20 years of Zackenberg

To mark the 20th aniversary of Zackenberg Research Station, dr.dk viden had a story yesterday featuring some of the important discoveries. I provided a few photos. It can be seen @
http://www.dr.dk/nyheder/viden/naturvidenskab/9-videnskabelige-opdagelser-fra-det-nordoestligste-groenland.

Also, the daily newspaper Politiken had a feature on Zackenberg yesterday. Again with a some photos of mine. I do not have the URL handy.

This years late snow melt have given some photographic opportunities with high concentrations of wader birds and geese in the few snow free areas close to the station. We have a couple of "house" barnacle geese hanging around the station buildings. They have gotten pretty used to people now and allow for rather close approach. I have been photo hunting a bit on the sea ice after ringed seal and managed to sneak up on one. Forty meters is still a bit long even with my longest lens. I therefore placed a photo trap at the seal hole but it seems to be using its other holes afterwards. I will probably need to rescue the camera tomorrow as puddles are starting to form on the snow on the ice. I want to set up a photo trap at the place I captured the image for the stamp hoping for more musk ox activity. But there are quite few musk oxen in the area.

Musk oxen dead and alive

I found the first muskox carcass of the season the other day. It was from a recently dead bull, so it was on top of the thick snow still covering almost the entire valley. We are expecting to find quite a lot more when the snow disappears, but this year it will take a long time. Yesterday, I heard a radio beacon from one of the collars we have on muskox cows. Two of the collars no longer transmit position via sattelite but we hope the collars are still logging positions and that we may be able to retrieve these via UHF radio. First we need to find the collars though (hopefully including muskox) and this is attempted by listening for the VHF radio beacon a few times pr. day. All other the functional collars are out of range of the VHF signal so there is still hope we may get a chance to find the disfunctional ones as they may also be out of range at the moment.

Dead fox

Yesterday the little male arctic fox that had spent over 24 hour sleeping between the station buildings died. I had photographed him day before yesterday and did notice that he looked a bit scruffy and stiff legged.
When I went to check on him yesterday afternoon, he was lying on his side and no longer reacting. I felt a little sad but it is part of nature and even those tough little survivors do not live forever. When I had a closer look it seemed he was rather old. His incisors were missing and the canines were quite worn. I put him on the scales to find his weight of only 1.85 kg. It was a rather little fox and perhaps the one we have seen during the last couple of years nick named the "3/4 fox". He did interact with another fox the day before yesterday, displacing it from some bits of interesting food items. That other fox may be the one that took shelter under the houses last spring. I'm not sure you can recognize individual foxes and we don't artificially mark them. During spring they loose their winter fur so their coat changes all the time. The dead one is now in the freezer and will be used as scientific samples.

No internet...

We have no internet and only simple means of email, but we can receive snail mail - when we have incoming planes...
As previously, I will return all received snail mail (letters/postcards/envelopes with liquorice...) with a postcard and stamp of my own breed (with musk ox motives...).

Send mail to:
Lars Holst Hansen
ZERO - Zackenberg
c/o Norlandair
Akureyri Airport
600 Akureyri
Iceland

If you need to contact me electronically, it is possible via email. Send an email to my kratlusk address and you should get an autoreply with my fieldwork email address.

Cheers,
Lars

Great to be back at Zackenberg

The weather has been wonderful since my arrival on friday, with mostly clear skies and rather cold temperatures (btw -10 and -21C). I have taken advantage of the nice evening light with a few nightly ski trips to some fox dens to collect scat and set up a few monitoring cameras. Also, I spent last night testing an automatic pano and tilt setup. This is later to be used for monitoring musk oxen on Aucella via massive gigapixel panos. We have only seen a few musk oxen travelling through the valley and I have not heard from any of the collared ones via VHF. I did test UHF download of data from a retrieved collar with success and hope to find two missing collars which are no longer transmitting positions via satellite phone.

Twenty kilograms hand bag

When I brought an Ortlieb Rack Pack 89 (XL) to Antartica earlier this month, I had the idea that it would be used to bring the f-stop Satori EXP backpack safely ashore in the rubber boats. But as our landings never included much walking I decided to leave the backpack on the ship and only take the Monster sized Internal Camera Unit. The rack pack is VERY roomy (89 litres) and had plenty of room for the camera gear in addition to Lastolite soft box and reflector, a big Gitzo Tripod with the Acratech GP ballhead, warm mittens, down anorak water bottle etc. The roll closure is great and I much prefer it to any type of zipper as a roll closure is indestructible. The shoulder strap is nice and wide with a padded shoulder piece but the bag really needs to be fully rolled up and secured with the fasteners at the ends for the shoulder strap to be used. That is a disadvantage as it is nice to walk with the bag open for fast access to the gear. I therefore mostly ended up carrying the bag by its handles. This was a bit tiring as the bag often weighed about 20 kilograms. It was nice to be able to put it down anywhere not considering wet snow, penguin shit or pee, and it made for a great giant bean bag giving relatively good support for those low angled shots of penguins. I ended up using the tripod very little and would consider not bringing one on another trip or exchanging it for a ground pod or a skimmer. I have discarded some images due to camera movement that could have been prevented by use of more stable support. Speaking of support, I enjoyed using the Novoflex Pistock-C modified with an Arca Swiss type Sunway quick release clamp for handheld operation with the 200-400/4 lens. I am confident it helped me on the keeper ratio. 

Photo packing list for a trip to Antarctica

For an upcoming trip to the Antarctic peninsula, I plan to take:

Cameras:
Nikon D4 (main)
Nikon D700 incl MB-D10 (backup)

Lenses and converters:
AF-S Nikkor 14-24/2.8
AF-S Nikkor 85/1.4 or AF-S or Micro-Nikkor 105/2.8 (but probably both)
AF-S Nikkor 70-200/2.8
AF-S Nikkor 200-400/4
AF-S Nikkor TC-14EIII
AF-S Nikkor TC-20EIII

Lens accessories:
Nikon drop-in polarisation filter for 200-400/4

Hoya polarisation filter (77mm)
Hoya 8 stop neutral density filter (77mm)

Flash and flash gear:
1 SB-900
1 SC-29 TTL cable

1 home made flash extender - Better Beamer style but better ; )

1 Lastolite EzyBox TTL

Support:
1 Gitzo GT3541XLS tripod
1 Acratech GP ballhead
1 Novoflex Pistock-C shoulder pod with Sunway DDC60i QR (for handheld work from ship or rubber boat)

1 Kirk nodal rail for panoramas

Bags:

1 F-stop Satori EXP photo backpack with Monster insert

1 rain cover for the backpack 

3 Lowepro lens cases - to carry 2 of the smaller lenses and 1 teleconverter in the belt of the backpack

1 Ortlieb Rackpack XL 89liter (drybag to transport the backpack to shore in rubber boats)

Others:
1 Lastolite trigrip 8-in-1 small difuser/reflector
1 Thinktank Hydrophobia 300-600 raincover
CF Lexar and Sandisk memory cards (96GBin total)
2*4 rechargeable camera batteries

12 rechargeable eneloop AA batteries

2 Nikon camera battery chargers

1 Ansmann AA and AAA battery charger

Sony PCM-M10 audio recorder - for recordings of notes, ambient sound and perhaps a little reportage
Sensor swab swabs and liquid

Lexar USB card reader

Dust blower and microfleece lens lens cloths

Hama single use lens tissues

1 laptop

2 external hard disks each 500 GB (one for storage one for backup)

I have not used the Satori EXP backpack very much during summer in Greenland, but it should come handy for this upcoming trip. I surely like the concept of having the opening facing towards the carriers back keeping this side free up mud and bird guano when you put the bag down on the ground. Most of the above will fit except either the 85mm or 105mm. The bag is really on the small side although it will weigh approximately 20 kg fully loaded. I plan to bring the Lowepro lens cases to minimize the times I have to actually take off the backpack while on shore. I have previously used a similar system on Galapagos Island with great success. I will probably have both cameras in use with the 200-400 on the D4 and 70-200 or 14-24 on the D700 most of the time. I may decide to keep the D700 totally as a backup as the D4 is arguably better and they are sufficiently different in handling to cause some irritation or at least confusion. The lens cases I take are relatively large and will easily take any of the lenses besides the 200-400. This way the one or two "smaller" lenses not in use can always sit in these. 

I do have the Wemberley Sidekick but have never used it much and will  also not bring it this time. The Acratech GP head makes for a very good gimbal ball head and with no modification needed it can be used as a normal ball head with the smaller lenses. It can also quickly be turned into a panoramic head for simple 360° one row panoramas. I used to have L plates mounted either on the "naked" D700 or the MB-D10, but I never got one for the D4 and I have not really missed it. I have a little Wimberley P-5 Camera Body Plate more or less permanently mounted though. To keep everything Arca Swiss style, I also have a low profile Wimberley replacement foot on the 200-400 and one from Kirk on the 70-200. 

I am still undecided on whether to bring the 105mm macro lens. The focal length is duplicated in the 70-200 but so is the 85mm! Both 85 and 105 are specialty lenses. I recently got the 85 for extreme shallow depth of field images of groups of animals but with the sense of the place that longer lenses will not give the same way. It is rare to see advice on bringing a macro lens to Antarctica but I think it would be nice to document some of the mosses and lichens with it. The 85 has a rather poor (long) minimum focus distance. I will probably end up bringing both. Some say a 2x extender is a waste of time and that upsized shots from a 1.4x extender gives just as good (or bad) results. Others say that the TC-20EIII is actually not that bad on the 200-400. It does slow down AF to the almost non usable, that is for certain. I will consider leaving the TC-20 at home, but it will not save much on the weight budget!