Last night was particularly beautiful on the tundra. I stayed up most of the night and enjoyed the beautiful light on this arctic prairie. The sun is now just touching the horizon at its lowest point in the night, casting a golden light over the land for many hours as the days get shorter—the subtleties [...]

Weather kept us holed up for large portions of the last few days. We were able to fly out to banding sites and survey the area from the air, but conditions were too poor to land for a period long enough to round up and band birds. I’m now back in Deadhorse while the amphibious [...]

Clear skies in the morning allowed us to get into the field early and spend a long day and evening banding. We worked on three lakes in the Teshekpuk Lake Special Area and banded about 1,000 Brant.

I was picked up from Lonely today and joined United States Geological Survey and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service biologists to band Brant in the Teshekpuk Lake Special Area. From the air, we were able to survey the huge concentrations of molting, flightless Brant and other geese that gather here each year. On the ground, [...]

The fog is back along with the wind. The three of us camping here watched the sky for most of the day hoping for a clearing, but conditions never improved enough for an aircraft to pick us up. We’ll see what happens tomorrow.

It’s midnight and I’m sitting in my sleeping bag about 50 meters from a dead-calm Arctic Ocean. The sun is still shinning brightly above the horizon. I won’t see anything close to darkness again until I get back to Ithaca. It’s beautifully warm and still here, and the mosquitoes are barely a nuisance, allowing me [...]

I flew into Deadhorse (Prudhoe Bay) this morning. I’m waiting for the arrival of several biologists. Together we’ll take a small plane to Point Lonely on the Arctic coast. Arriving in Deadhorse is always a bit of a shock. The scale of industrial development here is a stark contrast to the 500 or more miles [...]

Our main Alaska recording expedition came to an end this weekend. Mike and I spent the last two days packing, getting our records and files organized and duplicated, and decompressing from an intense five weeks of non-stop travel and field work. Mike departed on a midnight flight. Next week he’ll begin the task of archiving [...]

Today we made a quick trip to an island just off Homer, hoping it would be an easily accessible spot to record Red-faced Cormorants. We found the birds and were able to put a microphone in a nest, but the overwhelming calls of thousands of Black-legged Kittiwakes made recording the cormorants impossible. We also landed [...]

We spent the day cleaning ourselves up, doing some computer work, and getting a bit of rest. In the evening, we had a great few hours of recording in bogs and chest-high willows in the hills east of town. We had great luck with a pair of Parasitic Jaegers, Least Sandpipers, Greater Yellowlegs, and Golden-crowned [...]