There was nothing to see but an unbroken sea of snow and ice when Maureen McClintock arrived at the Tutakoke Bird Camp in April 2013. She and three other wildlife biologists took a charter plane to Cheevak, Alaska, snowmobiled about 30 miles to a point located by GPS, and then began digging. They set up a single tent on the first wooden platform they excavated from six feet of snow, and then they waited. McClintock was hired as a seasonal research technician to work on a long-range population study of black brant, a goose that is one of the avian species that has a breeding ground in the Yukon-Kuskokwim (Y-K) Delta in Alaska. She laughs and remembers that it was an unusually cold and delayed season, so for three weeks she waited in a tent with three near-strangers for the snows to melt and the birds to show.
And she wouldn’t trade the experience for anything. “It’s estimated that 40 percent of the bird species in the western flyways nest there [in the Y-K Delta],” McClintock said, “So the breeding season is incredible. It’s just – it’s covered. There are birds everywhere. I was there to study brant but got to see so many other species, including some endangered species.” This population of black brant winters in Mexico and travels up the California coast to the Y-K Delta breeding grounds each summer. There are other groups of brant, says McClintock, but this is the largest. This study, headed by Jim Seddinger at the University of Nevada Reno, has been continuously monitoring this population since 1987.
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