Polar Bear!

Now that we're both feeling better, we finally made it out on a Zodiac cruise, planning to swing around a small island and then go along the ice wall....the longest ice wall in the Northern hemisphere at 130 kilometers.

But, on the far side of the little island was a polar bear, just hanging out and thinking about raiding the Arctic Tern nests.  The birds were protesting, repeatedly dive-bombing the bear.  Anyway, we stayed just offshore--you're not allowed to approach closer than 300 meters.  All of the Zodiac drivers carry range-finders for this purpose.

He or she is a bit out of focus--moving Zodiac, plus the camera not being certain what the focal point was supposed to be, but you can definitely see that it's a polar bear.

When we finally left the polar bear, we continued on to the ice wall, passing a couple of spectacular icebergs along the way.  One was particularly striking.

The Greg Mortimer through the iceberg

And then after we got back to the ship, there were these really cool "braided" clouds.  I need to track Marcos down to find out more about them.

ICE!

 We finally made it into the pack ice, with a final position of 81°18' N, 22°2' E.

The black lump is a Bearded Seal.  If you zoom in, you can see his whiskers.

We spent the morning just cruising through the ice, spotting lots of seals but no polar bears. 

In the afternoon was a lecture on fog, followed by a chance to go out and walk around on an ice floe. We opted out of that one.

At some point, we did some "citizen science" by participating in a bird count.  You spend 20-30 minutes watching for birds and calling out what you see, checking in with either Gaby or Adrien for confirmation.  Then the total is submitted to EBird, which is run by Cornell University. There weren't many, but no data is still data. A few kittiwakes, some Black Guillemots, a couple of Arctic Terns....and then at the very last second, the elusive Ivory Gull! Sheila technically saw it...at least, she saw the flying white speck that ornithologist Adrien SAID was an Ivory Gull.  Not as satisfying as actually seeing it well enough to identify it herself, but it will have to do for now.

A Foggy Day

 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. 

Alkefjellet

 After dinner on Sunday, Sheila bundled up well and went for a late Zodiac cruise to the bird cliffs at Alkefjellet (Guillemot Cliff).  This is a nesting spot for tens of thousands of Brunnich's Guillemots, aka Thick-billed Murres. 

The photos aren't great--Zodiacs moving in 3 dimensions make poor platforms for photography in less-than bright conditions.  It was far from dark out, but her camera just wasn't quite up to the task.  Zoom in if you like, but things are pretty blurry.  You can still get a good idea that every single available ledge has a bird on it.  Possibly with an egg or chick...if they are facing the wall, they have young.  If they are facing out, they may have lost either egg or chick.

View from ship...we're headed toward that dark cliff

For anyone interested in such things, the cliffs are Dolerite (aka Diabase), which is akin to basalt, but doesn't form such neat, hexagonal columns. It's an intrusion into limestone, which causes marble to form in the contact zones (contact metamorphosis).  It's not GOOD marble (too full of inclusions), but it IS marble.

There was theoretically a polar bear with cub toward the top of the cliff, but Sheila didn't see them.  She DID see 2 Arctic Foxes lower down. One is right at the VERY top of the snow, pretending to be part of the rocks above.

And there's another one in both of these pics....can you find it? It's quite blurry--moving Zodiac plus moving fox plus low light equals blurry photos.

Is this better?