Birds of a feather

Cooper Island, August 7, 2002 – The motor vessel TURMOIL is at anchor 330 miles north of the Arctic Circle off the north coast of Alaska, eight miles east of Barrow. We are waiting to see if we might be able to press further on into the central Arctic Basin, a four- to five-day passage to the east through Amundsen Gulf and Coronation Basin – names with legendary significance to Arctic travelers. But late last spring, a massive piece of the frozen Arctic Ocean the size of Indiana broke off the ice sheet. It has drifted down onto the Alaska coast, pushed by strong northerly winds, and is held in place by alongshore currents.

We have come into polar waters for each of the past five summers, partly for the amazing adventure of seeing their fabled land and seascapes and partly to see firsthand the changes that the inexorably warming temperatures of the high latitudes will mean to us. If there is one lesson we have all learned since the first Earth Day, it is that all systems of the earth are connected to one another. In our case the circulation around the Gulf of Maine is connected to the Labrador Current, connected in turn to the currents of the Arctic Ocean, which are influenced by weather patterns off Iceland and the degree of melting of the ice sheet. We’ve known all of this in an abstract sort of way for a long time. But now we have the tools and technology to see and begin measuring these connections – and most important, predicting the effects they will have on our daily lives. Behind the narrow spit of beach that protects our vessel from the crunching ice pack of the melting Artic Ocean, we have a front row seat at the Theater of Global Climate Change, coming soon to a theater near you.

Because we are iced in and cannot proceed east, we decide to use the day to visit one of the most interesting research projects of the far north, a seabird banding station on a small barrier island 14 miles to the east. We launch a small boat from the deck and steam along at 27 knots with Philip Walsh at the helm. The air temperature is 33 degrees, the water temperature is 32 degrees and the rain is steady. At this speed the rain feels like hail on the face and we put on goggles as we continue our course a little south of east behind the chain of barrier islands that holds the ice at bay. About halfway there we cross the path of a mother polar bear and her cub, swimming from land out to the barrier islands. The cub, born this winter, is still small, probably less than 70 pounds, and appears to be on its mother’s back. Although polar bears have been known to swim upwards of 60 miles at a time, this pair’s course across the lagoon is about 10 miles. It strikes us that perhaps the reason we have seen so many polar bears – this pair makes at least nine different individuals among 17 sightings – is the same reason we are still here: the ice. With the ice edge right up against the shore of the outer islands, there are more seals feeding on the fish under the ice – and thus more bears hunting the seals.

We continue our course behind the barrier islands, which like the points of the mainland, are all only eight to ten feet above sea level and not visible until you are within a mile. In another 15 minutes, the low spit of Cooper Island appears like a pencil line on the horizon and slowly materializes. Broad, shallow flats make out from Cooper’s southern shore and we slowly nose into within 20 or 30 feet of the beach before we’re aground. We scramble over the sides in our chest waders and clamber ashore with a line and anchor. By the time we’re secure, the small figures from the vicinity of the tents midway down the island approach and introduce themselves. George Divoky, the gifted bird lover, introduces himself, his two field assistants, Katy and Evan, his girlfriend, Catherine, visiting from Seattle and a filmmaker who has been shooting on the island for a few days.

George half apologizes for the number of people on the island – he’s never had this many residents and visitors before in the three decades of his tenure as lord and master of this tiny spit of creation during the brief Arctic summer. But one senses that his life is changing, hopefully for the better, since the cover story of his lonely research north of the Arctic Circle appeared in the New York Times Magazine last fall. His set of careful observations on the breeding success of a small seabird, the black guillemot, that nests here has captured both scientific and popular interest for what he has seen at the receding ice edge amid the general warming of temperatures in the polar north.

George first came to Cooper Island over three decades ago to study its small breeding colony of black guillemots. George offers to show us some chicks. At the first nest site, he pulls out two palm-sized gray balls of fuzz, the guillemot chicks that will fledge in another 3 to 4 weeks. There were once 225 nests on the island, George says, but these have decreased in the past few years to 150 nests. George has correlated the decrease in nesting success to the increased distance the guillemots must fly to the edge of the ice to find the Arctic cod that swim underneath. Longer flying distances mean fewer fish, and that translates into fewer chicks. Because Divoky has been collecting this data painstakingly for three decades, it is one of the few, if not the only, continuous environmental record of one effect of the warming of the Arctic anywhere in the world. The guillemots might not be significant in and of themselves, but what they are telling us through Divoky’s lonely quest, surely is. Of course with the ice now temporarily right up against the shore, this is good news for the birds even if it’s not for our expedition.

At the tent site we stand in two small groups gleaning information from George and his assistants about life on Cooper Island. It turns out that George’s most important mentor was the great seabird ecologist, the late Bill Drury of College of the Atlantic in Bar Harbor. George’s assistants are both graduates of College of the Atlantic and the filmmaker regularly teaches documentary film at the Maine Photographic Workshops in Rockport, so it is amusing to realize that we are like birds of a feather gathered together north of the Arctic Circle still connected to Maine. The camp refrigerator is in a pit outside dug to the permafrost layer, now more than two feet down. George used to be able to store perishables on the ground, but no longer. Each year they must dig deeper to get to the frozen ground. The same is true throughout Alaska as many unhappy homeowners are learning to their horror as their homes sag and in some cases crack or break in two.

Although George and his crew offer a hot drink, we have probably overstayed our welcome so we respectfully decline and they accompany us back to the far shore where we’ve anchored. We say our heartfelt thank you’s and good-byes and mount up. Philip radios for a compass course and soon we’re up on a plane at almost 30 knots. The fog and rain is cold but exhilarating and within 35 minutes we retraced our course and Philip throttles back at the stern of TURMOIL almost giddy to have spent an afternoon with one of the possessed geniuses of the North.

Philip Conkling is president of the Island Institute.