Early Tuesday morning, we left our study area to head up to Pt. Barrow. Why? Because the marine forecast for our region was calling for 35 knot winds and 12 foot seas. Scientists cannot work in those conditions because the risk to both the equipment and the scientists is too great. Since this is forecast to last into the weekend, the captain and the lead scientists decided to hide out near Pt. Barrow where we will be in the lee of most of the weather.
While jogging up along the coast to Pt. Barrow, we were lucky to have calm conditions and were able to survey. We saw coastal species, mostly loons and eiders, and Yellow-Billed Loons highlighted the day.
Pacific Loon
We arrived on Tuesday evening, and were treated to a lovely rainbow and sunset.
We are now anchored up near Cooper Island, made famous in the seabird world by George Divoky’s long term study on nesting Black Guillemots. We saw a polar bear on Cooper Island! To be more accurate, we saw a moving white dot in the distance through our binoculars.
Somewhere in this picture is land and a polar bear dot!
The forecast keeps getting worse every time we look at it, but we are hoping to start heading back to our study area on Saturday. In the meantime, we are doing things like getting caught up on various aspects of work, napping, eating too much, watching the Harry Potter movies, playing card games, reading, coloring, knitting, listening to podcasts, and writing blog posts.
