Cooper Island, Alaska, Aug. 9, 2009 — Driftwood lines in the middle of Cooper Island are important for nesting terns and waterfowl, but in any given year there typically has been little accumulation of wood on the island’s beaches. Until recently, the short duration and limited amount of ice-free water were not conducive to movement and deposition of driftwood. Hundreds of miles north of the tree line, driftwood on Cooper Island apparently comes primarily from the Mackenzie River. When the Beaufort Sea had limited open water, wood coming out of the Mackenzie would likely have had little chance to drift...

Cooper Island, Alaska, Aug. 4, 2009 — The National Weather Service has been saying that the main pack ice is over 100 miles away — and that is apparently true — but this aggregations of very small floes and ice chunks showed up north of Cooper late on Sunday. It persisted through Monday — when the above picture was taken — and guillemots could be seen diving next to the floes and returning arctic cod to their young. The ice charts show this to be the only ice for this area of coast and its appearance off Cooper was fortuitous...

Cooper Island, Alaska, Aug. 6, 2009 — Cooper Island is only 25 miles (as the guillemot flies) from the community of Barrow, the largest village on the Alaska’s North Slope. When the atmospherics are right one can see the inverted mirage of Barrow shimmering on the northwest horizon, and on calm days there is a low hum as the village’s generators, fueled by a small natural gas field a few miles out of town, provide power to the 4500 residents. These reminders that there is a town just over the horizon make me aware that my field camp is in...

Cooper Island, Alaska, Aug. 2, 2009 — My focus on the birds breeding (or trying to breed) on Cooper Island runs the risk of making it seem like the island and surrounding waters are important to a relatively limited avifauna. In reality, the island is on one of the major migratory pathways for birds breeding on the tundra of Alaska’s North Slope and the western Canadian Arctic. In July and August, after breeding is complete, large numbers of waterfowl, shorebirds and seabirds move to the near shore Beaufort Sea and then westward to Point Barrow before heading south through the...

Cooper Island, Alaska, Aug. 3, 2009 — I was writing up the text for the “krill” last night and then there was a need to deal with a bear that had been sleeping on the north beach after coming in off the ocean. Clearly the cabin is the best (or worst) smelling thing on the island and bears always seem to head for camp after they wake up. I had to turn the bear around and then wait for it to walk off to the east before going to sleep. I turned the bear around with a “cracker shell” that...

Cooper Island, Alaska, July 29, 2009 — Record high of 70 degrees F. (23 degrees F. above normal) in Barrow yesterday which tied the previous record high. The temperature on Cooper Island was 66 degrees F and I would have enjoyed the warmer air more if there was not a bear trying to cool down in grass clumps in the tern colony (0.5 to 0.75 miles from camp, but very visible). At one point the bear dug a hole in a grassy dune and slept for awhile — which would have been more cooling if the permafrost was still here....

Cooper Island, Alaska, July 27, 2009 — In the late 1970s during the first field seasons on Cooper Island, my colleagues and I were preoccupied with the possibility of encountering polar bears since we were sleeping in a tent 20 yards from the Arctic pack ice, the primary habitat of polar bears. We assumed we would see bears with some regularity. But it turns out we didn’t see any bears in the first five summers on the island. The lack of sightings was due to being “adjacent” to polar bear habitat, but not “in” polar bear habitat. As is clear...

Cooper Island, Alaska, July 22, 2009 — Black guillemots, like all seabirds, need both parents to incubate eggs and care for young. This mutual participation of males and females in raising young means the breeding success for an individual guillemot depends to a great extent on finding and maintaining a bond with a high quality mate that will share and excel in raising young to fledging. The cooperation of both parents might be most critical during the current stage of breeding, when chicks are hatching and parents are transitioning from providing nearly continuous warmth (for the egg and young downy...

Cooper Island, Alaska, July 19, 2009 — It is not uncommon to hear a hiker or wilderness camper describe the exceptional nature of an outing by emphasizing that at some point on their excursion they realized they might be the first human to ever step foot at that spot. In my opinion, this statement, places too much importance on the individual, in settings which ideally should provide recognition of exceptional nature of an outing by the relative unimportance of oneself compared to the natural world, but it does reflect the common view that people like their wilderness experiences to be...

Cooper Island, Alaska, July 9, 2009 — This year, an ambitious “Around the Americas” expedition will attempt to have their sailboat, Ocean Watch, negotiate the Northwest Passage as part of their program to conduct research and also raise public awareness of the state of the oceans. They departed Seattle in early June and will circumnavigate both North and South America in 13 months. Ocean Watch is leaving Nome this week, and will be in Barrow on July 11. You can follow their progress at their website at http://aroundtheamericas.org. They plan on visiting Cooper Island on their way east through the...