ARCTIC AUKS

While in Longyearbyen one of the best things that we did was hike in search of the fabled fossils at the base of a glacier near town.

Here is Julia (below) and Derek (atop) a steep pile of scree.

Once we got the hang of it, we were finding fossils everywhere in that scree.
Evidence that Spitsbergen once looked like a very different place! Note the thumb for scale. Below is one of the typical sized plants in the area now–much smaller than that fossil leaf (raindrop for scale). This flower was growing amongst the fossils.

Most of the animal fossils we found were worms.

The following day, Julia, Derek and I flew from Longyearbyen to Oslo. Laurel stayed on to visit with friends that she had made during her winter in Longyearbyen 2 years ago.

Our last views of Spitsbergen:

Even though the field work portion of our work is done, we will keep updating this blog with our results and news throughout the year.

We spent our last days before flying home in Longyearbyen. Longyearbyen is a small city (about the size of Pomona College). The main industries there are mining, a university and tourism.
Here are Derek and Julia standing by the University Centre in Svalbard (UNIS)

Julia and Derek in front of the water pipes that are above the frozen ground and have to be heated during winter.

We had a magical midnight hike around town in the falling snow.
Here is a view of an abandoned mine building on the hillside covered in a light dusting of snow.

The Norwegians get acclimated to cold weather early in life. The babies take their naps swaddled in their carriages outside.
Here is a baby sleeping outside the market in a light rain/snow (we confirmed that the carriage was occupied).

The little auks breeding around Longyearbyen had gone south long before we arrived. The only little auk we saw was the one that Derek made out of snow.

We left Hornsund Fjord on board the Eltanin, a small yacht that transports people all around Spitsbergen during the summer months.

Our Polish friends saying goodbye along the shore.

We headed north to Longyearbyen.

Derek in his cozy bunk.

The view from deck to down below where dinner is on the table.

Thanks to Captain Jurek (on right) and first mate and extraordinary cook Ania (left) we made it to Longyearbyen in only 26 hours!

Our last day in Hornsund Fjord was spent packing up and making our final measurements on chicks. We coiled up the extension cord and with some help from colleagues at the station, hauled the batteries and PIT tag equipment down from the colony. Thank you Adrian, Christine and Witek!

Adrian, Derek and Julia coiling the extension cord.

Many of the chicks during our last day looked completely ready to leave the nest. They only had small traces of downy feathers left. It’s amazing how they grow up in only 25 days!
Here is Laurel with a chick ready to head south for winter. Notice that this chick has an all dark chin.

This chick held by Nina has a more typical white chin.

When the chicks leave the nest they generally go to sea with their father who continues to feed the chick. We put metal bands with individual numbers on the legs of as many chicks as possible in the hopes that one day we will find them again when they return to the colony.

Well folks, today, 36 days after our arrival in Hornsund Fjord, is the last day of our stay on Spitsbergen. We leave for the airport in fifteen minutes. Even though it is 3:30 am now, this is my very last chance to post from Svalbard, so how can I pass that up? Here are some of my favorite yet-unpublished photos from the past 5 weeks.

The shoreline of Hornsund just outside the Polish Polar Station.

A dead marine plant that washed up on shore and took a dramatic pose.

Some rusty metal that washed up on shore.

A close-up of the majestic glacier we see every day from the colony.

Mystic auks.

View from the front porch of the Polish Station.

Fugleberget, the tall mountain we see every day from the colony, at its most glorious.

One day, a Norwegian Helicopter came by to switch out some fuel canisters from the stockpile. This is a strategic fueling point along a long-distance helicopter route.

In the Polish Station, the cook dishes up some beigos, my very favorite Polish food. It is unclear what is animal, what is vegetable, and what is mineral in this delicacy, but that is irrelevant; it is the tastiest thing I have eaten north of  Arctic Circle.

Now for a recognition of some of the small things in life on the tundra:

Orange lichen

Yellow lichen

Moss

More moss

The local species of willow. This is as big as it gets!

Pink flowers.

More pink flowers.

Yellow flowers.

And, last but not least, a recognition of our favorite species of all:

It has been an excellent field season! Thanks for reading.

In addition to the foraging behavior, chick growth, and food availablity projects we’ve talked about so far in the blog, we’re also monitoring the stress levels of the birds. We do this by taking blood samples to look for a stress hormone called corticosteroid, or as we like to say, cort. Cort is hormone that humans also have and we can use it to see how the foraging conditions affect the birds’ stress.

First you have to catch the birds. We do this using the noose carpets that we worked so hard to make. We spread these nets with little loops of fishing line tied on over the birds’ favorite rocks and anchor the edges with cord.

The hardest part is sitting in the cold waiting for them to catch.  Sometimes a little auk will hover in the air for a second above the carpted rock and then turn away to avoid it. Despite all of the birds that manage to walk along the carpets without getting caught, eventually things get crazy. Since little auks are very social, once one bird lands on a carpet, two or three friends might come to join it. Sooner or later a bird will get a noose or two or three around its leg.

Cort levels start to rise about 3 to 5 minutes after capture. Since we want to measure their normal stress levels and not the stress of capture, the race is on to retrieve the bird as soon as possible. Derek and I take turns running up the hillside to get the bird. First we start our stop watches then we spring into action. When we arrive at the bird we hold it in one hand and free it with the other. Panting, we deliver our prized catch to Nina. (Sometimes this job makes me feel like a bird dog).

All of the cort samples have to be finished in 3 minutes from when the bird was caught. Laurel keeps track of all the capillary tubes and vials and labels. In addition to the sample for cort, we take a few drops to genetically sex the bird since the two sexes of our little black-and-white bird look identical. A third sample gets “shmeared” on a slide so our Polish collegues can count white blood cells.

We have “done cort” three times: first in late incubation, then in early chick rearing and finally in mid chick rearing. During late incubation, we checked for a brood patch, the bare spot where the parent put the egg directly against it’s skin to keep it warm.

During chick rearing we also use the opportunity to collect diet samples. Little auks return from the sea with meals of copepods to feed their chicks. They carry the copepods below their tongue in a spot called the gular pouch.  One of their defenses from predators is to spit out the copepods so sometime we collect only partial samples. We can remove the diet sample by gently opening the bird’s mouth, massaging the gular pouch and scooping out the copepods with a modified Polish toothpick. Since the parents make many foraging trips per day, losing one meal doesn’t hurt the chick.

The final step is banding and measuring the bird to keep track of it in the future.

We also use magic marker on the chests of some of the birds so we can watch them during the 48 hr feeding watch. It’s so nice to see the birds feeding their chicks after we release them!

On August 1, the high north was witness to a unique celestial phenomenon: a nearly full eclipse.  From the perspective of Spitsbergen, the sun was covered up to 93% at 11:40am (more information found here ).  Here at the Polish station, we ran outside at 11:30 and watched as the sun was slowly covered by the shadow of the moon.

This shot was taken with a Nikon D200 at 200mm through a 2mm thick sheet of filtered glass.  Although the light outside was somewhat dusky, we still had sunlight:

Even with a few clouds in the sky, we were very lucky to get an excellent look at the eclipse, and watched over the following hour as the moon shadow slowly crossed the sun.

While taking these photos, we noticed that if you turned the filtered glass just right, you could catch the eclipse and the reflection on the glass…producing something like this:

(The eclipse is above the Longyearbyen sign).

Or this:

An incredible showing of a rare event!

Where do the auks go to find food for their chicks? What prey are available to them? What are the characteristics of the water masses that they foraging in?

In order to answer these questions we went aboard the R/V Oceania for two days for a round the clock oceanographic survey of the water outside of Hornsund Fjord.

The Oceania is a three masted oceangraphic ship that sails from Poland to the Arctic every summer for oceanographic work.

While travelling along transect lines, we recorded all the birds within 300 meters off of one side of the ship. We noted the number of birds in each flock, the species of birds, and the behavior of the birds. One person would call out their observations while another used the computer to record them. We used a special program on the computer that made it easy to enter all of these data in a few keystrokes. For example, “5 little auks flying southwest, 1 northern fulmar flying towards the ship, 2 black-legged kittiwakes sitting on the water” can all be in the computer by hitting only 10 keys.

Here is Derek recording the observations made by Laurel.

The ship stopped along the transects at stations where oceanographic measurements were made by the zooplankton biologists and physical oceanographers aboard. First the physicists would lower an instrument called a CTD (Conductivitiy Temperature Depth sensor) into the water. The CTD measures the temperature and the salinity of the water as it descends. These data allow us to know if the water being sampled has Arctic or Atlantic origins. Next the zooplankton biologists pull a net through the upper 50 meters of the water. This net catches the zooplankton that little auks could eat.

Roman and Rafal pull up the multinet. This net is specially designed to sample different layers of the water column with multiple nets that open and close at different depths. We used this net twice during our surveys and at the rest of the stations we used a simpler hoop net.

We crossed the shelf break several times and each time we saw loads of Atlantic white-sided dolphins and whales. It was easy to know when the dolphins were around because they were always attended by flocks of black-legged kittiwakes. These birds would periodically swoop down to the water in unison to catch fish that would rise to the surface trying to evade the dolphins. When we first started our surveys, the seas were relatively calm.

Our view during the first part of our at-sea surveys.

Later, the swells increased and we were tossed around a bit. Dishes fell off the tables and we would slide across the benches where we sat to eat. Derek finally realized why the steward only filled the glasses with juice halfway.

Waves crashing over the bow of the Oceania during the later part of the survey.

When we weren’t counting birds, we were horizontal in the lounge.

All is all it was an excellent trip. We counted 990 little auks in 2 days!

We wish the captain, crew and scientists gentle seas for the rest of their surveys!

The lifestyle here at the Polish Polar Station is one that can be found nowhere else on Earth.

I particularly enjoy the equality and cooperation. Every person, no matter where they are from (in Poland) or who they are, lives together with the same luxuries (or lack thereof) as everyone else, and everyone shares in the menial responsibilities of the station. Here there are perhaps 30 scientists working on various research projects and about 15 staff who are responsible for keeping the scientific equipment working, maintaining the structures, etc. When off-duty, there is no way to tell the difference between the scientists and staff; everyone shares meals, relaxes in the lounge, goes on hikes, and such. Everyone rotates through 24 hour shifts as dyźurny and must perform duties such as set the table for meals, crush cans, bake bread, sweep the halls, clean the toilets, listen for incoming calls on the radio, and ring the bell to announce meals. Some people perform this latter duty with particular gusto, running through the halls rining the bell and shouting at the top of their lungs, “śniadanie! śniadanie!” (”breakfast! breakfast!”). Everyone takes a great deal of pride in their duty day, always smiling and being as helpful as possible. Mostdyźurnys hover over the table during meals, and the instant a person takes the last spoonful of their soup, the dyźurny will snatch up the bowl and whisk it away into the kitchen to wash it. Even the station leader takes shifts as dyźurny. He is the most enthusiastic mopper I have ever seen!

The table nicely set for obiad (lunch) by today’s dyźurny.

In addition to meals and duty days, everyone also shares the bathroom that contains the dual-flush toilets!

These toilets are themselves worth a visit to the Polish Station.

We also share the washing machines. We Americans have a little difficulty figuring out the controls:

But this washer is better than the one in the other wing of the station:

Wastewater from the station is directed to a holding tank with special cold-adapted bacteria which digest the waste.

There are no dryers here; the ingenious drying racks make any gas or electric dryer obsolete! Each bar can be lowered for loading and then raised to keep it out of the way!

Unfortunately, as eco-friendly as many featues of the station are, civilized life in such a remote part of the world requires a lot of energy. The station must be heated, the dishwasher must run, the satellite internet must be powered. There is a huge generator in the back shed, chugging away 24 hours a day. It’s easy to forget about when you’re in the station, but you don’t forget it very easily when you’re in the shed. Here’s a photo of what made this post possible:

A couple days ago, we took a small break from the little auks to go on an excursion to Gnolledan, a mountain near the Polish station. Gnolledan is a steep cliff-faced rock slab rising directly out of the sea that serves as the breeding colony for thousands of black-legged kittiwakes and thick-billed murres. It is one of the most beautiful and amazing places on Svalbard.

To get there, we took a zodiac with our friend Lech. We all wore our survival suits, and looked stunning! Even better, Lech gave us each a turn at the wheel (motor).

Derek LOVES driving…speedily!

Lech tries to explain the difference between right and left to me.  I have trouble.

Julia faces the waves with gusto!

As soon as we arrived, a little Arctic fox came up to say hello.  He took particular interest in our anchor, and even attempted to eat it.

Derek decided he wanted a closer look…

Nina helping with the gear upon arrival:

Before heading up to the cliff, we stopped to say hi at the Gnolledan trapper’s hut.  It now serves as the home base for any scientists doing research in the area.  While we were there, three botanists were sharing the tiny building.

Nina and Derek enter…

Forcing two botanists outside.  I can barely stand up inside the building, but it is nice and warm!

The two poles with the cross bar in front of the door is to keep bears out - they can’t fit through the logs.  Many of the cabins on Svalbard have this sort of safety lock. Turns out, it also keeps Laurel’s out (or in):

When we started our walk, we first went to the natural “hot” springs that run nearby (hot=not freezing).  The water bubbles up out of the ground near the beach…where I was finally able to get a semi-decent shot of the purple sandpiper:

Lech, leading us up to the cliff face:

From afar, you can’t see much - but you can certainly hear the birds!  The sound of kittiwakes, gulls, and murres is constant, and you can see them swooping through the air around each other.

At the base of the cliff face, we had an extraordinary view of the fjord.  The glacier across the way:

At the cliffs, we could see the nests of the birds.  The kittiwakes have neat little nests along the ledges, and the murres have incredibly managed to nest in the most impossible cracks.  Their eggs are specially shaped so that they roll in a circle, rather than straight off the cliff.

Climbing up:

Kittiwakes nesting:

Kittiwakes and murres:

Amazing place!  Once we got back to the station, we decided to go for a little survival-suit swim:

All in all a spectacular day!