[UPDATE: I’m reposting this story from September because I just read its mirror image in The New Yorker: “The Ice Retreat” by Fen Montaigne is about the fate of the Adelie penguins on Litchfield Island, and how a researcher who’s been visiting the Antarctic since 1974, is watching a once-thriving colony collapse. “Within several decades, Fraser believes, Adélie penguins will disappear from the northwestern Antarctic Peninsula.” Compare that to George Divoky’s field research with the black guillemots of Cooper Island, off the Alaskan coast.]
Right now, if you’re looking for Arctic seabird researcher George Divoky, you might find him analyzing data at Capitol Hill’s coworking space, Office Nomads, which he switched to from working at home.
Home alone was too isolating, he says, which sounds strange coming from a guy who spends three months each summer on a tiny, uninhabited island off Alaska’s north coast. When he ventured out into the neighborhood, though, he discovered the dark side of peer pressure. “Madison Valley, Madison Park, is a bad place to be for me because I go into a coffee shop, there’s a bunch of people of leisure, and I think, Oh, no one is working today.”
In practice, Divoky really does have some nomad in him. Since the mid-1970s, he has been making a trek north to Cooper Island, up by Barrow, Alaska, to study the black guillemots of Cooper Island. At first the idea was to survey the offshore wildlife in conjunction with the ’70s push for oil exploration, the impacts of pipelines vs. supertankers, but over time, it’s become a case study for the effects of global warming.
At first, Divoky saw the birds’ population flourish: “What seems like a long, long time ago, black guillemots on Cooper Island had the best of all possible worlds. The summer snow-free period was increasing annually, providing breeding birds with more time to raise their young, and the Arctic pack ice was close enough offshore that there was a readily accessible supply of Arctic cod to feed the nestlings.”
Now, he’s watching their population crash. Global warming has caused the retreat of even multi-year ice, and the cod that the black guillemots feed on have been retreating with the ice. The open water brought a proliferation of krill that Divoky hoped might keep the cod offshore, but the cod left. His birds are feeding instead on a bottom fish, sculpin, which is less nutritious. Egg laying has begun occurring earlier and earlier.
Though for decades Cooper Island sat adjacent to polar bear territory, and he felt safe in a tent, in 2002 his tent was been torn apart by polar bears ranging into new territory. Now Divoky sleeps in an 8′ x 12′ shack with a polar bear trip-wire alarm.”You really appreciate the windows, compared to the tent, where you can’t see anything coming up on you.”
This year, a bear rampaged though the nesting boxes, downing chicks out of desperation–Divoky points out “a thousand-pound bear doesn’t get much from something the size of a Cornish game hen.” And homicidal horned puffins–which, like the polar bears, were once infrequent visitors to the island–have moved in and kill the black guillemots before and after they hatch.
Divoky wrote on his blog for the Discovery Channel: “It is important to recognize the one certain fledge from the colony this year, since it may well be one of the last guillemots to fledge from the island.”
“I can’t see how they can get out of this,” he adds ruefully, over coffee at Café Allegro. “Five years ago, I thought this is a great opportunity, I have all these birds banded. I knew who was related to everyone else. Some of the birds could cope with the sculpin diet and some couldn’t. I thought there’d be a chance to look at selection and adaptation in a rapidly changing environment. But now selection is happening at the population level, not the individual level, and this population won’t persist.”
There’s a pause while we consider the end of a world.
“When you’re in an environment dominated by snow and ice,” Divoky picks up again, “when you hit 32 to 34 degrees, things change. At 34 degrees, ice goes away.” He has already pointed out the reason he was so interested in his black guillemots is because the sub-species he found is completely ice-adapted.
This realization has occasionally tempered his enthusiasm for his research: “Only in the past few years has it occurred to me, this is a strange thing to do. It might be because the bears are showing up. I’m thinking, no one else is out here. I’m melting ice for drinking water, I’m eating next to nothing, guillemots are shitting all over my clothes.”
It’s also not surprising that Thoreau’s name comes up, given the rigors of this kind of solitary research. But Divoky is no sentimentalist.
“Solitude doesn’t make me feel spacey and empowered–well, the first two weeks. But by the third week, my body is telling me, You haven’t seen a conspecific–another member of your species–in two weeks, and historically, evolutionarily, this is not a good thing. So my body makes me depressed, tries to get me to move. When you don’t know what’s going on, you think, Oh, things truly are bad. I’m a bad person, my life has gone wrong. But about a week before I take off, things turn around.”
Asked if he can see the end of his visits approaching, he acknowledges, again, that the fates of the black guillemots of Cooper Island may be sealed. But, he adds, Cooper Island has become a great place to study polar bears.
To find out more about George Divoky’s work with the black guillemots on Cooper Island, and learn of upcoming talks in the area, visit Friends of Cooper Island.
