From a distance, Prince Leopold Island looks almost like a fortress. Great cliffs rise vertically from the waters of Lancaster Sound, their horizontal bands of sedimentary rock forming enormous walls above the sea. Even before we reached them, we could see birds circling around the island, but it was only when we climbed into our sea kayaks and began paddling beneath the cliffs that the sheer scale of this extraordinary Arctic seabird colony became apparent.
The conditions allowed us to take the kayaks right beneath the great cliffs, looking upwards at hundreds of metres of limestone and sandstone stacked in almost horizontal layers above us. Frost, ice and erosion have attacked those layers over thousands of years, picking out the softer rocks and creating cracks, shelves and narrow ledges. To a geologist they tell a story stretching back hundreds of millions of years. To the seabirds, they are simply prime Arctic real estate.
Those ledges were crowded with Brünnich’s guillemots – also known as thick-billed murres – alongside black-legged kittiwakes and northern fulmars. Birds streamed backwards and forwards between the cliffs and the sea, while others sat on the water around us. From the low viewpoint of a kayak, with our eyes barely a metre above sea level, the cliffs seemed enormous.
One of the things I hadn’t expected was the sound of the island itself. As the morning wore on, alongside the constant calls of the birds we repeatedly heard stones falling from the cliffs. The Arctic is continually dismantling these rocks. Water penetrates tiny cracks, freezes and expands, gradually breaking pieces away through frost shattering. Every so often another stone would tumble down the cliff face towards the sea.
It was a wonderful reminder that Prince Leopold Island is not simply a static lump of rock. Even while we were there, the processes that created those thousands of seabird nesting ledges were continuing around us.
Then something appeared beneath the cliffs that changed the whole experience. A polar bear. It was walking along the narrow strip at the base of the cliffs, beneath this vast seabird colony. To reach Prince Leopold Island it must, at some point, have swum across the surrounding water, and there was something extraordinary about seeing such a huge terrestrial predator walking beneath cliffs containing tens of thousands of birds.
Polar bears are, of course, primarily hunters of marine mammals, particularly seals, but they are also opportunists. Seabird colonies can provide a seasonal source of food, with eggs, chicks and occasionally adult birds available to bears willing to exploit them. At a colony on this scale there must also be a steady rain of food from above as eggs, chicks and birds fall from the nesting ledges. Seeing a polar bear anywhere in the Arctic is special. Seeing one from the water while paddling beneath one of the Canadian Arctic’s greatest seabird colonies was something else entirely.
Prince Leopold Island lies close to the junction of Lancaster Sound and Prince Regent Inlet in Nunavut. It covers roughly 64 square kilometres and is around 13 kilometres across, but its relatively modest size is misleading. Most of the island consists of a flat-topped plateau surrounded by immense cliffs which in places rise around 250 to 300 metres directly from the sea.
There are relatively few easy landing places for humans, but for seabirds the geography is almost perfect. The cliffs contain countless ledges, cracks and projections where birds can breed, while immediately offshore lies one of the richest marine environments in the Canadian High Arctic.
Accommodation upstairs and restaurant downstairs. It is hardly surprising that the birds arrive in such extraordinary numbers. Prince Leopold Island supports one of the largest multi-species seabird colonies in the Canadian Arctic. More than 100,000 breeding pairs have been estimated here, and the importance of the colony led to the creation of the Prince Leopold Island Migratory Bird Sanctuary. But numbers alone really don’t describe a seabird colony.
From the kayak we were surrounded by movement. Birds flew out towards Lancaster Sound to feed while others returned towards the cliffs. Fulmars cruised effortlessly past us. Kittiwakes called from the ledges and from the water. Brünnich’s guillemots flew past in groups, their short wings beating furiously. And above everything was the constant sound of the colony. The Brünnich’s guillemots are particularly interesting. British birdwatchers will immediately recognise them as close relatives of our common guillemots, although this is a much more Arctic species. Adults are dark above and white below, with a relatively short, heavy bill carrying the characteristic pale line that helps distinguish them.
They breed packed together on narrow, exposed cliff ledges, and one of the most extraordinary moments in their lives comes when the chicks leave those ledges. At only around three weeks old and still unable to fly properly, a young guillemot launches itself from the cliff. It may be hundreds of metres above the sea.
The chick flutters downwards on tiny wings while the male parent accompanies it. If all goes well it reaches the water, after which father and chick swim away from the colony together. The male continues to feed and care for the youngster at sea. Looking upwards from our kayaks at the height of those cliffs made that first journey seem even more extraordinary.
The northern fulmars were very different birds to watch. Fulmars are related to petrels and albatrosses rather than gulls, and their mastery of the air becomes obvious when you watch them from sea level. Rather than constantly flapping, they use the currents of air flowing across the waves and around the cliffs, banking and gliding with remarkably little effort.
Fulmars belong to the group of seabirds known as tubenoses, named after the distinctive tubular nostrils on their bills. They have a remarkably well-developed sense of smell, an extremely useful adaptation for an animal searching huge areas of ocean for food. They also possess one of the more memorable seabird defence mechanisms: when threatened at the nest, they can eject foul-smelling stomach oil towards an intruder.
The black-legged kittiwakes occupied many of the cliff ledges as well. Their familiar call – the source of the name “kittiwake” – mixed with the voices of the other birds to create the background soundtrack to our paddle. Although we often associate gulls with towns, harbours and rubbish tips, kittiwakes are genuinely oceanic birds, spending much of their lives at sea and returning to cliffs to breed.
Their nests can appear precarious beyond belief. Mud, vegetation and other material are built into small platforms on ledges that sometimes look barely wide enough to support a bird, never mind a nest containing eggs or chicks.
Black guillemots are another important part of the colony, although they tend to use cracks and crevices rather than the densely packed open ledges favoured by Brünnich’s guillemots. In breeding plumage they are among the smartest-looking birds in the Arctic: almost entirely black, but with a brilliant white wing patch, vivid red legs and feet and a striking red mouth.
They are wonderful birds to watch from a kayak because so much of their life takes place beneath the surface. One moment a guillemot can be sitting quietly on the water and the next it disappears, using its wings to effectively “fly” underwater in pursuit of fish before surfacing somewhere completely different.
All these birds raise an obvious question. Why are so many of them concentrated on this one island? The answer lies not only in the cliffs above us but in the water beneath our kayaks. Lancaster Sound is one of the most biologically productive parts of the Canadian High Arctic. Currents, tides, sea ice and underwater topography combine to move nutrients through the marine ecosystem. During the short Arctic summer, the long hours of daylight encourage phytoplankton growth. Zooplankton feed upon the phytoplankton, fish feed upon the plankton, and the fish and marine invertebrates support the huge numbers of seabirds breeding on the cliffs. Seals and whales are part of the same system, and ultimately so is the polar bear we watched walking along the shore.
That is what makes a place such as Prince Leopold Island so fascinating. The spectacular seabird cliffs are only the most visible part of a much larger ecological system. If more than 100,000 pairs of seabirds can raise young on a relatively small Arctic island, an enormous amount of biological productivity must be taking place in the surrounding sea.
The wider Lancaster Sound ecosystem is now recognised as one of Canada’s most important Arctic marine environments, with much of the region protected within Tallurutiup Imanga National Marine Conservation Area. For Inuit, of course, these waters have been important hunting grounds and travel routes for generations, long before modern conservation boundaries were drawn on maps.
There is another part of visiting a seabird colony that photographs and wildlife documentaries struggle to convey: the smell.
A huge seabird colony produces an equally huge amount of guano. You can sometimes smell a major colony surprisingly far out to sea, but that waste is also performing an important ecological role. Every day the birds fly out to sea, capture marine food and return to the cliffs. In doing so, they transport nutrients from the ocean onto the land.
Those nutrients fertilise the ground around seabird colonies and can create areas of unexpectedly lush Arctic vegetation. There is a wonderful ecological connection here. Nutrients that began in the sea, passed through plankton, fish and seabirds, eventually help plants grow hundreds of metres above the water.
Everything at Prince Leopold Island seems connected. The geology creates the cliffs. The erosion of those cliffs creates the nesting ledges. The productive sea provides food for the birds. The birds carry nutrients back onto the land. Eggs and chicks provide occasional food for predators. And walking beneath it all was a polar bear that had apparently crossed the sea to exploit whatever opportunities this extraordinary concentration of life might provide. Experiencing all of this from a sea kayak made it particularly special.
From the deck of an expedition ship, a 250-metre cliff is impressive. From a kayak it towers above you. You are sitting almost at water level, looking upwards through layer after layer of sedimentary rock towards a sky filled with birds.
It is one of the things I love about experiencing wildlife from a sea kayak. You become part of the seascape rather than simply travelling through it.
That does not mean a kayak has no impact, of course. Breeding seabirds can be extremely vulnerable to disturbance, particularly when they have eggs or chicks on exposed ledges. If birds repeatedly leave their nests because people or boats approach too closely, eggs and chicks can become exposed to cold or predators. A sudden mass departure from the cliffs is also a pretty good indication that something has disturbed the colony.
So the aim is never simply to get as close as possible. It is to find that distance where we can watch without altering the behaviour of the wildlife around us. If guillemots remain settled on their ledges, fulmars continue gliding past and kittiwakes carry on with the business of raising their chicks, then we are getting the privilege of seeing the colony functioning naturally.
Sometimes the best thing you can do while wildlife watching is simply stop paddling. The geology above us was also a reminder that the story of Prince Leopold Island began unimaginably long before the arrival of the birds. The horizontal bands we could see so clearly from the kayaks are sedimentary rocks, including limestone and sandstone, created from sediments deposited hundreds of millions of years ago when this part of the world looked very different.
Those sediments eventually became rock. Uplift, glaciation, erosion and repeated cycles of freezing and thawing then helped shape the island into the fortress we see today. The frost shattering we could actually hear while paddling beneath the cliffs is part of the same process continuing in front of us. Eventually another ledge will form. Another section of cliff will collapse. The architecture of the seabird city is constantly, if slowly, being rebuilt. Perhaps the most remarkable thing about Prince Leopold Island, though, is that this enormous concentration of life is temporary.
During the breeding season the island is almost overwhelmingly busy. Birds fill the sky and sea. Parents commute continuously between their nesting ledges and feeding grounds. Chicks call for food. Neighbours argue over space. Predators search for opportunities. Then the Arctic winter approaches. Temperatures fall, darkness returns and sea ice begins to transform the surrounding ocean. Most of the seabirds leave, travelling away from the island and dispersing across vast areas of ocean. The cliffs that had contained hundreds of thousands of birds become almost silent. Then the light returns, the sea ice begins to change and the birds come back. Some will have travelled thousands of kilometres through the North Atlantic before returning to this small island and even to the same nesting areas they have occupied before. Within a few weeks, the city comes back to life. That is perhaps the best way I can describe Prince Leopold Island after paddling beneath it. It really is an Arctic city, but one without streets or buildings.
Instead there are thousands upon thousands of tiny territories arranged along horizontal bands of limestone and sandstone. There are parents commuting to work, neighbours squabbling over space, youngsters demanding food and predators wandering around the edges looking for opportunities. We were only there for a few hours, but they were memorable ones. We paddled beneath immense cliffs while Brünnich’s guillemots, kittiwakes and fulmars wheeled above us. We listened to rocks breaking away through the relentless action of Arctic frost. We sat almost silently on the cold waters of Lancaster Sound beneath one of the great seabird colonies of the Canadian Arctic.
And then a polar bear walked beneath the cliffs. There are some wildlife experiences you could plan for years and still never quite recreate. Sometimes you simply have to be in the right place, in a kayak, when the Arctic decides to put on a show.
Why not take the opportunity to read our other blogs about Nunavut and the Canadian arctic;
- Beechey Island: Polar Bears, Franklin and Three Graves Beside the Sea
- Kayaking with Arctic Wildlife: Staying Safe Around Polar Bears, Walrus and Whales
- Croker Bay: Paddling Beneath the Glaciers of Devon Island
- Dundas Harbour: Ghosts in the Fog on Devon Island
- Duart Bay: Sea Kayaking into a Scottish Corner of Baffin Island
- Isabella Bay: In the Realm of the Bowhead Whale
- Qikiqtarjuaq: Gateway to the Wild Mountains of Baffin Island
- Port Leopold: Paddling Through the Search for Franklin
- Radstock Bay: Paddling Through a Thousand Years of Arctic History