George Divoky has spent nearly 11 cumulative years on Cooper Island, which is a remote sandbar off northern Alaska, and studied a colony of Mandt’s black guillemots. He first encountered the birds there in 1972, when a Coast Guard icebreaker dropped him off for a seabird survey and he found 10 breeding pairs nesting beneath debris left behind by the U.S. Navy. By 1989, the colony had grown to 200 breeding pairs.
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