Arctic Project Week 1

Arctic Project Week 2

Arctic Project Week 3

Arctic Project Week 4

Arctic Project Week 5

Background on Shorebirds

From the air, you can see the variety of tundra features, including polygon ponds, thaw lakes, and coastal islands.

By the end of the trip, Metta was battling many blisters, and resorting to alternative first aid techniques.

The helicopter takes the first load of our gear across the peninsula to the landing area along the Staines River.

6/30/04 - 7/04/03 - Our last week in the Arctic Refuge started with a return to winter conditions. After several days of better weather, with lots of sun and a high of 52 degrees one day, waking to ice on the tent again came as something of a shock. Down and thinsulite jackets came out under parkas again, and back we went to cold, windy surveys. But the birds were well into laying and incubation by this time, and seemed to take the cold in stride, so we did as well. We began finding nests with three egg clutches for previously elusive Pectoral Sandpipers, showing that indeed they had not been laying while the weather had been so brutal. We also saw many pairs of Red Phalaropes copulating, as well as single male Red-necked Phalaropes without their mates, indicating that they too were finally on nests.

During this last week, we completed the second rope drag on all four of our plots, as well as an additional round of single person surveys. This concluded our data collection tasks for the first part of our work, which was testing the sampling methods for the PRISM survey. We also took Steve Kendall, ornithologist for the Arctic Refuge, and one of his field assistants Collette, to our plots to spend a day showing them all the active nests on each one. They will continue to follow the progress of the nests on our plots after we leave, as part of the larger nesting success study underway in the Refuge. We hope that our birds will escape predation by the many hungry critters in the area, and be able to hatch their eggs and raise their nestlings. We feel quite attached to each pair after following their struggles to establish their nests in the difficult conditions of the arctic spring. Other biologists in the region have confirmed that this spring was 10-14 days late, though variation is more the norm than averages for the arrival of good weather here.

One highlight of the last week was a visit from Cyndi Perry, who came all the way from Washington D.C. to visit our camp and the Refuge camp to learn about our research. Cyndi is the Branch Chief for Migratory Bird Conservation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. She works hard on the most important conservation issues related to birds at the national level. It was a treat for her to get away from the many demands on her time back at the office, and a pleasure for us to spend some time in the field with her. She also took many wonderful photos, which we will use in future slide shows, and helped with the surveys. It was a big shock to go from summer in D.C., where it had been 80 degrees, directly into the arctic, but she was a trooper and enjoyed her arctic visit very much. She even says she wants to return next year!

The Refuge plane that picked us up was a Cessna 185 equipped with special tundra tires, so it can land on the flat area next to the river.

This lemming thought our gear pile made a nice home, and woke us up many times trying to make a tunnel under our tent.

We spend one night on the river, and waited for the Refuge plane to pick us up the next day.

Metta and Susan spent a day breaking camp on June 24th, joined by Jon and Stephen late in the evening, after our day in the field with Steve Kendall and filling out nest cards for his crew. We packed away most of the gear, leaving only the tents to put away in the morning before the arrival of the helicopter, which was coming for the first leg of our journey early in the morning. The next morning we woke to substantial fog, but right on time at 9 a.m. we heard the helicopter in the distance, so we raced to take down the tents. Helicopters can fly in the fog, but it's up to the pilot to determine if he can see well enough to fly safely. As he approached we heard his rotors through the fog, but he was a few miles to the south, and it wasn't clear if he would be able to find us. We heard him circle for an hour and a half, a sobering reminder of how difficult it is to find a small camp in difficult weather.

When we finally heard him fly off to the west, we assumed he was headed to Prudhoe Bay to refuel, then to his next job an hour west of Prudhoe. Metta suggested calling Kermit, our pilot from Cape Smythe Air in Prudhoe Bay, to relay a message with our coordinates. Fortunately Kermit was there, saving the day by reaching the helicopter pilot on the radio just as he was about to leave for his next job tracking caribou from the air. He agreed to come back, and aided by the clearing fog and proper coordinates, found us gratefully waiting. It took six trips to ferry the two of us, Cyndi, and all our gear over to the landing area near the Refuge camp, while Jon and Susan went on to Prudhoe Bay with the helicopter. We pitched our tent for one more night, next to what passed for the landing strip along the river. We spent our last evening in the Refuge walking along the river to the coast, and enjoying a late dinner with the Refuge crew, sharing stories of the project, and a little bit of how each of them came to be in such a remote place.

The next leg of our next trip required a Refuge plane to land on the small flat strip along the river that served as a too-short but just manageable airstrip. A plane was scheduled to come fetch us around 1 p.m. Right on time a Refuge plane circled, then continued on its way - a false alarm. Later we found out this was Roger, who had rescued us on the way in, circling in the larger Cessna 206 to check out the landing area for the other pilot Dave. Thinking that had been our ride and he couldn't land, we went back to making lunch, which was ready just as Dave came in and landed in the smaller plane, a Cessna 185 with tundra tires that allow him to land on the bumpy, unimproved terrain. Like many things in the Arctic, our departure took a long time to unfold, then happened very quickly, and we found ourselves back in Kavik with all our gear, where we had been stuck a few weeks before. Spring had come to Kavik while we were gone, and the many tall snowdrifts had disappeared, replaced by mostly waist high blooming willows along the river, a few of which were taller than us, and wildflowers everywhere. We also got our first taste of arctic mosquitoes (though just a small taste)!

It was a real pleasure to reconnect with Roger, who was at Kavik with the woman who works as the musk ox biologist for the Refuge, shepherding her on a series of aerial surveys. Over the past several years the resident herd of 300 musk ox have dwindled to about 30 remaining in the Arctic Refuge, a mystery she was investigating. That day she was able to hitch a helicopter ride with a team of bear biologists working for the state of Alaska to the site of a multiple kill, where grizzly had taken down six musk ox in April. She wanted to investigate the remains to learn what she could about the slaughtered animals, so we had the pleasure of Roger's company while she pursued her side trip. We shared stories of the trip while waiting for Kermit to return from another job and make the flight out from Prudhoe Bay to pick us up. We told him of our experiences during that week of awful weather, which was already legendary among all the camps on the north slope from Barrow to Canada. Roger had shared in the adventure as well, landing on the frozen lake one night in a feat of piloting skill that amazed us, to bring in supplies for the other camp in a 40 knot wind. Roger reminded us to remember: "most miserable, most memorable." True enough.

Spring was much farther along only 40 miles inland from our camp site and plots along the coast.

When Kermit arrived from Prudhoe to pick us up, it began to look like we would make it out. The Cessna 207 is a much larger plane, and took us and our gear in two trips.

Our first view of Prudhoe Bay as we circle the airport reminds us what "civilization" looks like.

We spent our first night in a bed at the Prudhoe Bay hotel, a very simple place made of modular trailers that seemed wildly opulent to us because it had showers, free laundry facilities, and all you can eat meals three times a day. We both ate like pigs from the salad bar, and Metta shamelessly ate two desserts. The next morning we arranged to have all our gear shipped by truck to Anchorage, and Jon and Susan's gear flown to Boise. Carrying everything where it needed to go, Stephen spent one last morning as a beast of burden in the impossibly dusty streets of Deadhorse before returning to civilization. Our flight back to Anchorage went off without a hitch, and it seemed very different to get on a scheduled flight, where you actually know what day you're leaving. Our friend Verena put us up for the weekend, and we even snuck in a quick trip down to Seward to take one of the boat tours in Kenai Fjords National Park where we saw several new seabirds, including a kittiwake colony. Now we are on the final leg of our journey, writing this on the two legs of the flight back, to Minneapolis and then to Boston, where our co-worker Linda Damon selflessly volunteered to pick us up at Logan Airport.

As we reflect on the trip, many images come to mind. Spending time in the wilderness is different from most other experiences in the outdoors, and although we have had many adventures in places we previously thought wild, the Arctic Refuge has shown us that we have barely begun to learn the true meaning and value of wilderness. The openness of the tundra, the stillness of the place, affects you deeply, but awareness of what is truly special and valuable about such a place grows slowly. It also was perhaps harder to begin to touch and feel because we were working so hard, and our research goals and priorities were constantly structuring our time and experiences. Watching the birds and the jerking swings of spring struggling to become established, we slowly became attuned to the rhythms of the landscape, and of the many birds living in the area. We also became accustomed to very little sign of human activity beyond our two camps - just the occasional small plane run, and the one or two trans-polar jets that crossed many miles above us and for a moment left a ringing roar that reminded us to appreciate the vast silence in which we were privileged to work.

We hope that our work here will contribute to the efforts to protect this remarkable wilderness, and the natural evolutionary processes that have been able to continue without human interference for thousands of years. It is a Refuge in many ways, from the development pressures that threaten bird habitats, and from the pace and pressures of modern civilization. We hope very much that as a citizenry, we will collectively continue to uphold these values and policies that protect this remarkable Arctic Refuge, all of it. This is probably the only place where those few hearty human souls who visit for research or reasons of their own have the opportunity to feel and experience being so very small within a vast healthy ecosystem, and learn something of a much bigger truth. We hope we will keep this one place where we humans don't control, mediate, dominate, or exploit the natural world for our own gain, disregarding the damage we inevitably cause to the natural processes and wilderness character that can never be restored or replaced.

Working in the arctic is challenging, and the conditions can be fierce, but the rewards are rich and varied as well. We hope to return to this magical place, and continue our work to understand the shorebirds that breed here, and the special nature of this remote wilderness.