On Cooper Island, there aren’t many rules. But one rule that is wordlessly respected is you never look directly at South Beach, because South Beach is the designated bathroom, sited on a gravel sandbar so flat you can take a headcount of all inhabitants from a mile away, no lenses required.
Another rule is you shouldn’t go out alone, but if you do, you should take a walkie-talkie and a shotgun, because you never know when a polar bear might show up, and if one does, you don’t want the polar bear between you and the cabin, the only structure on the island that might sustain a clawed assault.
Not that I know how to fire a shotgun, much less how to disable a starving bear keen on making me its meal. But rules are rules, so I carry one anyway.
When camping on an island a short boat ride from the northernmost point of Alaska, it’s difficult not to fixate on the bears, one of the few remaining animals that make humans prey. When bears do visit, though, they’re still not the most charismatic megafauna on Cooper Island. That distinction goes to George Divoky, a septuagenarian who’s spent nearly 11 cumulative years here. By the time I reach Cooper Island on August 7, Divoky has been here for two months. Between his mop of gray hair and unkempt beard—there are no mirrors in the South Beach bathroom—shine bright darting eyes that don’t miss much. He wears what you might expect of an Arctic field ornithologist: rain pants and a parka flecked with splatters of bird poop and undergirded with wool-sweater strata.
But few remember Divoky for his appearance; it’s the words that pour from his mouth like water from a burst dam that define him. Any object in his periphery can inspire a story, told in fractal spurts and with oppressive detail, and if he’s interrupted—by a question, a task, another thought—he’ll return to his story minutes later, as if the world paused in wait of his next word.
His lingual floodwaters can be disorienting and, to some, off-putting. A lifelong outsider in self-imposed exile, Divoky commands a conversation and is prone to unwittingly drowning out its more subdued participants with his contrarian convictions. But it’s hard to blame him, for you, the conversant, are the odd one here on Cooper Island, a mere visitor in his world. For the past 43 years, he’s spent every summer here, usually in a tent, and usually by himself.
Even so, the island’s other seasonal inhabitants—the colony of Black Guillemots that nest here every summer—hold a greater claim to Cooper than Divoky. They are the reason he’s here, and their progenitors were here first. It was July 6, 1972, when a Coast Guard icebreaker dropped him off for a seabird survey, that he discovered 10 pairs of the handsome seabirds nesting under scattered debris—ammo boxes, floorboards, and innumerable wood planks—abandoned by the U.S. Navy after the Korean War. His find was a northern range expansion for the species in Alaska.
Like a kid flipping rocks to find salamanders, a 26-year-old Divoky flipped boards and boxes to search for eggs and create new nesting crevices. By the end of the summer, his nest count for the island was up to 18. When he returned to Washington, D.C., for a fellowship at the Smithsonian, he couldn’t stop thinking about Cooper Island. He was struck by the scientific potential of its accessible nest sites and seduced by the opportunity to indulge himself in solitary nature. He soon relocated to Fairbanks, Alaska, and by 1975 got his hands on enough funding to return to Cooper Island for an entire summer. He hasn’t missed one since, serially sacrificing employers and girlfriends who demanded he choose between them and the guillemots.
“You have to be careful what you fall in love with in your twenties,” he says, unprompted, one evening. “I fell in love with this island.”
Divoky returned each summer to watch the colony mature, collecting meticulous data—growth, breeding, feeding, kinship—on every nesting pair and chick, and banding every adult and fledgling. The colony thrived, and grew to 200 breeding pairs by 1989. Since then, it’s taken a turn for the worse, slowly at first and then into free-fall, and Divoky now cares for an island and its birds in decline. “I used to see chicks hatch, and I’d see them grow, and they had an 85 to 90 percent chance of flying away,” he says. This year 85 pairs bred on the island, fledging just 45 chicks out of 120 hatched—not enough to maintain the colony’s population.
Nearly all the causes for this decline—changes in food, competitors, and predators—track the warmer air, warmer ocean water, and retreat of sea ice near Cooper Island, all symptoms of global climate change caused by carbon dioxide. These molecules build up in the atmosphere and trap heat, like the layers of blankets required to sleep through the night on a sandbar on the Beaufort Sea. Somewhat ironically, if it weren’t for climate change, guillemots may never have nested on Cooper in the first place: Until the late 1960s, snow blanketed the ground for too much of the summer.
“During my research lifetime, Cooper Island will no longer be able to support this species,” Divoky says. “It went from too cold to too warm. It should have taken centuries, not decades.”
And yet he keeps coming back to watch his beloved island decline, collecting as much data as he can along the way. Through his ruthless devotion, Divoky has created one of the few ecological studies with enough long-term, rigorously collected data to illuminate how climate change will force populations through an evolutionary bottleneck unlike any seen since the last ice age. And the only reason we have even this glimpse is because of Divoky, a rare bird indeed. (...)
His study also has particular power because of dumb luck: It happens to cover a period of rapid atmospheric warming. Most scientists studying the biological impacts of climate change can’t define “normal” for a given species or ecosystem, and now it’s too late; the effects are manifest. But Divoky spent his first 28 years following individual birds, individual chicks, their partners, their offspring, through their entire lives—surely enough data to describe a normal, functioning Mandt’s Black Guillemot colony. “At one point, he had the whole story told in his mind,” says Stan Senner, vice president of bird conservation for Audubon’s Pacific Flyway and Divoky’s long-time friend. “The birds are there, the ice is near shore, the cod are associated with the ice, the birds don’t have to go very far, they get the cod. Life is good.”
Then everything changed. For the first 28 years of Divoky’s study, chicks ate cod almost exclusively. But in 2003 parents began serving fourhorn sculpin, an ugly fish with a lumpy head and spiny fins. Divoky would find chicks choked dead with enormous sculpin lodged in their throats. Parents eventually learned to catch smaller sculpin, but chicks still suffered. “It takes a long time to break down all that cartilaginous mass” in sculpin fins, Divoky says. Just one fish is enough to fill a chick’s stomach. “It’s like, ‘I can’t get anything else down, I’ve still got the last sculpin head in my stomach.’"
The ensuing hunger makes siblings turn aggressive: In many nests the larger chick bullies the smaller one, sometimes to starvation. As we examine one nest, Divoky points to matted, thin feathers on the back of one beta’s neck—physical evidence of aggression. Under the sculpin regime, chicks grow more slowly and fledge at less than 300 grams. Nearly one quarter starve in their nests.
It’s an ugly scene, but the parents are doing their best as they face a novel Arctic landscape. The sea ice that previously drifted and persisted near the island through the summer is now melted and effectively gone—sometimes hundreds of miles away—by August or even July. Arctic cod can’t survive in warm water south of the ice, and guillemot parents can’t fly fast enough to make additional trips to the edge every day. So they’ve decided that more sculpin, for all its faults, is a better bet than fewer cod. “This is a pivotal time,” Divoky says. “You can see the size of the chicks now. They need all the energy they can get. And the primary prey is gone.” (...)
If seabirds are barometers of ocean health, then Arctic birds are screaming that there’s a major shift in the system, a shift so extreme the barometers themselves are now changing. Make no mistake: These seabirds, and other species across the Arctic, are entering a period of rapid natural selection that will lead to either their extinction or evolution.
Another rule is you shouldn’t go out alone, but if you do, you should take a walkie-talkie and a shotgun, because you never know when a polar bear might show up, and if one does, you don’t want the polar bear between you and the cabin, the only structure on the island that might sustain a clawed assault.
Not that I know how to fire a shotgun, much less how to disable a starving bear keen on making me its meal. But rules are rules, so I carry one anyway.When camping on an island a short boat ride from the northernmost point of Alaska, it’s difficult not to fixate on the bears, one of the few remaining animals that make humans prey. When bears do visit, though, they’re still not the most charismatic megafauna on Cooper Island. That distinction goes to George Divoky, a septuagenarian who’s spent nearly 11 cumulative years here. By the time I reach Cooper Island on August 7, Divoky has been here for two months. Between his mop of gray hair and unkempt beard—there are no mirrors in the South Beach bathroom—shine bright darting eyes that don’t miss much. He wears what you might expect of an Arctic field ornithologist: rain pants and a parka flecked with splatters of bird poop and undergirded with wool-sweater strata.
But few remember Divoky for his appearance; it’s the words that pour from his mouth like water from a burst dam that define him. Any object in his periphery can inspire a story, told in fractal spurts and with oppressive detail, and if he’s interrupted—by a question, a task, another thought—he’ll return to his story minutes later, as if the world paused in wait of his next word.
His lingual floodwaters can be disorienting and, to some, off-putting. A lifelong outsider in self-imposed exile, Divoky commands a conversation and is prone to unwittingly drowning out its more subdued participants with his contrarian convictions. But it’s hard to blame him, for you, the conversant, are the odd one here on Cooper Island, a mere visitor in his world. For the past 43 years, he’s spent every summer here, usually in a tent, and usually by himself.
Even so, the island’s other seasonal inhabitants—the colony of Black Guillemots that nest here every summer—hold a greater claim to Cooper than Divoky. They are the reason he’s here, and their progenitors were here first. It was July 6, 1972, when a Coast Guard icebreaker dropped him off for a seabird survey, that he discovered 10 pairs of the handsome seabirds nesting under scattered debris—ammo boxes, floorboards, and innumerable wood planks—abandoned by the U.S. Navy after the Korean War. His find was a northern range expansion for the species in Alaska.
Like a kid flipping rocks to find salamanders, a 26-year-old Divoky flipped boards and boxes to search for eggs and create new nesting crevices. By the end of the summer, his nest count for the island was up to 18. When he returned to Washington, D.C., for a fellowship at the Smithsonian, he couldn’t stop thinking about Cooper Island. He was struck by the scientific potential of its accessible nest sites and seduced by the opportunity to indulge himself in solitary nature. He soon relocated to Fairbanks, Alaska, and by 1975 got his hands on enough funding to return to Cooper Island for an entire summer. He hasn’t missed one since, serially sacrificing employers and girlfriends who demanded he choose between them and the guillemots.
“You have to be careful what you fall in love with in your twenties,” he says, unprompted, one evening. “I fell in love with this island.”
Divoky returned each summer to watch the colony mature, collecting meticulous data—growth, breeding, feeding, kinship—on every nesting pair and chick, and banding every adult and fledgling. The colony thrived, and grew to 200 breeding pairs by 1989. Since then, it’s taken a turn for the worse, slowly at first and then into free-fall, and Divoky now cares for an island and its birds in decline. “I used to see chicks hatch, and I’d see them grow, and they had an 85 to 90 percent chance of flying away,” he says. This year 85 pairs bred on the island, fledging just 45 chicks out of 120 hatched—not enough to maintain the colony’s population.
Nearly all the causes for this decline—changes in food, competitors, and predators—track the warmer air, warmer ocean water, and retreat of sea ice near Cooper Island, all symptoms of global climate change caused by carbon dioxide. These molecules build up in the atmosphere and trap heat, like the layers of blankets required to sleep through the night on a sandbar on the Beaufort Sea. Somewhat ironically, if it weren’t for climate change, guillemots may never have nested on Cooper in the first place: Until the late 1960s, snow blanketed the ground for too much of the summer.
“During my research lifetime, Cooper Island will no longer be able to support this species,” Divoky says. “It went from too cold to too warm. It should have taken centuries, not decades.”
And yet he keeps coming back to watch his beloved island decline, collecting as much data as he can along the way. Through his ruthless devotion, Divoky has created one of the few ecological studies with enough long-term, rigorously collected data to illuminate how climate change will force populations through an evolutionary bottleneck unlike any seen since the last ice age. And the only reason we have even this glimpse is because of Divoky, a rare bird indeed. (...)
His study also has particular power because of dumb luck: It happens to cover a period of rapid atmospheric warming. Most scientists studying the biological impacts of climate change can’t define “normal” for a given species or ecosystem, and now it’s too late; the effects are manifest. But Divoky spent his first 28 years following individual birds, individual chicks, their partners, their offspring, through their entire lives—surely enough data to describe a normal, functioning Mandt’s Black Guillemot colony. “At one point, he had the whole story told in his mind,” says Stan Senner, vice president of bird conservation for Audubon’s Pacific Flyway and Divoky’s long-time friend. “The birds are there, the ice is near shore, the cod are associated with the ice, the birds don’t have to go very far, they get the cod. Life is good.”
Then everything changed. For the first 28 years of Divoky’s study, chicks ate cod almost exclusively. But in 2003 parents began serving fourhorn sculpin, an ugly fish with a lumpy head and spiny fins. Divoky would find chicks choked dead with enormous sculpin lodged in their throats. Parents eventually learned to catch smaller sculpin, but chicks still suffered. “It takes a long time to break down all that cartilaginous mass” in sculpin fins, Divoky says. Just one fish is enough to fill a chick’s stomach. “It’s like, ‘I can’t get anything else down, I’ve still got the last sculpin head in my stomach.’"
The ensuing hunger makes siblings turn aggressive: In many nests the larger chick bullies the smaller one, sometimes to starvation. As we examine one nest, Divoky points to matted, thin feathers on the back of one beta’s neck—physical evidence of aggression. Under the sculpin regime, chicks grow more slowly and fledge at less than 300 grams. Nearly one quarter starve in their nests.
It’s an ugly scene, but the parents are doing their best as they face a novel Arctic landscape. The sea ice that previously drifted and persisted near the island through the summer is now melted and effectively gone—sometimes hundreds of miles away—by August or even July. Arctic cod can’t survive in warm water south of the ice, and guillemot parents can’t fly fast enough to make additional trips to the edge every day. So they’ve decided that more sculpin, for all its faults, is a better bet than fewer cod. “This is a pivotal time,” Divoky says. “You can see the size of the chicks now. They need all the energy they can get. And the primary prey is gone.” (...)
If seabirds are barometers of ocean health, then Arctic birds are screaming that there’s a major shift in the system, a shift so extreme the barometers themselves are now changing. Make no mistake: These seabirds, and other species across the Arctic, are entering a period of rapid natural selection that will lead to either their extinction or evolution.
by Hannah Waters, Audubon | Read more:
Image: Peter Mather
[ed. I met George back in the early 80s when we were both involved with OCSEAP, a massive multi-disciplinary research effort designed to provide baseline environmental information for making informed oil and gas decisions in Alaska (studies which no one seems to remember nowadays, even currrent scientists working in Alaska). He contributed the research, I took the data and developed state policy on federal lease sales, which came to encompass the entire Alaskan coastline and all offshore federal waters (an accelerated process under President Reagan and his then Secretary of the Interior, James Watt). Stan Senner was a good friend and colleague as well. Nice to see those guys still at it. I wish I were still there sometimes.]
