Thursday, August 03, 2017

Svalbard Diary, Day 6: The ice shelf and the kittiwake

We awoke to a rather gloomy picture, with temperatures below freezing and a stiff breeze from the north. However, we were passing the rarely seen ice shelf on the southern shore of Nordtauslandt, the second largest of Svalbard's islands. It's rarely seen because the pack ice seldom allows access, and even if you can get there, impenetrable fog often obscures the view.

Mile upon mile of ice cliffs, facing south, represents an impassable barrier. It was time to turn south.

We were heading for an area known as Kittiwake Canyon, where a crease in the hillside has created a perfect nesting sight for, yes, you guessed it, kittiwakes. Now I must admit that seabirds have not traditionally been a core fascination here at "Liberal Bureaucracy", but there is something curiously relaxing about a bunch of nesting birds, scattered across a cliff face. And the kittiwake seem pretty relaxed about us too, allowing us to get surprisingly close to them.


Apparently, kittiwake chicks have an innate sense of where the cliff ledge ends and the sheer drops starts, and early scientific researchers tested this in a way which seems astonishingly cruel nowadays. Different gull chicks were placed in kittiwake nests and inevitably fell to the deaths, demonstrating just how unique kittiwake are. Not a piece of knowledge with tremendous potential for application elsewhere, I'd have thought, but what do I know?...

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