The Birdman of Cooper Island has nerves of steel.
For five decades, Seattle resident George Divoky, 78, has completed an annual solo pilgrimage to a hostile island off the coast of Alaska to study his beloved seabirds.
There, on Cooper Island, he has witnessed climate change in action firsthand, with melting scorching ice radically altering the Arctic landscape and, in turn, the habits of native wildlife.
The most devastating thing for Divoky is that he has created a new threat: the polar bear.
These dangerous beasts are increasingly forced to search for food on land, which has resulted in the massacre of the colony of black guillemots that he has dedicated his life to studying. Anchorage Daily News reported.
The growing bear invasion has also put his life in danger, and Divoky is forced to install trip wires to deter them, employ motion detectors to warn, and always keep his shotgun within reach.
George Divoky, a 78-year-old ornithologist, has spent five decades studying black guillemots on Cooper Island, Alaska.
As sea ice melts and polar bears search for food, the murre colony has been decimated by polar bears
Divoky, an experienced ornithologist, has been monitoring black murres on remote Cooper Island in Arctic Alaska since 1972.
His research on the island has documented how a warming climate has affected the birds’ breeding patterns and survival.
The colony, which once thrived with 200 nests and 600 birds, now has only a few dozen left. Divoky’s observations provide one of the oldest records of the impact of climate change on wildlife.
Polar bears, which Divoky said began arriving on the island in 2002, are becoming stranded on land more frequently as the sea ice they rely on to hunt seals continues to shrink. Their hunger has taken them to Cooper Island, where they have become more adept at raiding murre nests.
In August, Divoky, 78, saw that three bears, a mother and her two cubs, had overturned their carefully placed plastic nest boxes he had set up to help protect them.
After firing warning shots to scare away the bears, Divoky observed the terrible damage. Half of the nests were destroyed and many birds died.
‘I have experienced this and it was very unique. And I wish I hadn’t,” Divoky told the Anchorage Daily News. “You couldn’t take your eyes off the train wreck.”
The once bustling colony of Divoky has now been devastated by the combined pressures of retreating sea ice, changing prey populations and, now, bears.
‘I don’t want them (the bears), in theory, to be here. But what am I? To the point that apparently fewer and fewer people care about what I do, or why I do it, or how I do it,’ he said.
He continued, “Yes, we installed bear-proof boxes to keep the colony running, but it doesn’t make sense to have a bear patrol trying to stop any bear disturbance now, when bears on the coast are inevitable every year.”
Black guillemots, which spend most of their lives at sea, depend on sea ice to feed on Arctic cod. But the ice has been receding faster and faster each year.
Divoky, once an advocate for birds, has now shifted his focus toward understanding and accepting the changing Arctic landscape.
Divoky had created the boxes by cutting holes in rigid plastic suitcases, which had previously protected the birds from bears. But they have figured out how to infiltrate then.
Longer, ice-free summers initially helped the birds, allowing them more time to breed. But as the ice disappeared, their food supply dwindled and the number of the colony’s inhabitants steadily decreased.
Divoky’s 50th field season, which could be his last extended stay, has been marked by significant losses.
“It’s a sign of climate change,” he told the Anchorage Daily News.
“Possibly one of the least important in terms of all global climate change, but it’s one that we know the arc of, from ’72, when this colony was nothing, to ’89, when it was the largest colony in Alaska, to 2024, when the birds that were still here, the two dozen pairs, were unable to raise their young because of the polar bears, due to the melting of the sea ice,” he continued.
‘And now I’m on the side of the polar bears. I have become an advocate for polar bears. What I’m saying is that I want these polar bears to do well. They won’t have ice for much longer. Use the island however you can, to rest or whatever.”
But guillemots will not appear here again in the future. And you will be able to roam more freely because I won’t be here much,” he added.
Pictured: The plywood shack where Divoky conducts his research on Cooper Island.
Despite the bleak outlook, he continues to be drawn to the island and the birds he has studied for so long.
Despite his bleak outlook, Divoky remains connected to the birds he has studied for half a century. Some have lived more than 25 years and he knows them by the colored bands he placed on their legs when they were rookies. But with more bears attacking nests and no sea ice in sight, the colony’s future looks bleak.
As he packed up his camp, Divoky reflected on the changing Arctic landscape and the grim reality facing both murres and polar bears.
“One of the important things in life is knowing when to leave,” he said. “It’s kind of the logical end, so to speak.”
However, Divoky may not be ready to close this chapter completely. When he returned to Seattle, Washington, he began planning a return trip to Cooper Island next year.
Despite the outcome of this year’s trip, he still wants to see what happens next.
