Drawing the Arctic: Exploring the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge with Michael Boardman

real >> well. >> I just see Bowden and a black screen. I'm the one that started recording and stopped it because we could always cut it off, but I won't start it till we start the program. >> You're in charge of that. >> My name is Genevie Leo. I'm the curator of the Perry McMillan Art Museum. And I'm not gonna talk at you. I'm just here to welcome you and to welcome Michael to campus and Jane. Um, and Jane is going to do all the introductions and I just would >> This is the microphone. James going to do all the introduction um and then we'll have questions time for questions afterwards. So welcome to all of you in the room and welcome to the people on Zoom and our prayers to you not right after the talk but in the coming weeks to come and visit the art museum. We do have some nice birds in our new exhibit not too it is delicious. Birds are delicious among other things. Thank you again. Thank you so much for having us here tonight and thank you for the introduction. Um, hi everyone. My name is Jane Brekie. I'm the director of Sierra Club Maine. Oh, is that better? >> Okay, great. Um, I'm not wonderful with technology, so we'll just roll go with the flow here. Um, a couple just housekeeping things for people on Zoom right now. Hopefully you can hear us. Currin, our chapter coordinator is on the Zoom. She is the person that can see um any question answer issues that you're having, sound issues. So, let her know in the chat and then she can let you know and try to figure it out. >> Now, I um we may need to have people mute themselves throughout the talk, but you can send her a message through Zoom and she can let us know what's happening. Uh, let's see. So, thank you all again for coming out tonight. We love having in-person talks. We love that we can also have people on Zoom. There's bound to be some kind of technical issue, but we'll push through. Um, I would love to introduce Michael. Michael, thank you so much for coming. Um, Michael Borman is a wildlife and watercolor artist based in North Yarmouth, Maine. His artistic practice includes many hours of field sketching and direct observation, taking notes and renewing a sense of wonder about the natural world. In 2019, field artist Michael Borman was selected by the US Fish and Wildlife Service to be the artist and residence for Arctic National Wildlife Refuge in northeastern Alaska. The two-week project was based on the coastal plains of the refuge, studying and sketching migratory birds that come from all corners of the world to use the unique tundra habitat to nest and raise young. Michael fell in love with the unique natural history of the Arctic and has returned many times to record the interactions of wildlife, botney, and climate. Through his nature journals, he will offer a view of the endangered coastal plane, the life that congregates there, and the stories of migratory birds who connect us all to the refuge. I'm very excited for this talk. Um, I just wanted to give uh briefly some information from Sierra Club National in terms of actions that we can do with the Arctic uh refuge. Right now just pointing out that the wildlife rich coastal plane is the biological heart of the Arctic refuge. Twice already the Arctic refuge has been up for bids for oil and gas development. And twice have these lease sales failed to generate any significant interest. The real value of the Arctic refuge is not its resources underground but the rich wildlife that supports sustainable communities in Alaska. Arctic oil cannot solve today's energy crisis. Even under optimistic timelines, Arctic refuge oil would not reach the market for more than a decade. Using a current geopolitical conflict to justify Arctic drilling is misleading and irrelevant to real energy needs. Um, unfortunately, we are expecting to see a lease sale in the Arctic refuge before the 4th of July as required by the reconciliation bill passed in 2025. The main delegation all voted against that bill. So, if you want to call and email your delegation to thank them for their vote in 2025 and tell them to stand up for the Arctic in the future, that is always helpful. Um, in order to impact the lease sale, we are suggesting people use our social media to tag oil companies and ask them to stay out of the Arctic refuge. Keep in mind, we shouldn't write messages that are threatening threatening of their reputation. Rather, tell them it's risky business and not worth that ecological value. Um, if you would like more information about this, let us know. We will follow up this talk with a email with a toolkit. So, if you want more information, you'll get it that way. And um, Ashley, who is our uh, organizer and myself are always happy to take a phone call, email. We don't turn down any opportunity to talk to anybody and answer questions. So, please always feel free to reach out to us. With all of that said, thank you for your patience. I'm gonna pass this over to Michael. Got to get the microphone thing figured out. All right, there we go. Thank you for the introduction and thank you for um Main Sierra Club and the Art Museum for having me in Bowden College. It's really a pleasure to be here. I'm counting and I'm seeing if there's more Bowden professors than students in this room. So, I had an amazing experience. I got to go to a place that I'd only dreamed about for 20 some odd years as a young environmentalist caring about this magical land that we hadn't quite screwed up yet. Um, and it was a slow process getting there. I was a a t-shirt artist. I still have a t-shirt business. I cobble together a bunch of different things to make a living as a creative person. I do illustrations. I do paintings, I do t-shirts and everything else. Um, but I started um exploring the idea of field sketching, drawing outside. That led me to the artist residency scenario where you you sort of go to my all my artist residencies have been in wilderness areas. I started going to Baxter State Park and being the artist residence there. Um, Acadia, Hog Island, Ottabon, then Bremen, which is a fantastic place. And eventually I got artist residency in Glacier Bay, Alaska, which is where I proposed to my wife about 30 something years ago. Um, luckily she said yes. Um, and that really opened up Alaska for me and it was suddenly this amazing place. And there's a series of residencies called Voices of the Wilderness that bring artists or writers or musicians or creative people and connect them with science and sort of activities that are um that pro protect the um wildlands of Alaska. And there's national parks, national forests, and national wildlife refugees that are all part of this this group that sign up for an artist. The artist the bunch of artists apply. They pick the one that that matches their mission the best. It's a it's a fantastic um residency program and one that I went to Glacier Bay with and also one that brought me to Arctic National Wild Refuge. Why is that not advancing? Our first technical difficulty. What the >> Is it? >> No, it's the one he hit me. >> All right. >> Can you try the keyboard? >> There we go. I'm just a bummer. Um, field sketching is an is an adventure in in nature. Um, I, you know, I was always interested in in being a wildlife biologist and being a a Jane Goodall or a George Showler out there in the wilderness, like studying and taking notes and and seeing all these cool creatures. But I, as I got into college, I was heavily in the art scene and um, I couldn't face statistics or any real college math. So, that was out for me. Um, but luckily through the art um the art path, I've managed to weasle my way into being a a pseudo scientist and to be able to follow along with some cool expeditions. I find some cool stuff on my own. This was a great experience trying to draw a spruce grass that eventually jumped on my lap. It was he was my worst critic, as you can tell. He sort of got that. Um he uh crawled up on my shoulder then hopped on my head and then flew off and did that like three times in a row. Very hard to draw when a bird is on your head. But um field sketching for me is like attaching to place and and sort of absorbing all that information that's coming out of you in the wild and be able to observe wildlife and watch behavior and take notes about it and take little drawings and sit and be in a certain space for a certain amount of time. without other stuff going on. It's a it's a meditative focus thing. Um, and you sort of if you're doing it well, you let go of that inner critic about how it's supposed to look and you just flow with drawing outside. And I really I'm a big proponent of field sketching in any way, shape, or form. Um, I teach it um here and there and it's a great way to connect to nature. I think these days we all need to connect to nature as much as possible. Next one. Why am I going backwards? All right, there we go. Um, and Marty Mirie were instrumental in starting Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and getting the land preserved in the 50s. Um, they fought non-stop, did all kinds of advocating for um, creating a wilderness area in the northern northeast tip of Alaska. Um they led an expedition with George Showler and um Brit Keel and a couple other um famous Alaskan um educators to sort of study the area and see what the what the wilderness connections were and what the animals were um what the biological communities look like. Um if you don't know these guys, they are um he was one of the first person to study caribou. They're great conservationists. They started the wilderness society. Um, and Olas Murray wrote the Peterson Guide to Tracking. But I love this quote. You can't overlook the importance of wild country as a source of inspiration. Um, which we give expression, writing, poetry, drawing, painting, mountaineering, and just being there. That's the for me that's the um that sums up the artist and residency experience where you're in you're immersed in an environment that is completely transformative at least for me here. Let's let's find this on the map here. Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the very northeastern corner of Alaska. I'm going to guess that my clicker doesn't work either. This thing doesn't All right. Well, um 19 million acres. This is the size. It shows South Carolina here, but it's the size of the state of Ma just about. Um this huge protected area. um Olas and Marty Murray sectioned off a fairly good portion of it in the 50s, but then Jimmy Carter with the Alaska National Lands Claim Act in 1980 um secured the rest of it and made it this huge reserve. Um, unfortunately the green area, the Arctic coastal plane was fought over and fought over and because Prudo Bay had just struck oil in the 80s, um, they were they wanted to hold on to the possibility of oil rights in this place. Um, one other thing I'm going to point out on this on this map, um, you see this little anagram, Anoir, ANWR, which is how most politicians and most oil companies refer to this land. It's a national wildlife refuge. It's not an anagram. Um, when people say Anoir, they're sort of buying into the erasing the fact that this is our land. It's not it's, you know, it's a refuge for all of us. It's not this anagram that the oil companies use to to sort of take that away. So, I just point that out. Um, so the coastal plane got put in this limbo for a long, long time until the Trumpet, you know, back and forth fighting. The Bush administration was just ready to start selling leases in the coastal plane and the oil spill at Vald happened and then that the political will to do that completely disappeared. Um but unfortunately in 20 2017 the Trump administration managed to sneak it into a tax bill. Um and they had two lease sales for Arctic Refuge. Both were complete failures. We'll talk more about that a little bit. So my re my residency brought me to the Canning River Bird Camp, which is right in the heart of the coastal plane, right in that green area. Um I will point this out with my finger. There it is, right at the edge of the Bowford Sea. It's an amazing landscape and I can describe it to you and I can tell you all about it, but happily Fish and Wildlife Service made this nice video while I was here. So, let's watch this and get a little intro into where I'm going. So that's the video I watched when it happened that day. >> Yeah, I can understand how that can. >> So two things happened in 2019 besides getting this artist residency for Artic National Wild Refuge. I finished the year-long course as a main master naturalist um and learned all these different connections between plants and animals and fungi and just it was it's a year-long course in all things nature based in Maine. Um and it was really amazing. It opened my eyes to a lot of stuff I hadn't before. And the other thing that happened is that I went from dipping my toe into being a burer to jumping full force as a murderer into the swamp of carrying binoculars at all times and driving away. So when the Fish and Wildlife Service emailed me and said, "We'd like to accept you for being an artist residence this year in our at in the refuge." Um, and they said, "Well, we're going to bring you out to this remote camp in the middle of nowhere with a whole bunch of ornithologists and you'd be studying breeding birds that migrate and nest in this tundra location." I was like, "Okay, that sounds just right." Um, so it was just, yeah, it was line all the cards lined up perfectly for me to be uh um doing this amazing cool event. Um so we land on the on the um tundra, walk to camp and it's a beautiful gorgeous day. I immediately sit on this little hill like right outside of camp and start drawing the Brooks Range in the background sketching. We were on a fork of the Canning River which runs it's the uh western part of our National Wild Refuge. Um and there was Pacific Loon floating right by one of the sketching. It was that was really cool. Um, and here is our camp with solar powered bear fence. Doesn't look very sturdy, does it? That's my tent, the black and orange one, right by the bear fence. I'm guessing that I was the most uh expendable member of the team. So, that's the tent I got. But the view was awesome. I wake up every morning and see tundra swans and other birds swimming down the river and hear all the bird noises. It's really fantastic. >> My um pilot, it was just me and a a pilot, a US Fish and Wild Service pilot in a small Cessna 180 that flew 300 miles from uh Fairbanks through the Brooks Range to this camp on the coastal plane. And just as we were landing, he said, "You know, it's a land of detail. Just get down and really absorb and see the smallalness of everything." And really the liipuchian aspect of this place that for nine months of the year is covered in snow - 40 -70 sometimes wind blowing off the Bowford Sea. No plant can grow higher than this for most of the coastal plane because it's so harsh. So there's this whole world that happens in this tiny little active layer of about seven to a foot seven inches to a foot or something and underneath that perafrost. So it's really fascinating to see all these little plants. These are some of my these some my plants became characters for me that I would that I would see constantly day after day. One of my favorites was a woolly blasphy little plant that looks like an alien coming out of the ground when it first grows. It's got these funny purple tender tendrils with these spikes on it and it's got this fuzz and the plant grows out of the fuzz and becomes this huge flowering spire that the caribou love to eat. It's like their favorite thing. Um, and the other cool plant is an Arctic poppy. I love this plant because it makes a little cup and follows the sun. We're in the Arctic in June. The sun does not set. It goes like this. It dips down the horizon and comes back up again. And this flower follows the sun around all day long. And because it's got a little cup and it's following the sun, it's a little solar heat. And flies come in and land in this little cup to warm up because they're cold bloodooded. They got to have a little little heat to go. Um and they end up pollinating the plant. >> They fly in there, pollinate, go on to the next one. Wild stuff. Numbers of insects were there too. These huge clunking bumblebees that would fly around. They're like probably an inch and a half or more long. wolf, spiders, lychans, moss, all this cool little stuff. I really got absorbed in this little world. But that's not what I was there for. If you look carefully, you can see the the shortbird nest on the corner. Um, this little li little fuchian world supports um a great migration of birds that fly from all over all corners of the world to come to Arctic National Wild Refuge to breed in a specific local. And our job was to find as many nests as we could find and mark them, follow them throughout the season to see if they had hatched or not. But we couldn't go back and forth all the time because we we'd sort of leave scent marks and and trails and stuff. So what they do is I don't sorry we would would walk through what what is a giant wetland complex. Basically um the geology of the Arctic is such that there's pingos and holes and different ridges that form as things freeze and um thaw and those fill with water in the spring. So, it's a huge web which is hugely attractive to all these birds and very tricky to survey and walk through as a as a scientist or a pretend scientist even. So, it's a lot of lot of miles and waiters trumping through a muck with perafrost underneath. But when we found a nest, we'd uh weigh the eggs to see how um far along they were. They let the artists actually do that, which I was pretty psyched about. And then if it was a um certain nest that was situated right, we'd put a camera on it, a game cam, which um if you look at the attachments on that, it's lag bolted into the Tundra perafrost. The Fish and Wildlife Service was nice enough to loan me some pictures to show you what this game can cam might have caught to see how much fun it is to be a bird on the Arctic tundra trying to raise its chicks. The lag bolts. The lag bolts are there just for the wind to protect or >> just to keep the camera upright and so other animals don't mess with it or Yeah, wind is a huge factor. >> There's that guy. Lots of traffic moving through. Then there's this guy. It's bad enough that you're stealing the egg, but what are you doing in that NASCA? What a jerk. >> And field sketching all the while. This is a video they took of me doing a couple tundra swans. You can see how fast I have to work. but very tricky to draw those birds that are uh that are like cobras on bowling balls with their necks swirling around and it's not a bird I'd ever drawn before. So, it was a was a challenge, but it was fun. And that's just sort of a brief like with my field sketches, I'll get as much as I can while I'm in the wild. Um it might be gestures like this, it might be a little more. or I might even if it's something sticking around long enough, I might be able to get my watercolors out and do a little little color stuff. But then I'll focus in and I'll also take pictures and then the pictures will inform a finished sketch where I want to go in and really look at the um anatomy of how something's put together and where the, you know, and compare how I did the deal sketch drawing versus the photograph and kind of do it back and forth with that. So that's kind of my process of this whole thing. One thing that was really amazing about the Arctic tundra um especially the coastal plane with all these birds there is constant bird noise and because there's no um sun no time they're calling constantly but more you know as the sun dips down they quiet down a little bit but then as it starts picking up they go off. So, I'm going to um run through this little video that is bird songs from the Arctic with uh with some of my sketches, birds that I'm not going to talk about. I will talk about other birds, but um and the only one that lines up with the actual call is this first one, which you might recognize if you've been in the ocean in Maine at all this winter. Tundra swans build these huge mounds that are nests that they sit on. long spur. So my mom made sandpaper. Imagine being in this place where the only noise you hear is wind and birds. It's just fantastic. No planes, no trucks, no motorized vehicles of any kind and flies. So now I'm going to do a little indepth about several bird species that I find fascinating. Um, the Arctic plane is really good habitat for shore birds. Um, and shorebirds are a pretty wide array of species, including woodcocks that are calling around here right now. Um, but a lot of birds that are attached to the ocean are attached to waterways in some way or form. And these are both red and rednecks. And they are so attached to the ocean that they only come to land to breed in this one spot in in Arctic tundra. Um the rest of the year they're floating around deep in the ocean, swimming around um mats of seaweed and they have this great little feeding strategy they do where they they sit in a circle and they spin around and create a gyro with their feet. So the water brings up invertebrates and other things from the bottom of the of the water and they pick them off one by one >> which is really cool. The other cool thing about um battle ropes is as they breed um the female finds a male she likes. She breeds with him. She lays some eggs and then she takes off and he is the sole provider for the eggs and the young as they hatch. So he is in charge of sitting on the eggs and she may go out and mate with another male and start another egg. >> Excuse me. Could you put your microphone up higher? I'm missing most of it. >> Sorry. >> Thank you. did it off here. Is that better? >> Technical difficulties. All right. How's that? >> That's good. >> I'll start I'll sort of bend my neck a little bit. >> It looks fairly ridiculous. >> So, red redneck battle ropes. Oh, wrong way. Um, another bird that I really enjoyed seeing and I wasn't really aware of is the pectoral sandpiper. It's a bird of um, grassy plains and farm fields when it's not up in the Arctic tundra. Um, but the males grow this huge sort of dark feathered pouch in front of their chest and when they fly they puff it up. They're like the Arnold Schwarzenegger of the bird world. But they've got this big pouch. And they fly from South America all the way to the Arctic, thousands of miles to find a bait. And they get up to the Arctic and they do what's called a lecting behavior where they all sort of find a spot and start displaying. And their display is puffing out their chest and flying around in circles and making this crazy sound that sounds like a UFO flying. And uh I will do the sound for you because I can. Sounds like this. They zoom around making this. I'll be here all night. Grab the um and hopefully they attract a mate. What happens with pectoral sandpipers, like many shortbirds, um, these guys, 70 75% of the males that make it all the way up to the tundra failed to breed, can't even attract a mate for some reason. >> I don't know why this reminds me of high school, but there's another amazing shorebird called buff breasted sandpiper. And this bird is pretty, you know, basic brown shorebird. Also sort of a a sod piper that likes farm fields and and plains, but it's got iridescent wings underneath it iridescent feathers underneath its wings. So it'll put its wing up in the air when the light gets low as the sun starts dipping towards the horizon and wave it around and that iridescent white feathers on the wing grab that sunlight and they spread it. They shoot it throughout the entire um Arctic tundra so they can be seen for a long distance and they'll flutter up and then they'll wave their wings and they'll come back and wave their wing again hopefully to attract a bait. Here comes one now. And if a male is lucky enough to attract mate, he starts this hittering display where he raises his wings and makes this tittering call that I'm not going to do because um and hopefully something will happen. So, he's got two two females here. But like in many things, females can be fickle and sometimes your best display is just not good enough and you're left all liars. This reminds me of college. But fortunately, um, one male somewhere was successful because we found a buff breasted sandpiper nest. They're a endangered bird in the um just in general their their population is very low and dropping. So um it was it was good and hopeful to find a nest of these birds. >> Well, it says actual size down here. >> Yeah, in my sketchbook it's actual size. They're tiny. They're like the nest the eggs are probably an inch and a half. Pressed sandpaper might be a little bit bigger. Um I'd have to look. I didn't bring my sketchbook, but actually if you look at some of the sketches on the wall, you can see there are some actual size nest things on there. Um, and it's a wetland. There's so many water birds, loons, ducks, geese. I'm not going to talk too much about them because I love the shore birds, but I do the red throat is pretty amazing. And I like this picture because the reflection really came out. Another bird I really like was the golden plubber, American golden plubber, which is just this beautiful artic bird. It's got this golden cap and golden feathers on its back. It's got amazing pattern. Um has these cryptic cryptic nests. You can see this painting I've done of the shorebird eggs with the with the young. Once they hatch, they have these like greenish yellow feathers that match almost exactly the spagnum moss that grows around their nest. So they can they can completely disappear. >> And it's another favorite bird of mine because as it migrates from Arctic refuge south um their migration path takes them through the northeast including me. So these birds they have certain requirements that they meet that they get in the Arctic refuge. They've got 24-hour daylight to feed when they need to feed. They've got undisturbed habitat and they have a food source that's readily and constantly available there. Guess what it is? >> For those of you who uh think there's no use for mosquitoes, mosquitoes feed a lot of birds, especially the larvae as they're they're picking up. that the birds are very um lined up with the timing of when green up happens in the Arctic and when all these insects spring to life. >> Um and they've got to be there at just the right time and the chicks have to hatch at just the right time for all the mosquitoes to come out so they have a possible source of food. >> So phenology is really important in the article. Phenology is the the study of what the timing of when natural events happen. We'll move on to some mammals now. And we're going to start small. We're going to start Greenland and brown lemmings. These guys have a boom and bust cycle. And they um they live in that subnivian layer. In fact, they spend all winter building tunnels just above the perafrost from place to place um stashing food. Um, and they're very susceptible to changes in climate because of that because they're living in this thin layer. They they can't migrate. They're they're there all winter. So, when we when the Arctic has a rain event with a lot of ice and snow and that stuff melts and the snow cushion layer above the lemings start to cave in and ice up, it it can kill entire populations. And when that happens, these guys go hungry. >> Are they lemmings that jump off the cliff? And >> that's a total myth. >> That's So just a quick aside, I'm pretty sure the Disney um when they in the whenever that was in the 70s, they like tossed a bunch of lemmings off a cliff and filmed it. So like they're all good. But there's a lot of lemmings. There's a lot of lemmings around and it's possible that some might accidentally fall into a hole or something, but yeah, that's that's a total that's a total. Um, but one thing I was really excited about because this is my favorite bird. I know I said you're not supposed to have a favorite, but this is the one I really like. Um, and the year before I went to the Arctic, there were seven snowy owl nests in the in the territory, the two-mile square territory of where the bird study was going on. So, I thought for sure I'm going to see a snowy owl there. It'll be great. But like I said, the lemming, they're there because it was a boom lemming cycle and there were a lot of lemmings around. And then the next year was a bust cycle. So >> I got to see pellets and feathers and study >> skulls around um the hill. Snowy owls like the tonger swans like to sort of nest on a hill. So I got to see all these these this evidence of snowy owls nesting. But the only snowy owl that showed up was the day I left about two hours after I flew out. They sent me a picture of the Oh yeah, snowy owl showed up at the camp for like five minutes then flew away. So, I sketched it anyways. That's all right. It was close enough, >> but it did inspire this painting, which that zoom thing is really killing it. But, um, this sort of idea of the tundra melting into the Arctic Ocean and animals hanging on and trying to make do with this changing climate um, and trying to collect as many lemings as they can for nesting. Um, so that this paint is called artic. It's hang. So what happens with the lemmings is when there aren't a lot of lemmings, um, the other predators that eat a lot of lemmings end up moving to birds. And the other the other option for food is shorebird eggs and goose eggs and and all the other nestlings. Um, so this is an Arctic fox taking it taking an egg like we saw earlier. He was running around. I think this this may have been a stash egg from the previous year even that he found in a in a hole. Um, and while the bird study was going on, they were also studying the Arctic foxes to see what they were bringing for food. They had a den that they had game cam on. So they they um watched this Arctic fox, male and female. Um, that's the male enjoying the um embraces of childhood. And so they had a um game cam on this as well. So I've got a video of the fox den. That's pretty interesting. I'd like to show you. So that's not a fox. Who can tell me what that animal is? >> Honey. >> It's a wolverine. So, he knows there's kids in there and he is determined to try to dig them out. And that's the male trying to keep the wolverine at bay. You can see >> as that uh as that fox bit the Wolverine in the butt, the Wolverine took off and actually those kids survived. the fox was able to hold that wolverine off and and have those kids leave the den. And beyond that, I don't know. But so maybe our jerk fox wasn't such a jerk after all. And now we're going to follow into our mammal um story with this is not the cow that was in our front yard a couple weeks ago. True story. Mhm. >> Um, but another animal who has hoofs and kind of the the signature animal of Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, the northern caribou and the porcupine caribou herd. It's the herd that lives in Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Varies from 100,000 to 200,000 depending on bunch of different circumstances. Um, they need the coastal plane to breed. It's their one spot that they can come to that has like the birds has all the requirements they need. It's a big flat area. It's far away from the mountains where all the other predators breed. Wolves, grizzly bears, and golden eagles. The three major predators of caribou all need big rocky structures to build dens and to have places to raise their young. So the caribou go to this spot. It's close to the Arctic Ocean. So have as they have their um calves, they can go catch breezes from the aros and keep those mosquitoes and bot flies and what whatnot off of them. And another really cool thing about caribou, there's a baby caribou there. Um the males have these huge antlers. They grow them all summer long. They go through the rut in the fall, fight over who gets to mate, and then they drop their antlers in the fall. But the females hang on to their antlers. The female antlers stay on. They have smaller antlers and their antlers stay on through the winter. So if you think about reindeers caribou in the winter with antlers, Santa's reindeer are all females. >> But even cooler than that, the females hold on to these antlers until they get to the place where they're going to have their calves. The general area is where their antlers fall off. And what happens is those antlers that are loaded with calcium, fall off onto the tundra, and then rodents and other creatures chew up that tasty calcium. They poop all over the tundra. The plants absorb that calcium, grow up in. So the first plants that the both the caribou cows and the mom are eating are loaded with calcium that feed the calf so they can have extra nutrients to grow fast to head on to the next place. And this is some of the tussex cotton grass is one of their favorite foods this time of year. That's one of the foods that really absorbs that calcium well. And cotton grass is is everywhere. It's not just in the Alaskan Arctic, but it makes these lovely tusks that if you're trying to walk across them, it's like trying to walk across bowling balls. Um, we were there. There were there were several dozen caribou in camp and around camp, big males. There was some leftover caribou from the year before. Um, it was just amazing to see and sort of inspired this painting. that we saw at first I saw a couple then we saw a couple dozen and then as um the season progressed I wasn't here for the whole thing but I it was a couple hundred and then it was a couple thousand and they also after they have calves and after they sort of spread out and get the calves ready to walk they all amass together in this huge um formation called the postcing aggregation and they head off in the fall into the mountains they have the longest migration of any land animal in the world. One caribou if he had a if he was tracking his steps could walk 3,000 miles in a year. It's amazing. And not only that, but these animals are also essential food for the glitch and aabaskan Indians who live in Arctic Village and around the edges of the refuge. Um they rely and have for generations on these caribou as a source of food and a source of you know cultural identity really >> and without you know think about what this coastal plane will be like this thin area between the mountains of about 20 miles if it's loaded with infrastructure. So, we're going to follow the caribou and we're going to follow this guy, too. This is a parag falcon who landed in camp. There are not many predators on the coastal plane. Um, like I said, it's far from the mountains, but this guy popped up and landed on the outhouse, which the rest of the crew is really psyched that I sketched a picture of the outhouse. But as he flies south, which is where we're going towards the Brooks Range Mountains, um we're going to follow him along and get a little uh taste of what the mountains are like. It's important when you're hiking in the mountains to bring a compatriot who is willing to carry your stuff. This is my son Elliot. He's got the scope and the tripod in the back of his backpack. He was very uh helpful and and helped me explore the mountains for being both a good buddy to hang out with and someone to carry stuff. >> The first the first bent of the mountains we're going to run into here is um large canine tracks that are this arctic wolf that we saw the first day we landed in this um river valley we were in popped up. There's just something about looking at the eyes of a wolf that is just all inspiring. Takes your breath away. He watched us for a little while. I got I had him in the scope. I got to do a little bit of sketching and then he just sort of trotted off. Just one single wolf, maybe a disperser from a pack. It was hard to tell, but it was really intense experience for me. Something I've always wanted to see. Golden eagles also inhabit the mountains and golden gold eagles um especially younger golden eagles will prey on caribou calves. They'll fly at them and grab them with their claws and scratch them. They can't kill them, but if they wound them, the caribou calf will eventually die and then they'll be able to to eat this carrying or they could possibly chase them off the cliffs. This is a tarant. This is not a predator. This is a prey. There were a ton of tarmaggan all around um the area we were at that year. And when there's lots of tarmaggan, there's lot of another animal that I'm going to lead up to. Um this is just a little bit a little shot of my field sketch journal and my kid a little bit my little pallet. I should have brought it. I actually didn't bring but I should have. Um, but the bird on that field sketch journal and the bird I'm sketching there in the middle of the Arctic tund or Arctic mountains at the Brooks Range is a gear falcon. Gear falcon is like a giant Arctic carbine falcon. Big dramatic bird. They come in either they can either be gray um dark brown or bright white. And there was a nest near where I was. So, we got to sort of observe the nest and draw the chicks. And I'll show you some of that as the chicks are sort of just starting to pull their feathers, get going, they they lay their eggs in um I can't remember the word, one after the other. So there's the the first one that hatches is bigger and then a couple days later the next one will hatch and a couple days later the next one will hatch. I monitor paraban falcons for the state of Maine as a volunteer. So seeing these falcons in the Arctic was a real treat. They're sort of cute little birds. Um the mountains were just amazing. Um, this is a little video of me drawing these awesome thousand foot hills. There's a few mosquitoes flying for flying foreground. Um, and the really cool thing about the Brooks Range is that at one ocean was a big shallow sea and the wonders of geology. Um, so there's all this history involved with these mountains as you look at them. Just layers of of millions and millions of years. And also really cool little plants. We did that hike up to the mountain. There were 50 or 60 different little wild flowers that were all blooming at the same time. It was really cool. But it's really cool because um as you look in the rivereds, there's fossils everywhere. Signs that this place has been, you know, the history of of the Arctic has been going on for millions and millions of years. Um, and then on the upper part of this slide, also slightly cut off by the Zoom banner, um, are little pieces of chapped by somebody thousands of years ago. They were just sitting on a little hillic and that really brought the idea of this place um, not only is a wondrous place for us, but it's a it's been a wondrous place for thousands of years for people. people have been here studying, hunting and living living on the office this land for ages. Um, our national life, which is one of the places that wasn't covered by ice during the ply and this is a bone scraper that our guide found that showed us. Um, it's a whale rib and it's got little marks on it. Who knows how old it is. It was Yeah, it was really wild to find this tool just for a hide scraper made out of a whale rip. You just think about the history of that stuff and you hold it in your hands. And then there's the history of what's happening now. Um last year I got a fellowship to go to the um Tulic Field Station which is run by the University of Alaska and it's an artic station that they set up. People come from all over the world to do climate change research based on the Arctic habitat. So, it's really lucky for me to be here and to be involved peripherally with incredible science going on. Um, and a lot of this the science that interested me was the study of phenology and the study how of how plants grow and what happens when it's warmer a lot and certain they they set out all these plots and then they have one that has more nutrients in it than one that has more nutrients and is warmer than one that has less snow cover. They do all these studies about how that affects the plant communities in the Arctic and then the plant communities um affect the animal communities which affect the entire Arctic. So it's really interesting. Um it was end up being a lot of what they call shrubbia which is all these shrubs that grow. as the as there's more nutrients, the little flowers aren't overly affected, but the shrubs that get bigger and bigger are. So, the shrubs eventually grow up and the willows and stuff and overgrow the the smaller plants and it becomes more of a monoulture because with all the um nutrients, these heartier willow plants can can take over. >> That's my friend Ruby. Um, she was doing a lot of the plant phology stuff and she likes this photo because she's holding a a batula birch seedling in her hand which is about 2 in or 3 in tall and she estimates that that burst a birch seedling is the same age as her entire plot behind her which she's been doing for eight years. And there's when the willows grow, there is one animal that uh that is able to take advantage of that and it's these guys. Those are muskox. >> Another really cool one to see on you can see there's a couple babies. There's I think four or five babies that are kind of behind them. Here's my sketch. As we were sketching them and watching them, eventually the one of the older males sort of snorted and then all the babies ran behind them and all the adults lined up in a line with their heads down. I was like, "Okay, I think it's time to go." But I mentioned the um the freeze and thaw. Muskoxin don't migrate like the caribou do. They they move around, but they don't really leave the Arctic coastal plane. The caribou head towards boreal forests. The muskox have to sort of tough it out. They've got lots of layers. Um, but they need to be able to scrape food out of the snow. They've got this big heads and they've got sharp hoofs that they sort of scrape out and and move stuff. When we get when the Arctic gets an icing event like we get in Maine where there's an ice storm and everything freezes up, they can't access that food anymore and the muskox and population of the Arctic is in trouble because of that. This is a wimble. I'm going to talk a little bit about a friend of mine, Shiloh Schulty, who is a bird biologist who I met at the Arctic research camp who was from Kenok. I was kind of surprised. There was a fellow Mater um and he was this great guy. He has done a huge amount of work studying wimbrals in the Arctic refuge in the Arctic coastal plane. and he found he's works for a man um worked for manment and he managed to tag these windmills a pair a mated pair on a nest and put radio tags on them and track how their migration went and it was really mindblowing that these two wimbers the male flew down through eastern Canada and across the eastern flyway to South America and the female went west down the west coast to California, flew to another place in South America, and then they flew back and met each other the next year in the exact same spot. Um, Shiloh was um, unfortunately killed in a helicopter accident last year. Um, and I had talked to him right before I went up to the Arctic about doing some Wimberl um, planning and and pre pre-looking around the Tulic area. And he said, "Yeah, that'd be great. I want to do a project there." Um, and although he was gone, I really wanted to sort of find there and see what was going on. And and sure enough, behind the station, a few miles behind the station, there was a breeding pair of wimbrals. Um, and I could hear them from a distance, and I was sitting on a hill like drawing plants, um, focusing on the little the little things, and I heard the wind coming closer and closer, and I was sitting there. It flew right around me twice, did these two big circles, and then took off down towards probably where its nest was. And I was like, I really felt that that was Shiloh. There's lots of magic that happens in the tundra. >> There's lots of bad stuff that happens in the tundra, too. Um, this is Prudo Bay. This is what the tundra might the Arctic refuge coastal plane might look like if the Trump administration has their way. Um it was talked about in the beginning of the talk a little bit that you know there's a possibility of oil there in the Arctic refuge but nobody knows for sure. They there was one test well dug in 1980 and nothing really came of it. It was secret for a long time and it's recently just came out that that well was dry. There was nothing there. But still there's this big push to develop this and and to erase this area and turn it into something obscene. >> This is one of my heroes, George Showler. This was also the uh screen saver on my computer for three years before I got the >> the artist residency artic refuge. And for me, it speaks to how my art can help the situation. You know, it's about pulling in motion. You can do the best science in the world, but unless emotion is involved, it's not really relevant. Conservation is based on emotion. It comes from the heart. One should never forget that. And if you don't know George Shaller, you should look him up. He's the preeminent wildlife biologist in the world. He's 90 something now. Still alive. So, taking George's um message to heart and my experiences in the Arctic and thanks to heart to Alaska Wilderness League, um I was flown down to Washington DC last year to do some um advocating for protecting the refuge. And it was mentioned before that all our representatives voted correctly to protect the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. And I can't take credit for that, but I'm hoping that maybe some little bit of something came through. Um, Angus King said, "I'm on your side. You don't need to you don't need to lobby me for this." Which is great. Um, and Susan Collins was very polite. Had no idea that birds migrate from all corners of the world to our natural life refuge. So, if that one fact stuck with her, then I think I did some I did super good. And there's the magic of that place where all these animals come to this one special place to to raise their young. The fact that they migrate from all over really captures my imagination. >> Was that super actual? >> That's an actuality. It was um uh I was crossing a river and there were black belly plugers. I turned them into golden plers because they're prettier to look at, I think. That's the artistic license part. >> But there was a whole string of caribou behind them and I was walking through. I didn't know where where to point my camera. I was like, "This is like crazy." >> Um, and for Fish and Wildlife Service, I designed this map that shows the migratory ver paths of a dozen different species that that breed in the Arctic. You can see they go through almost all 50 states of the US. A bunch go up into Russia. Um, there's a bird that flies all the way to there's one that goes to New Zealand. There's one that goes to Africa to the savannah. It's they they spread all over and they come to this one spot. It's pretty amazing. That map is is over on the corner if you want a better look at it. >> So, one more amazing thing about birds, and I'm going to shut up about birds. Um, when the shorebird parents hatch their babies and raise and and get them out of the egg, they they're precocial. They're pretty much as soon as they're out of the egg, they're moving around, picking up chicks, picking up bugs, doing their thing. Pretty soon after that, all the parents leave. Parents head on their migration south. leave the chicks to themselves for to bulk up on food and find things to eat and figure out how to get back to South America or Central America. >> And I had one experience that I'll that I'll share with my wife. Um in New Brunswick on the Bay of Fundy is one place where tons of these semi-polited sandpapers which have all breed all um grown up in the Arctic. These are all juveniles that have flown down in a mass group trying to figure out how to get to their next migration stop and they stop. They all come to numerous stop numerous places along the east coast but the Bay of Fundy is a major one for semi-palated sandpipers. This is tens of thousands of juvenile sandpapers just flying around. There's probably a merlin or a paragan falcon chasing them around. But they come one place to bulk up with as much food as they can before they fly 4,000 miles, 5,000 miles, 6,000 miles down the coast of um to South America. It's just amazing how they figure that out without any parental supervision or anything. It's just mindblowing. So, all right, I have a spiel. This is the stick the landing spiel. So get my paper out. See it. Even need to get my glasses out. This is everybody can hear. Um, so what can art do to protect artic refuge? I've been incredibly lucky to visit and fall in love with a place that began in my mind as an ideal. A place where humanity has not indelibly altered the systems of nature. A landscape grand enough to support all the original wild inhabitants. where hundreds of thousands of caribou and millions of birds can make their way undisturbed by roads, structures, development. I hope that we as a species can muster the will to save one landscape that functions perfectly well without us and has for millennia. Hopefully, you're all aware how fragile and dangered the Arctic is. Actions by the current administration will set the stage and demolish this landscape either directly drill baby drill or indirectly through climate change and impacts from resource extraction. People need to care about what happens up here to know the intricate web that keeps blooming flowers, laying eggs and creating bouncy baby muskoxin that nurtures the caribou population that continues to support the subsistence lifestyle of Witch and Anupia peoples. Will you all be able to come visit here? Not likely, but you may see birds that have used the tundra to raise their young. And perhaps you'll dream of these few wild places that we haven't tainted with greed. Arctic refuge is a landscape where we can test our values to keep one small part of the world as it was before we industrialized our lives. I hope my sketches can help tell the story of this place to inspire folks to care and take action for all the values that be that could be found here for science, for recreation, for inspiration, and for hope. San Wise GMG said, "There's some good in this world, Mr. Froto. It's worth fighting for. Thank you. Thank you." Um, these are organizations that you can follow to see more about what you can do with Art Refuge. Sierra Club has some great resources. And I would be remiss if I didn't put a plug in for my Instagram, my art, and my t-shirt business, which I still run called Coyote Graphics. Um, and this is a cool caribou art t-shirt that I happen to be wearing right now. Product placement is important. So, thank you all for coming and I would love to field any questions. >> Yeah. >> So, this will turn on in 10 seconds. not work. Oh, there we go. >> Okay. So, I'm going to try to take two questions from you all and then one from people on Zoom. As I stated earlier, technology is not my strength. So, we'll see what happens. We'll do our best. But you are are welcome to pass this around and throw this, they tell me as well, or I can hand deliver it if there's too too much distance. So, I see one hand already. I'm going to bring this over to you and then we'll go from there. >> I was check. >> I was wondering. >> Thank you. >> Are you able to tell me a little bit more about your day-to-day life when you were staying at the Arctic Wildlife Refuge and other people you were there with? >> Sure. Um when I first flew there um the pilots were telling me the the main leads for the bird study were all in Fairbanks still. So it was all grad students that I was there with um and grad students from all over the place. several from Alaska and um several from like US and and I think one person from abroad too even um and they applied to get this position through Fish and Wilder Service I'm sure. Um and our dayto-day was we would go out we we'd sleep in those tents. There was a weather port that we ate in that was had um some cook stoves, heat a small propane heater um chairs and stuff and there was a twomile square study area with plots and then we'd pick a plot and we'd search that plot for two hours for four people. So, what whatever that breaks out to, if there was two of us, then it would be, you know, four hours for the two people trying to find as many nests as we could. Um, and some nests got just marked as nests on a map. Some nests got the um game cams. Some got a little heat sensor tag underneath them that would would go off at a certain interval when eggs hatched versus when they were eating by eat by something. So it's all trying to study the um success of of shorebirds on the tundra to see to get a baseline for that because if development happens that will change and how that how drastic that changes is important. So um and we do that we come back have lunch do that again have dinner go out do it again. Yeah, often times those in bed, excuse me, by maybe one or something trying to follow 20-year-olds around. I'm not a string chicken anymore. So, definitely got my steps into >> Yeah. >> You want to you want to see if you can just give it to >> Thank you. Um, so fun to hear about your talk. There's a lot of ology that I have heard before. I really appreciate I really appreciate learning it. Um I'm curious if either at Tulic or on the coastal plane you had the artist and residence program or the scientific programs had much collaboration with the Gwen people because I know a lot of organizations and the Genon steering committee are at the front of this fight to protect their homelands. >> Exactly. That was kind of the miss that's been the missing piece for my trips to the Ark these these past few times I've gone. I haven't been able to go to Arc Village and actually talk to people. Um Fish and Wilder Service does sort of reach out with them. Um but I wasn't involved with what they were doing there. So that's kind of the next step in my process is to make that try to make that connection that it's not an easy connection to make as a as a old white guy to say and yeah I want to be able to to tell their story respectfully and and hear how they um do their subsistence lifestyle and how important these resources and animals are to them in their culture. But I don't want to be >> Yeah, it's tricky. I I've got some I've got some people working on it. So, it's it's trying to figure out how what what I can offer them that would be of value. So, it's not just me taking their stuff. You know, >> thank you. >> Good question. >> I don't have any Zoom Zoom questions yet, so we can keep going here. Oh, uh, that was my part of my question, but continue. Uh, I would suggest you take native studies, which I've done, and take the Wabanaki Reach Ally train here in Maine >> on a Saturday. And I noticed you're walking around like we would walk around here in Maine with gear, >> no gloves or anything. I was like weather we've had here in April. And are you continually going back every year to to continue the project? >> I go back as much as I can afford. um in the foothills. So the weathers were more controlled. So it's a little less crazy than that. But yeah, I it's a lot of gear. We bring a lot of different layers and then take them off and put them on constantly. >> Almost like here. >> Yeah, exactly. that thank you for that um comment about the Minaki thing because I've been looking at that. Appreciate that. >> My quick question about your semi-pomated Oh, sorry. >> Um quick question about the semi-pomated sand pipers in the Bay of Fundy. Yeah. >> When did you film that? >> That was the third week of August. >> No, but what year? >> This year. >> Last year. Last year. I'm impressed. I haven't seen numbers like that in May of Fundy in four decades. >> I So I missed by a day. Um I think we saw 40,000. There was 80,000 the day before. >> My friend Charles Dun was there filming and that's what they estimated. >> Super encouraging. >> Yeah, it's a it's a moving target for sure. >> I think behind you. >> Thank you so much. Very inspiring, fascinating presentation. >> Oh, thank you. I was wondering if you look familiar. It does coyote graphics go to the common ground fair. >> Well, yes. >> Okay. Okay. That's where I remember you from. Okay. Lovely presentation. Um but as a first year at college, very interested in doing some research in the Arctic. Um do you know of any good um organizations to look out for or places to start as someone curious to get involved in the Arctic? >> That is a really good question. That may be a good question for the boat museum as well as for me. Um, I know Fish and Wildlife Service sadly has been child blocked and they're not doing this bird research anymore. There was I think a couple years ago was the sort of closed off the they were going to close it off anyways, but there's there's very few people in even in the office now doing stuff. So, that's not encouraging. But um off the top of my head, I'm not coming up with anything, but if you want to scroll your name on my mailing list and write artic stuff, I will. Yeah, I'll send you some some connections as best I can. >> I'm glad you're you're excited about it because we need young people who are interested in this fight and interested in this awesome ecology. >> Thank you. >> And come see me. >> This is a Zoom question. Um, sorry to everyone on Zoom. We cannot figure out how to see you on our end. Um, Sam Landry asks, "If there was anything different that you wish you did on your trip or something that you wish you did that you didn't have the opportunity to do." >> Oo, that's a good question. There are So, there are several sort of outstanding things that I haven't seen and sketched yet that I want to experience. My my plan is to take all these field sketches and to take my stories and to connect them with some of the science of um my science friends, my professor friends and and biologist friends and make a book of field sketches about Arctic Refuge >> and use it as a tool for advocating for this place >> um in the middle of sort of writing it and getting ready to try to um submit to some publishers. So, but there are having something like that that's going to be something that speaks to this place. There's some things I got to do. I I need to go see the caribou migration and be in the middle of it and see a lot of caribou. That's on my list. Seeing a snowy owl nest would be awesome. Spending time with the witchin is probably the top thing that I want to do. Um, and they do, too, if I can figure that out. I don't have as many connections there. Um, and to tell you the truth, every time I go there, something new and awesome happens that I had no idea that I was even interested in until I was like till it happened and I was like, "Oh, cool." I had no idea I was going to be drawing plants all summer long last summer at Tulink, but it was just Yeah, it was just really fascinating. So, and it it's a it's a landscape with not a ton of biodiversity, but just enough to get a handle on and just enough to keep inspiring. >> Awesome. Thank you for that. Okay, we can go back to audience. >> And notice many of the researchers carrying guns and I assume that's for polar bears >> actually. >> Did you see them? And >> okay, that's >> not for polar bears. Very good question. Uh, more for brown bears than polar bears. Polar bears are a possibility. Um, grizzlies are more likely there. Um, I have not seen a grizzly in Alaska yet in all the times I've gone there. The outhouse had a big clump of hair where one had scratched on it early in the season. That's as close as I've gotten to a Christmas. Um, but I have seen polar bears not in Arctic Refuge, but in Talic, um, a little bit farther north and west Barrow. um where I've gone to do some bird um festival and stuff and they they regularly have polar bears that come from along the sea ice in town and eat leftover whale carcass stuff that the whalers put out. So, it's pretty amazing to see. But yeah, there's got to be with the fish and wild service, we had to be out with somebody with a gun at all times when we were away from camp. Thank you for your presentation. This is a question, but I would like to draw a parallel between the experience that you saw in this artic refuge and how you brought it back to the politicians and your experience to that of the Artemis crew looking down at our blue planet and saying we have to save this planet in the same light as you are saying we have to save this art of refuge. Thank you. Thank you for that insight. That was fantastic. Really appreciate that. >> Anybody else? >> I'm happy to ask another one. >> Did you seen any red foxes up there? Because I was on the cobell a few years back and they were saying that the artic foxes are kind of or yeah they're kind of being out competed by the red fox. >> You were asking the best questions a gold star for you. Um in 2022 when I was there so I ended up going to the bird camp twice in 2019 and then co and then um they said we'd love to have you back sometime. So 2022 came around say hey what are you doing? Um, so they invited me back and that we saw a red fox on the coastal plane which no one had ever seen before. >> Um, farther south in the foothills and mountains, there's lots of red foxes, but the fact that they're sort of pushing, they out compete and they actually hunt and kill the Arctic foxes, too. So, >> good question. Well, I'm happy to answer questions off mic too. Um, as we me over so you guys can get the heck out of here too if you want. It's all fine. Well, thank you all for coming. I really appreciate engageful audience. >> Are any of your uh drawings for sale by any chance? >> They are. In fact, >> I haven't put the price tag out yet, but the little sketch