ARCTIC AUKS

We left the Polish Polar station on August 3rd. Our dear friends gave us a grand send off– firing signal pistols in the air!!!!!!!!!!!!!!

Final goodbyes on the beach. In back: Marcin, Andrzej, Mateusz, Witek, Krysztof. In front: Nell, Derek, Nina, Zach.

We were picked up by the tourship Polar Pioneer and had a few days of luxury before we landed back in Longyearbyen.

The Polar Pioneer.

The expedition leaders Henrik Lovendahl and Sue Werner of Aurora Expeditions could not have been nicer! We went on a tranquil zodiac cruise of an ice choked lagoon in front of a glacier and then went to visit an old whaling camp where they used to hunt beluga whales.

A zodiac in front of the glacier.

One of the nice surprises was that Dr. Alan Burger, from University of Victoria, a seabird expert and old friend, was on board as a naturalist.

Alan explaining how beluga whales find food.

In Longyearbyen we reunited with Allison Bailey ‘07 who took Zach, Nell, and Derek on their final Arctic adventure along the cliffs above town.

Zach, Derek (note new facial hair configuration), Allison and Nell in the restaurant Kroa (cozy place at the end of the world).

After repacking and a couple hours of sleep, Zach headed off to Scotland and Ireland with his fiddle, Nell went home to Germany, and Derek went to Copenhagen. Nina stayed in town an extra day to return our rented firearms and to take care of the samples that we collected.

The Greenland team is still hard at work. Mary-Anne, the high school teacher from Chico, CA gave a live podcast from Greenland.

The Magdalena Fjord team (Kasia, Darek, Lech) had a successful field season. This was their first season at this site. They say that the colony is really steep but that they managed to do feeding watch observations after figuring out a way to put a chair on the cliff. The weather was great despite being so far North. They had a few polar bears visit their camp but all is well.

Harold Steen in Bjordalen had a sucessful season and the birds from there have already left. He had 10 nests being monitored with PIT tag readers!

Jorg Welcker in Kongsfjorden reports that the chicks there have also fledged and he is packing up his camp now.

More posts to follow as we get updates from the other teams in the field!!!

Well folks, the field season is coming to an end! We’ve been in a dizzying tizzy of work these last few days: measuring chicks for both the penultimate and then ULTIMATE (!!!!) time, obtaining our mid-chick-rearing stress hormone samples and hunting for our redeployed TimeDepthRecorders (TDRs) all in our blustery “windswept” colony. Other highlights included collecting samples for a colleague in the Greenland team (Jerome Fort) (feathers, measurements, diet samples) with the help of Adam and Mateusz Barcikowski (father and son), 48-hour continous observations of feeding birds, data entry… and Nina’s last night late night birthday celebration! We will continue to make posts about these many activities and about the Greenland side of the study. And with that I will make my (sad) adieu to Hornsund and our adolescent, very aukward chicks!

The Oceania.

We spent our last 2 days on board the research vessel Oceania out of Gdansk, Poland. The idea was to move back and forth on the sea just outside of Hornsund Fjord, observing where the little auks were out feasting on copepods. Do they tend to congregate in the coldest water with the largest, most nutritious copepods, as observed in past years? Our observations, combined with the work of several helpful crew members, who took plankton tows and measured water temperatures at every stop, should help to answer just that.

Kamila and Anna retrieve the plankton net from the ocean.

We did our work in four hour shifts. The four hours on the job were spent looking through binoculars and recording the sea life. After our teammates came to relieve us, we spent the next four hours making our way through the tight passageways belowdecks amongst men and women studying diverse aspects of polar science. We snacked, slept, drank tea, and tried not to get seasick as the waves tilted us 30 degrees back and forth.

The bird team (USA) and plankton team (Poland) on the Oceania.

In a few minutes we are going on board the R/V Oceania to determine where little auks find their food. We will be heading out of the fjord to survey birds, zooplankton and to determine the temperature of the water masses where the little auks are feeding. Check back with us in the next few days!

One of our main goals this season is to deploy Time Depth Recorders (TDRs) on Little Auks. These amazingly small instruments record pressure and temperature and time. To deploy a TDR we find a breeding bird and glue the instrument onto its breast feathers. We mark the bird with permanent ink pens so that we can find it again. The tricky part is recapturing it so that we can remove the TDR and download the data. In the last few days we deployed 9 TDRs and got all of them back (except for one) by spending long hours stacking out birds at their nest sites. We are thrilled to see the profiles of the many dives they make (most to 20 meters!) during one feeding trip. More good news is that all of the birds are feeding their chicks normally after we removed the instruments. The team in Greenland is also deploying TDRs and so are teams in Kongsfjord, Bjorndalen, Bjornoya and Magdalena fjord. It will be a great multi-colony comparison!

Nina deploying a TDR.

The recapture of Mr. Green!

A few days ago we had a chance to visit one of my favorite places in the world; a little trapper’s hut called Hytevikka. The hut was originally built by and used by Norwegian trappers who hunted foxes and polar bears. This year it houses 7 geologists. We were taken there by our friends Sean and Paul in their zodiac (rubber boat).

Zach, Nell and Derek looking stylish in their Helly Hansen survival suits.

When we got there, we were greeted by the team of geologists who are all from Poland except for one Russian geologist and an American undergraduate from Lawrence College named Emily Thien. We enjoyed tea inside the hut and then headed to the little auk colony on the plateau behind. It was spectacular, peaceful and sunny…heavenly.

Cozy Hytevikka. The large timbers by the front door are to keep bears out.

Emily, Zach, Nell, Marcin (in front) and Derek on the rocks.

Little auks on the rocks behind the trapper’s hut.

On sunday, together with our canadian photographer friends, it was our turn to cook for the Polish crowd here at the station. They wanted a true american meal, so we gave them the best we could (considering we were in a Polish kitchen): spicy ribs, mac & cheese, beans, chocolate chip cookies and iced tea made with glacier ice. It was definitely an exercise in improvisation and trial and error. Of course, every package was unreadable, which led to mishaps like dumping half a cup of salt, rather than sugar, into the rib sauce. Then there were the items they simply did not have here, like brown sugar, crucial for cookies and ribs. Finally, the oven was tricky: it burned my first pan of cookies on the bottom, and my second on the top, which led Nell to make her own batch, and these turned out wonderfully. Hers had baking powder (which we had finally found, with some help on the translation), so they flattened out and became like your average cookies, whereas mine stayed in tight little balls. We passed these off as “cookies from California” and “cookies from Alaska,” and nobody was the wiser.

In the end, after all our worrying, they seemed to enjoy the meal. We had a few people asking where the soup was, which has been the main dish at every lunch here at the station. One also proclaimed that tea is better hot than “z lodovyetz” (with glacier). But they dealt with those breaks from tradition in stride. Our winningest praise came from our friend Vitek, who said, “You have won the food contest! First prize is another day in the kitchen next Sunday!”

The polish scientists and mechanics sit down to the American meal.

Currently Mary Anne Pella-Donnelly, a junior high school teacher from Chico California is with the Greenland team. She is communicatiing with the world with a satellite link. See the Polartrec website for more photos of their expedition and to read Mary Anne’s journal. We are making the same measurements as they are so we will be able to compare the little auks at the two sites. They are in the middle of setting out Time Depth Recorders (TDRs) just as we are. We will be able to compare how often and how deep the birds at Hornsund Fjord, Spitsbergen dive compared to the Kap Hoegh, Greenland birds. It’s so great to have the internet connection with the Greenland team!

Mary Anne, Ewan, Jerome, Rachael, Ann, taken with Ann’s camera on July 14.

The first polar bear sighting! Right before lunch, a large male came ashore on to the beach and worked his way up to the boat house. After inspecting the amphibious tanks, light house, and boat house, he turned and started to slam against the siding of the boat house. We don’t know whether his motives were the zodiacs or the stock piles of potatoes inside, but he managed to put a huge dent in the side of the boat house. Soon, he turned and crept back onto the beach where he remained out of sight until reappearing 200 meters down the beach. After that, he dissappeared for good.

Paul, the Canadian nat geo photographer, remarked “theres a good chance I won’t be sleeping in the boat house tonight.” Fortunately, we had a sighting from the porch of the station–the best kind of sighting for these bears.

We have been as busy as the auk parents who are feeding their chicks. We marked 54 little auks with color bands on their legs and markings on their breast feathers with Sharpie pens. This way, we could identify individuals. Then we set out two chairs in the colony and watched how often they came back to feed their chicks during a 24 hour period. Sitting in one place for long periods of time here always makes you cold, but for this 24 hour period, we had RAIN and so we were wet AND cold. Still, it was wonderful to see the birds return to the colony with their gular pouches stuffed with food. We saw around 40 of the birds we marked! These data will tell us how long it is taking the birds to find food for their chicks.

Zach and Nina during their shift.

Derek and Nell during 24 hours of observations.

A marked bird returning from the sea with food.