Caribou flight

I'm going to India on August 14th, but before that, I'm preparing myself for the heat of the subcontinent by spending the summer in the Alaskan arctic. I thought that if I was going to quit my job to go to India, I might as well quit a bit early and do some fun field work before-hand! I'm working for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service as a seasonal biological technician on a shorebird breeding study on the coastal stretches of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. We have a big field team of about 12, who will be divided into three field camps based at three different river deltas along the arctic ocean. I'm not yet sure what delta I'll be at - those assignments will be made once we get into the field. I've been in Fairbanks, Alaska, where the Arctic Refuge field office is, for about a week now, preparing for the field season. This has mostly involved getting gear together, fixing tents and boat motors, and buying A LOT of food from various grocery stores and mailing it up to Kaktovic, a small village on the Arctic Ocean that we will stage the field camps out of. Ha, on Wednesday we bought $3,500 of food, and then spent another $1,000 to mail it. Seems crazy, but we had to get enough to feed 12 people for 6 weeks in a cold climate. We couldn't buy it in Kaktovic because apparently there's not much in the grocery stores there other than soda pop and doritos, and it's very expensive.



On Saturday Ryan and I got to go on a sweet boondoggle. The chief biologist of the refuge called us on Friday night to tell us that the annual census of the Porcupine caribou herd was taking place on Saturday. Three small planes from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service left from Fairbanks at 6am to fly north up over the Brooks range to the coastal plain, using radio telemetry to locate collared caribou individuals, and then take photos of the herd to get a count.







The pilot, Dave, Ryan and I flew north from Fairbanks in a Cessna 185 (a really small plane, the three of us took up all the seats), passing over the White Mountains, the Yukon Flats Wildlife Refuge, the Brooks Range, and finally to the coastal plain and the Arctic Ocean (a three hour flight). In concert with the other two planes, we then flew back and forth, listening intently to our radio reciever for the characteristic beeps that would indicate the presence of a radio-collar banded caribou. When we heard the beeps, we swooped down in the plane to get an exact GPS reading. All the crazy airmanship was making me ill, but it was an awesome experience with spectacular scenery! The photo of the aircraft here is not a Cessna - this was a beaver flown by the Alaska Fish and Game. They had a WWII-era camera mounted underneath to take photos of the herds to complete the census.