Tide, Feather, Snow_ A Life in Alaska - Miranda Weiss [73]
John took the lead in setting things up, mostly by just getting to work himself. We put up our sleeping tents and then a tent for gear, where we huddled to cook and eat dinner. Our field camp sat at the edge of the muddy Manokinak, which wandered slowly across a vast expanse of tundra. Half water, half earth, the region is dominated by two immense rivers, the Yukon and the Kuskokwim. The deltas of these rivers, which drain nearly half of the state, combine to form a flat, waterlogged landscape larger than the state of West Virginia. The region, called the Y-K Delta, is a wildly productive nursery for birds. Each summer, millions of waterfowl and shorebirds flock here to nest and raise young.
Once we had settled into camp, John trained us in how to get the project going. The goal of the research was to gather data about red-throated loons, duck-sized diving birds that nest in northern parts of North America, Europe, and Asia. The population of these birds in Alaska had dropped by half in less than twenty years and no one knew why. The Y-K Delta is the red-throated loons’ most important nesting grounds in Alaska: More than a third of the population that nest in the state do so here, and this region had seen the most profound decline.
We began by working as a group of four, locating nests of our study species. In the spring, thousands of pairs of red-throated loons land on the Delta’s shallow lakes and build nests along the shores. With legs set far back on their bodies, the birds are useless on land, so they assemble the wet mats of mud and vegetation that serve as their nests at the very edge of a lake. Their downy, gray chicks hatch in midsummer, and the parents feed them by mouth narrow silver fish that flash like blades. In the evenings, they wail out across the tundra.
We unpacked aerial photos that served as maps, and John showed us how to locate our position on the images by looking at the shapes of lakes, the curve of sloughs, and the minute changes in topography, and then how to carefully search for the nests and record the necessary data. Immersed once again in a world where John was teacher and I was student, I felt relieved when, once he showed us how to locate and record nests, we worked alone on the tundra, carrying a day’s worth of food, water, and gear on our backs. Most days, the work wasn’t difficult or exhausting, but engaging enough to make me forget about all the things I didn’t know how to do around camp, such as build sturdy furniture out of the pile of wood or assemble the VHF antennae.
Before leaving camp in the morning, we put on heavy rubber raincoats against the constant wind and hip waders to traverse the landscape, which was pocked by lakes and severed by sloughs. We fanned out into the tundra, scanning faraway lakes through binoculars, searching for the dark silhouettes of loons, with their characteristic upturned bills. The red-throats were skittish and flushed from their nests into the water long before we got close to them. As we approached, they would paddle nervously and then flap madly across the surface of a lake before flying away. We walked the rim of every lake carefully scanning for the loons’ dinner plate–sized nests that held one or two chocolate-brown, speckled eggs. Most of these nameless lakes were smaller than swimming pools and no deeper than my thigh. Permafrost just a few feet beneath the ground kept them from getting any deeper. We waded out to every island, feeling the hardpan of frozen ground beneath