Subject: Great article by Kenn Kaufman on Arctic drilling and birds
Date: Feb 22 09:07:33 2002
From: Lauren Braden - LaurenB at seattleaudubon.org



http://www.birdwatchersdigest.com/kenn_kaufman/kk2.html

Worthless Frozen Tundra?
by Kenn Kaufman


As I write this, there is debate as to whether we should drill for oil in
the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in far northern Alaska. I'm convinced
there are good and decent people on both sides of this debate. I'm not
anti-oil: I drive a car that burns gasoline, albeit not in very large
amounts. I have friends who work for oil companies, and they are honest
individuals with a professional and personal commitment to wildlife
conservation. I believe the debate can be carried on with honesty and
integrity.

But I also believe that neither side should twist the facts to bolster their
arguments. And there's one huge falsehood that I've heard too many times in
the past few weeks-enough times to make me drop the light-hearted column
that I'd been writing and settle on a more serious topic. The lie being
fostered by the pro-drilling elements is that the coastal tundra-the area of
the refuge where the drilling would take place-is essentially worthless.

I heard it again today in a discussion on talk radio, from a woman
representing the oil industry. "Of course the polar bears are cute," she
said, making it obvious she'd never had a close look at the huge iron-jawed
meat-eating machine that is a polar bear. "And the caribou are nice animals.
We know that the refuge has some pristine mountains. But that's not where
the drilling would be done. The drilling would be on the coastal plain, and
there's nothing there. There aren't even any trees. It's nothing but frozen
tundra."

Nothing but frozen tundra. I've heard oil company representatives say this
over and over. It would be true, more or less, in January, that far above
the Arctic Circle, with constant darkness and temperatures far below zero.
Not much moving out there at that season. Or so I've heard. I haven't been
there in winter, but I have been there in summer, and I can close my eyes
and go back in vivid memories

It's late evening, but the sun is still high in the southern sky and it will
not set any time this month. We're standing on a little rise by the edge of
a tundra pool, with reflections of evening light in the cold clear water,
but our attention has been caught by a bird that is flying in wide circles
overhead. Trim and streamlined, the bird has oddly slow and exaggerated
wingbeats, as if it has far more flying power than it needs to stay aloft.
Its flight is punctuated with a wild rich whistle that echoes across the
tundra. We watch for a minute or more, and then the bird swoops down to land
nearby.

It's a male American golden-plover. He stands poised, elegant, a study in
crisp pattern, black with white trim below, speckled with gold above. This
bird is a powerful flier indeed. When he left here at the end of last summer
he would have flown thousands of miles to the east and south, perhaps
touching down in the maritime provinces of eastern Canada or on the coast of
New England, then arrowing south across a wide expanse of the Atlantic to
the northern coast of South America, continuing on to the pampas of
Argentina. Then, two or three months ago, he would have left that southern
outpost to come back, flying on swift strong wings across the Amazon Basin,
across the Caribbean, and up through the corridor of the Great Plains,
traveling thousands of miles to come back and announce his claim to this
patch of supposedly worthless frozen tundra.

Maybe this golden-plover already has a mate, hiding somewhere among the
matted tundra plants. But even if not, he is not alone: There are other
birds all around us. The ridge where we stand is only a few feet higher than
the surrounding country, but from here the land stretches out for miles to
the flat horizon under a wide pale sky. The ground is covered with tussocks
of grass, clumps of reindeer moss, boggy low spots, the occasional
snowdrift, and broken everywhere by innumerable small ponds. There's not a
tree in sight. Birds that want to sing from elevated positions must take
wing, and they have: The sky is alive with bird song.

On the other side of the nearby pond, a small bird is fluttering high. Slim,
long-winged, patterned in subtle browns, it hovers with odd slow wingbeats,
singing a short trilled song that it repeats over and over, with incredible
endurance. This is another champion flyer, a Baird's sandpiper. He will have
spent the winter far south of the equator, perhaps around lakes of the high
Andes in Bolivia or Chile. Like the golden-plover, he will have flown
thousands of miles to be here.

Other long-distance migrants are adding to the chorus. The pectoral
sandpipers-what odd birds they are, at least the males, as they gather on a
nearby rise and seek to outdo each other in courtship displays. One of the
males puffs out his chest unbelievably with air, the feathers bristling out
so that he looks like a cross between a balloon and a porcupine. He takes
off and flies in a circle, giving a series of low booming hoots and sounding
like anything in the world but a sandpiper. These birds have flown back here
from as far away as South America or Australia to take part in this annual
mating ritual.

Other sandpipers and plovers are here as well. Though we call them
shorebirds, most of them are really tundra birds in summer. A white-rumped
sandpiper, another small species, fluttering and gliding overhead while he
makes odd honking and rattling sounds. Not very musical but definitely
champion migrants, white-rumps concentrate in southernmost South America
during our winter, with many in Tierra del Fuego, and they have even been
seen in Antarctica.

Stilt sandpipers, bigger birds but not quite so ambitious in their
migrations, are doing flight displays off in the distance, repeating a
guttural song as they glide down on set wings. There are buff-breasted
sandpipers, beautiful with their soft colors, standing about on the tundra.
They do their displaying mostly from the ground, the males quietly
stretching out one wing and then the other to show off the white underwing.
High above all the other birds, common snipes are zooming about, making
their hollow winnowing sounds.

The tundra in summer is at least half water, so it is no surprise to see
that ducks are everywhere. Pintails and green-winged teal are on all the
small ponds, just as they would be in the Dakotas, but the stars are the
true arctic species like eiders and long-tailed ducks. Here and there we'll
find a small group of king eiders resting on a pond. The males are
unbelievably ornate, with their orange bill-knobs contrasting with the pale
powder blue of their heads. Along the coast itself we might see the eiders
passing in flock after flock. Eiders of three or four species, big hardy
sea-ducks of cold waters, stick to the Arctic Ocean as long as they can
before peeling off inland to their nesting grounds. Many of these eiders
(and their cousins, the long-tailed ducks) will have spent the winter in
open leads of the shifting pack ice, as far north as the Arctic Circle. Now
they cross paths with flocks of brant, small sea-going geese that may have
wintered along the west coast of Mexico, or with red-throated loons that
have come from the California coast.

But there are other birds here whose wintering grounds are on the open seas.
Consider the silvery, long-tailed Arctic terns, hovering lightly over tundra
pools. They are not nearly as delicate as they appear. For much of the year
they live the life of true seabirds, far out over the ocean. During the past
nine months they may have traveled some 25,000 miles, to the edge of
Antarctica and back, out of sight of land for weeks at a time, somehow
finding their way back to this spot for the brief Arctic summer.

Also in from far oceans are Sabine's gulls, seemingly too petite and
beautiful to be gulls. Their striking white wing triangles are visible at
long distances, but we need to get closer to appreciate how their charcoal
gray hoods contrast with their red eye-rings and yellow-tipped bills.
However, no birds here reward a close look as much as the red phalaropes,
also just arrived from a winter on the ocean. The females, brighter than the
males, are incredibly rich in hue-the colors look as if they have been
melted and poured onto them. From the intense chestnut red of the belly to
the deep creamy buff stripes on the back to the rich chrome yellow of the
bill, a female red phalarope in summer is intoxicatingly colorful, a world
away from the gray plumage she wears while floating on winter seas.

In their ocean travels these birds will have crossed paths with long-tailed
jaegers out at sea, and during the summer the jaegers are here as well.
These piratic seabirds come coursing low over the tundra, graceful and
swift, their long streamers of central tail feathers waving up and down with
each wingbeat. There are actually three kinds of jaegers here, and the
largest, the pomarine jaegers, are among the major predators of the region.
In most summers the pomarines are not common, which is just as well for the
smaller birds on which they often prey. But in big lemming years-summers
when these little brown rodents are at a population high-the pomarine
jaegers move in and become lemming specialists, competing with the resident
snowy owls.

Ah, yes, the snowy owls. These magnificent, powerful birds, white with
glaring yellow eyes, are perfectly at home out on the coastal plain. They
are perhaps as numerous here as anywhere in the world. Some may even stay
through the harsh winter.

If they do, in spring they will get to watch one of the most remarkable
transformations in the world, as the deep freeze and darkness of winter give
way to an explosion of life. The summer is brief, but with constant daylight
the grasses, mosses, and wildflowers grow. Butterflies skim low over the
tundra along with myriad other tiny insects, lemmings scamper about, and
birds make feverish haste in raising their young before autumn sets in. A
year's worth of living is crowded into a few weeks, and the skies ring with
the cries of birds that have traveled thousands of miles to be here.

If oil drilling comes into this magical place, of course it will have an
impact. No matter how much the oil companies try to minimize the effects of
their operations, large areas will be destroyed or degraded. The birds that
live here can't just move to another spot. It simply doesn't work that way.
The land has only a certain carrying capacity, and the good spots are
already taken. Destroy a bird's habitat and the bird is as dead, for all
practical purposes, as if you had shot it.

These are sobering things to think about as we stand on this tundra ridge,
deep in the wonderland of the Arctic coastal plain. The golden-plover is up
there again, flying wide circles in the sky, sending forth that haunting
whistle that rings with wilderness and freedom and vast distances. Sad to
think that it might come back here next year, after braving migration, only
to find that its own special place on the tundra has been taken away
forever.

If we're going to drill in the Arctic refuge, we should not do it under the
pretense that "it's all worthless tundra" or that "there's nothing there."
We should do it with full knowledge of what we will be destroying.

Join Kenn Kaufman in BirdBuzz for a discussion about Oil Drilling and The
Arctic NWR!

Lauren Braden
Advocate for Wildlife Habitat
Seattle Audubon Society
8050 35th Ave NE
Seattle, WA 98115
206-523-8243 x14
laurenb at seattleaudubon.org