At 9:10pm, the guy wrote back and said,
I can't get a hold of my people,
so we can't do it,
but we can do it Friday.
And then I said,
Friday's not going to work
according to the forecast.
Friday's not going to work.
It's either tomorrow.,
or we got to do it in a few weeks.
And then 5 minutes later -
okay, meet at six.
My name is Arthur Kettle.
I'm a wildlife biologist
with the Alaska Maritime
National Wildlife Refuge.
The field I work in is mostly seabirds.
My interest in seabirds
started in college.
I've always been interested in
where animals exist
and why, how that whole process works.
And then when I graduated from college,
I and another friend
actually wanted to
travel to South America,
and we found a field site
working with penguins
as a volunteer
and then as a paid technician.
Then the Exxon Valdez spill occurred
when I was returning from Argentina
one year, and I got hired to work
at the Barren Islands
and trying to track damage and recovery.
Working with the penguins in Argentina
gave me a lot of experience
that fit really well with what was
needed at the Barren Islands
.This is my 29th
year going to East Amatuli
and working out there.
The Barren Islands are located
right at the entrance of Cook Inlet.
The Barren Islands
site is kind of unusual among
seabird monitoring sites in that
the only way to view
the cliff nesting birds is to use a boat.
And so we take a boat around,
we motor the boat in a little cove,
and then we take it ashore.
And climb up a steep headland
to view the birds from above.
So it takes it kind of a lot of
a lot of coordination.
It's actually kind of difficult
to get out there.
The overall goal
of of the work I'm doing is to
learn more about the marine environment
and about the seabirds themselves
by observing them
during their breeding season
and to look at how
the birds are doing each year
and how their numbers fluctuate
through the years and decades.
On the Barren Islands that we
work mainly on four species,
black legged kittiwakes, common
murres, tufted puffins
and fork tailed storm petrels.
We started using time lapse cameras
because of that difficulty
in accessing the observation points.
We want to record
four months of events at the nest site.
The battery will last for four months.
A digital clock that's in there
wakes up the microprocessor
and takes over from there.
Turns on the power,
takes a picture, turns off the power,
and then goes back to sleep.
We have permanent plots
marked on photographs
that we use and actually
individual nest sites
are numbered on the photographs.
Also,
we can see how many eggs they lay
and how many chicks fledge
from the from the burrows and the cliffs
and what the chicks eat.
And actually, we're doing some work
now to know what they do
when they're not on land
most of the time during the winter
they are at sea.
We're trying to sample species
that themselves, sample
different parts of the food web
and to learn as much as we can
about the marine environment
by looking at diets of the birds
and how that translates up
through the food web and the chain.
All the way to the seabird adults.
Climate change for the
birds in the location where we're working
is probably changing the behavior
and their breeding success in ways
that we haven't measured yet.
The temperature of the North
Pacific is changing is warming.
You've got data that you can compare
from year to year
and track long term trends.
We really don't know how that's
going to affect the birds
at the Barren Islands.
Wow, look at this day, huh.
This is like one of the most
amazing days.
My favorite part of the work that I do.
I don't know why,
but I'm very interested
in marine productivity
and how currents
and the different aspects
of oceanographic processes work to
to make a productive food web.
I also really enjoy.
The behavior of the seabirds.
I've always been interested
in animal behavior
and why animals act the way they do,
moving and changing and then resulting in
in these colonies of
seabirds that use the habitat.
And I guess it's just learning
more about ecology
and how different
aspects of life fit together.