Monday, July 27th was...foggy.
We were supposed to do a landing in the morning, but it was quite foggy, and while the expedition team was peering into the fog in order to determine if it was clear enough to land, they spotted a polar bear. The ship was too close to make a general announcement (the speakers are both inside and outside the ship), so they sent a quiet "ding-dong, ding-dong" to the interior speakers. This is the signal that wildlife has been spotted, so there was a scramble to leave breakfast, grab jackets and cameras and head up to the top deck.
All of the team were there, helping people find the bear and cub....but there's only so much you can do. "See that snow patch? No, not that one--THAT one. Find the 3 boulders to the right of it, and then go diagonally down to the sandy-colored rock....."
Lars and I have decided that the polar bears are some sort of mass hallucination. Everyone else seems to be able to se them, but we cannot. At least we saw that one on the crossing from Greenland.
As we couldn't have any excursions, we got some lectures. We learned about the formation of sea-ice, and how it differs from glacial ice. We learned about the now-extinct Great Auk (Pinguinus impennis), who lives on in the word "penguin", as early explorers in the Southern Ocean named the birds they found there after the one they were familiar with.
And we learned about the Ivory Gull. This bird lives its entire life on ice. It eats fish at the edge of pack and drift ice, or scavenges from polar bear kills, even eating the spilled blood on the ice. It migrates only as far as the edge of the ice pack, so it gets as far south as southern Greenland, northern Canada, and the Russian coast.
Adults are pure white, except for their beak (blue/yellow), and their feet and eyes (black). Their plump profile is a lot like pigeons, rather than looking like other gulls.
Here's the weird thing. Many of them nest directly on the ice, building nests of seaweed and moss, but some live in cliff colonies, like the Guillemots, though not as dense. Some of these cliff colonies are on "nunataks"--mountains that stick up through an ice cap--and are up to 30 kilometers/40 miles from the nearest open water. So they often nest far from a food source! Good thing they are very capable flyers.
At least one bird was tracked from Northeast Greenland, migrated south and then up the west coast. It stayed there VERY late, finally leaving about a month after all of the other tagged birds had left. Rather than repeat the normal migration path, it chose to fly straight across the Greenland ice sheet! This took it most of a month. It rested several times on the way, and finally arrived back at its nesting spot in Northeast Greenland. What an accomplishment! There's no way to know if it was just this lone bird, or if there was a small group of them.
The population has decreased by 50% over the past 50 years, and they are considered to be at a tipping point which could go either way. Because they feed on bear kills, they are prone to accumulate heavy metals as if they were an apex predator.
You can read more here:
https://www.allaboutbirds.org/guide/Ivory_Gull/overview
Sheila has added this bird to her "must see" bucket list
Irrelevant side note... one of the guides mentioned in passing that there are penguins that live in a forest in New Zealand. Look up the Fiordland Penguin for some really odd pictures.
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