Summer?

It's the end of May. Summer is coming. At least, I hope summer is coming. They say summer should be coming. We all want summer to come. But the fact that the temperature has hung at or below freezing ever since we arrived over a week ago is not terribly encouraging. Oh, and the freezing rain and snow don't really really help. Did I mention the fog? I never knew it could be below freezing, rainy, foggy, and windy all at the same time. Well, now I know. The other day Ram witnessed Least Auklet Ice Capades up at the colony. The entire area was covered with a layer of ice that even the chootchkies couldn't stand on.

To be fair, it hasn't all been completely nasty weather, we've had one or two decent days. We have been able to get some work done - the rookery has been liberally painted to help with entanglement resighting, and we've had good success doing band resighting on the birds. Ram and I even went on a lovely little jaunt around the southeast corner of the island. We were fortunate enough to see the reindeer herd (there were six other people hiking all over the east side of the island specifically looking for them, and did they see hide or hair of the herd?....of course not), a large number of nesting cormorants, and an absolute glut of sleeping foxes. We were tripping over them. We'd see one several rocks away, casually approach it for photographing, and nearly trample one or two more in the process. These foxes were remarkably quite. We're used to be barked at to great length whenever we invade their space, but this early in the season they seemed content to silently watch us pass by. We were even lucky enough to see a white specimen who still wore most of his winter coat.