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 rare break from my fieldwork to attend the Aspen Environment Forum where I was interviewed on Talk of the Nation, and early July has kept me busy monitoring guillemot egg laying that was delayed and disrupted by falcons and fox. I will be describing those...
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? Where are they nesting? With whom are they pairing? We record these data points in our field notebooks, and then later compile them in the breeding bird books for 2012. Even having done this for three days, I still worry that everything in my notes is...
Inspiration and the midnight sun
BARROW, ALASKA — Well, it is midnight and even though I promised myself to go to bed earlier, I am not able to withstand the draw of the midnight sun. One more walk down to the pack ice to look for another group of Common Eiders, one more discussion about changing ocean salinity, one more look at bright blue skies and sunshine. How can I not? I have really enjoyed the science talks at this workshop, from tracking bowhead whale populations, to using marine radars to follow ice moving offshore, to ocean ecosystems and their biological processes. In each Arctic...
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 success — in large part due to the close proximity of sea ice and Arctic Cod, the guillemot’s preferred prey. During that time of “no vacancy” status and high prey availability, the colony regularly had over 150 guillemot young fledge in a single year. Two...
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 about twice what is being experienced by the guillemots that bred on (and, thanks to the new Nanuk nest cases, fledged from) Cooper Island this summer. The length of the guillemots’ days are on my mind this fall, and will be until next field season, because...
Exit, pursued by a bear
SEATTLE, WASHINGTON — For the last decade the end of my field seasons on Cooper Island could be summarized by what is considered Shakespeare’s most famous stage direction, “Exit, pursued by a bear”. It all started in 2002, when the North Slope Borough Search and Rescue helicopter had to pluck us off the island early one morning after we spent a long night taking a short-course in polar bear deterrence. More recent retreats from the island have been less dramatic but no less emotional. In 2008-2010 we maintained our daily measuring of guillemot nestlings while polar bears reduced their numbers nightly, breaking...
In the beginning
COOPER ISLAND, ALASKA — While it seems like I have been at the Cooper Island black guillemot colony forever, there was actually a time when I did not spend the summer in Arctic Alaska wearing long underwear and worrying about polar bears for three months. George E. Watson, who was then a curator of birds at the Smithsonian Institution, played a pivotal role in getting me to the Alaskan Arctic in 1970, and to my finding the Cooper Island black guillemot colony in 1972. Last week George turned 80 years old and (while at this point of the summer it feels...
Black Guillemots show their individuality with reactions to new nest boxes
COOPER ISLAND, ALASKA — I had no idea when I decided to provide 150 Nanuk plastic cases to protect the Cooper Island black guillemots how much the new nest sites would change the 2011 field season for both the birds and me. It was clear that I would need to arrive at the colony earlier than usual so that Penelope Chilton and I could dismantle the traditional wooden sites that were remnants from a 1950’s Navy camp and replace them with the new nest cases. Black guillemots at the nest sites originally built by George out of World War II Navy debris. What...
A visit to Cooper Island
Post and photos by guest blogger, Greg O’Corry-Crowe COOPER ISLAND, ALASKA — Mid July and I finally get the opportunity to visit Cooper Island and its birds and to work with George Divoky. Over the years George and I had discussed ways to collaborate. If we could only put his unique four-decade long study of black guillemots and their environment together with investigations of their DNA, we could fill in some key gaps in this unique study of a seabird against a backdrop of dramatic environmental change. These discussions ramped up into real plans last fall and now I was speeding across Elson lagoon towards...
Solitary scientist at the top of the world
COOPER ISLAND, ALASKA — The subtitle of Darcy Frey’s 2002 NY Times Magazine article on the early impacts of climate change seen on Cooper Island, referred to me as a “lonely scientist at the end of the earth”. This wording was likely the work of an editor, who wanted to portray the “forlorn” qualities inherent in the word “lonely” and the phrase “end of the earth”. A more accurate (but less romantic) wording would be a “solitary scientist at the top of the world”. While it is true that I have spent weeks and months alone on the island without company, it is...