Orange birds in Alaska

Late April in Chenega Bay, Prince William Sound. The salmonberries have not yet bloomed. Ice still cracks off the tidewater glaciers. Then the first male Selasphorus rufus arrives - copper-orange from bill to tail, crossing more than 3,000 miles to get here, and immediately looking for a fight.

Alaska has two orange birds worth knowing: the Rufous Hummingbird and the Varied Thrush. Neither shares habitat or season with the other. What they share is this - in a landscape built around restraint, their orange is a specific kind of surprise.

The Rufous Hummingbird

The male Rufous Hummingbird is the only North American hummingbird whose plumage reads, without stretching the description, as copper. His back, flanks, and tail are a consistent rufous-amber. His throat flashes iridescent orange-red in direct light and appears black in shadow. Females are green above with rufous-washed flanks and an orange-buff base to the tail.

He is also, as the Alaska Department of Fish and Game confirms, the only hummingbird commonly found in Southeast and Southcentral Alaska - the northernmost-breeding hummingbird in the world. Males reach southeastern Alaska by late March or April; females follow a week or two later. The banding station at Chenega Bay has banded more than 1,400 Rufous Hummingbirds since 2007, with males documented arriving by the last week of April. Adult males begin moving south as early as July. Females and immature birds clear out by early August.

A female banded in Tallahassee, Florida on 13 January 2010 was recaptured at Chenega Bay on 28 June of the same year. The Western Hummingbird Partnership recorded that migration as the longest documented for any hummingbird: over 3,500 miles. Not a theoretical estimate - one bird, caught twice, with dates and places.

For all that, the species is contracting. The IUCN uplisted S. rufus from Least Concern to Near Threatened in 2018. The North American Breeding Bird Survey records a decline of roughly 61% since 1970. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game notes that earlier flower-bloom cycles driven by climate change can leave arriving birds outside the peak nectar window. Audubon’s field guide describes the species as widespread and common while acknowledging continuing declines - both things true simultaneously. You can watch a copper male at a Sitka feeder in May and still be watching a contraction.

The Varied Thrush

Ixoreus naevius does not move fast. It walks, turns leaf litter with its bill, and sings one long, single-pitch, faintly electronic whistle that fades and stops and starts again. Cornell’s All About Birds notes that adjacent males sing at different pitches, so in a productive stand of Sitka spruce you hear a chord rather than a single voice.

The male is dressed for a different register than his habits suggest. Cornell describes the adult male carrying an orange throat, eyebrow stripe, and wing markings set against a slate-blue back and divided by a dark chest band. In low forest light the eyebrow stripe appears to glow. Two subspecies divide Alaska: I. n. naevius holds the coastal southeast in Sitka spruce and hemlock forest; I. n. meruloides breeds through the interior. Both favour old-growth conifers with a dense, dark understory.

Audubon’s field guide lists the Varied Thrush at Least Concern with an estimated global population of 35 million, and notes vulnerability to loss of old-growth forest. Its numbers are stable for now.

The thrush occasionally irrupts east in autumn and winter, appearing in Ohio, Michigan, and Illinois well outside its normal range.

Other orange-marked species

The American Robin, Turdus migratorius, breeds throughout Alaska. If you see an orange-breasted bird running on open Alaskan ground, this is it. The Western Tanager, Piranga ludoviciana, is a summer migrant with an orange-red head set against black wings - June and July, interior and southeast. The Tufted Puffin’s breeding-season bill is bright orange, on a bird that is otherwise black and white; Kenai Fjords and Kodiak Island are the reliable sites.

When and where to look

For the Rufous Hummingbird: May through early July, Southeast Alaska and the Kenai Peninsula. A feeder up in late April will have visitors by May. For the Varied Thrush: any old conifer stand in southeast or southcentral Alaska through summer. Its whistle - one sustained pitch, a long pause, then repeat - is distinctive once learned, nothing like the robin’s rolling phrase. The Mendenhall Wetlands near Juneau is a documented site. The orange birds of Arizona offer a useful reference point for which migrants the two states share and which stay south.

What Alaska actually offers

The Alaska experience of orange birds is not the experience of watching northern cardinals at a winter feeder - the reliable bird at a reliable distance. In Alaska, orange arrives fast, stays briefly, and hides. A copper hummingbird who crossed 3,500 miles to feed in a bay where the ice has barely melted. A thrush who sings from inside the forest at a pitch no other North American bird uses, and then goes quiet before you find him. The northern cardinal print exists because the cardinal is always there to be seen. What Alaska offers is the opposite, and that is the better reason to go looking.