Spring usually comes slowly to the Yukon Kuskokwim Delta
There's an expectancy, there's an anticipation that you have
and it just takes a few more days of warmth, a few more days of sunlight,
for that life to come bursting forth.
The land is going to start filling up with birds.
If I were to use two words to describe the Yukon Delta
I’d say vast and productive.
The large bulb of land land reaching out into the eastern Bering Sea.
It's a huge area—
It's the size of the state of Maine. It supports some of
the highest densities are breeding water birds in the world-- not just in the arctic
but anywhere on the globe.
We literally are
funneling birds into arms all the flyways of the world.
There are no roads here on the Delta. There are no easy ways to get around.
Everywhere you look
is wild, natural habitat and
it’s more than half water.
There are rivers,
there are ponds. There are incredibly complex networks the wetlands.
Streams and sloughs and together they combine to form this
really unique world where the ocean
and the land and the freshwater all come together and because of that diversity
of major systems, we have a very diverse and productive landscape to support the birds.
One of the most amazing things about the Yukon Kuskokwim Delta is
that during the breeding season it hosts birds from virtually
all over the world.
It’s a nexus it a focus on international avian migrations.
Some birds arrive in great flocks;
others come as individuals. And they get here via very different flyways.
We have some birds that come up-- it's call the East Asian-Australasian flyway.
So birds from New Zealand,
from Australia, from Thailand, from China,
Japan, Korea come up their historic flyways
and arc over into western North America here on the Yukon Kuskokwim Delta.
We even have a species a bird that makes its way from the plains of Africa—
the Northern wheatear—and breds here on the Delta.
So they come from virtually
all the continents of the world to raise their young and contribute to the next generation.
Birds come to the Delta to raise their young for a couple reasons:
the first one of course is that there's so much food.
It allows them to produce the eggs that their young develop from
and it means that their young will have a rich source of food to help them as they grow.
One of the other advantages
is that there is so much habitat available to them;
They can set up their territories
at the density that is natural for them. Be as far away from their own kind as
they want or as close as they want depending what the species is.
Here the birds are really doing what they've done
historically, interacting with the environment
and one another in the ways they always have; in the way they've evolved to.
They’ve got the entire
ecosystem in which to make their living.
The most productive area the refuge
is on the Central Coast.
And in a band that's about 15 to 25 miles wide
you have an incredible diversity in abundance of wild foul.
On a continental scale the number of birds is really impressive.
For example, in this coastal strip, the density of breeding shorebirds
is higher than anywhere else recorded in the world.
The most abundant shorebird
in the Pacific Flyway is the Western Sandpiper and most of those birds
nest here.
In the fall over 80% sometimes
100 % of the entire flyway's population of Bartel Godwits
stage here on the Delta, prepare for migration here on the Delta before
flying nonstop
to New Zealand.
80% of the world’s Black Turnstones nest here on the Delta.
Most within just a couple kilometers from the Bering Sea shoreline,
but for many other species as well, it is equally important. All of the world’s
breeding Bristle-thighed Curlews and their offspring
stage here on the coast in meadows every fall before they migrate south.
About a million individual Geese come here to nest every year.
So the numbers are just
off the charts.
Tens of thousands of Pacific loons,
tens of thousands of Tundra swans,
tens of thousands of Sandhill cranes...
In terms of ducks, we may have between 1-2 million coming here to nest every year.
I'll and so in terms of overall numbers
and it's important for specific populations birds
that have a global reach this place is really unprecedented.
If we don't protect an area like this like turning the faucet off,
turning down the pipeline, and suddenly
at the other into the fly we people don't have the opportunity to see and
appreciate and find wonder
in the organisms that make up this planet.