This is one of the big reasons that I prefer to walk rather than jog or bike or rollerblade on local pathways: yesterday I spotted a pod of beluga whales while walking my collie mix, Coya, along the Coastal Trail. It’s also why I often choose to walk alone and with my binoculars. Though I greatly enjoy my walks with friends, we inevitably engage in conversation and I pay more attention to our dialogue rather than the surroundings. (This, I’ve been told by various partners across the years, is how it should be; my problem has been that I am sometimes too easily distracted from my human company by sounds and movements going on around me.) Walking alone, I am more engaged with the landscape and its other inhabitants: birds, squirrels, moose, even the occasional bear or lynx or whale. I notice spiders crawling across snow or curious assemblages of wildflowers where I never expected them or blueberry patches rich with ripened fruit. I’m the sort who needs both kinds of walks: in the company of humans; and in solitude.

The afternoon was a beauty, both for whale watching and exercising. During the 15 or so minutes I watched the belugas move up the inlet, at least 15 to 20 runners and cyclists zoomed by, all apparently unaware of the whales’ passage. Early on, I shouted to a pair of runners, “Hey, there’s a pod of belugas out in the inlet.” They briefly stopped to look. As it turned out, one of the runners turned out to be a friend. “Belugas, huh”? That’s pretty cool,” she said, then added, “Bill, you’re a wildlife magnet.”

I don’t think that’s it. I think I pay more attention to what’s going on around me, so I notice more animals.

My friend resumed her run and I turned back to the whales, while other people kept passing. Maybe they thought I was watching the gulls out on the flats, or other birds, but no one stopped to ask what I’d found.

Standing there, I recalled a recent walk along the same stretch of trail with my sweetheart, Helene. We met a woman who asked if we’d ever seen beluga whales along this stretch of Anchorage’s coastline. She’s a dog owner and has walked the Coastal Trail for many years and never seen whales on her walks, though she keeps an eye out for them. Only a few days later, here they were. And hardly anyone seemed to notice.

You couldn’t have asked for better conditions: the inlet was calm and the afternoon sunshine made it easy to distinguish the glistening white belugas from those that were gray. Conditions were so good, in fact, that the whales’ splashing caught my attention without the help of the binoculars I carried. But they were far enough offshore that you could easily miss them if you weren’t occasionally scanning the water. This has become one of my habits: to now and then check the mudflats, the inlet, the sky. You never know what you might see. On my earlier walk with Helene, we’d spotted two sandhill cranes. As often as I walk this section of coastline, I’d never before seen cranes along this stretch of mudflats. No one else seemed to notice them. And no one stopped to ask what Helene and I were watching, while we passed the binoculars back and forth.

Counting belugas is tricky and requires patience. By the time they’d passed, I was pretty confident I’d seen at least nine whales (though the pod likely contained more); five were white and four were various shades of gray. Usually, but not always, gray belugas are young whales, calves and adolescents.

The whales were moving steadily and I wondered where they were headed, and why. I also wondered how many of the trail goers would have stopped and watched if they’d known of the belugas’ presence. I spend way too much of my own life rushing around, missing lots along the way, I’m sure. But if someone is intently peering through binoculars, I want to know what that person is looking at, even it’s “only” a bird. It wasn’t always that way, though. For most of my life I largely ignored birds. And even now, when driving the Seward Highway, I won’t always stop and pull over to watch belugas moving through Turnagain Arm, usually because I’m in too much of a hurry to get somewhere. It’s a heck of a lot easier to stop and pull over and watch whales – or moose or birds – when you’re walking.

Finally I turned toward Coya, who’d shown great patience while I stood there watching the whales. Their presence had lifted my spirits, made a beautiful yet ordinary afternoon a memorable one. I was so jazzed that I called Helene on my cell phone and told her my good fortune. Of course she was happy for me and a little disappointed she couldn’t be there.

Heading down the trail away from the whales, I knew I’d never forget their passage, nor the passing of people moving fast along the trail, missing one heck of a spectacle.