Even though it is only the middle of July and we have just passed our halfway point – one month on the island – the seasons are starting to turn. Each day it gets a little bit darker at night and now the sun dips below the hills north of Pauline Cove at around 2am. Some of the flowers are dropping their petals such as Dryas integrifolia (or the Arctic Avens) that has even started to produce the twisting filaments of its seeds. And, the Salix richardsonii (or Richard’s Willow) is starting to release its fluffy seed on the wind. If you pick a Salix richardsonii catkin and blow on it, like a dandelion, you can make a wish – a willow wish.

This blog post is devoted to our list of willow wishes for the coming weeks…

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Our willow wishes:

1. Please can at least one of our drones start working again. We have had some major mechanical problems and both drones are grounded. We are hoping that Shrubcopter will be airborne again soon though… and a fixed wing, some kites and a new drone are on their way to the island.

2. Please can the wind stay brisk to keep away the clouds of mosquitoes, so that we are not driven crazy by the incessant droning, biting and itching. The mosquitos are at their peak now. We try to wait for the wind to pick up in the afternoons before going out, so that it isn’t so bad. The last few days the wind has been so brisk that there haven’t been hardly any bugs at all!

3. Please can the Muskoxen stop knocking down our phenocams – time lapse cameras pointed at the tundra – so that we can get record of the changing season of the tundra plants. We have repaired the third knock down so far and are anticipating more… but recently the muskox have moved away from our side of the island for a bit.

4. Please can the remainder of our field crew make it out very efficiently to us this week when the two halves of TeamShrub will be reunited after a month or more apart. It has been a long time since we have seen our team shrub friends, and we are very excited to see them again soon! It seems strange to be emailing back and forth with them when they are only an hour flight away in Inuvik!

5. Please can all sorts of really delicious (mamaqtuq in Inuvialutun) fresh fruits and vegetables come out with Team Kluane so that we can feast! We have finished pretty much all of our fresh food and are having the last of the potatoes tonight, so we are very excited that Team Kluane is bringing us exciting delights from Whitehorse and Inuvik for our final month on the island.

6. Jakob wishes he wasn’t after Isla’s cooking in the chores schedule, because Isla makes too many dishes dirty (even though she cooks delicious desserts)! It is going to be a lot more work cooking and cleaning for 9 people instead of 4, but on the other hand our cooking, washing up and lunches days won’t come around quite so often any more.

7. Please when we return to the city, can the pound be worth a normal amount so that we can go to a shop and buy things like normal people. We have occasionally been getting updates on all of the world events going on out there and the Arctic seems like the place to be even if our salary might be half what it once was.

8. Please can Otto the Walrus come back to visit us again! We miss you Otto. It was so awesome to see you for the first time, we want to see you again!

9. Please can we gain magical powers to both ward of mosquitoes and know where and when all the really cool wildlife are near us. Santo and I were passing the time on a hike out to the field discussing the magical power we would most want and we couldn’t decide between these two.

While we wait for all those willow wishes to come true, I can update you a bit on the goings on of Qikiqtaruk. Jakob and Andy have been spending a fair bit of time in the “Drone Lab” trying to repair the broken drones. Meanwhile Santo and Isla (sometimes accompanied by Andy) have been heading out into the field to do phenology measurements, taking precision GPS measurements of the ground control markers and taking multispectral measurements from a pole. Those sequoia sensors are really cool, but can be frustrating when you try to power them using a very long USB cable that doesn’t always work.

Yesterday, we were out at plot 4, working away, when the wind started to build and build – this was great because it meant that the bugs disappeared, but it kept getting windier and windier. We were almost getting blown over it was so windy. On the way back to camp we were throwing sticks into the air and they would come right back to us like a boomerang in the wind!

Then a small storm blew in, bringing some rain, so we stuck to camp and worked on drones, building structure-for-motion models of shrub canopies, and giving a talk on the science that we are up to on the Island to the visiting birders, the rangers, and Yukon Government employees. It was a jolly evening and now the sun is back and a lovely yellow and orange Western Tanager blown in on the wind has joined us at Pauline Cove. Cameron Eckert – parks biologist and ornithologist will be jealous of our yellow bird photos!!!

The most recent folks to leave the island were the crew from Heritage – Brent, Gisli and Jerry. Before their departure we had a heritage feast replete with an apple pie. Great work guys on levelling the Trapper’s cabin, lifting up the warehouses and fixing up the door to the ice house! Such an efficient team and so much heritage restored! Congrats to Brent on his 30-year anniversary of working here on the island!

About a week ago TeamDrone took a day off and got a boat ride out to Slump D – perhaps the second biggest retrogressive thaw slump in the North American Arctic! We saw some pretty cool features like this hole down into the permafrost where a stream was dripping off of the head wall. We saw some caribou running around in the slump too!

On the hike back from Slump D we found what might be the new tallest shrub on Qikiqtaruk – Tina. She is growing close to Tina slump and is a Salix alaxensis – the potentially up to 4 m tall willow species that we just discovered on the island last year! Look how tall she is! I haven’t measured yet, because we didn’t have measuring tape with us, but I have her height marked on my walking poll, we shall see if she can beat the height of Bjørn from last year.

To finish off here are are some pretty flower photos, and a very old plant…

Isla’s favourite flower – bladder campion (Silene uralensis)

Stellaria longipes

Shooting star (Dodecatheon frigidum)

Chamomile (Matricaria ambigua)

Paintbrush (Castilleja elegans)

Arctic Poppy (Papaver radicatum)

Can’t wait to be one big TeamShrub again in about a day or so!

Sandra left her zoom lens behind so we were bound so see some wildlife.

We passed by the bald eagle sitting in a tree above us, passed by the spruce grouse perched on a log by the path, passed by the three ptarmigan chicks pretending to be rocks, but we did have to stop for the two bears fighting it out on the horizon. Reared to full height, clawing and jawing each other, we almost didn’t notice the third bear just below them watching with some bemusement. And we definitely didn’t notice the fourth one that we walked into thinking it was just a hungry hummock of tundra. Thankfully it was too busy being hungry to give us much thought so we skirted around it filled with that strange mixture of fear and awe. After it eventually spotted us, looked us over as if to say “where did these odd creatures spring from?” and shuffled off awkwardly to look for some roots in an altogether less noisy part of the tundra, we all agreed that bears were really rather cute, though that we hoped not to see one again that day.

A spruce grouse, or “fool hen”

A ptarmigan chick trying to blend in with the surrounding rocks

This was our third time on the Kluane Plateau that week. Our legs were by now starting to feel much better about the four hour hike up 1000m of hill. Our boots were not. Sandra had reverted to wellies. Nevertheless, the quest for knowledge is a noble goal and worse things than walking boots have fallen apart in its pursuit.

A brief description here if you are lost (as we tend to become whenever we try to tackle the tall shrub without a GPS). The Kluane Plateau rises to the south of the Kluane Lake Research Station, home of the Arctic Institute of North America. 60° north of the equator and 1800m above sea level, the mountain ceases to rise for a short period and flattens out, giving us a stretch of unbroken tundra before the slope picks up again and breaks apart into snow packs and loose rocks. Here plants burst into their short existence between sunrise and snowfall, between the spring and the all too soon oncoming winter, coursing with life under a midnight sun. The hike “upstairs” passes through sun-lanced spruce forest in a haze of sweat before the trees thin and sharp, leaf bound branches claw at our arms, before clouds of blue, purple and yellow flowers spill around our holey boots, before the canopy and the hillslope rise to meet each other in the squishy, mossy, unbroken green sea of tundra. By that time out feet hurt a lot so we tend to lie down in a lump and eat some peanuts.

That day there would be less lumping because we didn’t want to be mistaken for the ursine equivalent of peanuts by Claire the bear. There was also little time to finish our more important tasks. We sampled willow stems for the common garden to compare how fast and how tall shrubs from different parts of the Arctic can grow in a common, and altogether warmer, environment. We measured plant traits – their characteristics (height, leaf size and thickness, woodiness etc) – to help determine how they interact with their environment.  We monitored soil moisture around buried and half-rotten teabags, not yesterday’s lunch but part of an experiment to find out how important moisture is for decomposition in temperature-limited places like the tundra. And we collected the leaves of a small shrub called Rhododendron groenlandicum because stewed in hot water they make a delicious tea.

Burying tea in the dense shrub

Tea plots

The hum of oncoming summer (Ok, not a bee)

John thinking about Arctic science

Using walking poles to mark out tiny willows

The clouds were playing games with us a little (jumpers on everyone. Wait…who has the suncream? Damn, unpack the waterproofs!) and despite clambering up and down a mountainside looking for a species of willow only 7cm tall and “definitely around here somewhere” we got all the work done in good time. Walking downhill is always more enjoyable I find, particularly when the tundra sponge add the impression of walking down the side of a slightly deflated bouncy castle.

Down into the shrub line, only getting lost once. Down into the tall shrubs, scratching open our scratches with their branches. Down into the forest where the air is dense and the paths try to slip and trip you at the same time. Down into the fresh air of the canyon edge where the light changes and the water rushes and the breeze starts to fumble again with your backpack, and where John fell and twisted his ankle only twenty minutes from the bottom of the hill.

Not the end any of us were expecting.

Post script 1

We all wrote Haikus for the bears.

Fighting silhouettes.
Teeth bared, claws raised, poised for strike.
This female is mine.

Hello lady bear.
I’ll fight for your…argh my face!
I might just leg it.

Foraging flowers.
Macho displays on the ridge.
I prefer tussocks.

Unwary hiker,
Look sharp! See that golden fur?
Let sleeping bears lie.

Post script 2

John is fine by the way.

For a vast and flat landscape with wide horizons and short vegetation it is surprisingly easy to lose stuff in the tundra. Tussocks, willows and permafrost erosion create the perfect environment for anything dropped to be lost permanently.

Last year we spend hours looking for lost handheld radios, a compass, drone bits and … gloves! Two of those were mine (and of different pairs). 10 months ago I left the island thinking that they were gone for good.

But as much of a black hole the tundra is, it occasionally regurgitates a lost item. This year it turned out to be three:

On our first visit to Collinson Head where we are setting up our some of our drone field sites, Isla suddenly shouts out, bends down and picks up the brown working glove I lost last year. What a surprise!

Full of joy, we head on to our next plot, till I suddenly realised that I lost one of the new pair of gloves that I bought this year. Backtracking for a kilometre, I am about to accept my karma – a glove lost for one gained – when I spot a red and black patch on between the cotton grass. There is my second glove.

The following day I am rummaging around the rangers’ workshop looking for a pair of clippers to cut tin sheet, when I spot a too familiar looking red glove sitting on the shelf: Indeed, the last one of my lost gloves from last year, found by the rangers in spring and kindly brought back to camp.

Three gloves lost and three gloves found, one pair united and two still waiting for to meet their partners upon our return to Edinburgh. Together with the beluga whales, bears and musk ox, such little things provide us joy and make working in the cold and wet of the tundra worthwhile.

By Jakob

We are back at Base after a week in Pika Camp. Last Sunday saw us depart with almost surprising punctuality as we hitched a ride with our new friends Scott and Cole (U. of Alberta), who were on a mission to check the bear-beaten weather stations that dot Pika Valley (final score was bear: 3 / stations: 4).

The long hike with our heavily loaded packs was like a snail race up the hill, following the tracks of bears and moose and wishing we were as agile as them. In the end we all made it across the ridge, and seeing the familiar little white igloo down in the valley heartened us as we hurried towards it to set up camp.

The strenuous walking was far from being over, as John and I spent the next two days trudging up and down a 700 m elevation gradient to set up and monitor a herbivory experiment. Luckily, we were rewarded with sightings of porcupines, marmots, pikas, ground squirrels and ptarmigans, and the view from the top of East Peak was in itself largely worth the effort.

This very unfazed ptarmigan would not move to let us pass across the creek bed

A wary ground squirrel alerting his friends of our presence

Meanwhile, Haydn and Eleanor were so busy collecting traits and litter samples that they would forget to have lunch, and then make up for it by ransacking our supplies of snacks and Country Time.

On the third day our spirits were – quite literally – dampened as a stormy front settled over the valley. After a morning of cold, wet and not particularly efficient fieldwork, we all retreated to the Pod for a lengthy lunch break. The lack of external forms of entertainment or mental stimulation were first felt when Haydn had the brilliant idea of naming each of this year’s cohort of 300 willows in the common garden with a name beginning with D, which led us to brainstorm 78 of them (suggestions anyone?). One thing leading to another, John was next challenging Haydn and I to name over a hundred Harry Potter characters. (We managed 216, can you do better? – or you could just do like Eleanor and go for a nap.)

After this cheerful nerdy break, we went out again for more sampling and before we knew it, we were all sitting in front of our last meal in Pika Camp. This was the perfect opportunity to celebrate John’s graduation from his Ecological and Environmental Sciences degree, which was officially taking place in Edinburgh last weekend. We all solemnly applauded as he put on his robe (made of a garbage bag lined with duct tape and flagging tape and complete with a toilet paper faux-fur collar), got hit on the head by Haydn’s beanie (for those familiar with Edinburgh graduation customs, the beanie got to the top of East Peak, which is as close as we could get it to space) and received a hand-made certificate signed by all of us. Congratulations John!

We made good time on the way down the following morning, fuelled by the promise of hot showers, cold beers and snug cabins waiting for us at Base. With two hours to spare before our agreed pick-up time (yes, we were that excited), we engaged in a heated pétanque match on the sandy roadside. It is now time to get back to work as there are dozens of willows to be rooted and hundreds of seeds to be germinated. Stay tuned for scientific discoveries!

By Sandra