We spent the last day in the field re-surveying Mt. Pelly for red knots. With the coordinates of the three nests found in 1999-2003, we used GPS to cover much of the area we had surveyed at the start of the trip but without success. We went back to Mt. Pelly that evening to listen […]

[Read more →]

A cold wet fog ended the long run of unseasonably warm weather we’ve had since our arrival on Victoria Island. Normal for this time of year is a high of about 46 degrees but over the last five days we have basked in temperatures as high as 75 degrees. Although most of the town of […]

[Read more →]

Mount Pelly

Our camp lies at the base of Mt. Pelly, about 12 miles north of Cambridge Bay. More a big hill than a mountain, Mt. Pelly nevertheless imposes a mighty presence in this large flat landscape. Imagine a steep mound rising ominously out of the tundra like a giant being with it own wildlife community […]

[Read more →]

Thursday, June 28, 2007
Snow and Ice first started appearing from the jet window about an hour north of Yellowknife, Northwest Territories. We were still an hour south of Cambridge Bay, Nunuvut, our final destination and where our expedition would begin. From our warm perch at 10,000 ft, we could first see a remnant patch of […]

[Read more →]

We wanted to get a late catch of sanderlings before the season ended. Most of the team had already left for their homes all over the globe: Humphrey, Phil and Alice to England; Clive, Susan and Peter to Australia; Pablo and Victor to Mexico. Now it was down to the core group, Steve, Jeannine, Bill […]

[Read more →]

We should not have gone out of the Gandy’s Beach Marina on Sunday. A small craft advisory was posted by the National Weather Service and even worse, over an inch of rain was being forecast. If we were to catch knots, then we had to go out of the barely- protected inlet […]

[Read more →]

There were close to thirty people waiting around for a catch of shorebirds. Beside our core team, the Southeastern Cooperative Wildlife Disease Team studying avian influenza, and Dave Mizrahi’s team working on semipalmated sandpipers, there were ten students from Dan Hernandez’s horseshoe crab egg monitoring team. We set our net on a small […]

[Read more →]

Last year our banding crew doubled the food budget. Imagine what 20 or so people working hard all day would eat over a month long period. But I’m not complaining. After all, food is a minor cost for all our team does, oftentimes working from dawn to dusk, seven days a week. […]

[Read more →]