Wayne Steinmetz from the Pomona College chemistry department took Julia and Derek and Laurel to the shooting range the day before we left for the Arctic to practise shooting and handling a firearm. Thank you Wayne for sharing your knowledge with us and taking the time to train us!

Then we headed up to the little auk colony for the first time. The little auks nest on the steep, scree covered slopes behind the station.
Here are Julia and Derek and Laurel at the base of the slope where the colony is.
Once we got to the colony, we were greeted by thousands of little auks whirling in the air. It was spectacular. They fly so close to us you can sometimes hear their wing beats.
Little auks in flight above the colony.
We spent the rest of the afternoon checking the nests. We check old nests by finding the wooden numbered stakes that we use to mark where nests are. Once we find the stake then we shine a flashlight in the hole and search for a bird. We found birds sitting on eggs in many of the nest sites from last year. We also found 12 new nests just by crawling along the slope looking into every crevise.
Nest searching on the colony slopes.

The Whale burger that was really a steak.

Derek with his new addiction: chocolate on a cracker.

Julia making her waffle creation.

Shrimp being sold on the street.

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!

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.

Nina deploying a TDR.

The recapture of Mr. Green!

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.

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