"The cold coast of Greenland
Is Barren and bare,
No seed-time or harvest
Is ever known there;
And the birds here sing sweetly
On mountain and dale,
But the birds do not sing
In the land of the whale."
-Farewell to Tarwathie, an old whaling song.
Recently Marshall Iliff sent my son, George, an annotated list of Greenland
birds. George shared it with me. It's fascinating. It is "An annotated
checklist of the birds of Greenland" by David Boertmann (Meddelelser om
Gronland, Bioscience 38, 1994, 63pp.). I have made 3 extra copies (they
lack p. 61, part of the list of references), glad to mail one with my
compliments to the first 3 persons who e-mail me at my PREFERRED address.
If that bothers you, then send 5$ or 10$ to the M.O.S. or the V.S.O. as
your own gift.
Greenland is the potential source of individuals of the following bird
species that occur in the Middle Atlantic region. Those most likely have
the standard capital initial letters shown. Those less likely to be from
Greenland have no capital letters. In the case of the latter they either
have very small Greenland breeding populations and/or most of the Greenland
individuals of those species are thought to winter mainly in the Old World.
For example, there are plenty of Brant on our coast here but most of
Greenland's Brant winter in Europe. Obviously some of these species are
rare or accidental here regardless of their point of origin.
Red-throated Loon. Common Loon. horned grebe. Northern Fulmar. great
cormorant. greater white-fronted goose. Snow Goose. Canada Goose.
Cackling Goose. brant. green-winged teal. mallard. Northern Pintail.
common eider. King Eider. harlequin duck. Long-tailed Duck.
red-breasted merganser. gyrfalcon. Peregrine Falcon. American Golden
Plover. black-bellied plover. red knot. sanderling. Baird's Sandpiper.
pectoral sandpiper. purple sandpiper. dunlin. whimbrel. Ruddy
Turnstone. Red-necked Phalarope. Red Phalarope. Parasitic Jaeger.
Long-tailed Jaeger. sabine's gull. Common Black-headed Gull. lesser
black-backed gull. Herring Gull. iceland gull. glaucous gull. great
black-backed gull. Ross's Gull. Black-legged Kittiwake. Arctic Tern.
Common Murre. Thick-billed Murre. Razorbill. Black Guillemot. Dovekie.
Atlantic Puffin. Snowy Owl. horned lark. American Pipit. northern
wheatear. Common Redpoll. hoary redpoll. Lapland Longspure. Snow
Bunting.
There are some instances of individual birds definitely coming from
Greenland to our region. Occasionally Peregrine Falcons that have been
banded as nestlings (called eyasses in the case of falcons) have been
captured at Cape May or Cape Charles. There is also an instance, by way of
contrast, of a Green-winged Teal banded in Maryland being recovered in
Greenland.
"Oh, Greenland is a dreadful place.
It's a place that's never green.
Where there's ice and snow,
And the whale fishes blow,
And daylight's seldom seen, brave boys,
And daylight's seldom seen."
-Greenland Whale Fisheries, an old whaling song
An amazing list of strays has been recorded. About 58 species breed. The
total list is c. 236 species (including Eskimo Curlew and Great Auk), less
than Fort Smallwood Park, MD. Fewer than the 264 I've seen on the 120
acres of our Maryland farm in Talbot County. Much less than the 307 Paul
Lehman has seen from his Cape May property of less than an acre. Fewer
than Hart & Miller islands in Baltimore County. Fewer than some individual
Christmas counts have recorded in one day at Mad Island Marsh, Texas. Not
as many as the Chesapeake Bay Bridge & Tunnel, or Kiptopeke State Park, or
Ft. McHenry in Baltimore.
On the other hand, Greenland's list boasts 9 rallids (including gallinules
and coots) and 24 New World Warblers (including Louisiana Waterthrush and
Golden-winged Warbler!). Other astounding finds include Cattle Egret,
Franklin's Gull, Yellow-billed Cuckoo, Common Nighthawk, Chimney Swift, and
Marsh Wren. Nine thrushes include mostly Old World species such as
Fieldfare, Redwing, and Song Thrush.
Here are some, to use an overused word, awesome facts. Greenland, the
world's largest island, is 840,004 square miles, about 672,000 of those
covered by the permanent ice sheet. Alaska is 656,424 square miles, Texas
268,601, California 163,707. Greenland is more than one fifth the size of
Canada or the United States. Its longest dimensions are 1,660 miles north
to south, 750 miles west to east. It has a coastline of 24,430 miles.
Some of its glaciers move 100 feet a day.
The massive Greenland ice sheet, averaging a mile thick, contains pollen
and other ingredients that reveal Earth's climatic changes and history for
the last 120,000 years. The ice sheet is up to 2 miles thick. At the
North Greenland Ice Core Project camp ice cores have been extracted for
such analysis to a depth of 10,121 feet in 11 foot cylinders each 4 inches
in diameter ("USA Today", Aug. 31, 2004, p. 8D).
Greenland's southernmost land, at Cape Farewell, a wonderful place name, is
at 60 degrees latitude, about the same as Churchill, Stockholm, Oslo, or
St. Petersburg. The northernmost land, Cape Morris Jessup, is 440 miles
from the North Pole. Greenland is less than 20 miles from Canada
(Ellesmere Island) at one point in its northwest sector. Yet it has an
impressive number of Old World stray species such as Grey Heron, Water
Rail, Eurasian Oystercatcher, Common Cuckoo, House Martin, and Rook.
"Adieu to my comrades
For a while we must part
And likewise the dear lass
Who first won my heart.
The cold coast of Greenland
She never will see
But the longer my absence
The more loving she'll be."
"Our ship is well-rigged
And she's ready to sail.
The crew they are anxious
To follow the whale
Where the icebergs do float
And the stormy winds blow
And the land and the ocean
Are covered with snow."
-Farwell to Tarwathie.
The presence in our region at times of abnormally high numbers of some
birds, welcome as they are, may not be good news. On February 15, 2004,
observers saw an estimated 7,000 Razorbills from shore at Cape Hatteras
(Brian Patteson, George Armistead, et al.). A few years ago over 1,000
were seen north of there from Rodanthe in one day. Last year on many days
in mid-winter a half dozen or so frequented the Ocean City, MD, inlet.
Perhaps their food supply of sandeels (sand launces), capelin, and juvenile
fishes of other species has plummeted farther north due to climactic or
other changes. These Razorbills were probably not from Greenland but their
presence in our Middle Atlantic Coast Region may be emblematic of general
environmental problems in the North Atlantic.
"Now the warming climate is causing the Greenland Ice Sheet to melt, and
billions of gallons of fresh water are pouring into the northern sea each
year. The ice melt has increased by 16 percent since 1979."-Gretel
Ehrlich, "The future of ice: a journey into cold" (Pantheon, 2004). It has
been estimated that if this ice sheet were to melt world sea level would
rise 20 feet.
The extent of vagrancy illustrated by Boertmann's annotated Greenland
checklist is probably hard to replicate at the higher latitudes of the
Southern Hemisphere. There's not the great landmass there that there is in
the Northern Hemisphere, where the northerly latitudes are mostly occupied
by Eurasia. In the south Africa, India, South America, and even to some
extent Australia taper off into points. Beyond that lie the Roaring
Forties and the Furious Fifties, the great expanse of the Southern Ocean,
and beyond that hostile Antarctica. Farther from big population centers,
the Antarctic and the many Subantarctic islands are less easy to access for
naturalists. Nevertheless, there are some astounding records such as
Eastern Kingbird in the Falkland Islands.
"It was not only a life of cold, filth, frostbite, snowblindness, and
starvation but also one of intimacy and comradeship, resourcefulness and
magic, when shamans in trance made soul-flights under the ice ... and ice
was cut with knives whose blades were hacked from a meteorite." -Gretel
Ehrlich, "This cold heaven: seven seasons in Greenland" (Pantheon, 2001).
I've tried to show there is a connection of our region to Greenland. Is
there an Antarctic connection? Yes - Wilson's Storm Petrel and South Polar
Skua. And some of "our" shearwaters breed on Subantarctic islands.
Gretel Ehrlich's writing on the Arctic is compelling although it sometimes
seems overdrawn, even unbelievable, such as when she maintains that Inuit
hunters sometimes go barefoot in order to be more silent. But she is as
much a poet as a writer of prose and should be granted some poetic license
in either milieu. Now that our region is witnessing winter's recessional
it is stimulating to think of "our" winter birds, their heroic migrations,
and their breeding territories in Greenland and their other Arctic
destinations which she describes so vividly.
"These men knew beyond a shadow of a doubt, beyond hesitation, what made
them happy, what gave them a sense of satisfaction, of wealth: an abundance
of animals." - Barry Lopez, writing of the Inuit in "Arctic dreams:
imagination and desire in a northern landscape" (Scribners, 1986), which
won the National Book Award.
Best to all.-Harry Armistead, 523 E. Durham St., Philadelphia, PA
19119-1225. 215-248-4120. harryarmistead at hotmail dot com
"Tacitus said that the sun made a noise when it rose in the east and cried
out at the end of the day as it drowned in the ocean. But here the sun
rises in the south when it rises at all. Learning to see in the dark seems
more important now. Jorge Luis Borges reprimanded his readers for thinking
that blind people live in a dark world. Behind his blind eyes he said
there were always colors. Milton, also blind, wrote of burning lakes and
inward conflagrations. So much about the Arctic has to do with blindness
and seeing, lucency and eclipse. Milton went to visit Galileo, who had
been put under house arrest by the Inquisition in Arceti, near Florence.
The scientist had gone blind, his starry world taken from him; Milton would
lose his sight later, but the calamity that disabled the astronomer gave
inspiration to the poet. The two men sat outside at night, heads tilted
back, and tried to remember the stars." ("This cold heaven", p. 41) Here
we have what seem to be throwaway references to four luminaries of
temperate climes, three of them blind, but neatly reconciled to a recurring
theme in Ehrlich's book of the ever-present consequences of darkness and
light in the high Arctic.
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