Tag: Climate Change

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Exploring Ocean Worlds

Ocean Reads

Nehalem Bay, at the confluence of the Nehalem River and Pacific Ocean. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
Nehalem Bay, at the confluence of the Nehalem River and Pacific Ocean. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman

Books

Jaime Green and Ayana Elizabeth Johnson’s The Best American Science and Nature Writing 2022

Ayana Elizabeth Johnson & Katherine K. Wilkinson’s (editors) All We Can Save: Truth, Courage, and Solutions for the Climate Crisis

Bathsheba Demuth’s Floating Coast: An Environmental History of the Bering Strait

Robert MacFarland’s Underland: A Deep Time Journey

Philip Hoare’s The Whale: In Search of the Giants of the Sea

Sy Montgomery’s The Soul of an Octopus: A Surprising Exploration Into the Wonder of Consciousness

Nick Pyerson’s Spying on Whales: The Past, Present, and Future of Earth’s Most Awesome Creatures

Ben Goldfarb’s Eager: The Surprising, Secret Lives of Beavers and Why They Matter (We know this isn’t technically an “ocean” read, but the health of our watersheds certainly plays a role in healthy ocean ecosystems, and let’s face it: beavers are super cool.)

Elizabeth Rush’s The Rising

Rachel Carson’s Under the Sea Wind (also see A Silent Spring)

Robert Kunzig’s Mapping the Deep: The Extraordinary Story of Ocean Science

Peter Godfrey Smith’s Other Minds: The Octopus, the Sea, and the Deep Origins of Consciousness

Sylvia Earle’s The World Is Blue: How Our Fate and the Ocean’s Are One

Carl Safina’s Eye of an Albatross

Articles and Multimedia

Podcasts & Podcast Episodes

Categories
Arctic Change

The Darkness of August

Chick ready to fledge is waiting for the safety of darkness before leaving Cooper Island. Image Credit: Mike Morrison
Chick ready to fledge is waiting for the safety of darkness before leaving Cooper Island. Image Credit: Mike Morrison

While much has changed over the course of the 45 summers I have spent on Cooper Island, as warming from anthropogenic carbon emissions has modified the Arctic’s snow and ice habitats, one thing has remained constant. The sun is always above the horizon for 24 hours when I arrive in early June and it does not set until precisely August 2.

The importance and impact of that constant daylight is hard to overstate. When I arrive on the island I am not constrained by the day-night/light-dark cycle that I just left in Seattle, and I can work on whatever schedule I like while setting up camp and conducting initial colony censuses. Equally important is the high serotonin level associated with the constant daylight, which increases the optimism one typically has when starting a field season at any latitude. That optimism is also amplified by seeing the guillemots, some of whom I have known for over two decades, initiate breeding.

After the sun sets in early August, “nighttime” for the following two weeks consists of an increasing twilight period until the third week of the month, when the sky becomes dark for the first time since before my arrival. The loss of daylight is the first clear signal that the summer is ending. Despite the major impact on fieldwork and my psychological state, I used to welcome the arrival of August darkness as it allowed the guillemots to complete their breeding season. Black Guillemot young fledge under the cover of darkness. After 35 days in a nest cavity, the chicks depart the colony independent of their parents. They fly off at the darkest time of night and quickly move offshore to reduce the risk of predation by diurnal shoreline predators like gulls, jaegers or falcons.

In recent years, however, the darkness of August has been a different experience for both the colony and for me. In the first two decades of the study, when the colony was almost three times its current size and breeding success was high, large numbers of nestlings would fledge every night. My dawn nest checks during those years found many just-vacated nesting cavities which provided daily evidence of that year’s breeding success and the promise that future breeding seasons would see large numbers of birds returning to their natal colony on Cooper Island.

However, the period of August darkness became quite different as the Arctic warmed. Starting in 2002, when annual summer sea ice melt notably increased, we began to see polar bears on Cooper Island. Polar bears on land are active during the nighttime hours and it was not uncommon to wake up in late August to find that bears had flipped over the wooden nest boxes and consumed guillemot chicks, sometimes wiping out half of the colony in one night. We addressed bear predation by replacing the wooden nest boxes with bear-proof plastic cases in 2012, but the continuing loss of ice that drives the bears to land each summer is also making the guillemots’ preferred ice-associated prey, Arctic cod, unavailable to parents for feeding their young.

In the 2019 breeding season that is just ending, decreased prey availability due to both a lack of sea ice and high sea water temperature underlie the death of 75 percent of the nestlings. While hatching success was good, only 25 percent of the 130 nestlings survived until late August. In past years when sea ice was just offshore and Arctic cod were abundant, over 75 percent of the nestlings would be expected to fledge. This year’s nestling mortality occurred mainly in late July and early August, when nearby ocean waters were so warm (up to 9 C or 48 F) that even the less preferred alternative prey, sculpin, were scarce. Guillemots typically have two-chick broods with the younger chick being fed less during periods of low prey abundance. This year none of the younger siblings survived past early August, the first year without bear predation that no pair was able to fledge two chicks.

A Black Guillemot chick considers taking the big leap and leaving the safety of the island. Video Credit: George Divoky

The small number of surviving nestlings are now fledging. Having monitored them since they were eggs, including weighing them daily during the five-week nestling period, I have come to know them as individuals and am pleased when I open a nest case to find the surviving chick had left the previous night. But I am also aware that the extremely low breeding success this year, coupled with similar low success in the past two years, will cause the number of breeding pairs in the colony to continue to decline. Although the few chicks that have fledged in recent years can be expected to return to Cooper Island in two to three years, if they survive the ongoing loss of ice in their winter habitat in the Bering Sea, realistically the Cooper Island colony of Black Guillemots can never be expected to regain its past numbers nor its past success.

In earlier years both the bright start of a field season, as birds laid their eggs, and the darkness of late summer, when chicks would fly off into the night, could raise one’s spirits. This year, the darkness of August has been a period of melancholy and uncertainty of how long the colony might persist.

This field report is part of an ongoing series titled Arctic Change centered around George Divoky’s 45th field season studying Black Guillemots, sea ice, and climate change on a remote Arctic island off the coast of Alaska. To donate and support Divoky’s work on Cooper Island, visit the Friends of Cooper Island website.

Read more

Dead Heat by National Snow and Ice Data Center

Exit, Pursued by Bear by George Divoky

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Arctic Change

Loss of Sea Ice Takes Its Toll on Seabirds

Three visitors to Cooper Island Arctic Observatory see firsthand how rapidly changes are taking place.
Pierre-Loup Jan, Katie Morrison, George Divoky, and Maria Coryell-Martin in August of 2019 on Cooper Island. Image Credit: George Divoky

The positive signs of colony size and breeding effort of the Black Guillemots on Cooper Island in June were too good to last.

After very high hatching success, the decreased ice and increased water temperatures took their toll as parents were unable to find prey in the warm, ice-free waters. Rapidly shifting ocean temperatures provided some days of good growth, but currently only one third of chicks are still alive. As the mortality was unfolding, we shared it with a reporter from the Washington Post for an article describing the impacts of climate change in Alaska in 2019.

The authors note that, “The early retreat of sea ice from the Bering and Chukchi seas has led to a jump in sea surface temperatures, altering weather patterns and upending the lives of residents who typically depend on the ice cover for hunting and fishing. It’s also affecting native species, including seals and seabirds.” In the article I describe the high rate of chick mortality from the loss of sea ice, which limits guillemots’ access to their preferred prey, Arctic cod.

Helping to monitor the changes that are rapidly occurring this summer are a Seattle science teacher, an expeditionary artist, and a French demographer. Pierre-Loup Jan, is a population dynamics modeler from the Centre d’étude biologique de Chizé, a local branch of the French National Centre for Scientific Research, analyzing the Cooper Island database as part of the Sentinels of Sea Ice (SENSEI) project lead by Christophe Barbraud and Yan Ropert-Coudert.

The SENSEI project aims at fighting against the reheating of the poles which have drastic consequences on the sea ice (decrease of the surface of the sea ice in Arctic and in contrario increase in Antarctica). Video Credit: BNP Paribas Foundation

On the island for the second time is Katie Morrison, board president for Friends of Cooper Island and an elementary school science educator in Seattle, WA. Maria Coryell-Martin, an expeditionary artist from Port Townsend, WA, is exploring the landscape and research of Cooper Island through watercolor sketches. Together, Katie and Maria are working on an interdisciplinary exhibit and educational materials.

Even in their short time on the island, they have witnessed dramatic changes and the impact of a rapidly melting Arctic.  

This field report is part of an ongoing series titled Arctic Change centered around George Divoky’s 45th field season studying Black Guillemots, sea ice, and climate change on a remote Arctic island off the coast of Alaska. To donate and support Divoky’s work on Cooper Island, visit the Friends of Cooper Island website.

Read more

Alaska’s sweltering summer is ‘basically off the charts’ by Matthew Cappucci, Juliet Eilperin, Andrew Freedman, and Brady Dennis

SENSEI: 8 Animal Species to Understand Global Warming by BNP Paribas

Europe’s Heat Wave Moves North by National Snow and Ice Data Center (NSIDC)

Satellite Observations of Arctic Change Overview by NSIDC

Categories
Arctic Change

Incubation Period Underway

In previous years, nonbreeding guillemots tend to roost by the pond. Image Credit: Katie Morrison
In previous years, nonbreeding guillemots tend to roost by the pond. Image Credit: Katie Morrison

The Black Guillemots on Cooper Island continued to show signs of a turnaround from the poor breeding season of 2018 as egg laying and incubations have occurred in over 75 nests this year, compared to only 25 last year. The breeding population saw the recruitment of 20 birds that had fledged from the island in past years but had yet to breed. This is important since it shows that even with the decreased reproductive success and poor ice conditions of recent years, some birds are surviving to breeding age (typically 3-years of age) and returning to their natal colony, Cooper Island. A major surprise was the return of a bird that fledged from the colony in 2012 and had not been seen since.

  • Breeding oair on nest cast. Image Credit: George Divoky

Unlike last year when daily nest checks found recently laid eggs being abandoned by parents, this year has found all eggs being regularly incubated. Incubation is the least energetically demanding stage of breeding as the parent birds, which both incubate, take shifts of approximately 12 hours each day, having the remainder of the day to forage for fish. Last year’s large-scale desertion of nests with eggs indicated birds were either starting incubation in poor condition or encountering low availability of prey during incubation. Discovering the potential reasons for the differences between the last two years will have to wait until the fall when I have internet access to environmental data.

While our daily nest checks have provided hope for high hatching success this year, other observations while we walk around the colony are causes for concern. Most noticeable is the almost complete lack of guillemots sitting outside near nest sites or at the edge of the pond in the center of the colony, where guillemots have typically roosted when not incubating eggs or feeding young. The daily period of colony attendance, approximately midnight to noon, used to have birds throughout the colony, while this year we see only the occasional lone bird or nonbreeding pair. There is little visual evidence that the island supports a colony of over 150 birds.  Additionally, in early July we experienced a rapid disappearance of sea ice with the island being nearly surrounded by ice to no ice in sight in 2-3 days. Both of these factors suggest that, despite the positive indicators seen in breeding effort and nest attendance, there are reasons to be concerned about the upcoming period of nestling growth and survival.

This field report is part of an ongoing series titled Arctic Change centered around George Divoky’s 45th field season studying Black Guillemots, sea ice, and climate change on a remote Arctic island off the coast of Alaska. To donate and support Divoky’s work on Cooper Island, visit the Friends of Cooper Island website.

This post was updated on August 4, 2019.

Categories
Arctic Change

Documenting Arctic Change

Cooper Island has provided me with a place to conduct a long-term study of an Arctic seabird and also a place where I have been fortunate to establish some long-term friendships. In June 2001, photographer Joe McNally visited the island to obtain images to accompany the New York Times story Darcy Frey was writing about the Cooper Island research. Joe’s week on the island in 2001 started with him being sick in his tent for the first two days but, after he and I had spent a week walking through the guillemot colony and chatting back at camp, ended with a friendship that has lasted 18 years.

Joe McNally and George Divoky on Cooper Island in 2019, 18 years after McNally’s first visit to the island to document Arctic change. Image Credit: Joe McNally

While Darcy’s story and Joe’s photos were scheduled to appear in the autumn of 2001, events in mid-September altered that scheduling, as the Times and the rest of the media focused on stories about 9/11 for the remainder of the year. To have 2002 begin with a break from events of the fall of 2001, the New York Times Magazine ran the Cooper Island story the first Sunday of the new year with Joe’s picture of me standing on sea ice as the cover photo.  

Over the past 18 years, whenever Joe and I have been able to meet, I told him I hoped he could return to Cooper Island someday to document how continuing warming has changed the Arctic since 2001. That all seemed like a pipe dream until recently when Joe arrived by boat from Utqiaġvik to spend a few days on the island to revisit the Black Guillemot colony and discuss my observations and thoughts about my 45 years of study.

Joe’s career in photography has taken him to many amazing places and his choosing to return to Cooper Island meant a great deal to me. This year’s visit came after almost four weeks alone on the island and the camaraderie of Joe and crew was an excellent way to end my solitude. Observing and documenting a melting Arctic can be disheartening but Joe’s desire to help me tell the Black Guillemot’s story – and the chance to renew our long-term friendship – raised my spirits as I approach the midpoint of this field season.

This field report is part of an ongoing series titled Arctic Change centered around George Divoky’s 45th field season studying Black Guillemots, sea ice, and climate change on a remote Arctic island off the coast of Alaska. To donate and support Divoky’s work on Cooper Island, please visit the Friends of Cooper Island website.

Read More

George Divoky’s Planet by Darcy Frey

Arctic Sea Ice Blog

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Arctic Change

Early Season Optimism as Guillemots Diligently Attend Eggs

Field camp cabin in remote Arctic Cooper Island.
Mandt’s Black Guillemots roosting on roof of Cooper Island cabin, which was added to the field camp in 2003 when polar bear encounters were on the rise. Image Credit: Mike Morrison
Field camp cabin in remote Arctic Cooper Island.
Mandt’s Black Guillemots roosting on roof of Cooper Island cabin, which was added to the field camp in 2003 for additional protection from polar bears. Image Credit: Mike Morrison

Polar bears caused me to get a cabin on Cooper Island in 2003. After a rapid retreat of sea ice in August 2002, bears trashed our tents, which required making a hasty departure from the island with the help of a North Slope Borough Search and Rescue helicopter. The first week of the 2019 field season found me again living in a tent as I cleaned up after a polar bear was able to remove the board covering the cabin door and rearrange much of the gear and supplies I store on the island overwinter. Damage was not major but making my 8- by 12-foot summer home habitable took time.

Polar bears are frequent visitors on the island, requiring a range of protective measures from bear fences to a small cabin added in 2011. Video Credit: George Divoky

Luckily the first week’s tedium of camp housekeeping was balanced with daily indications that the Black Guillemot’s 2019 breeding season would not be a repeat of last year, when colony size and productivity had major decreases related to the poor survival and breeding condition of adults. Of the 75 nest sites occupied last year, only 25 had pairs that incubated eggs. This year a similar number of nests are occupied but all of those have birds diligently attending eggs.

The reasons for the difference in the two years is not yet clear. Both breeding seasons were preceded by a previously unprecedented lack of sea ice in the Bering Sea wintering area. Geolocation data loggers I am retrieving from some of the birds will allow comparison of the overwinter movements and distribution for the two years and may provide an answer.

Another indication of the health of the colony in 2019 is the number of first-time breeders. Long-term annual mortality of established breeders is approximately ten percent, and a stable population requires enough new recruits each year to occupy the vacancies. Unlike many recent years, this year saw a substantial number of previously nonbreeding local birds (individuals fledged from Cooper Island) and immigrants occupying those vacancies and even pairing up with each other to breed in sites not occupied last summer – something that has been rare in the period of colony decline in recent decades.

Another major highlight of the first week of censusing was the sighting of a bird fledged in 2017, a year when the colony experienced large-scale nestling mortality. The season was documented by Hannah Waters in Audubon magazine. The two-year old bird sighted this year was raised in the nest featured in the Audubon cover image by Peter Mather; it shows a female parent about to enter a nest with a sculpin. The story emphasized how the colony’s survival in a melting Arctic would require a few individuals to be able to provision young from ice-free waters and for those young to return to breed. While the 2017 offspring sighted this year is not breeding, few birds breed earlier than three years of age, its return to Cooper combined with the other positive signs of colony health in 2019, provide reasons for some early season optimism.

This field report is part of an ongoing series titled Arctic Change centered around George Divoky’s 45th field season studying Black Guillemots, sea ice, and climate change on a remote Arctic island off the coast of Alaska. To donate and support Divoky’s work on Cooper Island, please visit the Friends of Cooper Island website.

Read More

Making Camp in the Arctic by George Divoky

Birders Don’t Need to Be Told That Catastrophic Climate Change Approaches by Hannah Waters

Disappearing Ice Means New Ways of Life for Arctic Birds by Hannah Waters

Categories
Arctic Change

45th Arctic Field Season Underway

A satellite image of Cooper Island from June 26, 2019. Image Credit: NASA
A satellite image of Cooper Island from June 26, 2019; George Divoky has spent the last 44 summers here, studying a colony of Mandt’s Black Guillemots. Image Credit: NASA

Even after 44 years, preparing for the field season to study Black Guillemots on Cooper Island is a time of excitement and anticipation as I gather the gear and supplies needed to survive and conduct research for three months on a remote Arctic island. This year the excitement was tempered with a high level of anxiety given last summer’s disastrous breeding season. While the size of the colony has been decreasing since the 1990s, as the guillemots’ sea ice habitat has steadily dwindled, the 2018 breeding season was unique in that 1) the overwinter mortality of breeding birds was three times the long-term average, 2) one third of the returning pairs failed to lay eggs and 3) half of the pairs that did lay eggs abandoned them soon after laying. The result was a colony that in August had only 25 functioning breeding pairs – something hard to observe and process when one has a vivid memory of a 200+ pair colony in the late 1980s.

Back in Seattle I was still processing the data and the implications of the 2018 field season when the U.N. issued a report about the pace of global climate change with a separate report on the Arctic saying a 2-5oC temperature increase was locked in for the region even with major reductions in fossil fuel emissions. While the reports had the positive effect of finally having the media and public focus on the trends in and causes of climate change, along with my findings in 2018 they affected the way I viewed my long-term study. Documenting the pace and magnitude of biological changes in the Arctic seemed all the more important.

I headed north to Utqiaġvik (Barrow) in early June knowing that the guillemots had experienced another year with little sea ice in the traditional wintering area in the Bering Sea and that the Arctic Ocean off northern Alaska adjacent to their breeding colony had unprecedently low sea ice extent for early summer. Conditions like those are bound to pose major difficulties for the Cooper Island Black Guillemots.

While I start the season with concern for the long-term trajectory of the colony, I see the 2019 field season as a unique opportunity to document the resilience and adaptability of one of the Arctic’s sea-ice obligate seabirds. I look forward to providing you updates as the breeding season progresses.

This field report is part of an ongoing series titled Arctic Change centered around George Divoky’s 45th field season studying Black Guillemots, sea ice, and climate change on a remote Arctic island off the coast of Alaska. To donate and support Divoky’s work on Cooper Island, visit the Friends of Cooper Island website.

Read More

Intergovernmental Panel on Climate Change 2018 Report

NOAA’s Arctic Report Card: Update for 2018

Arctic Change: 2018 Cooper Island Field Season

Categories
Exploring Ocean Worlds

Knitting the Ocean, One Sea Turtle at a Time

Sea Turtle Nest. Image Credit: Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge

Knitting sea turtles at sea on the E/V Nautilus. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
Sea Turtle Nest. Image Credit: Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge
A turtle trail along a scarf. Image Credit: Jenny Woodman
A blanket for Dr. Amber Hale. Image Credit: Amber Hale

There’s always one moment when a factoid emerges that endears me to a critter in some silly, but permanent way, propelling me forward on a quest to know more. Discovering otters juggle rocks fueled an ongoing obsession. Learning octopuses are notorious escape artists came with a permanent membership in the cephalopod fan club. An albatross’s roundtrip thousand-plus mile flights to feed their babies, made me a student of seabirds.

When a mamma sea turtle works her way up a beach to lay her eggs, her fins leave this wonderful squiggly pattern in the sand. It’s a straight line from the salty sea to a future where hundreds of little squirming baby sea turtles hatch and return to the ocean about 60 days after mom’s labor is done.

The fact that this squiggly pattern can be recreated with a simple series of repetitive twists and turns in some super-soft yarn is, perhaps, the ultimate bonus for science-loving knitting nerd such as myself. But, before casting on, let’s talk turtle.

Although sea turtles spend most of their lives at sea, female sea turtles come on land to lay their eggs. Image Credit: NOAA

There are seven species of sea turtles in our world ocean; six of them can be found in U.S. waters (green, hawksbill, Kemp’s ridley, leatherback, loggerhead, and olive ridley).

All six species are listed as threatened or endangered under the Endangered Species Act. According to US Fish and Wildlife, a species is listed as endangered if it is at risk of extinction, and it is listed as threatened if it is likely to become endangered.

Like many marine mammals and seabirds, sea turtles are at risk from ship strikes, entanglement, plastic pollution, and climate change.

These air-breathing reptiles have roamed the Earth for over 150 million years. Some species, such as leatherback sea turtles, weigh anywhere from 500 to 2000 pounds and can dive up to 4000 feet deep. Leatherbacks have been known to migrate thousands of miles for jellyfish, their preferred prey, but nibbling on squid, sea urchins, and floating seaweed will serve as a tasty meal too.

We haven’t always known much about their lives because we can only observe what we see on land. As technologies like satellite trackers and accelerometers get smaller and more cost effective, scientists are on a path to learn much more about the mammals and seabirds who spend much of their time out in and over the open ocean waters. In 2016, researchers at Woods Hole Oceanographic Institute (WHOI) used specially engineered cameras to capture rare images and oceanographic data of leatherback sea turtles in the wild. This information will help scientists learn what the critters are eating, where they travel, and what hazards they encounter along the way.

You can learn more about sea turtles by visiting NOAA Marine Life Education Resource Collection,  Archie Carr National Wildlife Refuge or the Marine Turtle Research Group at University of Central Florida.

If you’re interested in casting on and knitting some sea turtles, I really enjoyed Heather Anderson’s designs. I made her shawl and then modified the pattern to make a baby blanket for a dear friend and a scarf for my mom. She generously offered a coupon to our readers for her Turtle’s Journey Scarf, which you can find here; use PROTEUSTURTLE promo code on Ravelry (a well-known knitting site) and download the pattern for free. The coupon is valid through January 31, 2019.

Jenny Woodman is a writer and educator; she knits a lot. Follow her on Twitter @JennyWoodman

Heather Anderson is an avid knitter who lives not too far from the ocean in New Hampshire. She teaches knitting classes and designs knitting patterns that keep her learning new things all of the time; you can view her pattern collections here. 

This post was updated Dec 7.
 Read more

Understanding Seals – A Scientist and Artist in One of the Last Wild Places on Earth by Jenny Woodman

Understanding Wild Things by Jenny Woodman

On the Trail of Sea Life with an Autonomous Underwater Vehicle by Amy Amy Kukulya and Ken Kostel

Changing Seas Season 7, Episode 1: Sea Turtles the Lost Year by PBS

Categories
Arctic Change

Back from the Wilderness

George Divoky at work in the Arctic. Image Credit: Mike Morrison
George and Thomas during 44th field season on Cooper Island. Imager Credit: Mike Morrison
George and Thomas tagging and releasing Black Guillemots. Image Credit: Mike Morrison

For the past four decades, my field seasons on Cooper Island studying Black Guillemots have always begun with high spirits and a feeling of optimism. Experiencing the 24 hours of daylight in early June while documenting the return of individual birds to the island and their nest sites is always uplifting – some of these seabirds have been returning to Cooper Island for decades. Then, the days begin to shorten as nighttime returns to the Arctic. After monitoring the colony’s breeding activity for over three months, the end of the field season in late August lacks the intensity of the start of the season, but until recently, provided the gratification of having a large number of nestlings depart the island – with the hope many will return in the coming years.

The end of my 2018 fieldwork was as atypical and unpredictable as the first part of the season. In June I saw the colony had experienced a major decline in breeding pairs due to unprecedented high overwinter mortality of adult birds and many of the birds that did return failed to either lay eggs or incubate the eggs they did lay.

After those initial indications that many of the adults were in poor condition in late June, I was surprised to find that the chicks had high survival in late July and August – unlike the widespread nestling mortality witnessed in 2017. Last year’s low breeding success, with the younger of the two nestlings dying in almost all nests, was due to an early and major retreat of the pack ice in the Beaufort Sea, making the guillemots’ preferred prey of Arctic Cod unavailable to foraging parents. This past summer’s sea ice retreat was later than last year and atypical in that, although much of the Beaufort was free of ice by late August, a large remnant of sea ice remained near the Alaskan coast keeping the waters near Cooper Island cold enough for Arctic Cod.

Screen Shot 2018-09-15 at 11.36.02 AM
A large remnant of sea ice helped keep Arctic Cod in the Black Guillemot’s foraging range this summer. Image Credit: Alaska Ocean Observing System

 

 

 

 

Our last two weeks on the island were busy. In addition to monitoring the growth and departure of the guillemot fledglings, we spent many hours capturing adult birds and outfitting them with light-sensitive geolocation and activity data loggers. The high mortality during the nonbreeding season of 2017-2018 shows that winter conditions affecting adult survival, rather than the success of the breeding season, may now play the major role in determining the fate of the Cooper Island colony. As part of the SENSEI project, we deployed over 30 data loggers on adults that will provide us with information on their movements, distribution and activities from this fall until they return to the Cooper Island colony next spring.

My field assistants, Thomas Leicester and Mike Morrison, and I did see individual variation in the ability of the guillemot parents to find cod in the ice-free but cold (<4 degrees Celsius) foraging area. While some chicks weighed over 300 grams in their third week in the nest, some nests had young with large variation in daily growth and weights remaining in the low to mid 200 gram range. While it was heartening to see nearly 40 guillemot nestlings fledge this year, due to the number of nonbreeding pairs and those that abandoned eggs, chick production per active nest was well below the one fledging per nest needed to sustain a stable population.

Screen Shot 2018-09-15 at 11.35.43 AM
Light-sensitive geolocation and activity data loggers help us learn where the Black Guillemots go during the winter. Image Credit: George Divoky

 

While I typically use my first week after the field season to slowly transition into an off-island existence, as I adjust to a life with running water, internet access and no polar bears, this year I traveled to Great Britain for the International Seabird Group Conference in Liverpool. I have always felt a kinship with British seabird researchers as my initial interest in conducting a long-term seabird study came from reading the books of Ronald Lockley, who in the early 20th Century decided to live on an uninhabited British island where he could study seabirds.

After the conference I traveled to the Centre d’Etudes Biologiques de Chizé where I am collaborating with Christophe Barbraud and others who, as part of the SENSEI project, are analyzing the 44 years of demographic data obtained on Cooper Island.

In spite of the highs and lows of the past three months, I am glad to have completed another field season of our long-term study. The unexpected findings of this past summer show that our work has never been more important as we continue to monitor a rapidly changing Arctic. I look forward to 2019 and hope things improve for the Black Guillemot colony in the 45th year of our fieldwork.

This is the last field report from Cooper Island for 2018; it is part of an ongoing series titled Arctic Change centered around George Divoky’s 44th field season studying Black Guillemots, sea ice, and climate change on a remote Arctic island off the coast of Alaska. To donate and support Divoky’s work on Cooper Island, visit the Friends of Cooper Island website.

Read more

Arctic Change, a Proteus Plumb Line Series featuring articles and field reports

George Divoky’s Planet by Darcy Frey

Global phenological insensitivity to shifting ocean temperatures among seabirds by Katherine Keogan et al

Categories
Arctic Change

First Fledge of 2018

A pair of Cooper Island Black Guillemots. Image Credit: George Divoky

A pair of Cooper Island Black Guillemots. Image Credit: George Divoky

In a breeding season and field season that has been a tough one for both the Black Guillemots on Cooper Island and the investigators studying them, today was a day of celebration as morning nest checks revealed that the oldest nestling on the island had departed for the sea during the night.

The first fledge of the year is always exciting since it is an important benchmark in our field season, which begins with recording the owners of nest sites and continues with observing the dates of egg laying and monitoring the hatching and subsequent growth of nestlings. While it is the parent birds who get all of the credit for a successful nesting season, we cannot help but feel some satisfaction having monitored daily the details of their three-month reproductive cycle. Additionally, and certainly now with the recent decline in the size of the colony, a fledged chick provides hope for the future. With sufficient luck, in three years the chick that fledged last night will return to Cooper to join the breeding population.

So we congratulate the proud parents White-Black-Gray, a bird fledged from Cooper Island in 1995 who has bred here since 2000, and Blue-Blue-Yellow, an immigrant (likely from one of the large Russian colonies) who had been breeding on the island for the past twelve years.

We are hoping that in the next few days their now independent fledgling will be joined by its sibling and a good number of the 50 birds that remain in nest sites.

This field report is part of an ongoing series titled Arctic Change centered around George Divoky’s 44th field season studying Black Guillemots, sea ice, and climate change on a remote Arctic island off the coast of Alaska. To donate and support Divoky’s work on Cooper Island, visit the Friends of Cooper Island website.

Read more

Climate Change in the Arctic by National Snow and Ice Data Center

Some Of The Oldest Ice In The Arctic Is Now Breaking Apart by Christopher Joyce