Extreme Arctic 2010 – visiting a fulmar colony

Alison McLure, the IOP’s National Officer in Scotland is to join the British Schools Exploring Society (BSES) Extreme Arctic 2010 in Svalbard this April. During the expedition she will keep us up to date with regular features on her research project and life in the Arctic. Here she writes about visiting a fulmar bird colony.

I haven’t managed to blog for the last week or so because we decided to use the cold weather to travel to survey a fulmar colony. The colony was surveyed last year and we wanted to compare the breeding population. It took three days to get there and a crossing of a  large river, which was still frozen, luckily. The fulmar colony was located up a canyon and on a huge amphitheatre of rock….absolutely stunning. Once the count was done, we crossed the river as quickly as we could, in case it melted.

We climbed a hill yesterday to look at our route and we could see water rather than ice on the river, so we just made it in time. Nobody will be able to get back to the fulmar colony until the melt is over.

Meanwhile, I’ve been trying to download the data from the automatic weather station, with limited success. Despite the excellent laptop loaned to me by the Scottish Science Equipment Research Centre (SSERC), the software defeated me. We will start manual readings this week, since the young explorers have been honing their meteorological observing skills during the last few weeks.

The next plan is to carry out a three day expedition to study fossils at Deltaneset and to study the shorebirds, which are still arriving. Some of the Young Explorers will stay at base camp to monitor the increasing numbers of geese.