Arctic Dreams, page 14
Recent research into the size and dynamics of polar bear populations has resulted in a hunting moratorium in Svalbard and a partial ban on hunting in the United States.12 Native hunting in Greenland continues, apparently without serious effect on the population. Native hunting in Canada is under a quota system, which has worked well in the past, although quotas are subject to political manipulation and, as one scientist pointed out to me, often regarded not so much as limits but as numbers to strive for.
In 1965, polar bear biologists, meeting at the University of Alaska to pool what they knew, feared that bears might need protection from excessive hunting. The greatest danger to them now, stressed every scientist I spoke with, is not hunting but industrial development and what it brings with it, including summary demands for data on polar bear biology and ecology.13 Uppermost in scientists’ minds are three areas of concern. First is environmental poisoning. Bears feed at the top of a marine food chain that concentrates PCBs, heavy metals, and chlorinated hydrocarbons like dieldrin, all of which have been found in polar bears. The waste from drilling and mining operations has also proved lethal to bears. A second concern is the disruption of female bears at their denning sites, the result of intensive overflights and other transportation corridor development and of repeated seismic surveys.14 A third area of concern is what effect industrial development will have on the distribution of seals, and therefore bears.
The most pressing problem is finding a way to keep curious bears away from industrial sites. Deterrent systems that do not seriously injure bears—electric fences, rubber batons fired from riot guns—have met with some success, but polar bears are not easily stopped or fooled.
In the light of all these potential problems, IUCN polar bear biologists have asked for “no-activity zones” or what a Russian scientist has called “zones of peace,” where bears will simply not be bothered by various human projects.
Far from all these disturbing concerns, one May afternoon, I accompanied two polar bear biologists searching for breeding females on the sea ice of Lancaster Sound. I knew and trusted and liked these two men. I also sympathized with their ambivalent feelings about their work. One of them had once come upon a female nursing her cubs. Unaware of his presence, she had settled back against a bank of snow with them and was staring calmly out across the empty sea ice. “I saw that, and I said to myself, why in God’s name am I bothering these animals?” They were ambivalent, too, about the drugs they were using to immobilize the bears. What they were using—Ketamine (ketamine hydrochloride) and Rhompun (xylazine hydrochloride)—was an improvement over earlier drugs like Sernylan (phencyclidine hydrochloride, the street drug called “angel dust”), which appeared to induce psychotic reactions and cause breathing difficulties. But immobilizing drugs are still problematic. One bear biologist told me, “Every time I chase an animal to put a dart in it, I am in conflict. How can I justify getting the information like this?”
That afternoon on Lancaster Sound, in the completion of the somewhat somber duties of tagging and recording data and fitting the animals with radio collars to permit satellite tracking, we saw many bears. We landed once to inspect the remains of a walrus that had been killed, perhaps, or possibly only scavenged, by a bear. We saw two-year-old cubs with their mothers striding apprehensively away from the sound of our helicopter, and we saw males and females together, mating pairs, turning beneath us to stare. And females with five-month-old cubs, scrambling over pressure ridges with a boost from their mother’s nose.
One of the females we darted went down near a jumble of shattered ice. While the others made measurements, I looked at her feet. I had once been told that polar bear claws show an annual shading, faint rings, which could be used reliably to age a bear, as is the case with ringed seals. But there were none that I could detect. I looked at details of her fur and felt the thickness of her ears, as though examining a museum specimen. Uncomfortable with all this, I walked over to the pressure ridge and sat on a slab of broken sea ice. It was a beautiful day, the skies clear behind a thin layer of very high cirrus, which made the sky a paler blue. About five below zero. No wind.
As I sat there my companions rolled the unconscious bear over on her back and I saw a trace of pink in the white fur between her legs. The lips of her vulva were swollen. Her genitalia were in size and shape like a woman’s. I looked away. I felt I had invaded her privacy.
For the remainder of the day I could not rid myself of this image of vulnerability.
1 This project was part of a Bureau of Land Management/Outer Continental Shelf study of Alaskan coastal marine life, results of which were to lead offshore oil development in the least harmful direction.
2 Svalbard is the Norwegian name for an arctic archipelago whose largest island is Spitsbergen, a name sometimes used in English to refer to the entire archipelago.
3 The IUCN Polar Bear Agreement, signed by Russia, Norway, Denmark, Canada, and the United States in 1973, became effective on May 26, 1976. It is the only treaty of general agreement between the five polar nations.
4 As commonly experienced in zoos, a polar bear’s color, as well as its bulk, can be misleading—and the bear’s hollow guard hairs can play a strange part in the overall distortion. Blue-green algae living in freshwater pools in zoo enclosures can migrate through a polar bear’s damaged guard hairs and bloom in the hollow spaces within. Bears afflicted in this way, as they have been recently in zoos in San Diego and elsewhere, appear green to visitors. The disinfectants and cleaners used by zoos and circuses and the chemicals used to tan polar bear furs for rugs take much of the delicate shading out of the fur. The bears’ true appearance is further compromised when they are kept in climates where they produce neither a substantial layer of blubber nor heavy winter coats. With so much of their dark skin showing through, they seem barbered and gaunt.
5 A “lead” (pron. leed) is a passage through sea ice navigable by a surface vessel such as a kayak. Smaller fractures are called cracks.
6 On the basis of this, Greenland Eskimos object to the depiction of a polar bear extending its right paw on the official seal of the Royal Greenland Trading Company as inaccurate.
7 In a recent laboratory experiment, polar bears were declared “inefficient walkers” because they overheated on a treadmill. An experienced polar bear biologist smiled when I asked him about this. “The bear can’t walk properly on a treadmill…. Walking into the wind, making that great pendulum swing of his legs, opening and closing his body to the cool air, you don’t see that on a treadmill. Out on the sea ice you see he can walk a long way without overheating.”
8 Marine mammals that have crawled up onto the sea ice or come ashore are said to be “hauled out.” A snow cave dug out by a seal above its aglu as a concealed place of rest is called a haul-out lair.
9 Savssats occur most often in fiords, where a band of sea ice too wide for marine mammals to swim under on a single breath cuts them off from the open sea. As the fiord continues to freeze over, the animals, often hundreds of narwhals and belukha, are restricted to a smaller and smaller opening in the ice for breathing. If the ice doesn’t break up or recede, the trap is fatal.
10 Vitamin A is found in toxic concentrations in polar bear liver. Eating it causes hypervitaminosis-A. And about 60 percent of the present polar bear population carries species of Trichinella.
11 European royalty received live polar bears as gifts from explorers and adventurers from the tenth century onward. They, in turn, historically found them “an extremely valued and efficient instrument of diplomacy” in North Africa and the Middle East, where they were sent, along with gyrfalcons, in royal retinues.
12 According to the terms of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, which supersedes the stricter provisions of the IUCN Polar Bear Agreement, there are no seasonal limits and no limits on the number of bears that can be killed by native hunters. Nor are clubs, females with cubs, or denning females protected.
13 In the face of such demands some polar bears have been wounded or killed in poorly designed research projects or poorly thought-through experiments. For a description of experiments that killed two bears see N.A. Øritsland et al., Effect of Crude Oil on Polar Bears, Environmental Studies No. 24 (Ottawa: Northern Affairs Program, Northern Environmental Protection Branch, 1981).
14 Seismic surveys employ explosion and vibration to map the earth’s crust in search of mineral and petroleum deposits. When improvements are made in seismic technology, the same areas are often surveyed again.
Four
Lancaster Sound
Monodon monoceros
I AM STANDING AT the margin of the sea ice called the floe edge at the mouth of Admiralty Inlet, northern Baffin Island, three or four miles out to sea. The firmness beneath my feet belies the ordinary sense of the phrase “out to sea.” Several Eskimo camps stand here along the white and black edge of ice and water. All of us have come from another place—Nuvua, 30 miles to the south at the tip of Uluksan Peninsula. We are here to hunt narwhals. They are out there in the open water of Lancaster Sound somewhere, waiting for this last ice barrier to break up so they can enter their summer feeding grounds in Admiralty Inlet.
As I walk along the floe edge—the light is brilliant, the ceaseless light of July; but after so many weeks I am weary of it; I stare at the few shadows on the ice with a kind of hunger—as I walk along here I am aware of both fear and elation, a mix that comes in remote regions with the realization that you are exposed and the weather can be capricious, and fatal. The wind is light and from the north—I can see its corrugation on the surface of the water. Should it swing around and come from the south, the ice behind us would begin to open up. Traverse cracks across the inlet, only a few inches wide yesterday, would begin to widen. We would have difficulty getting back to Nuvua, even if we left at the first sign of a wind shift.
A few days ago one of these men was caught like that. A distant explosion, like dynamite, told him what a compass bearing he quickly took on Borden Peninsula confirmed—that the five-square-mile sheet of floe ice he had camped on was being swept out of Admiralty Inlet toward open water in Lancaster Sound. He and his companion, knowing the set of local currents, struck out immediately to the east. Twelve hours later, near exhaustion, they came to a place where the ice floe was grounded in shallow coastal water, making a huge, slow turn in the current before breaking loose into Lancaster Sound. They leaped and plunged across broken ice cakes for the firm shore.
I am not so much thinking of these things, however, as I am feeling the exuberance of birds around me. Black-legged kittiwakes, northern fulmars, and black guillemots are wheeling and hovering in weightless acrobatics over the streams and lenses of life in the water—zooplankton and arctic cod—into which they plunge repeatedly for their sustenance. Out on the ice, at piles of offal from the narwhal hunt, glaucous and Thayer’s gulls stake a rough-tempered claim to some piece of flesh, brash, shouldering birds alongside the more reticent and rarer ivory gulls.
Birds fly across these waters in numbers that encourage you to simply flip your pencil in the air. Certain species end their northward migration here and nest. Others fly on to Devon and Ellesmere islands or to northwest Greenland. From where I now stand I can study some that stay, nesting in an unbroken line for 10 miles on a cliff between Baillarge Bay and Elwin Inlet, a rugged wall of sedimentary and volcanic rock pocked with indentations and ledges, rising at an angle of 80° from the water. More than 50,000 northern fulmars. At other such rookeries around Lancaster Sound, guillemots, murres, and kittiwakes congregate in tens and even hundreds of thousands to nest and feed during the short summer. Gulls, arctic terns, snow geese, eiders, red-breasted mergansers, and dovekies have passed through in droves already. Of the dovekies—a small, stocky seabird with a black head and bright white underside—something on the order of a third of the northwest Greenland population of 30 million passes over Lancaster Sound in May and June.
On the white-as-eggshell ice plain where we are camped, with the mottled browns and ochers of Borden Peninsula to the east and the dark cliffs of Brodeur Peninsula obscured in haze to the west, the adroit movements of the birds above the water give the landscape an immediate, vivid dimension: the eye, drawn far out to pale hues on the horizon, comes back smartly to the black water, where, plunk, a guillemot disappears in a dive.
The outcry of birds, the bullet-whirr of their passing wings, the splashing of water, is, like the falling light, unending. Lancaster Sound is a rare arctic marine sanctuary, a place where creatures are concentrated in the sort of densities one finds in the Antarctic Ocean, the richest sea waters in the world. Marine ecologists are not certain why Lancaster Sound teems so with life, but local upwelling currents and a supply of nutrients from glacial runoff on Devon Island seem critical.1
Three million colonial seabirds, mostly northern fulmars, kittiwakes, and guillemots, nest and feed here in the summer. It is no longer the haunt of 10,000 or so bowhead whales, but it remains a summering ground for more than 30 percent of the belukha whale population of North America, and more than three-quarters of the world’s population of narwhals. No one is sure how many harp, bearded, and ringed seals are here—probably more than a quarter of a million. In addition there are thousands of Atlantic walrus. The coastal regions are a denning area for polar bear and home to thousands of arctic fox in the summer.
I am concerned, as I walk, however, more with what is immediate to my senses—the ternlike whiffle and spin of birds over the water, the chicken-cackling of northern fulmars, and cool air full of the breath of sea life. This community of creatures, including all those invisible in the water, constitutes a unique overlap of land, water, and air. This is a special meeting ground, like that of a forest’s edge with a clearing; or where the fresh waters of an estuary meet the saline tides of the sea; or at a river’s riparian edge. The mingling of animals from different ecosystems charges such border zones with evolutionary potential. Flying creatures here at Admiralty Inlet walk on ice. They break the pane of water with their dives to feed. Marine mammals break the pane of water coming the other way to breathe.
The edges of any landscape—horizons, the lip of a valley, the bend of a river around a canyon wall—quicken an observer’s expectations. That attraction to borders, to the earth’s twilit places, is part of the shape of human curiosity. And the edges that cause excitement are like these where I now walk, sensing the birds toying with gravity; or like those in quantum mechanics, where what is critical straddles a border between being a wave and being a particle, between being what it is and becoming something else, occupying an edge of time that defeats our geometries. In biology these transitional areas between two different communities are called ecotones.
The ecotone at the Admiralty Inlet floe edge extends in two planes. In order to pass under the ice from the open sea, an animal must be free of a need for atmospheric oxygen; the floe edge, therefore, is a barrier to the horizontal migration of whales. In the vertical plane, no bird can penetrate the ice and birds like gulls can’t go below water with guillemots to feed on schools of fish. Sunlight, too, is halted at these borders.
To stand at the edge of this four-foot-thick ice platform, however, is to find yourself in a rich biological crease. Species of alga grow on the bottom of the sea ice, turning it golden brown with a patchwork of life. These tiny diatoms feed zooplankton moving through the upper layers of water in vast clouds—underwater galaxies of copepods, amphipods, and mysids. These in turn feed the streaming schools of cod. The cod feed the birds. And the narwhals. And also the ringed seal, which feeds the polar bear, and eventually the fox. The algae at the bottom of this food web are called “epontic” algae, the algae of the sea ice. (Ringed seals, ivory gulls, and other birds and mammals whose lives are ice-oriented are called “pagophylic”) It is the ice, however, that holds this life together. For ice-associated seals, vulnerable on a beach, it is a place offshore to rest, directly over their feeding grounds. It provides algae with a surface to grow on. It shelters arctic cod from hunting seabirds and herds of narwhals, and it shelters the narwhal from the predatory orca. It is the bear’s highway over the sea. And it gives me a place to stand on the ocean, and wonder.
I walk here intent on the birds, half aware of the biological mysteries in these placid, depthless waters in which I catch fleeting silver glimpses of cod. I feel blessed. I draw in the salt air and feel the warmth of sunlight on my face. I recall a childhood of summer days on the beaches of California. I feel the wealth to be had in life in an aimless walk like this, through woods or over a prairie or down a beach.
It is not all benign and ethereal at the ice edge, however. You cannot—I cannot—lose completely the sense of how far from land this is. And I am wary of walrus. A male walrus is a huge animal, approaching the size of a small car. At close range in the water its agility and speed are intimidating. Walruses normally eat only bottom-dwelling organisms like clams, worms, and crabs, but there is an unusual sort of walrus—almost always a male, a loner, that deliberately hunts and kills seals. Its ivory tusks are crosshatched with the claw marks of seals fighting for their lives. (It is called angeyeghaq by the Eskimos on Saint Lawrence Island, who are familiar with its unusual behavior.) This rare carnivore will charge off an ice floe to attack a small boat, and actively pursue and try to kill people in the water. A friend of mine was once standing with an Eskimo friend at an ice edge when the man cautioned him to step back. They retreated 15 or 20 feet. Less than a minute later a walrus surfaced in an explosion of water where they had been standing. A polar bear trick.
