Personal Beginnings - The Changing Arctic Environment: The Arctic Messenger - page 5

pite their apparent isolation in Svalbard. However, my glaucous gull had the highest levels
of PCBs that the analyzing laboratory had encountered up to that time.
I do not believe the glaucous gull levels were ever published. It was a single bird and
of no statistical significance. However, it was a personal milestone for the rest of my life
and for the theme of this topic. How could an Arctic bird, whose winter migrations would
rarely (if ever) take it into industrialized waters, carry such a large burden of a toxic chem-
ical and what is the underlying message for the Arctic and global environments?
I made a museum skin of the gull. It remained a barely tolerated guest at the home of
my aunt in southern England. One night, after an aggressive spring-cleaning operation, my
bird was tossed over the estate wall of some local gentry whom she particularly disliked.
What is it about the Arctic that is so seductive? People whose ancestors have lived
there through hundreds if not thousands of generations will have a perspective that out-
siders such as myself can never experience or fully understand. What has it been for me? I
cannot really say, but I do know it is a magic that has never weakened since those days in
1972 amongst the flowering dryas with the utterly unstoppable Kongsvegen glacier thun-
dering into Kongsfjorden and the feeding orgy of the clamorously shrieking kittiwakes. It
is a landscape that engenders the true measure of how insignificant one really is. To para-
phrase from a poem by Chief Dan George, your spirit soars.
Whatever it was and still is, the spell was cast. That summer beside the Kongsvegen
became a turning point for the rest of my life. Returning to Aberdeen, I wondered what
research topic would get me back into the Arctic. The seabirds at Kongsfjorden were obvi-
ouslyfeedingattheicefront.Whatweretheconditionsthatgavethemsuchafeast?Iwrote
a doctorate proposal and sent it to every university I thought would be interested. The first
reply came from Alan Lewis, a professor at the Institute of Oceanography at the University
of British Columbia in Vancouver, Canada. I arrived there in late August 1973 and spent
the next four years working on plankton ecology in Knight Inlet, a very long glacial runoff
fjord about a 24-hour sail north of Vancouver.
These were wonderful years. Thérèse came to Vancouver just before my first Christ-
mas there and we were married two days later before five guests and the officiating priest.