Alaska Man Monday: More Dog News, and Migrating Birds

Still spring in the Great Land, and it’s still a wet, drippy spring. The ATVs are still in the machine shed. There’s a lot of standing water around, which doesn’t bode well for the upcoming mosquito season. But the robins are back, the mosquito-eating swallows are back, and I heard a Varied Thrush singing in the trees behind the workshop the other morning. Summer’s coming.

Now then, first, some good news: Another surviving dog has been found in that nightmare dog death-mill in Talkeetna, and in this area, I’m sure it will have a new home soon.

A second live dog linked to a Willow woman charged with 26 counts of animal cruelty was seized from a Talkeetna home Thursday and is now in borough custody. She is in good health, officials said.
Misty Rehder was arrested after more than two dozen dead dogs were found at her kennel last week.
Wasilla attorney Richard Payne was selected Thursday to lead an external investigation into Matanuska-Susitna Borough animal control officials’ actions related to the kennel. Witnesses say they warned officials for months about the dogs’ conditions but were ignored.

Good news after bad, I suppose. It's a sad story, still; I have little time for people who don't love dogs, even though we don't have a dog of our own at the moment. We do sort of share one; our neighbor's dog, Yogi, frequently wanders over in the mornings to say hello, and he will patiently wait outside the office until I come out, scratch his ears, and tell him he's a good boy. Then he goes about his business. Humans and dogs go together like peas and carrots, and that just makes it all the worse when we learn of people abusing them. These people, at least, will be paying the price.

Alaska Man score: Mixed bag here. Five moose nuggets for the authorities dealing with this; still nothing for the people who put these poor dogs through this.

In better news, it was just Hawkwatch weekend!

Every day from March 10 to May 15, four figures stand in waysides on the Glenn Highway in Glacier View, tracing slow “Ws” in the sky with binoculars.
Early this month, dozens of visitors with their own binoculars, spotting scopes, cameras, and lawn chairs joined them for a day of raptor spotting at Mile 118.8.
This is the annual Gunsight Mountain Hawkwatch Weekend, which draws bird enthusiasts from the Mat-Su Valley, Anchorage, and beyond to celebrate the spring raptor migration. The Anchorage Audubon Society and the Matsu Birders plan the event to coincide with the expected peak of the migration.
The goal?
“Just to basically see this parade of migrating raptors that comes through every year. It’s just incredibly cool to sit here and watch them stream by,” said Mr. Whitekeys, a longtime Southcentral celebrity and the so-called commander in chief of Anchorage Audubon.

My parents were big in the local Audubon Society when I was a kid, before the national organization became a center for environmental extremism and was still about birds. We did nesting and migrating bird counts every year. It was a lot of fun, and to this day, I can identify probably 90 percent of North American birds by sight, and probably half of them by sound alone.

And, right here in our corner of the Susitna Valley, even more of our summer birds are already returning. The juncos should be returning soon. May is when a lot of the summer birds return, including all of our warblers and the Swainson’s Thrush that sings so beautifully from the treetops.

Birds are great neighbors. Better than a lot of people, in fact.

Alaska Man Score: Five migrating raptors.

Now then, let me show you a new item in the gun safe!

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