polar bears

We are all happy to see fair weather in the morning. It is not unusual in coastal areas of Alaska to be stuck for days with fog, wind, and weather. We had heard reports of a brown bear and a cub along the road, but fail to see it on our way to the airstrip. Plenty of caribou and ptarmigan glance our way as we make our drive and there are patches of snow dotting the still brown tundra. Winter has not fully let go of this northern place.

Our last day for flight operations and we are all up early. Well, everyone but Jessica, our dedicated lab whiz, who was up until 3 AM working on the samples from the six bears we brought her late last night.

I stare out into a snowy and partially foggy morning as I work my way through breakfast and my morning coffee. Patchy squalls moving across the tundra and out on the ice – could go either direction today. The change in weather is expected, but we hoped for a couple of more blue sky weather days. The visibility is still fair, and the fixed wing will have no trouble flying, so we’ll push on out and see what we can accomplish today.

As luck would have it, the weather is good, but we are required to take the second mandatory crew rest day for our pilot (two off during any 14 day window). He would much rather be flying, but the rules are very clear. With only two more flight days for the season ahead, we begin to make plans for our return to Anchorage on Saturday. For our pilot Howard and our lab technician Jessica, it has been almost seven straight weeks of fieldwork – and as much as they like the job, they are ready to be home.

The winds have dropped a bit when I check the weather station data and we still have mostly clear skies. We coordinate with our fixed wing pilot in Kotzebue and make plans to meet up somewhere out on the ice west of Point Hope. We try to get the airplane out well ahead of us as he has much more endurance than our helicopter. Ideally, the plane will find a bear or at least tracks and we can take it from there.

The weather holds and even improves as we head into the last week of the project. Clear skies and sun, though the winds are forecast to pick up during the day. We’ll launch in the late morning as we’ve noticed over the years that the bears seem less active earlier in the day. Tracks and bears are also both easier to spot in the low angle light of the evening hours.

As will likely be a common scene from here on out, I awake to a snowy, foggy morning. As the sea ice starts to break up, more and more water opens up and that significantly adds moisture to the near shore environment. With the right temperature and dew point combination, fog doesn’t move in, it just happens.

The large lead (area of open water in the sea ice) that existed just offshore from our camp has closed overnight. The ice in the Chukchi Sea is very dynamic, even in the middle of winter. This part of the Chukchi is always ice free in the summer, so everything we are flying over and working on is first year or newer ice and typically not much more than 2 metres thick. Leads are constantly forming and closing and as the season winds to a close next week, the ice should really start to fragment and simply begin melting.

In early February, WWF and the US Fish and Wildlife Service partnered to facilitate community-based meetings between village conservation leaders from Chukotka, Russia and Alaskan communities along the Chukchi Sea coast. Although the people who live across the Chukchi Sea from each other are relatively close in miles, our Chukchi partners had to travel around the world to reach the other side and meet their neighbors for the first time. For WWF, this was also an opportunity to highlight the work of the Chukchi Umky Patrol Program we support in Russia, a grassroots effort to minimise negative polar bear human interactions. The Umky program has in addition cultivated efforts to eliminate poaching and manage a relatively new problem: walrus hauling out near villages in huge numbers.

At 7 this morning, Copenhagen time, a truck dropped off a huge wooden box more than 2 metres tall. It stand in one of Copenhagen’s oldest squares, the site of the original city hall, surrounded by majestic buildings. On this day it was surrounded by more as well – immediately behind the box, a collection of three sides wooden structures went up, to be topped by breathtaking photos of the Arctic, in all its splendour and fragility.