Arctic Project Week 1

Arctic Project Week 2

Arctic Project Week 3

Arctic Project Week 4

Arctic Project Week 5

Background on Shorebirds

After finishing our work, we walked out to the coast, and found a drained lake basin where coastal erosion had cut through the bank of a lake, leaving steaming mudflats.

Can you find the Semipalmated Sandpiper nest in this picture? Don't feel bad, it took us over an hour watching the bird sneak around to give us a clue where to look.

Here it is, hidden in the grass. Finding nests is a real challenge, because the birds do their best to hide them from us, and from the predators who would like to eat the eggs.

6/16/03 - 6/20/03 - Last week we had a couple of exceptionally nice days for the arctic, and we got a little spoiled. After setting up our plots south of camp, we monitored birds and practiced finding nests in the wetlands to the north of camp. The weather was clear and sunny, with highs in the 40's for two days. After finishing our training exercises on the afternoon of the second day, we took a side trip north to walk along the Arctic Ocean. With low wind and lots of sun, we had a memorable first trip to the frozen ocean, and were actually comfortable! Seeing the ocean frozen solid even in June brings home the harshness of this landscape. But all things come to an end, and our first week of actual surveys has brought quite different conditions.

This week the temperature has been in the 20s every night. Our first full day surveying on our plots (June 10th), we woke to a new weather pattern bringing harsh arctic conditions that lasted all week - easterly winds 20-30 MPH with gusts up to 40 MPH, daily highs in the low 30's, and a continuous fog with a 100 foot ceiling. When the fog is lower, we're treated to freezing fog, which is essentially ice crystals that the wind turns into little missiles stinging any exposed skin. We've woken to a dusting of snow and fresh ice on the ponds each morning, as well as frozen water filters and laundry. Only today has the temperature reached 40 degrees again.

Tracking birds under these conditions is quite challenging on several scores. First, the birds are minimizing their activity to essential foraging, so we are unable to track and map territories because they are not doing their usual displays. Second, the birds that have begun laying are sitting tight on their nests to keep them warm, and they flush only when you walk very near them (5-10 yards). Our plots are about 30 acres, so the chances of finding a bird by nearly stepping on it are much lower than finding them by tracking them through flight displays and following them back to their nests. Third, the wind is so strong it's hard to hold one's field glasses steady, it actually knocks you over. The cold makes them fog when you lift them to your face, so it's hard to follow the birds returning to their nests after foraging. Finally, the wind chill makes the effective temperature just about zero, and this means frozen fingers - therefore lots of fumbling with focusing binoculars and writing field notes. But we're hanging in there anyway, and making the best of it.

Although separated by a half mile to a mile from each other, the open vistas of tundra make it possible to occasionally see one another in the distance from various points on our plots. We all have every layer of clothing in use, with hats and neck-warmers under hoods, and we all try to position ourselves with backs to the eastern wind when we do find birds to track. By noon it already feels like a very long day! Some days in the afternoon the fog lifts to several hundred feet revealing the bases of the mountains, and through breaks to the north west enough sunlight gets through to raise the temperature into the upper 30s. With this encouragement we all carry on, and a few hearty birds display for the hour or so that this small improvement lasts.

Our protocol for nest searches involves each person searching two 12 hectare plots, and a second person searching the same two plots, on alternate days. That way, we can test the amount of effort needed to find all the nests by comparing the nests each person discovers. If all goes well, both people will find the same nests, and we will know how much effort is needed when we do the surveys on a much wider scale next year. After a few days of our single person searches, we will also work in pairs dragging a special rope with plastic tassels that hang down every few feet to increase the chance of flushing nesting birds. This works well when the birds are hard to flush, but it's also grueling work because the rope is heavy and often gets caught on tussocks or small shrubs.

So far on our plots we have found nests of Pectoral Sandpipers and Semipalmated Sandpipers, and we think the Red Phalaropes and Red-Necked Phalaropes are starting to nest. We've also seen Stilt Sandpipers, Dunlins, American Golden Plovers, and Long-billed Dowitchers in the area, but apparently not nesting on our plots. Other birds are preparing to nest too. We see King Eiders, Pacific Loons, and Long-tailed Ducks every day. And the ubiquitous Lapland Longspurs have had their nests established for a couple of weeks already. We've started seeing a few mammals - an Arctic Fox, Brown Lemming, Collared Lemming, and the first few Caribou are making their way north. Jon and Susan also saw a Musk Ox before we arrived.

The female red phalarope is one of the most striking shorebirds breeding in the Arctic Refuge, and is common on our study plots.

Along the coast we found these tracks of an Arctic Fox, which can be a major predator of shorebird nests.

Doing laundry in the arctic is a challenge! Maybe these frozen shirts will dry today! This also how we dress for surveys in the snow.

At the end of our first full day of surveys, we found that three of the four of us tripped on tussocks or slipped on ice at some point in the day, thereby soaking various pieces of clothing as well as getting icy water inside our hip boots, so we started a new nightly ritual taking turns steaming articles of gear in front of the small propane tent heater. We also give thanks for goretex which limits the soaking, and for fleece and polypropylene, which stay warm to some degree even when wet so long as one keeps walking. As the week continued conditions worsened, as temperatures dropped and the wind speed increased. This makes our tent ropes sing at night, in counterpoint to the furious flapping of the tent fabric. Under normal circumstances we cant imagine being able to sleep with all that flapping on our heads and shoulders, but we are so exhausted that we conk out anyway. Although we are all struggling during this first week in the field because the harsh conditions have limited our ability to detect birds, we are making slow but steady progress toward our goal of identifying all the birds nesting on our study plots.

There is a wide diversity of birds breeding in this area, in addition to the shorebirds we are here to study. Below is a list of all the birds we have seen so far. During the next week, we will continue our shorebird surveys, with the addition of rope dragging, and hope to find all the nests on each of our plots.