Going to the Arctic had always been a dream. This was amazing
to me to be asked to go.
There's no way to find out what's
up there, what it looks like in many places without going there.
It's largely unexplored
you feel like you're you're seeing things for the first time.
We packed up a
knapsack with a little bit of food, but mostly the recorders, the parabola.
We had a shotgun with us. Armed with those
items and our binoculars, we started walking.
You have all these birds that come there from
all over the world these small tiny birds fly
some birds 6-8,000 miles to breed.
But all these things happen these brief little windows. So to be there when these
things are happening is really
special to get to experience that.
We were in Resolute and one night we heard an
unfamiliar call. Usually, I know what most the sounds are up there, so as soon as I
heard that's got to be an Ivory Gull. And we ran over the sea ice and we went out and
sure enough we spotted a couple of Ivory Gulls flying around.
and there was a carcass on the ice left over from some native hunters
and four Ivory Gulls came in and fed on the carcass and
we spent probably four hours in the middle of the night out there with the gulls
on the ice.
The Ivory Gull pretty much just lives year-round in the
Arctic it breeds in high arctic islands; they rarely come
much farther south than the Arctic.
Resolute Bay is it about seventy four degrees north
of the equator-- well above the
Arctic Circle.
The only way to get there is to fly. It's a small
town. You could say it's in the middle of nowhere.
No trees, I talked to people who had never seen trees.
Its truly, truly Arctic.
We're in Resolute,
Nunavut Canada yesterday we were in Ottawa and also in New York where was
eighty-five degrees and humid
it's probably about 25 degrees; the wind chill
much below that. The winds been blowing about 30 to 40
miles an hour. So we've left summer and now we're getting used to the
the arctic conditions and winter and we're heading over to Bathurst Island.
So, we're finally on our plane!
We've got all our gear here, all our food for
two and a half weeks anyway. I can hardly believe we're doing it!
We have been, over the course of the last few years,
identifying areas in the collection that we wanted to improve.
And one area that we wanted to work in was the High Arctic;
mainly because it's an area that could be threatened
very rapidly by global warming.
There's a host of bird species that live in the High Arctic that go there to breed.
One of them in particular - the Sanderling is a very familiar bird to
most people -- it's the little white shorebird you see running back and forth
chasing waves on sandy beaches
throughout the world. All the Sanderlings every year go up to the
High Arctic
to breed on these barren Islands.
The camp that we're at,
I think it's roughly maybe 250 miles from the magnetic North Pole
which is distill a distance from the actual North Pole but
gives you some idea of how how far did North it is.
This location was really a remote place. We relied on some written accounts from
the 1960s about the birdlife the chronology of events and when
birds may show up to breed and so we sort a put together a puzzle of
when we thought the exact right time of year would be to be there,
but that was always, you know something that you're anxious about--
are we gonna be there exactly the right time?
Our first feeling was
okay this is big.
There's a lot of space.
It's an immense
landscape. I've never felt more isolated anywhere
in my life than I felt up there. n
That first day when we're walking around
we, gosh, I just remembered
it's just a big land and
there's so much snow and you don't know if that's snow you can walk across
or if you'll just sink through it.
We'd head for the snow and it was pretty much solid.
And we got up to the top of the hill and
I remember it being quite gravelly very little vegetation
but all of a sudden there were birds there. There were three or four Sanderlings
Gerrit started recording
and I was standing a good maybe twenty feet away from Gerrit
which turned out to be really good because I can watch
where birds were flying around and one came right toward him and I could
say, "Incoming." And he got on this bird and just got such a good recording of it.
After the initial day we found the Sanderling and we were really excited
and we thought OK, this is going to be great we're gonna get
no fear you know no more anxiety about if
and when we're going to get the Sanderling recording. Day after day
went by after that and we could not locate a male
Sanderling doing the breeding display in-flight
which is the recording we wanted but,
we spent days following around pairs of birds
that were obviously courting, but no males were displaying anywhere.
So all this anxiety built up day after day.
But then, finally I think we were maybe day 10--
and this was a wetter area we're going through and we didn't really expect to
find
Sanderlings there, but indeed there was a male
and he was up...
Here comes this male floating by the tent
and giving this little display flight
and I just busted out of the tent and went and recorded in the rain.
And there's rain
pinging on the dish, but it was something at least. So we'd finally gotten like
a recording of this vocalization that we have no recordings of.
So we hung out there the rest the day and we finally got a few little breaks
in the weather that day
and we got some really great recordings of this bird doing its displays.
And it was incredibly lucky that we found this one bird because,
I think we did not hear another
individual male display until maybe our last day at Bathurst.
Another stunning part in the trip was finding the Snowy Owl nest.
Over the course about a week we moved a blind into place.
I planted the stereo pair of microphones and ran the cable back and, I don't think
they've told Garrett this yet, but
I had seventy feet of cable and the
blind was exactly seventy feet.
We placed an MS pair of microphones
about a foot from a female
and for chicks.
There were three unhatched eggs.
I was sort of leaning back to the blind and through the video screan
all of a sudden I see these glaring yellow eyes and this white white head.
This absolutely beautiful male owl came in and it was
like this stunning moment such a beautiful bird.
I could see just barely the top of one of the
chicks heads. At that point I pressed the record button 'cuz
there was all sorts of sound coming out of the nest-- the chicks were [cheep cheep]
and you know the females doing [call]
She started feeding the youngsters and was just plain very, very moving watching
this whole scene.
You have to watch out, because you get this sort of cozy family looking
thing, you know, oh and aren't they so sweet? You have to remember that in years when
lemmings are few and far between it's not warm and fuzzy like you want it to be.
But, it was fun to watch.
[Long-tailed Jaeger call]
[Rock Ptarmingan call]
[Snow Goose call]
[White-rumped Sandpiper call]
[Baird's Sandpiper call]
[Purple Sandpiper call]
Overall I felt like the trip was a big success. We didn't run into any
unexpected weather or hazards and we came back with all the recordings in the
species that we went after.
Had we not gotten the Sanderling, I'm would probably not
feel good about trip but, once we had the Sanderling in the bag
it felt like okay now it's really worth it that we came up here
to be able to share this with the world.