Getting to the Tundra
Natalie Boelman, an ecosystem ecologist at the Lamont-Doherty Earth Observatory at Columbia University, writes from the North Slope of Alaska, where she is studying the effects of climate change on the interactions among plants, insects and migratory songbirds.
I’ve been doing fieldwork in the foothills of the Brooks Mountain Range on the Alaska North Slope since 2001. This area is part of the tundra ecosystem, which is characterized by permanently frozen ground and the absence of trees. All of my work in this rather remote region has been based out of the Toolik Field Station. The purpose of most of my visits to Toolik has been to explore the use of remote sensing techniques to measure the response of tundra vegetation to climate change and, more recently, wildfire.
But last summer, my collaborators (Laura Gough from the University of Texas at Arlington, and John Wingfield from the University of California, Davis) and I began working on a new project that extends beyond the response of tundra plants to explore the effect that changes in vegetation have on organisms at higher trophic levels that depend on it for food and shelter.
In a nutshell, we are exploring how global climate change will affect songbirds that spend winters in our backyards and migrate to Alaskan tundra to breed every summer. Among other effects, Arctic warming is causing spring snowmelt to occur earlier, and is changing the type of plant growth on the tundra. Over the course of five songbird breeding seasons (2010 through 2015), we’re testing a series of predictions related to songbirds and their interactions with plants and insects, to begin to untangle the complex relationships among these groups in the context of these warming-induced changes. We began this project last spring, so this spring marks the beginning of our second field season, which began on May 1 and will end on Aug. 2.
I left New York City on May 25 to join other members of my science team at the Toolik Field Station. Although I’m just getting to Toolik now, we’ve had a small early-season crew working to get this year’s field season up and running since May 1. It takes two days to get from Manhattan to Toolik. On the way there, I made a stopover in Seattle to hand over our two children to my parents, who live down the road in Vancouver, British Columbia. Our daughter, Aline (4 years old), was all smiles when I said goodbye, excited to play in a garden and get spoiled rotten for two weeks. On the contrary, however, our son, Nico (2 years old), wasn’t too thrilled to see me walk away. Poor little man Mummy will be back soon! I took a deep breath, waved goodbye, and continued northward on Alaska Airlines to Anchorage.
Caged next to me on the flight, in seat 18B, was Poncho the yellow cockatiel, a species of bird endemic to Australia and popular as a house pet worldwide. Poncho and his keeper, in 18C, were traveling from Phoenix, where they spend winters, to King Salmon, Alaska, where they spend summers. Is migration via commercial jet considered migration fraud in the bird world?