Bird mistaken as plane seen in parts of Alaska

ANCHORAGE — A giant winged creature, like something out of Jurassic Park, has been sighted several times in Southwest Alaska in recent weeks. Villagers in Togiak and Manokotak say the huge bird is much bigger than anything they have ever seen.

A Dillingham pilot says he saw the creature while flying passengers to Manokotak last week. He calculated that its wingspan matched the length of a wing on his Cessna 207. That's about 14 feet. Other people have put the wingspan in a similar range.

The reports, initially published Tuesday in the Anchorage Daily News, have taken on wings, drawing interest from as far away as the Netherlands and producing fodder for talk-show hosts including David Letterman.

Scientists aren't sure what to make of it.

One sighting occurred on the morning of Oct. 10 when Moses Coupchiak, a 43-year-old heavy-equipment operator from Togiak, 40 miles west of Manokotak, saw the bird flying toward him from about two miles away as he worked his tractor.

"At first I thought it was one of those old-time Otter planes," Coupchiak said. "Instead of continuing toward me, it banked to the left, and that's when I noticed it wasn't a plane."

The bird was "something huge," he said. "The wing looks a little wider than the Otter's, maybe as long as the Otter plane."

The bird flew behind a hill and disappeared. Coupchiak used a radio to warn people in Togiak to tell their children to stay away.

Pilot John Bouker said he was highly skeptical of reports of "this great big eagle" reported to be two or three times the size of a bald eagle. "I didn't put any thought into it."

While flying into Manokotak this week, though, the owner of Bristol Bay Air Service looked out his left window and 1,000 feet away, "there's this big ... bird."

"The people in the plane all saw him," Bouker said. "He's huge, he's huge, he's really, really big. You wouldn't want to have your children out."

Nicolai Alakayak, who was flying with Bouker, said the creature looked like an eagle and was as large as "a little Super Cub."

Comparison to an eagle, certainly. Super Cub (light aircraft)? Probably not, scientists said.

"I'm certainly not aware of anything with a 14-foot wingspan that's been alive for the last 100,000 years," Phil Schemf, a federal raptor specialist, said in Juneau.

The Daily News has been besieged with e-mails, including one from the Netherlands. The online newsmagazine Drudge Report posted links. A San Diego FM radio program talked it up. Letterman joked about it Wednesday.

Bouker said he is "bummed out" from all the calls he has received.

"They're calling from all over the world," Bouker said Thursday. "The London Telegraph, a Los Angeles radio station, Seattle TV — I could go on and on and on."

Schemf, other biologists, a village police officer and teachers at the Manokotak School said the sightings could be of a Steller's sea eagle, a species native to northeast Asia.

The Steller's eagle, about 50 percent bigger than a bald eagle, has shown up occasionally in the Pribilof Islands, on the Aleutian chain and on Kodiak.

A bird known to be a Steller's sea eagle has been spotted at least three times since May and in August 2001, 40 miles up the Nushagak River from Dillingham, according to Rob MacDonald of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Another Steller's eagle took up residence on the Taku River south of Juneau for 10 summers starting in the late 1980s, Schemf said.

The fish-eating Steller's sea eagle can weigh 20 pounds and have a wingspan of up to 8 feet. It has a distinctive and impressive appearance, Schemf said, with a pronounced yellow beak, a black or dark brown body and large white shoulder patches.

"It's hard to mistake it for something else," he said. It's clearly an eagle, though more "like a giant bald eagle."

Bouker said Thursday that he knows what he has seen and agrees that it's likely a Steller's sea eagle.

"People in Alaska can appreciate this stuff," Bouker said, adding that those in the Lower 48 cannot understand Great Land dimensions. "In Alaska, we see big birds, big moose, big fish, things you don't see down south."