Murres, puffins, the various varieties of shearwaters, leeches storm petrels, northern gannets, red necked phalaropes, are just a few of the 20 or more seabirds Jessie Wilson and Kristine Hannifen will need to identify over the coming 21 days.
From dawn to dusk the Acadia University masters students will occupy the port-side corner of the Polar Prince’s bridge, identifying, counting and cataloguing for the Eastern Canada Seabirds at Sea survey.
“I’m good with most terrestrial birds, but I’ve still got a lot of seabirds to learn,” admitted Wilson on Wednesday.
For backup they’ll have longtime birder Rick Ludkin.
“Generally it has been a prolonged decline,” said Ludkin of what the survey has shown of seabird populations along our coast.
While the data matters, of near equal importance are the people Wilson, Hannifen and Ludkin will meet aboard the Polar Prince, said expedition lead Geoff Green. The ideas they’ll share and the collaborations that are created when you pack scientists, indigenous peoples, artists, fishermen, musicians, and marine industry representatives aboard a former coast guard icebreaker are the fruit he hopes the expedition will bear.
“It’s probably the most famous ship in Canada,” declared Green of the 67-year-old former CCGS Sir Humphrey Gilbert.
Then perhaps remembering the province he’s about to tour around, Green added, “second to the Bluenose.”
The Mulgrave wharf was a busy place Wednesday morning with supplies getting hoisted aboard along with four freshly tuned-up Zodiacs in preparation for the departure of Ocean Conservation Expedition 2022.
Amongst the ship’s busy crew was Faron Joe.
“My uncle Billy made that,” he said of the birchbark canoe in the ship’s former helicopter hanger, turned meeting room.
Joe is a member of Newfoundland’s Miawpukek First Nation which bought the Polar Prince and has leased it to Students on Ice for three years of expeditions similar to the one began Wednesday.
He’s one of the people Green wants other members to meet so that they can hear from Joe about paddling a canoe with other members of his community from Conne River to Saint Pierre and Miquelon. Other trips from his community in large seagoing canoes came as far as Cape Breton, demonstrating how the Mi’kmaq regularly crossed the 95 kilometres of open water from St. Paul’s Island (Northern Cape Breton) to Cape Anguille (Southern Newfoundland) prior to European arrival.
With funding from the Department of Fisheries and Oceans, participants get to travel for free.
“The goal is to showcase the wonders of these parts of the world, the ocean and why it’s so important that we take care of our ocean,” said Green.
“It’s not in great shape as many of us know and its critical to life on earth. Every other breath we take comes from the ocean, the food we eat, the oxygen we breathe. So it’s a really important time to look at what’s going on and bring people together so they can learn and listen and understand different perspectives, cultural, scientific, western, indigenous.”
Previous expeditions organized by Students on Ice have seen them take a similarly eclectic mix of perspectives to Antarctica and through the Northwest Passage.
The Bay of Fundy had been missed — until now.
Captain Gilles Poirier, of Cheticamp, planned take the Polar Prince down the eastern shore, with a stop in Halifax on Saturday, then on around southwest Nova, up the Bay of Fundy into the Minas Passage, then Chebucto Bay, along the New Brunswick coast to Machias-Seal Island and back around to Mulgrave by the end of September.
Over his 21 years captaining the Polar Prince through its various name changes, Captain Poirier has circled the world twice.
“My main job here, as always, is to bring everyone out and back safe, the same way we left,” said Poirier.
