Personal Beginnings - The Changing Arctic Environment: The Arctic Messenger - page 4

tumn by a bear that had come ashore several months before the arrival of the ice and seals.
Seven years later, when doing an oceanographic section by ship, we encountered a bear
swimming exactly halfway between Disco (Greenland) and Baffin Island. It was more than
150 kilometres from the nearest land and (it being late summer) was at least 300 kilometres
from the closest pack ice. The bear did not seem to be lost or disorientated and kept swim-
ming in a straight line towards the west, sublimely undisturbed by the ship circling around.
It is constantly surprising how quickly time glides by. I have not seen Robert for 40
years. He became the geography teacher at the school in Drumnadrochit, not far from Loch
Ness, and later at Tain. His enthusiasm for birds obviously never waned. From time to
time, I read about him accompanied by bands of lucky schoolchildren working on birds all
over the highlands and islands but especially on Canna. Here, he has maintained a sum-
mer ringing (banding in North America) and census programme of the bird population that
must be one of the most valuable ornithological records in Scotland. I often think about
the learning experiences provided by Robert, along with Andrew Ramsey, Peter Macdou-
gal and Alastair Duncan (three other teaching friends from my Aberdeen days), and by
my wife, Thérèse, who also became a teacher. Their exciting extracurricular environment-
al activities with young minds must have encouraged a public awareness of environmental
issues in adult life.
Glaucous gulls preyed heavily on the young seabirds behind our Kongsfjorden tent.
The adult glaucous gulls are magnificent, but from a purely human viewpoint, they prob-
ably have few friends. They will murder anything they can. However, with them having
not evolved into raptors, it is a clumsy and cruel business. A few days before our return
to Aberdeen, I noticed one close to our tent. It was behaving in a distressed way, and soon
after, it was dead. I was puzzled. It looked so healthy, with a lot of fat and no obvious
parasite problems. I took some organ and fatty tissue samples and added them to the puffin
material collected earlier by Sandy Anderson. All the samples were passed to Bill Bourne,
who was then working at Aberdeen University. Later, we learned that the puffins contained
similar levels of PCB derivatives as were found in other auks from the Scottish coast des-