The Black Guillemots on Cooper Island have seen their nesting success reduced over the past four decades as sea ice decline has reduced the availability of their preferred prey. Sea ice extent in the Arctic on June 15, 2015 was 9.1 (only one decimal point) million km sq., 10 percent less than the average...
Category: Black guillemot
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Cooper Island Guillemots and Shell’s Chukchi Sea Drilling Plans
The two weeks before I head north to Cooper Island are always an interesting mix of anticipation of the upcoming three-month field season combined with regret at having to leave my family and friends in Seattle. In recent years, as the Arctic continues to warm, there is a good amount of uncertainty as to what...
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The Black Guillemot
The Black Guillemot has a number of life history characteristics that make it an ideal monitor of changes in the marine environment in general and the Arctic in particular. Guillemots, of which there are three species, belong to the seabird family known as auks, or alcids. The most abundant seabird family in the Northern Hemisphere,...
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Seattle science teacher returns from Cooper Island
Katie with nest box. By Katie Morrison Heading back to Barrow, we glide across the glassy Elson Lagoon and it is hard to imagine the wind-driven angry whitecaps that filled the lagoon just a few days before. But tonight it is calm and still and we travel with ease in our open skiff. I am...
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Guillemots Go to the End of the Earth in Pursuit of Retreating Sea Ice
The annual announcement of the minimum extent of the Arctic’s summer sea ice has become one of the more important metrics by which we measure the rate of change of our warming world. This year’s minimum extent of 3.4 million square kilometers (1.32 million square miles) on September 16th broke the previous minimum set in...
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Black Guillemots mingle before getting down to business
COOPER ISLAND, ALASKA — While no year on Cooper Island is like any other, so far the 2012 field season has been more different than most. For that reason ( and also because Max Czapankskiy did such a good job with his blogposts in June) I am way behind in my postings. In late June I took a...
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Learning to speak bird
Posted by Max Czapansky: Ex-Microsoft employee wants to be a field biologist. Will he after his first season on Cooper Island? COOPER ISLAND, ALASKA — The birds arrived on Tuesday, I’m writing this on Friday, and during the interval George and I have been walking the colony, taking a census of the guillemots. Which birds have returned?...
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Special delivery for the birds
During the salad days of the Cooper Island Black Guillemot colony, in the late 1980s, there were 200 wooden nest sites, which I had created in the late 1970s with wood left on the island by the Navy two decades earlier. All 200 nests were occupied by breeding pairs and the colony enjoyed high breeding...
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Shedding some daylight on the winter range of black guillemots
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON — Declining daylight is a concern to many at this time of year as we turn our clocks back one hour and experience a stepwise decrease in late afternoon daylight while preparing for seven more weeks of increasing darkness. Day length in Seattle is now down to less than ten hours but is...