Seabirds of Prince William Sound

Earthwatch volunteer David Brindle, who works for Shell in the Netherlands, joined the Earthwatch expedition Seabirds of Prince William Sound in July 2008.

I've always loved the great outdoors, but I've never paid much attention to the creatures roaming in it. After this expedition I see the link: we're conserving the environment for wildlife as well as for ourselves, and flourishing wildlife shows we're managing it well.

Despite Prince William Sound being in the Chugach National Forest which was designated in 1907 by Theodore Roosevelt, the threat from human activity is never far away. Below our field camp in a beautiful bay headed by the Shoup glacier and ringed by mountains, loaded supertankers slid daily through the Valdez narrows.

I'm an engineer, and I admit I didn't expect the data gathering to be interesting, but I was wrong. For a couple of months a year, 20,000 black-legged kittiwakes descend on this small rocky island in Prince William Sound to raise their chicks. The raucous noise, smell and mess of this seabird colony has to be experienced to be believed.

I learned that kittiwakes only feed on herring and pollock, so their success in feeding chicks is an indicator of the health of the oceans (by comparison, increasing numbers of glaucous-winged gulls means nothing, because they scavenge from domestic rubbish). The adults fly for hours to fetch food for their chicks. To assess their breeding success, we caught, weighed and measured the same chicks every three days. They grow quickly, and reach full size in about 30 days before leaving the nest. I learned that predation also controls chick numbers, and we monitored how this happened. As a bald eagle hovered over the colony, the adult kittiwakes would fly off in panic, and magpies would dive in to grab a chick. Life for kittiwake chicks is a race between eating and being eaten. Long term results show that the colony is just holding its own, so any trend up or down in future could be significant.

The Earthwatch field team leaders patiently taught us how to crimp bands onto chick legs (we practised first on kebab skewers), and how to measure and weigh a chick. Their dry humour had clearly been shaped by four months in the field: "If the chick barfs on you, please scrape it into a bag for analysis...ooh look, this bag's got sea worms in it!" It certainly helped to keep our team smiling in the endless rain. I didn't need my technical skills for the work, but the biologists were intrigued when I showed them how to triangulate the distance to the island from the shore. And inevitably, I faced some lively discussion about why gasoline for the outboards cost more than $5 a gallon. Actually, everyone conceded that the higher price did make people more careful in how they used it.

This was also borne out by daily life at the field camp. "Reduce, Reuse, Recycle" was a daily ritual. All drinking water had to be brought in - so being profligate with drinking water meant a two hour boat trip to fetch more. We collected rainwater for washing, and despite constant rain, the rainwater butt ran low, so we reused our dinner plates for dessert to cut down on washing up. Showering was out - water and propane gas was just too precious. "Sorry guys....but you can swim in a glacier pool to freshen up!" We reused empty plastic bottles as bailers in the boats, reducing the amount of trash we had to ship out. If it sounds tough, it was, but it really showed me how many resources we use and how much rubbish we make, just to live. Reduce, Reuse, Recycle, please everybody!

The field camp was so isolated that the only contact we had with other ‘locals' was with occasional kayakers who came to paddle around the bay. Seeing us with our clipboards and binoculars, they were curious as to what we were doing, and it was nice to chat to them and explain our work. I learned every intro could be the start of a fruitful discussion. Even a "How's it going?" from the check-in staff at Valdez airport on the way home led to "I've been working two weeks on an environmental project and....." instead of "Fine, thanks".

I'd urge you to apply for an Earthwatch project. You don't need specific skills - what I needed most was enthusiasm, and being patient when things didn't go to plan. You'll come back with a new desire to learn something new.