Our epic Arctic adventure began on the 2nd at 4:30 a.m. We arrived in the lab to get our massive bags of clothes and gear and were greeted by a beautiful send-off banner from Zach, auk alum ‘07.

Then the stretch limo (that’s right) rolled up and we labored for a while to get the duffels onboard. Good thing it was a stretch limo or there wouldn’t have been enough room.

The grandiloquent transport to the airport came replete with champagne flutes and illuminated color-changing trim.

After arriving at the airport, we spent almost an hour checking our multitude of oversize, overweight bags. It took a lot of redistributing, but in the end we only had to abandon two jars of jam (actually we gave them to Julia’s mom) in order to get all the bags under the maximum weight limit. Then it was a six hour flight to Newark, where we were treated to a fly-by of the Manhattan skyline and the Statue of Liberty. There we boarded the plane for Oslo and witnessed our last sunset for six weeks.

Next we had the big eight hour trans-Atlantic flight (my first!) to Oslo. The time went by quickly thanks to personal on-demand movies, Arctic adventure books, and noose carpet manufacturing (but mostly the former two).

Getting through customs was as easy as getting our passports stamped. Then we spent another long while getting the next airline to accept our huge bags. Then a three hour flight to Tromso in northern Norway. At the baggage claim I saw a girl from Tromso wearing a Duluth Pack, made in my hometown of Duluth, MN. She said her godfather got her the bag when he was in Duluth once.

We met some friends of Nina’s and Laurel’s who helped us load all our bags in a big van (though only after making some snide jokes about the amount of baggage we had).

During my travels in South America, I always wanted more than anything to be mistaken for a local. Of course that was always a stretch. Here, though, I have no problem at all. The only thing is, it means everyone starts talking to me in completely incomprehensible gibberish, and then I have to give away my true foreigner identity by asking them to repeat what they just said in English (or I just fake it–one time a flight attendant asked me something in Norwegian, I responded “Tea” assuming she had asked me what I wanted to drink, and she replied with more gibberish and then poured me a cup of tea–I guess the word for tea is “tea”). But when more complicated communication is necessary, it’s not a problem either, since everyone also speaks perfect English, most with a pleasant British accent.

Everything here seems so appealing and convenient and well-thought-out and tasteful and environmentally conscious. On the way from the Tromso airport to our hotel, we went through a tunnel that had a roundabout in the middle where two roads crossed. A roundabout intersection inside a mountain! The hotel room has a slot that you put your keycard in when you enter in order to turn on the power to the room–there is no way to accidentally leave a light on. The toilet has two buttons–one for a mini-flush and one for a full flush (this feature amazes me). The shower control doesn’t let you go over a certain temperature unless you push in a safety button.

This afternoon we board a ship for the two-day journey to Svalbard and our new home–the Polish Polar Station on Hornsund Fjord!

Laurel McFadden, Julia Gleichman ‘10, Derek Young ‘09, and Professor Nina Karnovsky.

After a couple busy days of packing and preparation, we are enjoying the HOT California afternoon before heading for the airport early tomorrow morning. Next stop: NORWAY!

Packing galore!
PIT tag reader cords everywhere…

And Jason, blogsite-manager extraordinaire, with his birthday chicken!

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.

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.