394 Grantni, Alaska Peninsula Notes. leer 
SOME ALASKA PENINSULA BIRD NOTES. 
BY CHARLES A. GIANINI. 
THE wandering bird lover if fortunate sometimes finds himself 
in a bird paradise — such was my good luck last Spring when I 
landed in Stepovak Bay on the south side of the western end of the 
Alaska Peninsula. My time while on the mainland was pretty 
well taken up with hunting the big brown bear of that country, 
but I always had a welcome eye for birds and now that I am home 
in the east and the trip in retrospect it is questionable whether 
bears or birds gave me the most pleasure but certain it is that one 
without the other would have left a void. 
The country surrounding this great bay is inhabited for about 
six months every year and then only by a limited number of 
trappers who make their homes on the outlying islands and come 
here in the Fall and leave in the Spring. The shore of the main 
bay is indented by smaller bays and each has its trapper’s shack or 
barabara, and as the men usually trap in pairs the population 
amounts to about two exclusive of any women and children for 
each bay. The trappers arrive when most of the birds are either 
gone or travelling south and leave when they are coming in so that 
the birds of this big section of country are practically unmolested 
save by some of the predatory members of their own family and a 
few four-footed hunters. The country remains wild and in its 
original state and offers every attraction to breeding birds in the 
way of shore, grass, shrubbery and cliffs; everything but large 
trees of any kind, for these last do not grow on this part of the 
peninsula. 
Two of us and our dunnage on the 25th of May were landed on 
the beach at daybreak and I was immediately treated to the spec- 
tacle of a couple of jaegers worrying a gull but the arrival of gull 
assistance put the former to flight. We hunted from two camps, 
the main one a cabin a couple of hundred yards from the sandy 
beach and the second a tent pitched on the bank of a river five or 
six miles inland. Both were in great flat valleys surrounded by 
high snow-covered mountains with glaciers and a steaming volcano 
for variety. 
