Thoreau meets veteran bird scientist on Cooper Island

EARL FINKLER

June 19, 2008 at 11:49AM AKST

As June began in Barrow, more and more birds were scheduled to arrive from their spring migration northward, including the black guillemots, a shorebird that has been studied by bird scientist George Divoky of the University of Alaska Fairbanks each summer for more than 30 years.

Divoky came back to Barrow again, with a graduate student from the university, to reoccupy a little shed on Cooper Island off Point Barrow, where the guillemots return each year.

In the course of such an extended study, Divoky discovered that the ice has been pulling further offshore.

This makes it difficult for the adults to feed their young, since the young need the cod that remain under the ice edge. With the ice receding, the parent birds have to fly further out to get the cod and cannot always make the longer round trip to then return and feed the chicks.

So Divoky continues his work each summer, sometimes with an assistant, but other times all alone on the island. And with the warming climate, he said he is seeing more polar bears, which can move in and eat some of the chicks.

Also puffins, which generally reside to the south, have appeared on Cooper Island.

Divoky said they can push out some of the nesting guillemots.

Divoky himself can seem at times like a rare breed: a one- or two-person operation, in this time when many climate change research projects involve a lot more scientists and researchers. But he does have a decades-long data set, which could prove valuable as time goes by.

Then help in understanding the Cooper Island research came from an outside source.

I happened to pick up an October 2007 copy of the Smithsonian magazine. There, on pages 60-65, was an article titled “Teaming up with Thoreau: One hundred fifty years after the publication of ‘Walden,’ Henry David Thoreau is helping scientists monitor global warming.”

“Throughout the 1850s, while his neighbors toiled in their fields and offices, Thoreau spent hours each day walking Concord’s woods and meadows, contemplating nature. … The earliest blossoms and other signs of spring especially fascinated Thoreau.”

He said he often visited a particular plant half a dozen times within a fortnight so that he might know exactly when it opened.

He also noted when birds, such as the bluebirds, arrived each year.

A friend of his in Concord said arrival information on the bluebirds interested him as much as others might regard a message by Atlantic cable.

According to the Smithsonian article, Thoreau organized his eight years of botanical notes into detailed monthly charts. Later, others found his information, and then still others picked up the idea and continued regular studies of the flowering dates of hundreds of plant species in the Concord area.

One researcher said that bird migrations and plant flowering times “are the best indicators we have that natural communities are starting to change.”

I was fascinated with the article and got in touch with George before he came to Barrow on his way to Cooper Island.

He said he found it very, very interesting. From one solitary researcher back in the mid-1800s to another relatively solitary Arctic researcher right here around Barrow. It indeed is a small world.

One scientist who is helping develop a national observation network to collect data on flowering times and bird migration described Thoreau-type efforts as “heroic efforts by individuals.”

This was true back when Thoreau built his tiny, basic cabin by Walden Pond. In my opinion, it is also true after over three decades of isolated, often solitary, work by George Divoky on Cooper Island.

Earl Finkler does the morning show on KBRW, the radio station out of Barrow.