Get more of the Cooper Island story at “Friends of Cooper Island”:http://www.cooperisland.org, or
contact George Divoky directly – e-mail:fngjd@uaf.edu .

Author’s Interview Notes:

2.30 They’ve been telling me that the summers are getting longer… and the guillemots kept breeding earlier and earlier because they were responding to an earlier snowmelt, and this was one of the first indications…. that this region of the arctic was warming up

3.08 Then, after 1990, as the warming continued,…pack ice was melting at quite a rate …and was pulling offshore much earlier in the season. So the same warming that opened up the breeding season for them by melting the snow early was now melting the pack ice in the summer. And they’re a species that feeds at the edge of the pack ice and under the pack ice on arctic cod and zooplankton, so their prey was then being taken offshore or at least was being taken away from their breeding colonies. So the same thing that let them expand into the area in the seventies and eighties was now decreasing numbers in the nineties and now in the twenty-first century.

4.09 Eighty days is a very long time in the arctic – it’s the length of the arctic summer – at least it’s the length the arctic summer used to be

4.50 In the past, I always used to be there until Labor Day, weighing chicks, Now by the twenty-ninth of August, things are usually wrapped up

5.11 We used to go out over the ice by snow machines in late May and early June. We can’t do that any more because of the fact that the near-shore ice is melting by mid-May…since the pack ice that surrounds the island is melting earlier in the year, we are now able to boat more throughout the summer than we ever did in the past. We are also getting much more wave action, that is eroding the island rather rapidly

6.31 What is really striking is that it lasted for a period of maybe five years or so, at the most, and that just by chance, at a colony that I happened to choose somewhat randomly, that things went from being almost too cold for them to breed successfully, in the early seventies, to it being almost too warm for them to breed successfully thirty years later.

9.08 Now, birds have to actually figure out what’s going on…. these are generalists that are able to do things like that.

9.25 There’s this very interesting thing going on with only twenty pairs being successful that past summer, out of the 140 pairs that were trying to breed, and that those individuals may be the ones who are able to figure out a new environment.

11.11 What’s going to be very interesting is to see if the same twenty pairs that were able to breed this year if they’re able to breed again next year and if there’s actually some sort of process that might be going on where there is selection for these generalists as opposed to the ones who were…rather hard wired for a certain date, a certain prey, and things like that.

15.10 The rate of change is very quick. … I’ve had a guillemot that has lived for twenty-nine years. So essentially during one gillimot’s lifetime the climate in that area has gone from being almost to cold to almost too warm for the species to breed successfully

18.39 I think it is because we are so … separate from the natural environment in terms of how we live our daily lives, and I’ve been surprised that when I’m in Seattle for like nine months and I’m kind of disconnected from any kind of environmental impacts, that it isn’t something that is as real to me as when I go out to the island and see things be totally different than they were even ten years ago… in terms of the ice environment, in terms of the rain and snow environment and certainly in terms of the guillemot numbers. And that sort of thing really brings it home to me. …even last summer… I would say to myself, “this is really going on.” And clearly I have believed that there were these major changes going on, with warming and have seen that for at least the last decade or so, but just to have it be brought home on a daily basis as it was this past summer, makes me leave the field, to be honest, in a much less positive mood, because I think, something very serious is going on and the bulk of the people who I deal with on a daily basis aren’t really aware of it.

Why do we care about this one population of guillemots?

20.45 I don’t even want you to care about guillemots. But I just hope you care about what the guillemots are telling us. And I think that this sort of rapid rate of change – that a three-decade, and even within the length of one study – to see this much change indicates that things are happening globally that humans have to take note of.

The following person was interviewed for today’s show. Our thanks to:

George Divoky
Institute of Arctic Biology
University of Alaska Fairbanks
Fairbanks, AK