00:05Cooper Island, Alaska.
00:07It's a narrow sandbar in the Beaufort Sea,
00:10closer to the North Pole than to mainland America.
00:16Independent American scientist George DeVocchi has spent 48 summers here
00:21studying black guillemots, an Arctic seabird.
00:27Guillemots spend the winter on Arctic sea ice
00:31and visit Cooper Island in summer to breed.
00:40But they're not the island's only wild visitors.
00:49These are sold as driveway alarms on Amazon.
00:54And I realized that I needed something to tell me that something,
01:01that a polar bear was approaching the cabin so I could be prepared.
01:06So two or three years ago, I bought four of these.
01:12And there's a game changer.
01:14They have very few false positives.
01:17And I'd been waking up in the morning and heard the doorbell alarm
01:24and looked out and there was a bear walking up to camp.
01:34Guillemots normally breed on rocky cliffs.
01:37Dr. DeVocchi visited Cooper Island in 1972 as a student
01:43and discovered Guillemots breeding in cavities and debris.
01:47That gave him extraordinary access to study them very closely ever since.
01:56One egg.
01:58New egg.
02:01They are a nearshore species.
02:03Unlike most seabirds, they lay two eggs because they feed so close to shore
02:07they can actually make enough trips to have two young fledged from their nest rather than just one.
02:14And I always found them an interesting seabird because of that because they were somewhat atypical.
02:18They were feeding within, you know, five or six kilometers of shore typically
02:21and not going offshore like albatross or petrels or various things like that.
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