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Detective style Today's schedule was a change of pace. No cliffs, no climbing, no auklet hunting among the rock crevasses and no productivity counts. Instead, we went beachcombing to gather clues for an unsolved mystery, detective style. This is a mystery not restrained to St. Lawrence Island

Dr. Bret-Harte has two sites at Toolik that were part of her initial 2006 experiment. Yesterday she and I visited the Riparian Snowfence Site. The second site is down the road, about a mile or so, from the other snowfence site we visited earlier in the week. As with the tussock site, the riparian

Where's Waldo? One of our sites is home to a colony of auklets, both the least auklets and crested ones. They are all very sociable creatures, chattering together perched on rocks as if reviewing the day's gossip, heads and eyes darting this way and that. They also frequently fly en masse overhead

History of Savoonga Savoonga is a small Siberian Yupik village on the northern coast of St. Lawrence Island, in the Bering Sea. Closer to Russia than to the U.S., its name "Savoonga" literally means that a giant scooped the land out of the sea and wrung it out. If you look at the outline, you can

July 25, 2018. Today I was able to join Dr. Bret-Harte in the field to mark the specific quadrat locations of the sites that we will be "plucking," or collecting, next week. The Tussock Snowfence Study began in 2006. In the Arctic, it appears that a widespread shift from tundra to deciduous shrub

5:45 AM. That was the time I checked in to the Dalton Highway Express office. I was exhausted. I had gone to bed the night before at a reasonable hour, but woke at 2:35 to an earthquake. It was minor, just a 3.0 with an epicenter in College, AK, but it was enough to rattle my nerves and get my mind

Sep-Sep (one of our two guides) brought walrus for lunch today. Fermented baby walrus. You see, they bury it in the snow for a couple of weeks, then hang it out to dry for another couple of weeks. It is not like jerky at that point as you might think. In fact it was oozing in its own juices when Sep

A Day at the Bird Salon So, without feather ado... look no feather for info on the Bird Salon. Remember the big rule? Move S L O W L Y, right? Once the bird is captured, it's essential to move quickly, but in a way that doesn't further stress it out. Blood should be drawn within the first

Daily Journal ###Cheesequake is a real name To better prepare myself for hiking in the Swiss Alps, I have been doing a 10k training program and trying to get out on some practice hikes. Although with the extreme heat and humidity in NJ and two small kids at home, I have not gotten out as much as I

Birdcatching... and hair dye? The biggest office rule here is to move S L O W L Y. Seabirds, being the wild animals they are, are unaccustomed to humans, skittish and fly away easily. Of course, this doesn't help when you're trying to capture them, so patience is key. Seabirds love nesting on