Cooper Island, Alaska, July 31, 2010 — The transitions in the summer season on Cooper Island tend to be step changes rather than gradual trends for both me and the Black Guillemots I am studying. This reflects, in part, the rapid shifts that occur in the Arctic when it goes from “winter” to “summer” in a matter of days as the snow melts from the island and then, about a month later, when the nearshore waters go from ice-covered to open water with one good windstorm. The breeding season for the Black Guillemots, which has three distinct periods, is marked by similar rapid transitions.
One of the lucky chicks as I explain below.
The “pre-egg” period after the birds arrive in early June is characterized by birds reforming or forming pair bonds, competition for nest-sites and mates and the female producing the two eggs that are the typical clutch size for the species. This is followed by the “incubation” period, from mid-June to late July, both parents take turns attending the egg, which needs to be incubated almost constantly, but during which each parent is still free to forage for prey for about 12 hours a day.
Black Guillemot eggs
The hatching of the chicks is the event that most drastically changes the season, since once the chicks hatch they must be fed enough prey over the next five weeks to increase their weight from 35 grams to 350 grams. It is during this “nestling” period, which extends until early September, that the abundance and distribution of prey near the island is most important to the breeding guillemots. For 35 days, parent birds need to find suitable prey as close as possible to the island, to minimize their energy expenditure, while also selecting the highest quality prey (in terms of energy content) to return to their young. Since I track the daily changes in chick weight and prey type it is also an extremely busy time for me.
It is during this period of chick rearing that most major environmental changes have taken place over recent decades, and that is reflected in the high annual variability in nestling survival and the near complete nesting failures like the one that occurred last year. In the 1970s and 1980s when sea ice was typically a few hundred meters offshore (or at least no further than the horizon) parent birds had short commutes to an abundant and high energy food source of Arctic cod, their preferred prey. By contrast this year, as in the majority of summers of the past decade, ice retreat from the island was extreme — last reports were that the main pack ice was at least one hundred miles to the north. This creates a major problem for Black Guillemots, one of the few pack ice obligates in the Arctic.
An adult black guillemot now needs to fly longer distances to find food for its young due to the retreating pack ice.
In past years the absence of ice within the parent’s foraging distance meant birds had to turn to lower quality prey such as sculpin, which do not have the high energy content of cod and are also frequently rejected by chicks, who can choke on their large spiny head. Surprisingly, this year parent birds were able to keep finding Arctic cod after the major ice retreat (indicating the water temperature north of the island is not changing rapidly) but were clearly finding fewer of them. When parent guillemots are unable to find sufficient prey to raise two young, the older (‘alpha”) chick in the nest monopolizes any prey returned to the nest and the younger (‘beta”) chick loses weight and starves if prey abundance does not change. Although many alpha and “singleton” chicks are doing quite well, so far this year beta chicks have died in approximately 75 percent of the nests that had two chicks hatch. Those that remain are much thinner than their “alpha” siblings.
The chicks find the spiny head of the sculpin hard to take.
Watching the nesting failures during the nestling period provides one of the more dramatic examples of the changes that are occurring in the Arctic. When ice was close to the island, as it was for most of the first 25 years of the study (1975-1990), 75 percent of all chicks I was weighing would survive to leave the island and about a third of them would return in three to four years to breed. There was a good chance I would see any given nestling as an adult in a few years and then be able to follow its breeding history over a decade or more. Now, with most chicks failing to survive the nestling period, daily nest checks result in my guessing how many more days a given chick might live and, if things are as bad as last year, any chicks will survive to leave the island.
The August-September nestling period on Cooper Island has always been one with more fog and clouds than earlier in the season, as both decreasing ice cover and increasing air temperature increases the moisture in the air. While the bright sunlight and 24 hours of daylight in June and early July can elevate one’s emotional state, the gray skies and decreasing daylight later in the season have the opposite effect. This change of mood is increased by returning to the cabin every day with a collection of dead chicks found during nest checks. In periods such as this it is good to be able to waken early in the morning and have one’s optimism renewed by an inspiring sunrise like the one I saw at 4 a.m. earlier this month.
This sunset helped to raise my spirits.
The fate of the chicks remaining on the island will play out in the next two weeks and depends much on the distribution and abundance or guillemot prey and predators during that time. My next post will discuss how we hope that an experimental nest site may allow guillemots to avoid the sort of polar bear predation that accounted for approximately 50 percent of the nesting mortality last year.
Cooper Island, Alaska, July 31, 2010 — Cooper Island is about as far from the Gulf of Mexico, and its now-oiled waters, as one can be and still be in the United States. But the Deepwater Horizon blowout, and the resulting paradigm shift in how the government and public views offshore oil drilling, will have a major effect on the potential threats of oil to the arctic marine system that surrounds this island.
Cooper Island biota has a history of being affected by distant and political forces:
The boxes and debris used by nesting Black Guillemots are only here because the Navy visited at the end of the Korean to dispose of surplus ordnance.
My first visit here in 1972 was the result of the federal government responding to the potential of supertankers moving Prudhoe Bay oil through the Arctic since the construction of the Trans-Alaska Pipeline was held up the courts.
My extended study began here in 1975 as part of a national assessment of the outer continental shelves where the U.S. was considering drilling in response to the Arab oil embargo.
The moratorium on offshore drilling resulting from the recent events in the Gulf of Mexico has delayed industry plans to drill exploratory wells in northern Alaskan waters this summer. The drilling planned for the Chukchi Sea was already being delayed by the courts due to insufficient information on the biota that could be affected by drilling. The “Liberty” project near Prudhoe Bay, where BP intends to use directional drilling to tap offshore reserves from onshore, is receiving increased scrutiny. (Read more in the New York Times.) If and when the moratorium is lifted the potential that offshore drilling could occur near Cooper is very real. The map below shows the lease areas near Cooper Island that could be exploited if and when the moratorium on offshore drilling is lifted.
The dark area just north of Cooper has been kept out of lease sales due to pressure from the native community and local government who know that to be an important area for feeding bowhead whales. As the current Gulf spill shows any leak from any of the adjacent areas would impact that region and the birds on Cooper Island.
There are many who believe that the development of offshore oil and gas reserves in the Arctic is inevitable as the country’s need for fossil fuels shows no signs of waning and the decreasing extent and thickness of the pack ice facilitates operations in the region. There is a very real possibility that after a number of years of being affected primarily by the indirect effects of fossil fuel emissions well south of this latitude, Cooper Island biota could soon be directly affected by the same sorts of impacts being seen in the Gulf of Mexico.
The response and impacts of a spill equivalent to the Deepwater Horizon occurring in the Arctic is almost impossible to fathom given the differences in the physical and biological environments of the two regions as well as the asymmetry in infrastructure. Oil gushing from an uncapped well in the Arctic would be entering extremely cold water where oil dispersal would be much less than in the warm waters of the Gulf and where organisms that break down oil are less abundant. For at least nine months of the year in most areas of the Arctic the oil would be rising to an ocean surface with near complete ice cover. The underside of the pack ice where it would gather is the habitat supporting biota that is the basis for much of the marine food chain in the Arctic. Oil that found its way to cracks and openings in the ice would foul critical habitat for both marine bird and mammal species that depend on those openings for feeding and migration corridors.
The logistics of controlling and responding to a spill in the Arctic would demonstrate just how remote the region is. A flotilla of vessels of the size responding to Deepwater, to stop and contain the spill, is not present in arctic Alaska, nor is there a road system that could allow responders to easily access coastal areas. Equally deficient is a pool of personnel that would be able to respond to a spill. Even if large numbers of people could be flown up to Barrow (there is no road access to the village) there is insufficient infrastructure to house and feed many more than the approximately 4500 people who live there now. The lack of vessels, roads, personnel and infrastructure would probably mean a major exercise by the military would be necessary.
A large majority of the general public only sees (or thinks about) seabirds when they are oiled or recovering from oiling in “rehabilitation centers”. In most cases the only information provided on the individual bird is the species (and sometimes not even that if the oil is thick enough). I consider myself (and the Cooper Island seabirds) lucky in that oiling events have not reached this region. Although the more popular iconic image of an oil catastrophe in the arctic might be an oiled polar bear, the image that would be most upsetting to me would be a that of an oiled banded Black Guillemot that I had weighed as a chick in the 1980s and whose breeding history I had followed for the past quarter century. I hope that day never comes.
Currently, guillemot chick hatching is proceeding with approximately 175 chicks still doing very well. Strong (> 30 mph) south winds today (July 31) are moving the ice away from the island, however, and cod abundance could decrease as a result. So that readers of this post don’t leave with thoughts of oiled seabirds, here is an image taken by Elizabeth White of the BBC during her recent visit.
A Black Guillemot with its distinctive red mouth lining and feet
Cooper Island, Alaska, July 27, 2010 — When my interest in bird-watching first developed in the 1960s (the avocation would not be called “birding” for a number of years), a common wintertime activity was visiting the Cleveland lakefront and scanning the flocks of gulls for any interesting vagrants among the large number of Herring Gulls that wintered on the south shore of Lake Erie. One of our “fantasy birds” was the Glaucous Gull. The thought that this large and very pale arctic species might visit our temperate latitudes was very exciting and a sighting would provide a link to remote northern areas which, at that point in my life, were also the stuff of fantasies.
My arrival in Barrow in the early 1970s modified my view of Glaucous Gulls rather rapidly when, on my first trip past the Barrow landfill, I saw hundreds of Glaucous Gulls feeding on the village’s garbage. Over the past forty years I have seen Glaucous Gulls in every possible tundra and marine habitat and also preying or scavenging on almost every possible food source. I still consider them a beautiful gull but their ubiquity means that any individual Glaucous Gull flying past the island does not warrant a second glance. I pay some attention to the odd individual attracted to the guillemot colony in hopes of preying on eggs or chick, but soon realizing that the nest boxes prevent predation on nest contents. Last summer they impressed me with their numbers as thousands gathered to feed on the krill wash-ups that were attracting thousands, and possibly tens of thousands, of Arctic Terns and Sabine’s Gulls.
Ice remnants along the coast of Cooper Island
Given my history with Glaucous Gulls I did not think they could easily surprise or engage me but that all changed this summer in early July when I took a walk to the east end of the island with my visitors from the BBC. Next to a grounded fuel barge that marks the end of the island I saw a conical mound of peat that was not present last year and which, upon closer examination, was found to harbor a Glaucous Gull nest — the first on Cooper Island in at least 35 years and probably much longer than that. I was truly taken aback, although given the abundance of the species in the region, the discovery did not have the same impact on me as lifting up a box in 1972 and finding the first Black Guillemot nest in the Beaufort Sea. The Plover Islands, of which Cooper Island is the largest, are not typical Glaucous Gull nesting habitat. While Glaucous Gulls breed in a wide range of habitats on the mainland their colonies on barrier islands are typically limited to locations near river mouths that have open water earlier in the season than places like Cooper.
I inspect a Glaucous Gull nest.
My discovery of the nest at the east end of the island did not prepare me for what I discovered a week later when I censused the west end of the island. After finding a small number of tern and Sabine’s Gull nests I was about to head back to the cabin when I noticed two Glaucous Gulls acting territorial. As I left the area one of the gulls set down on what looked to be a driftwood pile but proved to be the second Glaucous Gull nest I have ever found on the island. The discovery of the second nest was almost more of a surprise than the first in that there was no clear connection between the two nests. The four-mile distance between them precludes there being any social facilitation and it appears that two pairs of gulls independently made the decision to breed on the island. When I went back to visit the west-end nest a few days later I was delighted to find a chick and the other egg in the process of hatching.
A Glaucous Gull nest
The reasons for and implications of this most recent addition to the small list of birds breeding on Cooper Island are not clear. At the simplest level it may be that last summer’s abundance of nearshore prey enticed some previously nonbreeding gulls (out of the thousands feeding here) to consider Cooper as a suitable breeding location. This year the krill wash-ups have yet to occur but even in their absence it is likely that the nearshore waters near Cooper Island can provide enough scavenging and predation opportunities to raise a few gull chicks. While it seems unlikely that Cooper Island could support a large gull colony sometime in the future, I thought the same thing about Brant twenty years ago when the first pair bred on the island. There are now 75-100 pairs of Brant within sight of my cabin.
Newly hatched Glaucous Gull chick and an egg in the process of hatching
Glaucous Gull chicks leave the nest rather soon after hatching so tracking fledging success of the two nests could be difficult. More importantly the time I can spend monitoring the gulls is now limited as Black Guillemot hatching is in full swing with approximately 80 chicks appearing in the past few days with enough eggs to triple that chick count in the next week. The new chicks are benefitting from the ice that remains adjacent to the island with its associated Arctic Cod. The big question now is how long that ice will persist and how the month of August — with its potential for bear predation, puffin disturbance and prey shortages — treats this year’s crop of nestlings.
Cooper Island, Alaska, July 21, 2010 — In addition to documenting the timing and success of the Black Guillemots breeding on Cooper Island I always make an assessment of the other avifauna attempting to raise their young here. The changes that have occurred in some of those populations have been almost as striking as the findings for Black Guillemots. Brant, a coastal goose, formed a major colony in the past two decades while Arctic Terns went from being the most abundant species on the island three decades ago to having just a few scattered pairs today.
An Arctic Tern takes to the skies
With the guillemots finishing up egg-laying last week, I was able to spend some time assessing the other bird populations and was reminded of the advantages of studying a cavity-nesting species, especially one breeding almost exclusively in cavities I created. I can walk the circuit of the approximately 200 structures with cavities that have been utilized by guillemots in the past while also checking the few pallets and rubble piles that have cavities but for some reason have never attracted guillemots. Having done that over the last month, I now can say with almost complete certainty that there are 146 pairs of guillemots breeding on the island in 2010. This is well below the over 200 pairs breeding here in the late 1980s, but about the same size found in the past five years.
Determining or even estimating the numbers of species not breeding in cavities is much less straightforward. The waterfowl, Arctic Terns and Sabine’s Gulls that lay their eggs in relatively exposed locations are much harder to census, in much the same way that censusing homeless humans is harder than censusing people who live in houses or apartments. And since most of the surface-nesting (vs. cavity-nesting) birds attempt to have their nests avoid detection by predators, with nest placement, egg and chick coloration and behavior all maximizing concealment, it is similar to censusing homeless populations trying to avoid detection. While requiring more effort than sampling the guillemots, searching for tern and gull nests in driftwood lines does provide more sport, and also the thrill of discovery that makes Easter egg hunts engaging — a similarity increased by the tern chicks looking remarkably like a buff-colored version of fluffy Easter chicks.
I began my assessment of the island last Friday by walking the driftwood lines at the west end of the island and found that the small tern colony there is now even smaller (< 5 pairs) and that chick hatching was just beginning, indicating like most things on the island this summer, terns were having a late breeding season. The decline of the Cooper Island Arctic Tern population from 75 pairs in the late 1970s to the current approximately 10 pairs is dramatic, but, since terns show less fidelity to breeding sites than most seabirds, it iis not that surprising nor something that can be easily linked to environmental changes near the island.
While terns frequently reveal the location of their nests by increasing the intensity of their calls and attacks (passing swipes at the intruder’s head) as one approaches, the opposite is true for Long-tailed Ducks (formerly Oldsquaw), which breed in the same driftwood lines. They have a completely different strategy — the female remains motionless until one is directly over the nest, when she then explodes into the air. Observing a nest with an incubating female requires systematic scanning of likely driftwood aggregations — and then realizing that one of the piles of driftwood is staring back at you.
I found out that Long-tailed Ducks (formerly Oldsquaw) have a unique way of protecting their nests.
As I was weighing one of the tern chicks I felt a few drops of rain and was reminded that one of the big benefits for cavity-nesting species on Cooper Island is that they have a place to get out of the wind, rain and cold. Surface-nesting species have to not only provide warmth to the newly hatched chick (that will not be able to regulate its body temperature for a few days), but also act to prevent rain from soaking the nestling’s down during the period immediately following hatching. Concern for any chicks or eggs I might expose to the rain had me immediately return to the cabin, thinking I could resume censusing later in the day. I had no idea that those first few drops would be the start of the largest precipitation event I have seen on the island. Heavy rain fell for the rest of Friday (totaling 0.6 inches) and though there was a break on Saturday, another rain storm started on Sunday. By the time the second storm ended early Monday afternoon, over an inch of rain had fallen in a 24-hour period. To understand the magnitude of these storms (nearly 2 inches of rain in four days), one needs to remember that the Barrow area is in a “polar desert” with annual precipitation estimates of less than ten inches. Accurate estimates of annual precipitation are confounded by having much of the winter snow “fall” horizontally during wind events which precludes use of typical snowfall gauges.
The best way to appreciate a cabin with a temperature of 48 degrees F. is to go out into a rain storm with winds of almost 20 mph and temperatures hovering just above freezing.
During both storms, as I listened for hours to rain striking the roof of my cabin, I was reminded why I relate to the Black Guillemots. Like me, the attending parents and their eggs and chicks avoid the elements by being inside a box. While a cabin with an interior temperature of 48 degrees F. may seem like a chilly place to spend a summer afternoon, my Davis weather station let me know that it was considerably warmer than the 23 degree F. wind chill temperature outside. It did make me concerned for the just hatched tern chicks, however. Their survival during the storms was dependent on the attentiveness of the brooding parents, but knowing how dedicated tern parents can be, based on the hundreds of times they have hit me in the head, I have little doubt the chicks survived.
Cooper Island, Alaska, July 12, 2010 — As Black Guillemots finished up their egg laying — the last of the nests got eggs this weekend — I had the pleasure of having two visitors from the BBC’s Natural History Unit. Anyone with an interest in nature has seen some or all of the BBC’s excellent “Planet Earth” series, which does indeed live up to its catchphrase “Earth as you’ve never seen it”. The BBC is now wrapping up filming for a series entitled “Frozen Planet” with the catchphrase “Earth as you’ll never see it again”. They have been filming frozen habitats and their occupants for a number of years and the series will debut in Britain in late 2011.
The story playing out on Cooper Island that caught the attention of Elizabeth White, a BBC producer/director, was the northward expansion of the subarctic Horned Puffins to an arctic seabird colony occupied by Black Guillemots. Puffins first bred on Cooper Island and in northern Alaska in 1986, using the same boxes and other wooden debris used by Black Guillemots. The formation of a small colony of Horned Puffins on Cooper Island over the last 24 years is almost certainly due to the decrease in ice in the Chukchi and Beaufort seas over the last few decades and the concurrent decrease in annual snow cover allowing increasing access to nest sites. While the puffin range expansion was almost predictable as the warming temperatures moved the boundary between subarctic and arctic ecosystems northward, what was unexpected was that puffins would turn out to be such villains as they competed for nest cavities with the guillemots. The large multi-colored bill of puffins makes them a favorite with the general public, who tend to think of them as the “charismatic clowns of the sea”. They are recognizable and precious enough to even be exploited by commercial interests, with a breakfast cereal named after them. Most people would be surprised to know puffins can completely wipe out productivity of a guillemot subcolony by displacing eggs or killing (but not eating) nestlings. Last year they accounted for almost half of the mortality of guillemot nestlings. Read post of 2009 season.
Elizabeth White, BBC producer/director (right), David Wright, director of photography and I sit in a hollow dug out by a polar bear.
Apparently the BBC thought the unexpected behavior of puffins on Cooper Island would be a good demonstration of the type of interactions that can occur when species occupying shifting ecosystems collide. For those more interested in bizarre nature stories than concerns with the population level effects of invasive species, the story has tabloid appeal: “When good puffins go bad — how climate change has turned a beloved seabird into a nest-destroying thug!”
The BBC arrived on the island on June 28th, when puffins typically begin to displace eggs as they begin breeding or prospecting cavities.
Liz White arrived with David Wright, the director of photography for this shoot. David works out of Maine and Georgia through his company, LunaSea Films, but is a British citizen. I was immediately put at ease when it became clear they both had extensive experience in the Arctic. While recognizing that the Cooper Island camp will never get four stars on Trip Advisor, I was heartened by their appreciation of the Cooper Island cabin and other amenities.
Amazingly, for the first time in decades, Horned Puffins failed to appear in late June or early July. The six-day stay on the island that Liz and David had anticipated stretched out to 11 days as we waited for the puffins to start their breeding or typical nest disturbance activities. We did have one pair of puffins come in for a day and act very much like they would soon get down to breeding. One member of the pair carried a feather in its bill for hours — indicating it had courtship or nesting on its mind — but ultimately no puffins visited nest sites while the BBC was on the island. This year’s paucity of puffins and their lack of interest in breeding, given their annual breeding over the last decade, cannot be easily explained. While it was a late year for snowmelt, there was a large amount of open water near Point Barrow in early June which should have facilitated their arrival. It will be interesting to see if and when puffins do arrive and how they behave when they do.
Black Guillemots are ready for their close up.
The wait for the puffins did provide Liz and David a chance to video the guillemots (which are neither as aggressive or camera shy as the Horned Puffins) [photo of them in front of camera] and also to explore the four-mile length of Cooper Island. I greatly enjoyed having two experienced and well-traveled nature observers share their reactions to the birds, habitats and weather on the island. Perhaps most importantly to me, Liz and David greatly appreciated the appearance and behaviors of the guillemots and the unique attributes of the Cooper Island colony. Black Guillemots do lack the bizarre bill of the puffins (and it will be some time before boxes with pictures of guillemots grace American breakfast tables). But to this biased observer, they are visually elegant — as well as being an excellent monitor of change on a melting frozen planet.
Cooper Island, Alaska, July 8, 2010 — This post, like the start of summer on the North Slope is a bit tardy. Once Black Guillemot egg laying finally started in the last week of June, I was busy checking every one of the 200 nest sites on the island to determine date of egg laying. The snow drift in front of my cabin persisted until the Fourth of July due to both the large amount of winter snow accumulation and the cool temperatures in May and June. Snowmelt in front of the guillemot nest sites was also slow.
Black Guillemot enjoying its snow-free nest site.
Guillemot females begin to form their egg only after they gain access to their nesting cavity so the timing of egg laying is dictated by the time snow melts from the entrances to their ground-level nest sites. Over the 35 years of my study there has been a trend to earlier breeding, but this year’s breeding initiation was later than last year. The first egg appeared on June 23 compared to June 18 in 2009. The colony had one hundred nests with eggs on June 30, whereas last year that occurred on June 27.
The difference between the two years demonstrates the importance of looking at the response of birds to weather vs. climate. A two-year database (if one can even call something that short a database) cannot show how a population is responding to changes in climate. The response of Cooper Island Black Guillemots to climate change is demonstrated by the long-term trend over the past 35 years whereas comparing this year’s egg laying with those of last year demonstrates the effects of annual variation in weather.
As I waited for guillemots to start laying their eggs in response to this year’s weather, I was preparing for the consequences of the loss of arctic pack ice over the past decade. These changes have driven polar bears to shore and Cooper Island where they are now regular visitors in late summer. Over the years I have had to make a number of adjustments to address the issues involved when one has the world’s largest terrestrial carnivore as a late summer neighbor. In 2003 I brought out a cabin after seeing a bear rip through my tent in 2002. In 2009 I installed a noise-making trip wire as bears began to approach my cabin on a more regular basis. This year, because polar bear behavior may become less predictable as their habitat and prey availability changes, I purchased an electric bear fence.
Destruction of tent by a polar bear
Polar bear alarm used in 2009
The one I am using came from the North Slope Borough’s Department of Wildlife Management and was used earlier this year on the ice off Barrow during the spring census of Bowhead Whales. Unlike last year’s noise-making trip wire, this fence, which is similar to those used on horse farms a little bit further south, should actively discourage polar bears from reaching the cabin.
My camp with bear fence
I currently have two visitors from the BBC’s Natural History Unit who are hoping to get footage for the “Frozen Planet” series that will be coming out sometime next year. My next post will provide some details about what they are hoping to obtain during their ten-day visit to Cooper Island.
Cooper Island, Alaska, June. 21, 2010 — The last 20 miles of my 2000 mile trip from Seattle to Cooper Island is always the most exciting but also the most unpredictable. Alaska Airlines has two flights a day into Barrow so not only can one pick the day one wants to arrive but also choose a morning or evening arrival. One can arrange that leg of the journey months in advance and know that the timing will be very close to the original plans. However, when people ask how long I will be in Barrow before getting out to Cooper Island, I tell them that I hope to get out in the week following my arrival. This year even that target was almost a bit too optimistic. I was reminded again that Cooper Island is more inaccessible than remote and feel very lucky to be out here now given the chain of events that kept me in Barrow from the twelfth to the nineteenth of June.
My journey
In the weeks leading up to my departure from Seattle my main concern about the trip was the fires in the Alaska interior decreasing air quality in Fairbanks, keeping people indoors and temporarily closing the Alaska Highway. Having lived in Fairbanks for seven years, I have many friends there I see on my way north and was hoping that unhealthy air and a smoky overcast would not be part of my visit. Rain subdued the fires before I arrived so all went smoothly in Fairbanks, but upon arriving in Barrow I remembered that an appreciation (rather than a fear) of the unpredictable is an important part of enjoying one’s time in the Arctic.
I first had an indication that this year might be interesting when I saw Cooper Island on the approach from Prudhoe Bay/Deadhorse and was surprised to see extensive areas of snow cover in the area of the colony. A record amount of snow in the last nine months and a cool May and early June meant that snowmelt was much delayed compared to recent years. Atypically high winds and regular patchy fog had both local Inupiat and visiting researchers talking about how unpleasant the early summer was. The weather (a combination of high winds and fog) was the first thing that prevented me from flying out to the island once I was ready to leave. But after the environment began to cooperate, it was technology that caused further delays. The only truck that can deliver unleaded aviation gas had equipment problems and could not fuel the helicopter. Parts were “coming up from Fairbanks”. I was not alone. A survey of Steller’s Eider and Spectacled Eider was grounded due to lack of fuel. In addition to not being able to get the fuel out of the fuel truck there were questions about the quality (apparently due to the fear water had gotten in a tank) so that even when fuel could be delivered we would have to wait for the results of tests. As last week began I was packed and ready to go and rather certain I could get out to the island before the first guillemot egg was laid. As the week wore on I started to wonder if I would be able to get out for the first hatch — and also what I would do in Barrow in the interim.
My cabin on Cooper Island
Last Saturday, thanks to a weather window and the kindness of some very good friends in Barrow, I was able to get out to the island on an aircraft using fuel that was available. Guillemots lay their eggs about two weeks after gaining access to their nest cavities when snow melts, and as of today (June 21) no eggs have been laid. Compared to recent years this is a very late start to the breeding season, but is a predictable event given the record snow fall of last winter and the late snow melt. While monitoring guillemots nests for the first egg and censusing adults to see how survived the winter, I am unpacking gear from the cabin and setting up the Cooper Island “infrastructure” (connecting wind and solar generators to the battery bank, erecting an antenna for VHF communications, collecting snow for drinking water) . In recent years all field seasons have had an interesting ending with guillemot chicks starving due to lack of food or being killed by polar bears and puffins. I was not expecting an interesting beginning to this field season, but clearly this is a “different” year weatherwise and it will be interesting to see what that means to the guillemots, puffins, polar bears and other wildlife that live on and visit Cooper Island. I will be posting next when the first egg arrives and then at least once a week over the next few months until guillemot chicks leave the nest in late August.
Seattle, Wash., May 4, 2010 — Over the last four decades there have been many technological advances that have helped make the fieldwork on Cooper Island more pleasant and efficient but none has had a bigger impact on day-to-day operations than the addition of the 8×12 ft. cabin that has served as a summer home since 2003. After the 2002 field season it was clear to me (and to my field companions who saw their tents shredded by a polar bear in August 2002) that there was a need for sturdier living quarters on Cooper Island. While protection from bears was the motivating factor for getting the cabin, its ability to provide a windless, dry and sometimes warm living space has changed the way life is lived on the island. Friends of Cooper Island purchased the cabin in Barrow and we hauled it over the lagoon ice in April 2003. It took me two years to realize I had to be very serious about how I boarded up the doors and windows when I closed down camp at the end of the field season.
My summer home is hauled over the ice in 2003.
After its first summer on the island, in the fall of 2003 I was informed by polar bear biologists, who had been doing an aerial survey of the mainland coast, that they had seen a bear on Cooper and that it ran to and into the cabin as they buzzed the island. The bear had earlier broken in the door and was using the cabin as a shelter while waiting for the late fall ice to form. My friend, Craig George, went out to survey the damage and board up the door for the winter. Other than some bent camp furniture and many teeth marks in my squeeze bottles containing everything from sun block to hot sauce, there was no major damage. The next winter I was informed in March that someone snowmobiling on the sea ice near Cooper had seen “debris” scattered by the cabin. I went out to the island in late March and found the cabin door open and a major snow drift inside. With help from my companions from the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium I shoveled out the cabin before boarding the door back up.
A polar bear made himself at home in my cabin in 2003
Luckily this string of winter break-ins stopped after 2004, but because the integrity of the cabin and condition of its contents are so important for summer research on Cooper Island, every season now starts with a trip to the island in March or April to assess the conditions of the island’s “infrastructure”. Last month I flew to Barrow with Jim Gamache, a friend and consultant on Cooper Island’s electrical issues — and also my next door neighbor. Since polar bears are now my “next door neighbors” for much of August, it is all the more pleasant to have Jim as a neighbor when I return to Seattle in September.
Our arrival in Barrow on the first of April was a lesson in how while the month is spring throughout the northern hemisphere, the season of spring can mean very different things at different latitudes. In Seattle we left temperatures of over 50 degrees and landed in Barrow to find it to be hovering just about 0 degrees F. But spring had already started in Barrow as was evident by the first and extremely early Bowhead whales passing by in the lead (open water adjacent to shore).
Jim Gamache unloads supplies at the cabin.
I was also reminded yet again that if increasing heat is what characterizes spring in north temperate regions, in the Arctic spring is most noticeable by its rapidly increasing daylight. While the sun was down for about ten hours during our three day stay in Barrow, its daily period below the horizon was decreasing by about ten minutes per day. The “night time” sky was never really dark as the sun was not more than 12 degrees below the horizon — and on May 12 will come above the horizon and remain there until the first week of August.
My many friends at the North Slope Borough provided gear and advice that allowed Jim and I to feel confident we could make the trip to Cooper on our own. Biologists Craig George, Robert Suydam and Dave Ramey were too busy preparing for a spring census of bowhead whales to accompany us. The trip from Barrow to Cooper by snow machine is an amazing experience through a surreal landscape as snow cover masks any visual transition from mainland to lagoon to islands. Navigating through this continuum of white requires use of a range of cues, such as the relative position of the sun, direction of the wind, orientation of snow drifts and as a reality check — a reading from a GPS.
A surreal landscape as snow cover masks any visual transition from mainland to lagoon to islands.
On the way out we had some problems navigating as we tried to balance the desire to keep the GPS warm inside a coat with the need to make frequent checks on our direction and track. After two hours and about a mile from Cooper the cabin appeared as small gray dot that broke the horizon. Upon arrival we were glad to find the cabin boarded up and secure as it was when I abandoned camp last August. Jim and I left a canister of propane at the cabin to be used this summer and returned to Barrow with the luxury of being able to use our outbound tracks, rather than a GPS, for navigation… We both noted that the temperature was warming as we returned and later found out the mid-afternoon temperature had risen to 10 degrees F. – one of the warmest days of the year.
My cabin this “spring” complete with snowdrifts
I will return to Barrow in early June hoping to get out to Cooper by June 10 or 13, just after Black Guillemots arrive and when the island will already have experienced one month of constant (24-hours per day) daylight. I hope to post regularly from the island this summer and hope you visit this site to see what is occurring with the birds, bears and researchers on Cooper Island.
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Photo Credits: George Divoky | Craig George | Jim Gamache (3) |
For nearly 35 years George Divoky has been returning to Cooper Island, a small, low strip of desolate land close to Barrow, AK. Initially he went there simply to study Black Guillemots, but as – over the decades – he tracked the dates of their arrival and the new chicks hatching, he realized he was documenting how climate change was affecting both an organism and an ecosystem. As summer ice retreated, food for the chicks was harder and harder to find – and polar bears began to roam the beach.
Cooper Island, Alaska, Aug. 27, 2009 — What seems like a long,long time ago,black guillemots on Cooper Island had the best of all possible worlds. The summer snow-free period was increasing annually, providing breeding birds with more time to raise their young, and the Arctic pack ice was close enough offshore that there was a readily accessible supply of Arctic cod to feed the nestlings. The only real dark cloud on the horizon was the realization, slow in coming over the past three decades, that the warming planet that had given the guillemots their "salad days" in the 1970s and 1980s could cause increasing melt of the pack ice, making Arctic cod less accessible and causing problems for parent guillemots provisioning their young in August and early September.
The increasing rate of ice pack melt is causing a shift in food supply for black guillemots as well as polar bears.
Even as the ice kept retreating during the 1990s there were reasons to think the guillemots could cope with the change in prey type and availability since even though this subspecies has specialized on prey associated with Arctic pack ice, the genus to which it belongs, Cepphus, is highly adaptable and lives on a wide variety of near shore prey in temperate and subarctic waters. It appeared that documenting how the Cooper Island guillemot population, with its many color-banded individuals, responded to an ice-free nestling period was going to be a rare chance to watch adaptation and selection in a wild population.
But this past summer suggests that the geographic shift in the guillemots’ prey may not be the deciding factor in the future of the colony, but the shift in two species that were uncommon in the area when the study began: the horned puffin and polar bear. The preliminary results from this summer show that hatching success (the number of eggs that hatched) was reasonably high at about 70 percent — but could have been over 80 percent had eggs not been displaced and broken by horned puffins pushing the eggs out of nest depressions and polar bears breaking the eggs by moving nest sites. Still, with over 180 guillemot chicks in nests in late July and early August, there was a good chance the colony could produce a sizable number of fledglings this year.
A black guillemot protects its nest from a horned puffin.
However,as August progressed the activities of puffins changed and visits by bears increased so that the number of guillemot chicks rapidly decreased to 100, and then to four chicks on August 16. While a few chicks died from lack of food or natural causes, the vast majority were the victims of puffins prospecting nest cavities and polar bears looking for food, with puffins killing (but not eating) about 80 chicks and polar bears killing (and sometimes eating) about 90. It is telling that the polar bear, an Arctic species forced south because of melting ice, and the horned puffin, a subarctic species moving north because of melting ice, could together cause the major breeding failure guillemots experienced this summer. While either species could have, by itself, greatly deceased breeding success, the combination proved devastating to the Cooper Island colony in 2009. A number of guillemot nests with two nestlings had young lost to both bears and puffins.
When I left the island late on August 17, one young guillemot had just fledged and there were three young still in nest sites, each with about two weeks to go before nest departure. It is likely that polar bear visits increased in frequency and duration after my departure, greatly decreasing the chances the three remaining chicks would successfully fledge.
Because of the melting ice pack, horned puffins are coming to Cooper Island in search of nesting sites.
Based on the frequency and activities of polar bears on Cooper Island in the last three years it appears likely that bears stranded on the beach looking for food will continue to cause major decreases in breeding success in the future. Surprisingly, it appears that non-breeding horned puffins, looking for nesting cavities and competing with guillemots for those cavities, could have an almost comparable impact on breeding success. Since the presence of both bears and puffins is related to the decrease in the ice extent and since there is no indication that the decrease in summer ice extent will reverse itself in the near future, both bear and puffin numbers on Cooper Island will likely increase in future breeding seasons.
Although the marine waters adjacent to Cooper are becoming more amenable to puffins, the establishment of a puffin colony on Cooper in the long-term will be prevented by the presence of polar bears that in recent years have preyed on puffin nestlings.
The remnants of a nesting site after the polar bears paid a visit
I
n the past week colleagues in Barrow and friends in Seattle have asked what the future of the guillemot colony is given this year’s observations. The short-term outlook is that breeding adults, with their high fidelity to nest sites, will continue to return to the colony even though breeding is likely to fail in most years because of bears and puffins. This lack of productivity will mean that, without immigration from other colonies, there will be no birds reaching breeding age and recruiting into the population. With overwinter mortality of breeding birds at approximately 15 percent and if no recruitment occurs, the colony will decrease in size by approximately 15 percent every year. This would mean that in 2025 the colony would be back down to ten pairs of guillemots, the same size it was in 1972 when I found it -– allowing me to exit saying "this is where I came in".
The class of 2009
Of course this assumes that the nest sites the bears destroy every year will be reconstructed to provide a nesting cavity and that some other factor doesn’t come into play. For instance, increasing erosion coupled with increasing storms and wave height may result in nest sites being washed away by late summer and fall storms.
While this assessment sounds gloomy it is also realistic, since the annual trend in summer ice extent leaves little doubt that there will be an ice-free Arctic sometime in this century. The number of polar bears forced to use the edge of the Arctic Basin as summering habitat will increase, and Cooper Island is one of the more logical places for them to aggregate on the Alaskan coast. And horned puffins will likely continue to visit Cooper Island in small numbers, drawn by the increases in subarctic fish in the region and a lack of suitable nesting cavities in the region.
The only way to know what will happen, of course, is to visit Cooper Island. And given this scenario, it is important to recognize the one certain fledge from the colony this year, since it may well be one of the last guillemots to fledge from the island. It survived a puffin visit that resulted in the death of its sibling and two bear visits that repositioned and almost destroyed the nest site where it was raised to fledging by its parents. If it can survive the next three years, it will likely return to Cooper Island for the 2012 breeding season. Even though the outlook for the colony is grim, seeing if that chick – the "Class of 2009" — does return will be enough to make me excited at the start of the field season three years from now.
I’ll have more thoughts on the field season, and the ongoing prospects for the colony, in the weeks to come. It looks to be a busy fall, with presentations as part of International Polar-Palooza, as well as places closer to home, and more analysis of the summer’s data and how it fits into the bigger picture on Cooper Island. Thanks to you who have followed the Cooper Island field season this summer. And special thanks to those who provided donations of moral,logistical and financial support allowing me to work on Cooper Island during this past field season. I plan to continue these posts here and on my website (cooperisland.org) in the off season and hope you visit during the coming months.
