The Shark and the Albatross

by John Aitchison

  I open my eyes, see the duck and realise that I’ve dozed off. This is a bad idea when there might be bears around, but between sleeping and waking nothing has changed, literally nothing: I had been seeing the duck with my eyes closed too. A skua flies low overhead and she freezes. It could swallow the ducklings in a minute but her camouflage works and it flies on, unaware.

  Hours later a duckling climbs from under her tail, stumbles halfway around the nest and disappears under a wing. She stands and four well-fluffed little ducks stand too, swaying on their minute black webs. They are well coordinated now, pecking at the flowers, climbing onto her back and sliding off, flapping their very small wings. She sits back on top of them. It is colder now and becoming foggy. I talk, quietly, by radio to Miles and Steinar. They say we have been here for fourteen hours and, as the ducks have settled down to sleep, we decide to take a short break to eat something hot. When Steinar unzips the hide I topple backwards onto the ground. Miles says I look like a beetle.

  When we return to the hide we are met by a wall of fog. It is hard to see more than grey shapes but something is moving by the nest. Miles calls, ‘They’re coming,’ but it is too late and too foggy to film the duck and her ducklings as they run down the shore to the sea. There are five ducklings. One egg must have been late hatching: no wonder she has waited so long.

  Disappointment mingles with relief: I had so wanted them to do well, despite my being there, but now we’ll have to try again to film a different eider family’s journey to the sea.

  With every passing day there are fewer occupied nests, so searching for another sitting eider takes us some time. As soon as we have found a suitable one and set up the hide, the Telephone Bear comes calling.

  He climbs out of the sea with his hair plastered to his sides and shakes like a dog. His nose comes up and points straight at the hide, but by now we are watching him from a distance because Steinar saw him swimming in and radioed just beforehand: ‘Quick, quick, get out! There’s a bear,’ and together we scuttled back to the cabin.

  The bear shows an unhealthy interest in my hide. He creeps up behind it and pushes his muzzle under the zip.

  ‘That would be an interesting moment if you were still in there.’

  He inspects it from all sides, then stands on his hind legs and leans on the top with both front feet. The hide collapses as if it was made of paper.

  This bear has been moving from island to island, systematically searching them for nests. After he flattens my hide I film him in the tern colony with the birds in uproar. He flinches when they draw blood from his muzzle but otherwise ignores them, stamping on their chicks, then stooping to eat the tiny bundles of fluff. As he approaches the eider’s nest I hold my breath. She is almost impossible to see but bears have extraordinary noses.

  Should we scare him away? Steinar has the flare pistol ready but would it be right to interfere? It’s a question as old as wildlife filmmaking. If we had made things worse for the eiders by being here it might have been right to redress the balance, but we haven’t and the bear needs to eat, so we must let the scene play out.

  He raises his head and sways to and fro to test the wind, then starts forward and the duck explodes from her nest in a clatter of brown feathers. He opens the down gently with his claws and lifts out an egg. It cracks open and a duckling drops onto the beach. The bear eats it and does the same to the others. The eider watches from the shore: in this moment she has lost a month’s effort and a whole year in which she’ll have no young. If the bear had come a day later they might have survived.

  He moves on through the nesting terns towards the cabin. The last eider’s nest is the one below the window. I can see her crouching there. Her heart must be hammering but she is as still as the rocks. I wish I could help but I must film the bear. His feet fill the frame and then his muzzle. It is the closest I have ever been, filming his feet thumping down, coming straight towards us and the sitting eider.

  Steinar doesn’t deal in filmmakers’ niceties about whether we should affect what happens. He is in charge of keeping us safe and abruptly he decides that the Telephone Bear must not come any closer. He aims his flare pistol out to sea and fires to let him know we are here. The flare explodes with such a loud bang that I jerk the camera and the bear jumps too. He turns and hurries back the way he came. The duck has stayed put.

  Tonight a boat will come to take us away, so the eider nesting by the cabin is our last hope, but we have no idea when her eggs will hatch. We retreat inside and I watch her from the window. She is hunched, as the other duck was when her eggs were cracking. Then from under her wing pops a duckling – two of them. They are already dry and fluffy so, with four hours left, Miles and I straighten out the flattened hide and start again. I wait and watch the nest, while he and Steinar pack the rest of the equipment and move the cases to the shore. The duck may be shy of leading her family away while there is so much activity around the cabin but at least it means the bear is unlikely to come back. For hours she bumps up and down as her ducklings squirm under her, then she seems to make up her mind. She takes two steps from the nest, checks they are following and sets off, weaving between rocks and scrambling over others, with the ducklings running in a string behind her, almost stepping on each other’s heels. A few minutes later they reach the water’s edge and she pauses to take a sip, then leads them in. The ducklings float immediately and as their mother shakes food from a clump of algae, her family starts to feed.

  It is the last piece of the story Miles wanted to film, the story of the Arctic in summer, when even the world’s most powerful land predators become desperate for food and where the dedication of a most unlikely hero, a mother duck, has brought her youngsters safely through.

  AN UPDATE ON THE POLAR BEARS’ APPETITE FOR EGGS

  Louis has retired from farming eider down since we filmed the nesting eiders and the Telephone Bear. It is hard to prove that Svalbard’s bears are taking more eggs or young birds – their adaptability and their willingness to eat almost anything mean they have probably always done so – but in these times of dwindling sea ice, the energy neatly packaged in a clutch of eggs must be especially welcome.

  In recent years Canadian researchers have recorded polar bears coming ashore earlier, as the ice melts and breaks up in Hudson Bay, which brings them into contact with nesting snow geese. In four days a single bear was seen eating more than a thousand eggs: equivalent to about a quarter of a million calories. Just eighty-eight goose eggs would have the same energetic value as eating a seal. They eat the birds too. In one colony the scientists watched several polar bears hunting flightless goslings.

  It is too early to say whether the bears’ increasing overlap with the geese during their most vulnerable time will reduce the burgeoning goose population. The researchers are careful to point out that while the extra food could benefit some hungry bears it can be no substitute for the long-term loss of sea ice and, with it, the lost opportunities to hunt seals.

  – TEN –

  A STORM OF BIRDS AND WHALES

  While many of Svalbard’s polar bears struggle to find enough to eat on land, some parts of the northern seas become fabulously productive during the Arctic summer. The waters around the Aleutian Islands attract some of the largest gatherings of animals anywhere on Earth. These feeding frenzies cover such large areas that you’d think they would be easy to find, but they happen far from the shore and in one of the world’s wildest places, so trying to film them for Frozen Planet is one of the hardest things I have ever done.

  Our skipper’s name is painted on his coffee mug. It says: Jimmer – American Viking. His ancestors were Danes and Icelanders but also Aleuts, Russians, Irish and Scots. He is a one-man history of these islands and wave after wave of explorers.

  The Aleutian Island chain stretches almost 2,000km (about 1,200 miles), from Alaska all the way to Russia. The islands are famous for their fickle tides, their fog and above all their storms. They are less well known for hosting one
of nature’s most spectacular banquets, which happens here because this is a meeting place between warm and cold seas. When currents from the Pacific Ocean meet water from the Arctic they stir up nutrients and encourage plankton to grow, which in turn feeds many animals, including humpback whales. These ocean currents, and the masses of air moving above them, brew the frequent storms, which travel east along the chain from Russia. People came that way too – the island communities still have Russian Orthodox churches, with distinctive, onion-shaped spires. The Russians were lured by the promise of sea otters whose fur was so thick that it was impossible to push your fingers through it to touch the skin. At home the furs were worth a fortune but the Russians did not catch the otters themselves, the native Aleuts did that. They had lived here for millennia and were skilled at hunting from skin kayaks called baidarkas, wearing waterproof coats made of seal intestines.

  All the enterprising people who made the risky journey to these islands faced the same problem, whether they were the Aleuts’ ancestors, who island-hopped from Asia to America, or Vitus Bering, the Dane who explored the Aleutians on behalf of imperial Russia: they all came without being sure of what was over the horizon or hidden in the fog. It is also the humpback whales’ problem and it’s our problem too.

  Bering named two of his ships after saints but these days all the smaller boats in the Aleutians’ main town, Dutch Harbor, take their names from sweethearts. Jimmer’s is called Miss Alyssa. He tells us that he proposed to the original Miss Alyssa by writing on a slate during a scuba dive. It had an engagement ring attached to it by a zip-tie. After reading his question she turned to find Jimmer kneeling on the seabed. Her namesake is a 13-metre (43ft) fishing boat, only slightly smaller than a humpback whale.

  I have seen fishermen like Jimmer on television, hauling gigantic king crabs out of the Bering Sea in winter. The crab boats are tied up now and rows of their pots, the size of washing machines, are piled on the quay, but Dutch Harbor is also home to boats that land huge quantities of pollock, year round – it is the largest fishery in the USA. In the winter fishing boats sometimes capsize under the weight of ice, and men slip and vanish overboard. Jimmer’s brother-in-law was among them.

  This is a wild frontier, where making a living sometimes means taking great risks. If you are in the right place at the right moment the rewards can be enormous too. That’s what we are hoping will happen when we go to sea.

  We have already spent several days modifying Jimmer’s boat and Miss Alyssa now has a stabilised camera fitted to her bow. Jimmer asked us not to drill holes to bolt it down, so the camera, worth over £300,000 ($500,000) has been stuck to the deck instead. Dave, who owns and will operate it, has paid close attention to the glue. How long it will stay put in such rough seas remains to be seen. A stabilised tripod head has also been fixed to the wheelhouse roof for my camera. It can be moved into the specially strengthened inflatable tender if we ever find ourselves surrounded by whales. This has all taken longer than we had hoped but it has made no real difference because all flights to Dutch Harbor have been grounded by fog, leaving much of our equipment stuck in Anchorage.

  When the sky clears and the planes are flying again, I go to the tiny airport with our assistant, Tom, to collect the missing cases and the last two members of the crew: a whale biologist called Steve, and Jess, an observer who monitors the pollock fishing boats and who is going to be a spotter for us in her spare time.

  The town is full of fishermen and most of the processing plant workers are men as well. Jess tells us about being the only woman on boats with macho names like Seawolf and Intrepid. On one trip a captain offered her the kind of dating advice only a fisherman could: ‘Change your bait and try a different ground.’ Life at sea is full of surprises: she describes coming across a fulmar lying on the deck of another boat, flash-frozen like the fish in the hold. It was still alive after the ice had been chipped away.

  Chadden is the assistant producer from the BBC who is in charge of this shoot. He has decided that Dave and his stabilised camera will transfer to a helicopter once he’s filmed enough from the boat. We can all see that this plan is ambitious, given that the helicopter will have to fly here from the mainland, despite its pilot not being allowed to cross water hidden by fog. We don’t know where the whales will gather either, but we have a month to find them.

  To celebrate finally being ready to start filming we have a Chinese meal and finish it off with fortune cookies. The note inside mine says: Watch your expenditure, frugality is good, so I give it to Chadden for a joke and in return he gives me his, which says: Next week your lucky colour will be green. Perhaps not, as the radio is forecasting strong winds and fivemetre waves. The inflatable boat from which I’m supposed to be filming is barely that long. We are hoping to film a storm in the Aleutian Island but ours is of a different kind: a living hurricane made of whales and birds.

  When Jimmer takes us out in Miss Alyssa to look for whales, he says the Bering Sea has only two states: he calls them FAC and DFS: Flat-Assed Calm and Dead for Sure. We discover what he means when we leave the land behind and find the open sea filled with restless energy: it seems that Jimmer’s FAC is hypothetical. Fog is gathering too, erasing the horizon.

  Bering had the same problem in the 1740s. He sailed past whole islands, blinded by the fog. The expedition’s naturalist, Georg Steller, recognised birds he knew would never stray far from land and deduced that islands must be hidden nearby, but by then Bering was very ill and the Russian sailors ignored Steller’s advice. What could a naturalist teach them about navigation? In time the ships did find land and Steller, aged just thirty-three, became the first scientist ever to set foot in Alaska. He wrote: I have fallen in love with nature. Several of the animals he found were new to science and to this day they carry his name.

  Our own expedition’s biologist, Steve, is also in love with nature. He is a superb whale spotter and often stands in the bow, bearded and alert, clutching a crossbow like a modern-day Captain Ahab, except that he intends to use this weapon to help the whales. He has a special permit to approach them and will work closely with Jimmer to ensure they’re not disturbed by the boat. Steve is also licensed to collect small skin samples, using hollow crossbow bolts, and he will photograph the distinctive patterns on the whales’ tails as they dive.

  Humpbacks can live for 100 years but they were almost wiped out by whaling: there were only 1,400 of them left in the Pacific by the time it was banned in the 1960s. They reproduce very slowly but their numbers are gradually recovering. There are about 20,000 now and more than a third can be recognised from their tail ID photos. Matching the pictures taken at either end of their migration has shown that most Alaskan whales swim to Hawaii for the winter, to have their young. Some have even turned up there towing crab-fishing gear from Alaska (one of Steve’s jobs is to cut whales free when they become entangled), but the Aleutians’ humpbacks are different – most of them just disappear during the winter – and Steve hopes that by collecting skin samples on this trip he might help track down their wintering grounds, somewhere in the vastness of the north-east Pacific.

  By comparison to that, the area we are searching is tiny, but even here the whales are hard to find and we spend our time at sea trying to predict where they are.

  Jimmer stares intently at the echo-sounder, which is plotting the bottom fifty fathoms down. Dave and Chadden have installed themselves behind their screens in the wheelhouse. My station is with the other camera on the roof, where Steve, Jess and Tom will spot for whales and crew the inflatable boat if we need it. For the moment there is very little to see because we are in a bank of fog so dense that it’s hard even to tell that we’re moving. Jimmer’s instruments show that Miss Alyssa is following the edge of a shallow bank. It ought to make the water well up, bringing food with it. The bank is in a busy shipping lane and a container ship looms on the radar, huge and close and bound for Asia at twenty knots. In the fog we don’t even see it pass. As we roll in its wake Jimmer
spots a line of flotsam by the boat: ‘That’s a kind of indicator of the edge of the tide,’ he says.

  Currents are meeting here. It’s a good sign: they might concentrate the krill. The water is shot through with a subtle grain, like flecks of mica in a rock. The sea begins to simmer. There are massive numbers of krill swimming beneath us. We rush to launch the inflatable, struggling to transfer the camera across the gap. It is slippery in its waterproof cover.

  Tom asks, ‘How much is this worth, before we drop it in?’

  ‘You don’t want to know.’

  The stabilised tripod head comes to life, making weird robotic sounds: a grumbling monologue about the state of the sea. The Miss Alyssa backs slowly away. I peer into the water and creatures like pink grains of rice peer back. They swim in circles with quick flicks, biased by their round black eyes. How odd to think that the largest animals on Earth are fuelled by these tiny krill. Their numbers make up for their size: krill are counted not as individuals, but in hundreds of millions of tons. There might be 60,000 of them in every cubic metre of the water around the boat.

  The surface boils. The sound is like hail striking the sea. It’s herring: more fish than I have ever seen in one place. The water flashes silver and bronze as they rise to snatch the krill, changing the texture of the sea with their bodies and covering a huge area, all of them feeding. There are so many that we can smell them.

  An unearthly patch of neon green appears below our little boat. It’s a whale’s pectoral fin, growing larger, rising through the water. The whale surfaces beside us like a dark island. Its two nostrils open, quivering, each the size of my head. Spray shoots far above the boat and an oily mist blows into our faces: it is whale breath. The smell is shocking. Others surface until there are twenty humpbacks feeding around us, quite undisturbed, whales with the girth of submarines and so deep-keeled that they’re hardly affected by the waves. They are the largest animals I have ever seen this close. Their tails are wider than our inflatable is long and each one weighs thirty or forty tons. One raises its immensely long pectoral fin higher than our heads.