SEWARD -- On a rainy day in Kenai Fjords National Park, fog settles over shimmering water and softens the ribbed faces of steep bluffs. Stillness reigns – or seems to reign, until one's eyes adjust to revealing blurs and flashes.
There: a sea otter rolls at the water surface, clasping a shell to its chest.
Just beyond, a black oystercatcher probes the tidal zone for its own dinner. Its bright orange bill stands out against the gray rocks, as does its voice: a whistling queep, piercing the mist.
Further yet, the smooth bay yields to open ocean, transformed by undulating swells. Beyond sheltering headlands, a more frenetic portrait of life emerges. Within and alongside the boundaries of Kenai Fjords National Park, animals stake out territories, nest, give birth, and raise young. But most of all, they eat.
The 600,000-acre park may offer majestic views to visitors, lessons to scientists, and inspiration to artists, but what it offers to its animal residents is something far more tangible: a feast. Whales migrate thousands of miles to dine abundantly, sieving the cold, food-rich currents that quicken around the headlands and islands. A black bear scavenges a seaweed-covered shoreline or patrols a lagoon's edges in search of spring greens. Nesting seabirds return to the same scraps of ancient rock year after year because they, too, find the menu satisfactory.
To see wild animals anywhere is a delight, requiring both attention and luck. But visual pleasures aren't the Kenai Fjords' only gratifications. Naturalist John Burroughs once wrote, "I go to nature to be soothed and healed, and to have my senses put in order." Not sense, but senses.
In the Kenai Fjords, sensory stimulation includes the thundering boom of calving glaciers and the crackle of melting ice. It includes the taste of salt spray and the smell of the rich littoral zone, submerged and revealed twice daily by the tides. It includes the feel of human history, a light pulse that began long ago with the rhythmic dip of Alutiiq kayakers' paddles and continues today with the roll of waves under one's own feet.
Those sensory experiences lead, finally, to the understanding of more complex marvels. Like the geology of a rattling, plunging coast. Or the invisible connections linking living organisms and non-living air, rock, water, and ice.
Big eaters
Scale confounds the modern wildlife-watcher here. Consider the sea otter, a common Resurrection Bay resident. From afar, it appears kitten-soft and cat-sized -- a furry log, rolling on the waves. Really, it is impressively hefty, reaching 5 feet and weighing about 70 pounds.
Nearly all the marine mammals are bigger in life than they appear from the deck of a boat. A Steller sea lion bull grows to an average 8 feet long and weighs about 1,500 pounds. That makes a Steller sea lion heavier than a typical bull moose, and nearly as heavy as Alaska's three bears -- the polar, brown and black bear -- combined.
Even the tufted puffin, a relatively small seabird, is larger than it seems. At 15 inches long, the tufted puffin is 5 inches longer than an American robin and, because its bones are denser, 10 times as heavy.
But why should scale matter? Because it reveals a great deal about these animals' lives. To maintain their size and weight, Kenai Fjords animals eat a lot, and often. Cold northern oceans are more productive than tropical seas and local animals are engineered to take advantage of northern abundance.
The horned puffin has a thick, serrated bill in which it can hold a dozen slim fish, crosswise, at one time. To maintain its heft, the sea otter eats a quarter of its weight daily. While Steller sea lions fast during much of the summer breeding season, they make up for it at other times of the year, consuming 40 to 120 pounds of fish a day.
Voracious animals can make their homes in the Kenai Fjords because it is an ecologically rich environment. The reason isn't quite so easy to see.
Phytoplankton paradise
"Anything essential is invisible to the eyes," wrote Antoine de Saint-Exupery, author of "The Little Prince." His assertion applies to phytoplankton, the foundation upon which Gulf of Alaska productivity rests.
Phytoplankton are microscopic floating plants that convert ocean nutrients and solar energy into a food source that supports the entire marine ecosystem, from tiny zooplankton to great whales. In the Gulf of Alaska, phytoplankton get a boost from several sources. One of these is sunlight -- more than 19 hours of direct sunlight in midsummer. Another is the low temperature of the water's surface, which creates better conditions for plankton blooms. The other ingredients are more complex: an ideal mix of upwelling, which brings nutrients to the sunlit surface; stability; and freshwater discharges from land sources, which keep the Alaska Coastal Current moving.
Those discharges include meltwater from the park's 38 named glaciers, proving that everything is connected: the things we can see and the things we can't.
Excerpt from "Stirring the Senses: A Guide to Kenai Fjords National Park", an Alaska Geographic booklet published in 2005 and used with permission of the author, Andromeda Romano-Lax. Alaska Geographic is a nonprofit education partner to Kenai Fjords National Park. Romano-Lax is an Anchorage freelance writer and author of "Searching for Steinbeck's Sea of Cortez", "The Detour", "The Spanish Bow" and several other books. She co-founded the 49 Alaska Writing Center.
Remaining in 2014
The season is winding down for the tour boats exploring Kenai Fjords National Park as autumn rolls in. Here's what's available for boats leaving Seward:
• Kenai Fjords: Six-hour cruise leaving 11:30 a.m. daily until Sept. 28. The final day for an earlier six-hour cruise leaving 8 a.m. is this Sunday, Sept. 14.
• Major Marine: Its six-hour tour ends Sunday, Sept. 14. A five-hour tour continues until Sept. 21 and a three-hour tour runs Sept. 22-Oct. 12.
• Miller's Landing: Offers a six-hour tour leaving 11:30 a.m. though Sept. 28; there's also an early 8 a.m. to 2 p.m. trip on Sept. 28.