Leaving Disko
So, this is our last day on Disko. Our last hour in fact – I’m writing this entry less than an hour before we head off to the ferry for Ilulissat.
The final wheatear ringing count is 131. We would have got a few more but the mealworms gave up on us before the end. Not to worry, I’m very pleased with how many we got, and never thought we’d exceed 100. Getting all the geolocators on was excellent too, leaving this story open-ended as there is still exciting data to retrieve from their memories next year. I hope.
I’ve been getting lots of snow bunting photos recently. I thought I might as well take advantage of them eating all the dried mealworms, and they’ve been easy to get close to near a couple of the feeders. One of these shots is below.
Greenland is still very much a hunting-oriented society. We haven’t seen a single living seal in our entire stay. The numbers killed are officially reckoned to be within sustainable limits, and given that the density of people in Greenland is the lowest of any country in the world, may be that’s true. The country’s population is estimated at 56,500 (Wikipedia!). You do have to wonder though when you don’t see any at all. It would be interesting to look at the population biology of the seals here, especially source-sink dynamics (perhaps someone already has? Any feedback on this appreciated – thanks). The second photo is a seal skin, complete with head, that we found on a tiny beach by some houses on the outskirts of town yesterday. Quite a grizzly sight.
The final photo is a gratuitous cute husky shot, to make up for the seal.
Now on to Ilulissat, and then Kangerlussuaq, where we are hoping to catch the musk oxen rutting season, and may be see some Arctic foxes. Apparently around the airstrip is a good place – no shooting allowed there!
Snow bunting
Seal skin
Cute husky puppy
In the news
Thanks to the Cardiff University and BES press offices, some very nice articles about my BES photographic competition successes have been published both online and in print.
Permafrost, sled dogs and winter
Brrrrrrr! The weather forecast was spot-on yesterday, predicting that last night would be the first dipping below 0°C since before the summer. Autumn doesn’t seem to last very long here, at least not in the eyes of a soft European!
We still have a few wheatears around the place, but only a handful. Getting the remaining few onto one of the feeders is proving rather difficult. Meanwhile, a raven has discovered Feeder 1, daintily picking up dried mealworms with its enormous beak (see below).
Yesterday we had a change of scenery, accompanying Outi and two of her sled dogs to a permafrost monitoring plot. Measuring the depth of the permafrost entails sticking a long and thin metal ruler into the ground and writing the number down on a sheet – trusty low-tech kind of science. The dogs had a great time and must have covered at least five times the amount of ground we did, running backwards and forwards all the way there and all the way back. The puppy, Lumi (a Finnish word for snow), was one tired little dog by the time we got back! Our whale sightings are not completely over afterall, as four fin whales were out feeding in the bay.
Raven at feeder
Measuring permafrost
Reading the measurement, with some canine help (pic by Ruth Lovell)
Susi (Finnish for wolf)
Competition wins!
I’ve been keeping some good news fairly quiet for a while now, but as the official results have been announced, I can now say that I’ve won two out of the five categories in this year’s British Ecological Society photographic competition! One shot is of a puffin being released after being colour ringed on Fair Isle, the other is of course wheatears!
Puffin being released
Wheatears in snow shower
All loggers deployed!
This has been a very successful trip to Disko. We came here hoping to catch perhaps 50 wheatears, deploying geolocators on 28 of them (all the loggers we have). Well, today we attached the 28th logger, but also caught our 124th wheatear! Far beyond my expectations, and necessitated a request for new rings from Copenhagen (which arrived in double-quick time).
I’m really looking forward to seeing the results of the loggers – fingers crossed that we’re able to get some data. This depends on (a) the birds surviving until next year (about 30% of juvenile wheatears tend to survive to 1 year old), (b) the birds returning to within a couple of km of the Arctic Station so that we can find them, (c) our ability to retrap the birds, (d) the loggers are still attached, and finally (e) the loggers worked. So getting the loggers on is only the beginning. At least there is cause to think that it might work out, see e.g. work by Stutchbury et al in the US.
Two nights ago the light at sunset was fantastic. I took a break from watching videos of wheatears eating mealworms (great evening entertainment) to go out and get a few shots from the beach. One of these is below:
Iceberg at sunset in Disko Bay
99
At close of play today, Team Wheatear was on the brink of a century of wheatears, poised at 99 captures by lunch. Play was then called off for the rest of the day to analyse video replays.
I also had a presentation to prepare for a class of students from down the coast at Aasiaat, who have been staying at the Station for the last few days. Its a little bit tricky trying to convert material I’ve used in university seminars (supplemented with some slides courtesy Dr Rob Thomas) into something that Greenlandic and Danish speaking high school children will understand. It seemed like at least some got something out of it. Well, at least I had some good questions that suggested they did.
Buntings are the new starlings (starlings were the bane of my field seasons on Fair Isle, and even a different species for a while in Senegal). Both the snow buntings and Lapland buntings are having a great time on the mealworm feeders. Wheatears are still getting on, but I wonder if any new ones are being put off by the frequent bunting feeding frenzies?
I got out before wheatear feeding time the other day to get some photos, and ended up with some decent wheatear shots, one of which is below:
Wheatear behind the Arctic Station
Below is an image of the Disko Line ferry passing by some of the icebergs in the bay. The ferry, running a few days a week, is the only regular connection between the island and mainland Greenland for most of the summer.
Disko Line ferry in Disko Bay
Witness
Incredible. You come all the way to a remote island in the Greenland Arctic, and who should come knocking at the door? Jehovah’s Witnesses! Their material was in Danish, so we just had a brief chat about what we were doing in Greenland, and how he came to be out here (his daughter works here).
Two more wheatears ringed this morning, one of which also received a light logger to track its migration. I really hope we get some of the loggers back next year, it will be great to see what these birds actually do. It has been suggested that Greenland wheatears might cross the Atlantic in the autumn straight to the west coast of Africa in one go, given a tail wind. This seems like a great risk for the birds though, and I would have thought crossing via north-west Europe would make better sense. These loggers should help us understand what is going on.
