Join us at Seattle’s Swedish Club, 1920 Dexter Ave N. , on Tuesday March 20, 2018 to hear about the eventful 2017 field season, the 43rd consecutive year of study of the Black Guillemot colony on Cooper Island, Alaska. Doors open for a reception at 6 pm with a talk starting at 7 pm. The Swedish Club has plenty of free parking and is easily accessible by public transportation. The summer of 2017 on Cooper was highlighted by a visit from Audubon magazine, with journalist, Hannah Waters, and photographer, Peter Mather. spending a week on the island, resulting in an...
Cooper Island Research Part of SENSEI: Sentinels of the Sea Ice
In 2015 Christophe Barbraud of the Centre d’Etudes Biologiques de Chizé began assisting us with the analysis of the four-decade demographic database we have obtained from the Cooper Island Black Guillemot colony. Christophe is a highly respected avian demographer whose study species include the Snow Petrel, an ice-obligate Antarctic seabird, as well as a number of other seabirds. We were fortunate to have him appreciate the potential and uniqueness of our long-term databases and show an interest in our work. Our collaboration has led to the Cooper Island Black Guillemot study being part of the recently initiated project Sentinels of the Sea Ice...
Canary in the Climate Mine: Arctic Seabird’s Future Is on Thin Ice
Oceans Deeply recently had a story about our work and the poor 2017 breeding season after an October interview with George Divoky. Oceans Deeply is part of News Deeply – an “award-winning new media company dedicated to covering the world’s most important and underreported stories.” The story was written by Jessica Leber and illustrated with photos by Joe McNally, who visited the island in 2001 to obtain images for Darcy Frey’s New York Times magazine article on the early effects of climate change being seen at the Black Guillemot colony. Joe McNally/Getty Images The Oceans Deeply story also contains information...
June 2017 – The Arctic continues to surprise
The Arctic is warming twice as fast as the rest of the world. For the past 42 years I have had a front row seat on Cooper Island off northern Alaska studying the Black Guillemot, a high Arctic seabird that is responding to the earlier snow melt and diminishing summer sea ice cover. Early melting of snow had allowed the birds to breed as much as two weeks earlier than they did in the 1970s, which facilitated a major increase in the size of the colony in the 1980s. But increasing warmth after 1990 has decreased breeding success by reducing...
Annual Seattle Update March 14 2017 Town Hall Seattle
Extraordinary Arctic Climate Change in the New Abnormal Tuesday March 14th, Town Hall Seattle The pace of Arctic warming accelerated in 2016 causing an unprecedented melt of snow and sea ice during the globe’s warmest year on record – see links below. Now 2017 has started with the disconcerting news that the federal government is reducing its commitment to researching and addressing climate change and informing the public of its pace and consequences. Due to these extraordinary events the research and outreach of Friends of Cooper Island is all the more important as our long-term study of Arctic seabirds enters...
Cooper Island Video part of NOAA’s “Ocean Today: Every Full Moon” Outreach
The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration interviewed George via Skype and put together a concise educational video on the Cooper Island Black Guillemot research and the record warmth of 2016 as part of their Ocean Today Every Full Moon series, a resource for educators. The Cooper Island video is at this link :
If it’s Polar, Go Solar
Most Alaskans and others who live in bear country are familiar with the adage that provides species-specific advice on how one should react in a close encounter with a bear in the wild. “If it’s black, fight back. If it’s brown, get down.” The rhyme is premised on black bears being small enough (and, relatively, timid enough) that a human fighting back could deter an attack. Brown bears are considerably larger and more territorial than black bears and an aggressive human response could even increase the level of a brown bear’s attack, so the best strategy is to lay on...
Trying to stay optimistic in a seabird colony that is half full – when it is really half empty
The standard and far-too-simplistic “test” of whether someone is an optimist or a pessimist is to ask if they consider half a glass of water to be half full or half empty. The major flaw in the test is that it implies a steady state situation. If the glass is being filled with water, one has reason to be optimistic about half a glass. If it is being drained, there is reason for pessimism. The increasing or decreasing trend of a resource needs to be considered in deciding whether to be optimistic or pessimistic about the currently observed conditions. This...
The Earliest Year
During the 1970s, in my first years in Arctic Alaska, people would talk about it being a “late year” or “early year” when discussing the timing of snowmelt, arrival of birds, flowering of plants, or the melting of sea ice. It was generally assumed one would rarely or ever see an “average year” but that over time annual variation would produce approximately equal numbers of late and early years with no reason to believe there would be any long-term trend to earlier or later years during the course of one’s lifetime. That proved to be true for the first fifteen years monitoring the timing...