On June 15, I sat beside the Churchill River where it enters Hudson's Bay, listening to eiders coo, terns squeal and gulls cry as I waited for the sun to set. It disappeared at 10:37 p.m., about 18 hours after it rose.
The birds' sounds had significant competition. The ice on the river was breaking -- rafts of ice 100 yards long crashing and grinding as they rode the current into the bay.
My wife, our friends and I were in Churchill for the birds, of course. It is one of the places in North America that every birder should go. The town is on the south shore of Hudson's Bay, held tight to the water's edge by thousands of square miles of tundra and boggy spruce forest.
There, in the self-proclaimed polar bear and aurora borealis capital of the world, we saw neither bears nor northern lights. Instead, we saw dozens of common eiders and little gulls. We even found a Bonaparte's gull nesting in a spruce tree. We could look out the windows of our rented truck on the nests of Arctic terns and semipalmated plovers. (Gravel roadsides suit them just fine.)
We watched Hudsonian godwits court and saw common snipe in aerial combat over nesting rights. American golden plovers hustled through tundra mud flats. Lesser yellowlegs called from the top of spruce trees. Nelson's sharp-tailed sparrows ruined their reputation as shy and hard to see by giving us face-to-face looks.
The night after my sunset vigil, I was on the riverbank again, this time in heavy fog. The sunlight glowed white, a brilliant all-encompassing light that sucked color from everything. The ice was gone, the river quiet.
I could hear birds approach long before I saw them, their cries and wing beats suddenly transforming into scoters and mergansers and eiders pulled from the fog.
And then the whales began blowing, belugas back in the river after a winter at sea. First a foursome, then a single blow. Their arching gray backs were all I could see, then slicks on the water marking where they had been. In half an hour, I watched 15 whales slide past.
