Polar bears came into George Divoky’s camp on a barren Arctic Island last summer and devoured a colony of black guillemots he had studied there for 50 years. He didn’t try to deter them. The bears were hungry. He had watched their world melting.
I had known Divoky for half his career he spent on the island. With him, I’d seen the progression of climate change in the Arctic environment and in the American mind.
But on this day, when I was supposed to be on the island, and would have captured the destruction of the colony, I could not. Just before the long journey, I had been turned back by an exposure to Covid.
We did the piece anyway. Technology made it possible. The work we published won an important award. You can read the article and see the photos and video here (free registration is required.)
This is some of my best work in recent years. How did I do it without actually being there?
Divoky and I began talking about it since the spring of 2024. I was amazed that he was still spending his summers on Cooper Island studying the birds. Cooper Island is a desolate gravel bar north of mainland Alaska, constantly swept by strong wind and fog, with typical summertime highs in the 40s. George, now 78 years old, worked there alone.
Across 50 seasons, he went from being an obscure graduate student to a feted minor celebrity and now back to an obscure field researcher—just as climate change had gone from a dawning idea to an urgent cause and now to a daily threat as prosaic as insurance rates.
After extensive preparation, Loren Holmes of the Anchorage Daily News and I (and my wife Sarah) were scheduled to land on the island aboard a chartered boat. But George didn’t want Covid on the island. (He was right, Sarah and I did get sick.)
We sent Loren to the island anyway. He ran a recorder whenever anyone spoke and shot many hours of video, capturing just about everything that happened. (And he showed real courage in the face of polar bear danger.)
In the old days of analog tape and physical film, I couldn’t have written this piece. We wouldn’t have the video, and managing and interpreting so many hours of recordings would have been overwhelming.
With an automatic transcription service that pairs text with sound, I was able to organize and isolate story-relevant pieces, which I incorporated with extensive added reporting, including long interviews with George, Loren, and George’s wife, Catherine Smith, who had also been on the island.
We achieved sensory immediacy using these technology tools. Loren’s work gave me the sights and sounds, and the interviews gave me the taste and feel of the place.
Besides that, my biggest asset was time. I’ve known George and his birds for a long long time, and with him I’ve lived the peril of our fragile, oblivious society, as we tell these stories, first giving warning, and now recording the harms that have undeniably arrived.
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