Introducing the Bering Sea Research Center
There is an exciting new project happening on St. Paul Island; the opening of the new Bering Sea Research Center (BSRC). I sat down with Veronica Padula [...]
2024 Seabird Report Card
It’s Fall, and time for the Alaska Maritime Refuge’s annual Seabird Report! Here it is: the 2024 Seabird Report Card Background Although seabirds spend most [...]
Seldovia
Seldovia is a small community located across Kachemak Bay from Homer. Current population size is around three hundred Ann traveled by water taxi over to Seldovia in [...]
Bering Sea Days: Day 2
Bering Sea Days took over Saturday school, and we spent the morning rotating through the classrooms again. In kindergarten/first grade, Alexis led us through some great games [...]
Putting up a murre blind
My name’s Leif and I am 11 years old. We live in Cordova, but we travel to the west side of Cook [...]
Alaska Bird Conference
Congratulations to Ashley Kushin (Mat-Su Career and Technical High School) and Bay Rose Kauffman (Wasilla High School) for presenting a poster at the Alaska Bird Conference in Anchorage [...]
2023 Seabird Report!
It’s Fall, and time for the Alaska Maritime Refuge’s annual Seabird Report! Here it is: the 2023 Seabird Report Card Background Although seabirds spend most [...]
Auklets and a Family Walk
Our interns had the opportunity to participate in two Least Auklet research and monitoring projects throughout the week. […]
2022 Seabird Report Card
It’s Fall, and time for the Alaska Maritime Refuge’s annual Seabird Report! Here it is: the 2022 Seabird Report Card. Background Although seabirds spend most [...]
2021 Seabird Report Card
It’s Fall, and time for the Alaska Maritime Refuge’s annual Seabird Report! […]
Sea Duck presentation
Brian Uher-Koch is a wildlife biologist with the USGS Alaska Science Center in Anchorage, and his research concentrates largely on Arctic breeding waterbirds. […]
Steller’s Sea Cow
Imagine sitting high on a cliff and looking down through the clear water to watch these huge animals slowly rolling around in a kelp bed below! I [...]
St. Paul Island field sketches
Students attending Seabird Camp 2021 had a wonderful field trip to the seabird cliffs. After identifying different seabird species and trying to [...]
Science Spies
Trail Cameras (also known as game cameras) are small, motion-triggered, weatherproof cameras. They can detect wildlife while you’re not around! […]
Volcanoes and Seabirds
Volcanoes can be disruptive, but they can also create new nesting habitat for crevice nesting auklets, like the Least Auklet, that breed on the Aleutian Islands. Watch [...]
Flashy for the summer
Have you ever wondered why some seabird species look different in the winter? Some seabirds have bright and flashy plumage in the summer breeding season, but change [...]
What Do Seabirds Eat?
Ranger Kendra at the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge explains why biologists are interested in learning what seabirds eat in this great video. […]
How much do you know?
The Seabird Fun Game features challenges in six categories: Squawk Talk, Kittiwake Shuffles, Do you know Guano?, What Bird?, Where in the World?, and Seabird Search. [...]
Seabird Fun Game!
Introducing the Seabird Fun Game! It is a seabird game like no other. […]
Outreach and Education activities at the Alaska Maritime Refuge
Kendra Bush, Education Specialist at the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, shares this report about outreach and education in this incredible Refuge: […]
Seabird Report Card 2019
Background Although seabirds spend most of their life out at sea, all seabirds return to land to lay their eggs and raise their chicks. Breeding sites are [...]
Summer 2018 on St. George
Sarah Guitart was part of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge’s field team working on St. George Island this past summer. Many thanks for sharing this report, [...]
Seabird Report Card 2018
Background Although seabirds spend most of their life out at sea, all seabirds return to land to lay their eggs and raise their chicks. Breeding sites are [...]
The point of a murre egg
Tim Birkhead and colleagues have spent the last 6 years examining different hypotheses (possible explanations) for why common murre (also known as the common guillemot in the [...]
Commander Islands Nature and Biosphere Reserve
Marine Biologist Dr. Olga Belonovich has been using the translated Seabird Curriculum with kids on the Commander Islands. Here’s Olga’s report: […]
How do Seabirds respond to changes in the Bering Sea?
Scientists are working all over the world, exploring questions on every subject imaginable. A critical part of being a scientist is sharing your findings in a scientific [...]
St. George
It’s been a privilege to spend this week on St. George. […]
Day Four on St. George
We started the day making a puffin chick bread load. Waylon even found a dried cherry with a strange shape that looked like the mini horn for [...]
Day Three on St. George
It’s dark at 8am when the kids show up, and still dark at 9:30am. Everyone starts the day with warm milk to drink, and Bianca had her [...]
Day Two at St. George
We started the day making our story sticks from yesterday’s beach outing. Paint and yarn transformed […]
November on St. George
I had plans to fly to St. George Island straight after Thanksgiving, to spend a week with the kids doing some fun seabird activities. Flying this time [...]
Seabird Report Card 2017
Background Although seabirds spend most of their life out at sea, all seabirds return to land to lay their eggs and raise their chicks. Breeding sites are [...]
Bering Sea Days 2017
2017 is the tenth anniversary of Bering Sea Days on St. Paul Island Bering Sea Days is a weeklong program hosted by the Ecosystem Conservation Office, Aleut [...]
Don’t Lose Count!
2017 was a Population Count Year on the Pribilof Islands. McKenna Hanson, a Refuge biotech working on St. George Island, explains what this entails: Click, click, click, [...]
Waiting for eggs…
Rachael and Abram are on St. George Island studying red-legged kittiwakes. Even though field biologists can be totally organized with all the details for camp-life, they can’t [...]
Letters between islands
For the last 3 years, students living on the Pribilof Islands and the Commander Islands have been sharing letters. Letters are translated between Russian and English and [...]
Back on St. George
The red-legged kittiwake research team are back on St. George Island. Here’s Rachael Orben’s update on the start of their field season: Abram and I arrived on [...]
Mercury
Mercury is one of the most toxic contaminants found in the environment. It is released naturally during volcanic eruptions, however, over the last 300 years, humans have [...]
Welcome Poster
Summer is approaching, and school is almost out for the summer vacation. Students on both the Commander Islands and the Pribilofs are getting excited for summer activities. [...]
Alaska Bird Conference
Hi, my name is Destiny and I am in seventh grade recently attending Hanshew Middle School in Anchorage. The reason I came to Cordova was to present [...]
Story of the Commander and Pribilof Islands
One of the highlights at the last Bering Sea Days was learning more about the historical link between the Commander and Pribilof Islands from Aquilina Lestenkof, director [...]
Fall on St. Paul
Bering Sea Days was in early October this year, and Fall on the Pribilof Islands has a very different hum to the breeding frenzy of summer life. [...]
Bering Sea Days 2016
Another week of Bering Sea Days is over! Many thanks to all the hard work of folks at the Ecosystem Conservation Office, Aleut Community of St. Paul [...]
Seabird Survivor Game
We’ve enjoyed following Catherine Pham’s journeys as she studied seabirds out at-sea over the last year. This past week, Catherine flew all the way from Hawaii to [...]
St. Lawrence Island
Biologists from the University of Alaska, Fairbanks (UAF) and Tokyo, Japan, are starting a new seabird research project on St. Lawrence Island this summer. St. Lawrence Island [...]
Before there were eggs!
Where do red-legged kittiwakes forage before they lay their eggs? No one really knew the answer to this question until Rachael Orben and team deployed GPS dataloggers [...]
St. George Students – Учащиеся с Острова Святого Георгия
We’re excited for the 2017 Seabird Camp. В предвкушении встречи в Лагере Морской Птицы 2017. […]
Central Place Foraging
What is a central-place forging trip? Red-legged kittiwakes are birds and therefore they lay eggs to reproduce. And, an egg needs to be kept warm for the [...]
Kittiwake Highways and Traffic Patterns
St George Island is home to roughly half a million red-legged kittiwakes and the majority of these birds nest on the north facing cliffs of the island. [...]
What did the GPS loggers tell us?
Last summer, Rachael Orben and Abram Fleishman attached GPS loggers to red-legged kittiwakes on St. George Island to find out where they were finding food during both the [...]