In two posts last summer (this one and this one) I admitted that yes……… I was a bit of a raptor nut. In the second I just happened to mention that I’d spent time observing peregrines and gyrfalcons in Greenland. How did I manage that? Weeelll…… I had wangled a place on the White-fronted Goose Study 1984 Expedition to west Greenland, just inside the Arctic circle. I spent more than three months there, from a sub-zero early May – with snow deep on the ground – until mid-August – well into the arctic autumn. By that time snow had started falling again instead of rain and the nights had begun to draw in. They must have been at least an hour long!
To be perfectly honest, even then I was more interested in birds of prey than geese. I would have been happier tramping around the area looking for eyries than some of the very mundane tasks us normal folks were expected to do. One example I remember of the latter was assisting with the fieldwork for one of the expedition leaders’ PhD. It involved cutting areas of vegetation back with nail scissors to simulate the effects of goose grazing, and collecting the clippings ready for analysis. I don’t think the PhD was ever completed.
Rifling through my brain cells recently I remembered that as a result of my explorations I managed to get a scientific paper published in an American publication, the Journal of Raptor Research. I may have a paper copy of it somewhere but I would have no idea where to start looking, and there was no record of it on the Journal’s website. So I emailed the President of Raptor Research Foundation and to my delight and surprise he immediately sent to me a scan of the paper.
Most of the other expedition members were very ambitious young biology or environmental science graduates. For various reasons I was a bit of an outsider, being about ten years older than them, with more experience of “life”, and in some ways, of fieldwork. Plus I had a degree in psychology! In some ways it was a difficult time. I felt that I should have had a tee-shirt made with a big slogan on the front : “Expedition Scapegoat”
Reading the paper reminded me that at the time I myself was also rather ambitiously hoping to make a career in wildlife conservation. I already had the waxed Barbour jacket. Many of the other members were using the expedition as a stepping stone to greater things. Several have made successful careers in conservation and are very well known in their fields. But for me it was the beginning of a realisation that I just wasn’t going to make it. Environmental science graduates were flooding out of British universities so my chances were poor. By the time the paper was published, in 1987, I had more or less thrown in the towel, and decided to become photographer. Ever the realist! But at least as the latter I was modestly successful.
The photograph was taken a couple of miles from the ice-cap and shows a tremendous, primeval, melt-water river valley. You can just about see low sand-dunes by the river bank. The glacial erratics reminded me of standing stones. Behind the camera lay a several-mile stretch of sheer cliffs on which peregrines nested; I may have missed gyrfalcons on my visit. It was one of the most magnificent landscapes I have ever had the opportunity to visit. The original image was taken on Kodachrome 64 and has faded and lost definition over the last thirty-eight years. I scanned it in to Lightroom and spent quite some time processing it in an attempt to reproduce the vitality of the original landscape.
If you’d like to read the paper, here it is. Click on the link below: feel free to comment!
Raptor nut – it’s official!
To read more Tales from Wild Wales as they are published, please click the Follow button,
Tales from Wild Wales 