Scientist spotted birds' warning

COOPER ISLAND, Alaska — The Bird Man was restless.

He had begged his annual helicopter ride to this scratch of island in the sea. He had loaded both shotguns, unfurled two fat sleeping bags and unpacked gallon after gallon of Dinty Moore beef stew.

Still, ornithologist George Divoky couldn't yet visit the seabirds he'd come 2,000 miles to see.

First he had to clean up the pasta a hungry polar bear had spilled on the floor of his tiny plywood shack while he was away.

Flustered and impatient, Divoky moved left and right, a white trash bag in hand, struggling to figure out what to pick up first. "This isn't too bad," he muttered. "I mean, it's kind of bad."

This is the dogged, if befuddled, scientist who has become respected worldwide as one of the first to record how Arctic warming was making life worse for some creatures.

Bird signals

Every summer for three decades, this 59-year-old, a Seattle resident who works for the University of Alaska's Institute for Arctic Biology, has migrated to Cooper Island, a pile of pebbles in the Arctic Ocean 25 miles from Barrow.

The grizzled scientist arrives each June, hauling three months' worth of supplies, to record the lives of birds called black guillemots, which nest on the ground under decaying wooden boxes.

Thirty years ago, Divoky's mission started simply enough: He hoped to record long-term observations of a colony of seabird — an undertaking too obscure for all but the most devoted scientists.

But one day he spotted a weird pattern.

Guillemots don't nest until the snow melts and the ground is exposed. The first eggs are laid roughly two weeks later. In the mid-1990s, Divoky noticed that first egg was being laid 10 days earlier than in 1975.

The Arctic summer was arriving sooner.

"It happened so slowly, it took a long time to see," Divoky said.

Eventually the federal government also took notice.

"I think it was our station chief at Barrow who told me there was this crazy guy who studies birds, and he's got almost 30 years of data," said Bob Stone of the University of Colorado, who works with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration. "I took George's data and compared it to the disappearance of snow at Barrow, and it's extremely well-correlated."

It was among the earliest evidence that the Arctic was melting.

And the link between guillemots and climate would only grow stronger.

Witnessing change

Divoky's friends, after worrying for years about his futile efforts to keep polar bears out of his tents, finally built him the little cabin on Cooper Island in 2002. Now hungry bears simply break into it.

That's how, on his first day on the island last summer, Divoky wound up inspecting clawed insulation and picking up spilled spaghetti and punctured bottles of salsa and chili powder.

Finally, at 2 a.m., with the sun shining and the mercury hovering at a mild 15 degrees, Divoky traipsed across the gravelly island toward an incessant chirping, all the while prattling nonstop himself.

All around, the guillemots were arriving from a night of fishing to huddle in pairs and squeak like chipmunks. Divoky nodded at wooden nests he has dubbed "Wallingford bungalows" and "married-student housing."

"The military was out here in 1955 and 1956, and they had a bunch of ordnance with them, which is where all these boxes came from," he chattered as he made his way past a puddle he called Pasta Pond because it contains just enough salt to boil his noodles.

"You've got the gun, right?"

Divoky lives a life like few others. He fills garbage bags with ice, which he melts for drinking water. He's had so little financial backing for his research that he has "borrowed" frequent-flier miles from his school-age son to get to his island.

One summer he and a visitor watched as polar bears chomped most of his guillemots.

"We were very freaked, and called search and rescue to be picked up," Divoky recalled. "There was no thought of dedication to science. We saw no reason left to be here. A bear eats all your study animals? Fine. Now we'll leave."

The guillemot colony once hovered at 200 pairs. But as the sea ice moved farther offshore each year, it drew away cod the guillemots eat. As temperatures ticked up, horned puffins, which used to stay in the warmer Bering Sea, began moving in and killing the guillemots to take over their nests.

"Now you've got a sub-Arctic species driving out an Arctic species in the middle of the Arctic," Divoky said.

He suspects warming will ultimately drive off all the guillemots, leaving Cooper Island for puffins. But "I don't have another 30-year study in me ... " he said.

He lifted up a guillemot egg and held it to his lips, gauging the subtle temperature to determine if a chick was live inside.

The egg was cold. So he continued his thought.

"... But if we break it into three 10-year studies... " he said, and he raised an eyebrow.

And then Divoky turned back to his birds.