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Andrew Stowe - Watson Project 2006-2007
After traveling for a day by plane(s), and two days by train through the northern boreal forest, I arrived in Churchill, Manitoba. The end of the first travel day found me in Winnipeg, Manitoba, with the sun starting to set as I boarded the train that would carry me to the Hudson Bay and the tundra. While the rumors of overly friendly and open (from American standards) Canadians were not validated during my time with Air Canada, the train to the far north was transporting every person on whom those rumors were based. Though we only had a few conversations, I can now count among my friends the third cousin of Steffi Graff and an Estonian refugee whose family fled the country in 1944 when the Germans were on the warpath, to name a few. Churchill has been no exception to the consistent Canadian camaraderie I've encountered since Winnipeg. Despite the fact that the Northern Studies Centre is a research station full of very serious scientists, staying here is like spending a few weeks at summer camp (with the added fun of guns and potential polar bears). It may be because of the size of the study centre building and the associated dormitory life, but everyone acts like family. People aside, the tundra is astounding, a landscape unimaginably different from other areas and teeming with life (including mosquitoes the size of bumble bees, and Arctic hares twice as big as most house cats). The northern edge of the breeding range for many southern species of birds, and the southern edge for a lot of northern species, the Churchill area is a veritable birder's paradise. Standing at the mouth of the Churchill river where it runs into the Hudson Bay (Cape Mary), we watched beluga whales swimming upstream while the seals played on the ice farther out, the terns swooped and dipped to avoid the aggressive thievery of the parasitic jaegers, and three different types of loons fished the rich waters. Polar bears on the far shore would have made the scene worthy of Natural Geographic attention, but it is still early in the season for the P-bears. Driving back from Cape Mary, we encountered five caribou, the first of many that will leave the boreal forest during the coming weeks and make for the coast and the bug-free winds that blow off of the bay. Those biting insects that can literally drive caribou to the point of madness are supposed to be swarming viciously tomorrow, and I wisely planned to spend the day observing terns in a marsh. If the pictures I post tomorrow appear blurry, grainy, and overall poor of quality, it might just be the mosquitoes.
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