Follow an Ornithologist’s Alaskan Adventures in Pursuit of Hudsonian Godwits

A new book immerses readers in a search for shorebirds

In mid-May 2021 I flew to southwestern Alaska to spend time with Hudsonian Godwits nesting on their bogland (muskeg) breeding habitat. This field trip had been arranged with shorebird expert Nathan Senner, then a professor at the University of South Carolina who was doing long-term field studies on Hudsonian Godwits in Beluga, just west of Anchorage. I shadowed Nathan’s team to take in the details of his field work and learn more of the godwit’s nesting behavior. Back in Churchill, Manitoba, I had encountered a godwit that Nathan had color-banded in 2010. So now I got to spend quality time with the world authority on the Hudsonian Godwit at his new study site.

Arriving in Alaska ahead of the Senner team, I spent a couple of days in Anchorage to settle into the new environment. Local birding expert David Sonneborn took me out birding a couple of times, and we managed to see Hudsonian Godwits in the mudflats of Cook Inlet in Anchorage harbor. The godwits had already arrived for the spring. Anchorage is a stunning venue for those who love the out-of-doors— fjord-like coastal waters, snowcapped mountains in every direction, and ready access to birds that are exotic to those of us who live in the Lower 48. The Arctic Tern, for instance, is a commonplace and confiding breeding bird on ponds and wetlands right in the city proper, as is the Red-necked Grebe. Hudsonian Godwits and Whimbrels breed in habitats not far from Anchorage.

One afternoon I visited Arctic Valley Ski Area in the Chugach Mountains, just a few miles, as the raven flies, east of downtown. The road to Arctic Valley gave ready access to the mountainous uplands and rocky tundra. I hiked up to the top of a mountain ridge next to a former Nike-Hercules missile site—ringed by forbidding “Stay Out!” signs—from the early 1960s. I walked the upland tundra in search of Rock Ptarmigan. I had bumped into the more commonplace Willow Ptarmigan several times on my visit to Churchill. The Rock Ptarmigan was a more difficult bird to track down. I hiked the ridgetop tundra for several hours without seeing my bird. Then I did a sound playback of the bird using my iPhone, and suddenly three all-white adult Rock Ptarmigans appeared out of nowhere, flying and vocalizing.

One individual perched on a rock pinnacle overlooking the waters of Turnagain Arm. I cautiously approached this grouse with its dark red eyebrow comb and all-white winter plumage until I was too close for my zoom lens. I then shifted to my iPhone and got fullframe images that I could email to family and friends. This confiding bird never flushed, no matter how close I approached. I left the bird where it was perched and headed back down to the car. On my hike down, I found Arctic Ground Squirrels and Golden-crowned Sparrows. These uplands offered stunning vistas of the Cook Inlet and the snowcapped Chugach Range to the east and the snowy Alaska Range to the west. For a first-time visiting naturalist, western Alaska is over-the-top amazing.

To get to Beluga I chartered one of Spernak Airways’ singleengine Cessnas out of Merrill Field, the downtown airport where the bush charters take off to fly wide-eyed visitors to wilderness spots in the interior. Because roads are few, bush planes are still an important means of transportation to the backcountry for fishing, hunting, and getting to isolated Indigenous communities. My target airstrip, Beluga, services an Indigenous community named Tyonek as well as a remote power plant that generates electricity for Wasilla and other northern suburbs of Anchorage (and, no, you cannot see Russia from any of these places). Tyonek is home to an Athabascan community speaking the Dena’ina dialect.

As this was my first time in Alaska, I really had no idea what to expect in terms of lodging, food, transportation, and access to good godwit habitat. As it so happened, things played out as smoothly as my 20-minute charter flight from convenient Merrill Field. Weather was good for the flight, and from aloft, vistas to the northeast featured the snowy Alaska Range as well as the great snow dome of Denali—at 20,310 feet, the highest summit in North America. There was lots of water below—the Cook Inlet mainly, but also the Knik Arm reaching northeastward and the Turnagain Arm stretching southeastward. The mighty Cook Inlet stretched southwestward to join the Gulf of Alaska. We flew mainly over undeveloped land that supports a mix of bog/muskeg, spruce monoculture, and, on higher and drier places, stands of aspen, whose leaves were just beginning to break from the bud. Below were flocks of Snow Geese, their plumage white against the dull colors of the wetland. The waterlogged boglands were dun colored and broken up by myriad ponds and marshlands. This was Alaska as imagined—undeveloped and waterlogged land stretching to the horizon.

After the pilot dropped his plane down onto the long gravel runway, Max Vigeant, one of my hosts, greeted me and drove me to the lodge at Beluga Fish Camp, getting me checked in to a rustic but capacious bedroom suite plus arranging a car for driving the local gravel roads. Max and his colleague, William Fredette, run the Fish Camp, which is set in a clearing on a high bluff overlooking Cook Inlet. The lodge mainly caters to guests from the Lower 48 who visit for the seasonal runs of Coho, Sockeye, Chinook, and Pink Salmon, which ascend the nearby rivers from mid-May to late September. Off season, most of the Fish Camp’s business comes from local clientele who favor the Camp’s well-stocked bar. As their sole overnight guest, I got great service—three nice hot meals a day, prepared just for me. The boglands that support nesting Hudsonian Godwits were just a few miles from the lodge, and the road system gave access to a whole array of upland and adjacent coastal habitats—ideal for birding and enjoying nature.

I spent a week based at the Fish Camp, focusing on the Nathan Senner team and the nesting godwits in the north and south bogs. In my spare moments, I wandered all about in search of birds and other wildlife. Much of the landscape is truly wild, but the Beluga area has been developed because of a large gas-fired power plant just north of the airstrip. The plant is situated there because there are producing gas wells right there, supplying all the needed energy to make the generators run. This facility explains why there are roads, power lines, and settlements other than Tyonek village. There’s even a little Beluga General Store, crammed with all manner of supplies, snacks, and drinks. I was not exactly roughing it in rural Alaska! There was even good internet and phone access—a nice mix of civilization’s amenities with ready access to wild lands filled with birds and mammals.

The boglands were indeed boggy—they were very wet. Open water mixed with inundated boggy grasslands. This was not tundra but rather a true bog. Spruces managed to take hold on any ground that rose above the standing water. These higher areas also attracted a range of woody shrubs. Thus there was a nice mix of vegetation that offered a range of nesting habitat for birds. My first morning was spent in the north bog. Nathan and his team had not yet arrived in Beluga, so I was on my own. This gave me a chance to get a sense of the habitat where they would be working. Donning my tall rubber boots, I waded out to one of the small spruce-clad hillocks in the bog and sat down to watch and listen. The air was still, and frost lingered on any vegetation that remained shaded from the rising sun.

The bog was, more than anything else in spring, a gull breeding colony, with many Short-billed Gulls, quite a few Bonaparte’s Gulls, and some Glaucous-winged Gulls in attendance. The gulls milled around over the bog and made a lot of noise. The very aggressive Bonaparte’s Gulls dive-bombed me regularly. Pairs of Arctic Terns were setting up nesting territories and building nests. There were nesting shorebirds too—Least Sandpipers, Wilson’s Snipes, Shortbilled Dowitchers, Pectoral Sandpipers, and Hudsonian Godwits.

It did not take me long to hear the godwits’ high-pitched complaints. Males circled overhead. When taking a break from their overflights, they perched precariously atop the White Spruces (just as they did in Churchill). I saw a female godwit foraging at the edge of a pool, and after a while it became evident that there were two male-female pairs moving about in my area. Hidden by the spruces, I happily monitored these godwits, who were foraging intently out on their nesting territories in this Alaskan wetland.

Read more in Flight of the Godwit: Tracking Epic Shorebird Migrations, which is available from Smithsonian Books. Visit Smithsonian Books’ website to learn more about its publications and a full list of titles. 

Excerpt from Flight of the Godwit Text © 2025 Bruce M. Beehler Text illustrations © Alan Messer
 

Bruce M. Beehler | Read More

BRUCE M. BEEHLER is an ornithologist, naturalist, conservationist, lecturer, and author of nature books including North on the Wing: Travels with the Songbird Migration of Spring, Birds of North America: A Photographic Atlas, and New Guinea: Nature and Culture of Earth's Grandest Island. He is a research associate in the division of birds at the Smithsonian's National Museum of Natural History.