White-winged dove spotted in Petersburg, only fifth sighting in Alaska
Reprinted from the Petersburg Pilot
Jane Smith spotted a different kind of bird at her feeder around New Year's, something she knew she'd never seen in Alaska. Her sister, Anne Smith, saw it again during the
annual Great Backyard Bird Count in February and identified it as the white-winged dove. She took a picture with her iPad and posted it on the Alaska Rare Bird Alert Facebook page, but her post didn't draw much response, so she figured the bird wasn't too special.
Weeks later, Jennifer Cross, director of the Alaska Raptor Center, happened to be visiting from Sitka. Jane showed Cross some photos and videos of the dove. Cross shared the photos with some bird friends in Sitka and, later that night, called Jane to say news of the white-winged dove was blowing up - at least in the bird-nerd circle. People started reaching out from around Alaska asking if it was ok to come and camp out in Jane's yard to see the dove.
Anne proceeded to document the dove on eBird - a widely used online birding database - as the fifth sighting of the white-winged dove in Alaska. The first was in Skagway in 1981, followed by two in Wrangell in 2007 and 2014, and the latest was in Willow in 2017.
Brad Hunter looked into the increasing distribution of the white-winged dove, which has typically been at home in the southwest US and down through central America. "Some have been migrating northward, north being Oklahoma...They are expanding, partly due to warming...but also urbanization has provided a lot more feeding opportunities," he said.
This bird's coming to Petersburg could be a part of normal behavior, said Hunter. "That's just a natural way that species spread, sometimes the young ones will go off somewhere, just like salmon will go up different streams sometimes, and that's how they establish new populations. The Stikine River is unique for us as a corridor for stuff to come down from the interior..."
Unusual bird sightings can occur during winter months, as that's when people often fill their bird feeders, according to Hunter. "You get a lot of odd birds showing up after storms," Birds can simply get blown off course, and "Not all birds brains are normal, you can get an odd one where their internal compass is messed up."
Normal or abnormal, the white-winged dove is rare enough in Alaska that it brought more travelers flying after it.
Pat Pourchot and his partner Jennifer Johnson flew from Anchorage to see the white-winged dove in Petersburg. They got situated and waited with cameras at the ready. "You get real nervous that you might not see the bird," said Pourchot. "It was the classic, 'Let's give it ten more minutes,' and within ten minutes he flew in ... We're really happy, Jennifer got some nice pictures."
This was Pourchot and Johnson's second attempt to see the white-winged dove. When the dove was sighted in Wrangell, in 2007, they bought tickets and boarded the plane in Anchorage but weather prevented landing in Juneau to make the connecting flight, "...so we missed that opportunity."
Pourchot and Johnson keep a list of all the birds they've seen in Alaska. "The magic number to get to now is 400. There's three people in Alaska now who have seen 400 or more...Jennifer's actually the top woman birder, lister I should say." Her number is 365.
The couple met through birding. They get on a plane four or five times a year for birds, and especially appreciate chances to see new birds within Alaska. "A feeder bird that's been here a while like this dove, that's pretty tempting," said Pourchot. "Petersburg, coincidentally, in the last several years has had two other birds that people have traveled down for; one was a cattle egret. It was feeding on lawns. The other was a Lewis's woodpecker - the only one ever seen in Alaska."
A few places have built sizeable tourism industries around birding: including the Rio Grande Valley and the MaGee Marsh on the shore of Lake Erie in northern Ohio.
Festivals are held there and hotels offer deals to birding groups. Nome has also successfully capitalized on birding. Pourchot said, "We tried going first of June; we tried to get an Airbnb, and they were all booked up by these groups...Their chamber of commerce has a bird board - rare sightings from day to day."
While the hotels in Petersburg weren't exactly full of birders to see the white-winged dove, there was another birder from Anchorage that had already come and gone before Pourchot and Johnson and others from Juneau and Sitka had plans to visit soon after.