music through your headphones while missing the sounds of nature, a walk on the breakwater is good exercise and a scenic change from urban sidewalks. ​
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Brown Pelican
​​How will the addition of thousands of pelicans feeding up and down the waters of   Door County all the way to Manitowoc and who knows how far south, affect the ecosystems of the lakeshore?  Trout, salmon, and other fish, and other birds, such as gulls and terns and cormorants also feed on the same fish.  Maybe alewives are just as good in the bellies of pelicans as laying dead by the millions in windrows along the beaches.​
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White Pelican
​And one more note.   I’ve seen another bird feeding on alewives, a species one might not expect to be doing so: common grackles!  But that’s a topic for another posting. ​

​
R T WALLEN
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Skip's Corner  06/12/2017

6/12/2017

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Eagles and Whales 
While it may not be politic to point out this fact, our national bird poops, and, as anyone who has walked through the whitewash at the base of an eagle nest tree can affirm, does so copiously. 
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So when Bob Armstrong, Juneau author, photographer and naturalist sent this picture of an eagle perched on top of my whale sculpture, I was not as charmed as some of my friends.  They were thinking of the interesting spectacle. I was envisioning the corrosive deposits that would result soon enough if eagles made a habit of perching there. Nor did the workmen preparing the whale site offer any comfort. They mentioned that the eagle had been there off and on for a week, seemingly unconcerned about heavy equipment moving about below it.  That got me thinking of ways to encourage eagles to go elsewhere. ​
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Eagles insist on a lookout over a body of water, whether lake or river or sea, from which to keep watch for passing fish, To illustrate this, the shape and outline of hundred-mile long Admiralty Island, just west of Juneau, is easily described by a plot of eagle nests along its shores. ​
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I should have foreseen the problem of eagles perching on the bronze whale.   Years ago I set an eagle perch pole into the beach in front of our house on Douglas Island, which is situated immediately across the fjord from Juneau. The pole is an old piling supplied by my friend Henry Tiffany, three or four decades ago.  With one end buried in the beach it stands, with a slight lean, at low tide, 12 or 14 feet high.   Its ‘freeboard” depends on the stage of the tide.  At high tide only a few feet project above the surface.   It is the only convenient perch for long distances up and down the beach.  True, there is the forest above the beach with lots of perches, but given the option, eagles, like airplanes, prefer unimpeded approaches and departures.  Why contend with intervening branches when there’s a pole out in the open?  So my out-in-the-open, easy on, easy off perch pole is popular with eagles, ravens, great blue herons, and belted kingfishers. Eagles use if frequently most days, and Lynn and I often have the pleasure of their presence.  Sometimes one arrives with a salmon, and stands on the pole to tear into it, ignoring pesky crow and raven hangers-on hoping for a share.  Sometimes one is perched there for hours, head bowed, enduring wind and rain, to spread its wings to dry when the storm abates.  After years in the intertidal, the venerable pole wears barnacles around its base and is topped with moss and an alder seedling. ​
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So , returning to the sculpture site, maybe we provide the eagles more comfortable perches nearby.  Hard bronze can’t offer the best grip for their talons.  I think we need tall wooden pilings even closer to the sea than the whale, one to the northwest and one to the southeast of the sculpture. They should be at least as tall as the whale.   Another option would be to weld spikes on the end of the whale’s jaw and at the tip of the upraised fin.  Spikes would discourage perching but have the drawback of degrading the sculpture.  I think the poles are worth a try. 
​

Either way, the sculpture is plumbed on the inside just waiting to be connected to a water source to create a tumultuous simulation of the briny sea carried aloft by a breaching whale. Come next spring, when the connections are complete and the fountain is turned on, any eagle perched on that whale is in for a mighty surprise. 

R T WALLEN

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Skips Corner  03/06/2017

3/6/2017

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Following up on last week’s posting of the Whistling Straits Mockingbird, I wanted to comment on a showy display in which these birds engage in their southern—or as Warrensy would have it                          —Rebel— strongholds.



                              MAESTROBIRD
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       The behavior was observed on Sanibel Island, offshore Fort Myers, in the spring, when male mockingbirds seek out the highest perch in their vicinity, often the pinnacle of a Norfolk Island pine. These tall, slender, introduced trees tower over everything on that island, and we had a particularly tall one on the property, owned by a talented and aggressive mockingbird. From its topmost branch he sent forth his warning piling intimidating message upon intimidating message. Not intimidating to you and me. We hear a mockingbird and relish the pleasurable sounds of spring in Florida, missing the point entirely because, like other bird songs, it is delivered as dog whistle. Male mockingbirds hear it and they don’t miss the point. They understand the threat emanating from the pine: “This area and everything in it is mine, especially my woman.  Enter at your peril!”  

When, which was most all the time, he was in a frame of mind to warn off any potential rivals within earshot, he used his tree as a bully pulpit.  For some reason he didn’t fly the 100 feet to the top but instead hopped and fluttered from branch to higher branch, spiraling ‘round and ‘round until he reached the summit, no doubt muttering to himself all the way up, rehearsing the arias he was going to vocalize to warn off his rivals.  Arrived at the highest perch, and not one branch lower, he would issue his challenge.  

Here’s the thing, He was not so much mimicking other bird’s songs—although a person might pick out a copycat melody now and then. Rather, it seemed to me, he composed and tested his own stuff, originals, either drawing them up from memory, or inventing and delivering them on the spot as he went along.. In this sense, Maestrobird might be a better name for the species. His recitals were interminable tours de force, melodious filibusters consisting of endless different phrases strung one after another, some practiced, some experimental, with sometimes a slight hesitation before using a new phrase, like reviewing the notes and asking himself, “Should I use this one or not?  Is it up to my standards? Will it put them in their place? Yeah, go for i!”  

Even the tallest of tall Norfolk pines wasn’t sufficiently high enough to make certain his message was getting across. Once he worked himself up to a certain fevered pitch, he orbited himself skyward, bursting into the air eight or ten feet higher, his white wing bars flashing like semaphores. Reaching perihelion, he floated back down to the tree, burbling out new tunes the whole while. Lynn’s take on mockingbirds and the satisfying variety of their songs:  “If you’ve got a mockingbird, you don’t need any others.“

R T WALLEN
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