Thankfully, that fog cleared soon and we got back to captures. We had great luck the first day out, capturing our first bear by 9am. It was a small bear and we all thought it was recently-weaned, making it about 32 months old. However, when we checked its marks we discovered it was a five-year old female, making it an adult. She was in decent shape but she was short and did not have lots of fat. Unlike a lot of bears we capture in summer her fur was clean and mostly free of mud.

We captured this adult female last week. Because she was not very fat, her limbs appeared longer and thinner than other bears we have captured. She is laying on a blue tarp on the tundra.

That afternoon we caught another bear immediately after we finished working on the first bear. The warm weather from early August had disappeared, and temperatures were much colder. We set up the windbreak to make our sampling easier, and shortly thereafter it began to snow lightly. I was really excited – I had not yet seen snow in August. We finished up that bear and began to fly home, only to have the other helicopter spot an adult male bear. It was a bear we had not captured yet and it was on a large island that would make darting possible. While they began the capture, we flew back to Oliktok to grab some additional supplies before joining the other helicopter.

I had not done a full sampling on a large adult male, so it was a different and fascinating experience to do everything on a 950 lb bear. We did not wrap up until late at night, and when we returned we did not finish our lab work until 2am. It was a great day, increasing our total captures by 3 all at once.

The cool weather and low clouds stuck around for the next several days. Here, we landed our helicopter next to this beach during a break from looking for bears. The tundra at the left is slowly being eroded into the beach.

We flew over this area one afternoon. Our pilot suggested that this was the remnants of a fenced pasture built with driftwood. Some folks – perhaps those of the local indigenous culture – may have used it to keep caribou.

We extended our stay at Oliktok by several days in an attempt to catch just one or two more bears. We caught one more bear, an adult female in excellent shape with lots of fat; she was very large for a female, weighing 770 lbs. She had no young and was most likely pregnant. If pregnant, she will likely dig a den into a snowbank by October or November, and begin hibernating. She will give birth in December or January while hibernating, then she and her young will emerge in the spring to head out onto the sea ice and hunt seals.

On last Thursday afternoon, I drove the two hours from Oliktok back to Deadhorse and returned the truck. I caught the afternoon flight to Barrow, then Anchorage, then Seattle. I slept on a bench in the Seattle airport for several hours, then I caught a flight to Minnesota to visit family, where it was 90 degrees (Fahrenheit) and humid – quite a change from the north slope. I had the opportunity to give a public talk in Minnesota, with an audience of over 50 interested friends and family.

We now have a short break between field seasons. I have sent a complete set of field gear to Seattle, where it is being loaded onto a US Coast Guard icebreaker, the Polar Sea. This ship will leave port in late August, eventually making it offshore from Barrow in northern Alaska. In late September, we will use helicopters to get onto the ship from shore, and we will begin traveling north to get to the edge of the retreating sea ice. Once we make it to the ice we will spend the month of October recapturing bears that have spent the summer on the sea ice. Simultaneously, a second crew will return to Deadhorse and recapture bears that have spent the summer on shore.

Outside of Deadhorse, we drove through fields that provide oil which flows through the trans-Alaska pipeline to Valdez. Oliktok is northwest of Deadhorse, and I was told it is the farthest north you can drive in North America. Oliktok Point is a spit of land that juts into the ocean, and the US Air Force maintains a radar site for scanning the skies along the northern coast. The radar site was built during the Cold War, and is one of several such sites scattered along the coasts of Alaska.

Oliktok is much different than either Deadhorse or Kaktovik (a town farther east on the Alaska coast). The radar site is normally operated by crews of 2 people, but rooms and meals can be provided for up to 12. An oil drilling facility is just down the coast, but this area feels much more isolated. The living quarters are in a single long, narrow building that seems like a ship on the inside. All visitors here are required to watch an informational video about polar bear safety. Polar bears are frequently seen in the area and in fact, a tragic attack occurred here in 1993. A polar bear broke through a closed window to attack a man sitting in the living space. The bear mauled the man and other people at the facility were forced to shoot it. You can read the full story here. Since then, precautions have been taken to make the facility safer, such as placing grating over the windows. Such an attack is an incredibly rare event, but serves as a reminder to use caution in the habitats of wild animals.

Skies were blue and temperatures climbed into the upper 60s (Fahrenheit) and maybe even 70s our first several days here. This unseasonable heat felt odd – I expected to be wearing a light winter coat rather than a t-shirt. Yesterday heavy fog and cooler temperatures returned. Hopefully skies will clear and we will be able to fly again tomorrow. The tundra is completely transformed from May, and summer is in full bloom.

A tundra-covered island off the coast, pocked with small ponds.

A large herd of caribou, grazing near piles of driftwood on the coast.

Thus far we have caught two adult females, each with twin male cubs. It is great to see bears again. After working with polar bears last August, last October, in the spring this year, and now seeing them again in August, I am beginning to get a better understanding of their annual patterns. For example, their fur is much thinner in August and many bears are still shedding heavily. By October, their fur was deeper, and by spring the fur was quite deep with very distinct layers of coarse guard fur and thick underfur.