Current Topics from Kenn Kaufman

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. Now, don't get me wrong: I'm convinced there are good and decent people on both sides of the 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 these are honest individuals with a professional and personal commitment to wildlife conservation. I believe the debate could 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 last few weeks—enough 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 the idea 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 in a condescending tone, making it obvious she’d never had a close look at the huge iron-jawed meat-eating machine that is a real polar bear. “And the caribou are nice animals. And 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 spokespersons say this over and over. And 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 up there in summer, and I can close my eyes and go back there 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 is moving with 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, spangled 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 land is covered with tussocks of grass, clumps of reindeer moss, boggy low spots, the occasional snowdrift, but broken everywhere by innumerable and nameless little 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 birdsong.

On the other side of the nearby pond, a small bird is fluttering high. Slim, long-winged, patterned in subtle browns, the bird is hovering with odd slow wingbeats, singing a short trilled song that it repeats over and over, on and on. The endurance displayed in this song-flight seems incredible ... but then again, perhaps not. 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, or at least the males are odd, as they gather on a nearby rise and seek to outdo each other in courtship displays. One of the males will puff out his chest unbelieveably 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. Odd indeed—although, if female pectoral sandpipers are attracted by this, they must be rather strange themselves. These birds have flown back here from as far away as Australia or South America 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, flutters and glides overhead while he makes odd honking and rattling sounds. Not very musical but definitely champion migrants, white-rumps concentrate in southernmost South America in 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 also 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, Wilson’s snipes are zooming about, making their hollow winnowing sound.

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 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 unbelieveably 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 real 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 in which 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 they are 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. And the birds that lived on those areas cannot 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 dead, for all practical purposes, just as if you had shot it.

These are sobering things to consider 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 another long migration, 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 go into it with the full knowledge of what we will be destroying.



	Current Topics in Natural History and Wildlife Conservation
	July 17, 2008: Drilling in the Arctic Refuge Some elements within the energy industry have been trying for years to get the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska opened up for for oil drilling. So far, such attempts have been voted down by congress. But the current high gasoline prices are seen by some as an opportunity to reopen the debate. The issue has suffered from some overheated rhetoric on both sides, with the pro-drilling factions accusing “environmental extremists” of causing the current high gasoline prices. A calmer assessment of the potential for oil in the Arctic Refuge can be found in a May 2008 report prepared by the Department of Energy. Their best estimate is that oil from the Arctic Refuge could lower the cost of gasoline at the pump by a little less than four cents per gallon, with the first effects felt in 2018 and maximum impact in 2027-2028. Given the current progress on alternative energy sources and alternative vehicles, we can reasonably ask whether this savings of less than one percent, achieved 20 years from now, is worth the risk to the environment of the Arctic. A congressional delegation led by House Minority Leader John Boehner, from my own state of Ohio, is heading to Alaska within the next few days. They will make a brief visit to the North Slope, including the Arctic Refuge. We would like to hope that our elected representatives would approach this visit with open minds and with an honest desire to learn about the refuge. Unfortunately, Rep. Boehner gave a good indication of his motives during a press conference on July 15: “We’re going to look at this barren, Arctic desert where I’m hoping to see some wildlife. But I understand there’s none there.” It’s disappointing to hear that Rep. Boehner apparently has been swayed by the falsehoods of those who depict the Arctic as a “barren desert.” We would hope that he and the other representatives would have the honesty and integrity to try to find out about the wildlife on the refuge for themselves. The fact is that the refuge is a nesting ground for vast numbers of migratory birds, a place that hums with life during the brief Arctic summer. Those of us who know the situation have been trying to communicate the facts for years. Reproduced below is a column that I wrote almost seven years ago, addressing this very issue; most of the points in the column are still applicable today.
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		*This text was written in October 2001, and an edited version of it appeared in my column in Bird Watcher's Digest in January/February 2002.* 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. Now, don't get me wrong: I'm convinced there are good and decent people on both sides of the 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 these are honest individuals with a professional and personal commitment to wildlife conservation. I believe the debate could 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 last few weeks—enough 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 the idea 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 in a condescending tone, making it obvious she’d never had a close look at the huge iron-jawed meat-eating machine that is a real polar bear. “And the caribou are nice animals. And 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 spokespersons say this over and over. And 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 up there in summer, and I can close my eyes and go back there 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 is moving with 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, spangled 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 land is covered with tussocks of grass, clumps of reindeer moss, boggy low spots, the occasional snowdrift, but broken everywhere by innumerable and nameless little 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 birdsong. On the other side of the nearby pond, a small bird is fluttering high. Slim, long-winged, patterned in subtle browns, the bird is hovering with odd slow wingbeats, singing a short trilled song that it repeats over and over, on and on. The endurance displayed in this song-flight seems incredible ... but then again, perhaps not. 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, or at least the males are odd, as they gather on a nearby rise and seek to outdo each other in courtship displays. One of the males will puff out his chest unbelieveably 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. Odd indeed—although, if female pectoral sandpipers are attracted by this, they must be rather strange themselves. These birds have flown back here from as far away as Australia or South America 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, flutters and glides overhead while he makes odd honking and rattling sounds. Not very musical but definitely champion migrants, white-rumps concentrate in southernmost South America in 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 also 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, Wilson’s snipes are zooming about, making their hollow winnowing sound. 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 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 unbelieveably 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 real 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 in which 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 they are 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. And the birds that lived on those areas cannot 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 dead, for all practical purposes, just as if you had shot it. These are sobering things to consider 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 another long migration, 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 go into it with the full knowledge of what we will be destroying.

Current Topics in Natural History and Wildlife Conservation