Getting Started...

We stepped out of the charter plane at our Teshekpuk Lake campsite, and immediately saw a Buff-breasted Sandpiper, an auspicious beginning for the 2007 Arctic field season.  Within the first half hour, we had also seen a Gyrfalcon, Semipalmated Sandpipers, a Long-billed Dowitcher, a Dunlin, Golden Eagle, Black-bellied Plovers, and Lapland Longspur.  Eight of our nine field crewmembers made it to camp from Anchorage or Fairbanks via Deadhorse, as planned on Friday, June 8.  Metta, Rick, Brad, and I went with the first load of gear, and a Beaver, equipped with tundra tiring.  We are camped in a beautiful site on a little peninsula, surrounded by 300 degrees of water, thanks to a deep off flow of a small but fast-flowing river.  

The locals call this site "Marty's Mosquito Ranch."  We hope to finish our work before the mosquitoes hatch.  We have just completed the first two days of survey, after three very long days of travel and setting up camp, bear and gun safety training, field protocol review, and practice catching shorebirds with bow nets.  This year, in addition to avian influenza testing, we are banding the birds and collecting a blood sample for analysis.  Four crews of two go out each day to randomly selected sites across the Teshekpuk Lake Region by helicopter for eight hours of surveying, plus two to four hours of preparation and data entry.  

After finding nests and netting birds each day, we come back to camp for a hasty session of preparing for the next day.  Our pilot, Chuck, learned to fly in Vietnam, and recently came to Alaska after many years as a rancher and crop duster in Montana.  The weather so far has been quite diverse.  The first day was sunny and warm.  We set up camp barefoot and in t-shirts.  The next day, it was in the 30's, with 45 mile per hour winds, and gusts over 55 miles per hour, so we knew we were truly in the Arctic.  It has stayed cold and mostly sunny, and only one foggy day thus far.  

There was little snow this winter, so the nesting is well established, because the ground is already almost entirely uncovered.  The density of birds in this region has exceeded our expectations, and Brad saw a rare spectacled eider on his second survey.  We can already see that more extensive study of this region in future years is likely to valuable.