Ann holding an adult common murre, captured for body measurements and leg-banding.

I grew up in rural England, and after finishing high school at age 18, I spent five years doing a variety of volunteer work, ranging from apprenticing to a taxidermist in Sweden, to monitoring seabirds in the Shetland Islands. My appreciation for the Arctic environment began to develop when I spent a winter helping run dogsledding expeditions in Spitsbergen, and during the following winter worked and lived among a remote farming community in Iceland.

During 1991-1993 I spent summers on Skomer Island in Wales, a long-term seabird monitoring station and nature reserve. My time on Skomer inspired me to continue working on seabirds, and I moved to Alaska in winter 1993-94 to volunteer for John Piatt on a puffin diet study, spending the 1994 field season on a major horned and tufted puffin colony in the Semidi Islands off the Alaska Peninsula.

Ann with a young common murre chick.

In summer 1995, I returned to Alaska to start seabird colony monitoring work on Chisik Island in lower Cook Inlet, as part of the CISeaFFS project. Since then, I’ve led field crews at Chisik in the 1996-99 field seasons, working together with Alice Chapman, Ram Papish, Dave Black, Greg Hoffmann, and Tom Van Pelt. We’ve monitored populations and studied the feeding ecology of horned puffins, common murres, black-legged kittiwakes, and glaucous-winged gulls, in addition to regular beach-seining to learn more about local forage fish.

My experiences doing field work made me want more theoretical knowledge and a scientific framework in which to continue learning and questioning, so in autumn 1996 I began studying toward a BSc. degree in Zoology at Sheffield University in England. My degree work included a field project that I conducted at Chisik Island, investigating parental provisioning in horned puffins.

In spring 1999, I graduated from University and came back to Alaska for the summer’s field work, and plan to spend the winter in Anchorage working on data compilation and analysis.