An Arctic Summer Scene: Grounded Birds and Flying Plywood

 

By Tamara Enz

Summer 2003

 

 

      

In the summer of 2000 I lived alone on Cooper Island, an island four miles long and half a mile wide, in the Arctic Ocean twenty-four miles east of Barrow, Alaska.  From 29 May through 30 August, with a few brief respites, I lived in two dome tents, one for cooking and working, and one for sleeping.  I had a radio with which to contact the mainland, and after the first week, checked in daily, weather permitting, with Dave Ramey from the Barrow Arctic Science Consortium (BASC).  My job, as a Research Associate for George Divoky of the Institute of Arctic Biology at the University of Alaska, Fairbanks, was to follow the breeding chronology of black guillemots on Cooper Island.  Black guillemots are diving seabirds found both in the north Pacific and north Atlantic Oceans.  What follows is a portion of that adventure.

8 August

The wind finally dropped off this evening.  It was quite strong earlier in the day, 30-35 mph, and I spent a lot of time hunkered down in the tent.  It was nice this morning, almost clear, mild, and not too windy but by noon the wind was screaming and it was dark and grim.  When the wind died down I went for a long walk along the beach.   

The bright, low light was intense and glorious.  When the sun actually shines like that there is a quality to the air that is amazing.  It is crisp and clear and with the binoculars everything is sharp and in focus.  It is quite astonishing. 

The jaegers [predatory seabirds] were back working the north side of the colony.  They are remarkable and relentless.  They patrol the north beach, watching as adult guillemots come in to the colony with fish in their bills; they chase the guillemots until they drop the fish.  The jaegers swoop down and snatch it up.  The jaegers are fast and maneuverable and drop on a dime.  The guillemots can keep speed but not for long and they give up quickly.  The weights of some of the guillemot chicks have not increased and some have even decreased in the last few days since the jaegers have been hassling the adults.  There doesn’t seem to be more than one or two jaegers at a time but between them and the horned puffins, and now the peregrine falcon, they are jittery and in constant flight.   

I saw the peregrine coming straight toward me when I was weighing chicks this afternoon; I could see the barring on its breast and the dark helmet.  It went right over my head and hung for a long minute on the air currents just behind me before swooping low and away across the wastelands and over the pond.  It landed in sub-colony 52 and then disappeared.  Later I walked down the south beach looking for it but I got distracted by the phalaropes and flushed it before I even knew it was there.   

10 August

This morning started reasonably enough: cool, 15-20 mph wind, out of the southwest.  I radioed in and talked with the various folks at 8:15.  They told me there was supposed to be a little wind picking up later in the day and that the wind storm the day before hadn’t materialized at all so who knew what would really happen?    

I had another cup of tea and was getting ready to start the day’s routine but the wind already picked up significantly.  I decided to give the birds the day off; I didn’t want to flush anything into this wind.  Who could say whether it would make it back to its nest? 

The door to the cook tent, where I had been sitting and watching, blew out about 10:30.  I had shut down the stove, turned off the gas, packed up the radio, and tried to compact everything into what relatively dry space was left.  The wind was blowing the sides of the tent in against my shoulder and an occasional gust would reach under the floor of the tent, lifting me ever so slightly. 

Deciding that I needed to check a nest site that I was not sure was securely grounded, I walked into the wind, bent almost in half from the force; I felt like I was suffocating.  The intense pressure against my chest barely allowed me to inhale and looking up was like looking into a sand blaster at full tilt.   

As I walked, head down, gasping, I looked up and saw a juvenile Arctic tern at eye level next to me, trying to work into the wind.  Arctic terns are the premier flyers, pure effortless energy and fluidity.  They are long and sleek, with delicate tapered wings and fine forked tails.  By far the most agile and graceful of the Arctic birds, these creatures migrate annually from the Arctic, where they breed, to wintering grounds in Antarctica and back.  This poor creature was going backwards and, as soon as I passed, it settled back onto the sand. 

Once assured that the nest site was as secure as it could be given the conditions, I turned my back to the wind and fairly flew to the tent.  As I approached camp, the radio antenna blew down and the only large pot that I had, the pot I used to carry water, took flight across the island.  I chased it for a minute and then just watched it roll and bounce, up, over the bank, and into the Arctic Ocean.  Gone. 

I gathered some field books, food, and water, and the radio out of the cook tent, secured it as best I could and retreated to my sleeping tent.  My tent was bowing and pulling but was still relatively well set.  I piled in with my supplies.  I had mostly been reading all morning and continued to do so.  After a while, the walls of the tent were trying to meet.  I was getting squeezed out of the middle and had to lie down.  Rain and snow squalls were chasing across the island all morning so the tent walls were wet, as was the floor.  I moved things around, piled them up, trying to keep them dry.  I jammed my sleeping bag into the only dry bag I had.  I was getting dripped on and my parka was wet. 

I had to lie on my back to avoid getting hit in the knees and hips by the fiberglass tent poles that were doing their best to act as if they were made of rubber.  Now and then a wave of sand and grit would hit the wall of the tent.  I stuck my head out occasionally to have a look.  I could see the sand blowing across the north beach and debris in the air, plywood and boards taking flight.  I wasn’t exactly comfortable in my soggy tent eating my fourth peanut butter and jelly sandwich of the post-stove day but I was in the depths of a good book for most of the day and was mostly content. 

About 7 pm, after ten hours of storm, I heard a helicopter.  I was sure it was a trick of the wind but, no, there it was, the steady, even beating of the rotors.  When I stuck my head out the door I could see them coming low, from the northeast, into the wind, ready to land.  They set down right in front of the tent.  When I saw the wave of sand and gravel coming at me from the rotor wash, I frantically tried to zip the tent door, pulling it closed just as tent lurched with the impact.  I pulled on boots and went across to meet the search and rescue technician jumping out of the helicopter.  He yelled into my ear, “There’s a storm coming in.  We’re taking you back to Barrow.”  Coming in?  I thought to myself.  You mean it’s not already here?  OK.  I grabbed my binoculars, camera, bird book, laundry, and toothbrush (obviously, all of the important things), boarded the helicopter, and was buckling in within a minute of their landing. 

As we lifted off I could see that the island was getting pounded.  “Flying plywood, great!” the pilot said into the headset.  It was just chaos.  Waves were crashing against the north shore, eating into the bank.  The pond in front of my tent was no longer a pond but had become part of the lagoon.  We lifted off southwest into the wind and then swung east along the coast headed to a cabin where two kids needed to be lifted out.  We had crossed the lagoon and were following the shoreline when terror struck me.  I remembered that I had left a half-eaten peanut butter and jelly sandwich on top of the radio case.  I could imagine it stuck to the wall of the tent, sticky and slimy forevermore.  But worse, I had committed the greatest mortal sin for field biologists.  I remembered my laundry but left the field books, full of the summer’s data, in a neat stack next to the radio case and the half-eaten sandwich.  My stomach turned.  Ugh, how could I face the world of scientists ever again?  Who knew if the tent would survive the storm or if the data books would settle on the bottom of the Arctic Ocean with my water pot?  I couldn’t ask these people to go back when they were already risking their lives to get my sorry butt off a desolate island.  So, resolved that there was nothing I could do, I settled back and watched the tundra roll away beneath me. 

Over the water, the waves were tight and white capped.  The foam was in perfectly parallel lines across the surface and into the wind.  The cat’s claws on the water’s surface were fine and delicate given the force of the wind.  There were birds everywhere, I don’t know if they had been scared up by the helicopter passing or if they were just enjoying the ride; jaegers, gulls, terns, phalaropes, and brant.  Wave after wave of wind ran through the grass.  The snow was scudding along the ground, blowing and driving across the tundra in white sheets below us. Half a dozen caribou ran beneath us, across tundra broken into polygons and ponds—beautiful, soggy, mosquito-ridden land. 

The helicopter ride was wild.  The wind pushed it the way a car slides sideways in the snow, the tail of the helicopter skidding in the air.  Pushed by the wind so, even though we were moving forward, the tail would slide sideways and we would move laterally. 

When I landed in Barrow, Craig George, one of the North Slope Borough wildlife biologists [the North Slope is the area of Alaska north of the Brooks Range, including Prudhoe Bay, and the Borough government is based in Barrow], was there to pick me up.  He had made the final decision about sending Search and Rescue.  He was afraid I would be angry.  I made it clear that while I didn’t feel I was in any danger and didn’t want to endanger anyone else by asking them to fly out and get me, I was also perfectly happy to be in a dry, warm place where I could stand upright and eat something other than peanut butter and jelly.   

We drove around town for a while.  Barrow sits at the base of a peninsula, which juts into the Arctic Ocean and divides the Chukchi and Beaufort Seas. It is the northernmost town in the U.S. and is reliably accessible only by air, although the airport is often closed due to fog.  There are no roads leading to Barrow and the adjacent ocean is ice-free for only about a month each summer.  The road from town to the research station was closed because it had been washed out by the surf.  Crews were working frantically to keep another road open. 

11 August

This morning we made it out to the research station where I was told that folks had been laying bets on me all the previous day.  Most who go out onto the tundra, and especially out on the water, have a Personal Locator Beacon (PLB).  It is a transmitting device that, when activated, alerts the nearest Search and Rescue base that you are in need of help and it sends your exact location.  When the wind picked up and they were no longer able to get me via radio they started betting on when I would pop the PLB.  It seems, though, the betting was short lived because after a brief debate they decided I would never do it. 

The final story: sustained winds of 56 mph with gusts in the 70s.  The highest gust recorded that day was 79 mph.  The satellite image of that storm was a perfect spiral, the quintessential eastern Atlantic hurricane.  What was it doing in the Arctic? 

13 August

Once the storm abated we made several tries to get back to Cooper, even going so far as to have the boat packed and at the boat launch, only to turn back at the sight of the high water and rough seas.  Finally, Craig and I and two friends from the research facility launched the boat and headed back to the island.  The seas were high; it was gray, windy, sleeting, and snowing.  There were flocks of murres and Sabine’s gulls everywhere, even a few horned puffins. 

We followed the Plover Island archipelago east and then swung south to avoid the treacherous current through a cut between Tapkaluq and Cooper Islands, but we went too far east along the coast.  With cloudy skies and no horizon to gauge by, we had bypassed the island, and had to work our way back, eventually landing at the west end of the island. 

The camp was trashed.  The cook tent was 15 or 20 feet from where I had left it, laying open on its side, full of sand and water.  The tent was still closed and had blown out from underneath.  My sleep tent had also blown 20 feet but was stopped, luckily, by the five-gallon water jug and the munitions box full of banding gear that I had tied the tent fly to.  It had been thrown around and the poles were bent, but mostly the tent was functional.  Everything was damp but nothing was ruined.  The abandoned sandwich had flipped and stuck to the radio case.  The forgotten data books were all there, undamaged. 

Before the wind returned we quickly set up a spare tent, reset the antenna, and packed up the garbage.  They bade me farewell and headed west.  I was left alone again on Cooper, with a lot of cleaning up to finish and general mayhem to contain. 

Guillemots are cavity nesters.  The nest sites were in a variety of old building materials, window frames, 55-gallon drums, wooden crates, some plywood boxes, old floorboards—debris left from a naval site blown up and abandoned in the 1950s or 60s.  Before the storm I had been checking the nests every other day if both eggs had already hatched and daily if they had not yet hatched.  Now I made a round of the island, checking each nest for survivors.  Many of the nest sites were gone altogether, blown away, into the pond or the ocean.  Some nests had been inundated with seawater when waves washed over the beach (the highest point on the island is approximately 9 feet above sea level).  From a beginning total of perhaps 180 chicks there were 40 missing.  Some nests were missing both chicks, some only one, others had three or four chicks instead of just the usual two.  Most of the chicks had lost a substantial amount of weight. 

Over the next week the number of chicks continued to drop.  Guillemot chicks will walk away from their home nest sites if they are not getting enough food—they venture into a neighboring site with hopes that the fish supply is more plentiful.  Sibling rivalry also becomes evident, with the larger chick picking on the smaller until it either dies or walks away.  So it was over the next few days that there were chicks everywhere—wandering through my camp, paddling across the bay, moving out of one nest and into another, back again, walking across the island in search of any safe harbor.   I would check a site one day and it would be empty, but the next day there might be two or three chicks huddling in the corner.  All told, only 68 chicks survived the storm and grew to fledging.  Each of the survivors eventually walked away from their nest site in the night, headed to the beach, and paddled off into the dark.   

The ferocious storm caused enormous damage to the human world, but left the guillemots undaunted.  They pass the season on the Arctic Ocean, barely changing their ranges from summer to winter.  The breeding season was not a huge success, but they will return and begin again next year. 

The work that I did, just one small piece in a 30-year project, added to the growing understanding of how species are affected by the changing climate.  The endless days of the Arctic summer, the vast and always-moving skies, the clarity of the air, and the overwhelming silence have left me changed forever. 

 

I returned to Cooper Island to work for five weeks in the summer of 2001.  During that field season, George Divoky, the force behind this project, was interviewed by a reporter from the New York Times.  The article by Darcy Frey, “Watching the World Melt Away, The Future as Seen by a Lonely Scientist at the End of the Earth,” appeared in The New York Times Magazine on January 6, 2002.  There is also a web page dedicated to Cooper Island at www.cooperisland.org.