\n<\/p>\n
High up in the Arctic Circle, Olivier Chastel begins his working day by scanning the horizon for polar bears, rifle at the ready. \u201cIn 25 years I\u2019ve never had to use it, but you can\u2019t be too careful,\u201d he explains. There can\u2019t be many conservationists who go birdwatching while armed, but the danger to life from bears in Svalbard \u2014 the largest island of the Norwegian polar archipelago \u2014 is so high that it\u2019s a legal requirement.<\/p>\n
Every day between mid-May and early July, Chastel and his colleague Fr\u00e9d\u00e9ric Angelier, a specialist in avian stress physiology, use a 5-metre rubber dinghy to visit the Krykkjefjellet kittiwake colony, where around 400 pairs of black-legged kittiwakes (Rissa tridactyla<\/em>) come to nest each year. \u201cTypically, we stop the boat just in front of the beach and scout the place before landing,\u201d says Chastel. \u201cWe see polar bears coming for the bird eggs, just like us, and often they arrive before us. But most of the time they leave in peace.\u201d<\/p>\n For 25 summers, Chastel, a biologist, has returned to the same spot to monitor these migratory seabirds, which travel 4,000\u20135,000 kilometres each year, from the Canadian Arctic to Svalbard\u2019s western Kongsfjorden coastline, to breed. Since 2000, Chastel has been studying the impact of synthetic contaminants as well as mercury on the birds\u2019 physiology, a project supported by the French Polar Institute in Plouzan\u00e9 as part of a long-term partnership with the Norwegian Polar Institute in Troms\u00f8.<\/p>\n Angelier (pictured with Chastel, below), who works alongside Chastel at the Centre for Biological Studies of Chiz\u00e9 in Villiers-en-Bois, part of the French National Centre for Scientific Research (CNRS), comes to the site to study how contaminants affect the telomeres at the ends of the birds\u2019 chromosomes, a biomarker of health. The two researchers have been close friends and colleagues since 2001, when Angelier became Chastel\u2019s first PhD student.<\/p>\n The changes they have seen in the birds and their landscape during that time are stark. \u201cThere used to be sea ice in the fjord in May when we arrived for the start of the season, but we haven\u2019t seen any sea ice since 2009,\u201d says Chastel. \u201cThe ecosystem has changed dramatically, and I worry about the future.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":" High up in the Arctic Circle, Olivier Chastel begins his working day by scanning the horizon for polar bears, rifle at the ready. \u201cIn 25 years I\u2019ve never had to use it, but you can\u2019t be too careful,\u201d he explains. There can\u2019t be many conservationists who go birdwatching while armed, but the danger to life<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":37535,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[58],"tags":[240,3948,362,9845,20733],"class_list":{"0":"post-37534","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-science","8":"tag-arctic","9":"tag-lives","10":"tag-pollution","11":"tag-seabirds","12":"tag-tracing"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37534","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=37534"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/37534\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/37535"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=37534"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=37534"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/naijaglobalnews.org\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=37534"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}