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We’ve arrived at our new Bockum base and it’s beautiful. Thank you to Peter for finding it.
The advance party comprises An (expedition leader), Pat (A* expeditioner), Peter (scientist) and Matthias (we’re not sure and just for the day).
It’s overcast and muggy with a mixed outlook for the next few days.
So here we are unpacking, preparing, printing, sorting, organising and generally doing all the things that are needed to make an expedition a success. From Saturday, we are expecting you to pull your weight 😉
We are approaching the start of the 2023 Germany wolf expedition and I am getting into expedition mode. My name is An and I will be your expedition leader for this fifth edition of the Biosphere Expeditions wolf monitoring programme in Lower Saxony.
I just read the report with the 2020/2022 expeditions’ results (you should make sure you read at least the abstract of the 2020/2022 report; it’s a good idea to also read the 2022 diary, or at least the round-up). It’s truly motivating to see what a great boost and relevant contribution the Biosphere Expeditions teams make to the annual state monitoring efforts on the wolf populations. Not just in terms of quantity, but also great quality of data. I am certain this year’s teams will be no different and live up to the challenge. No to worry, the 1.5 days of intense training will equip you with all the knowledge and skills you need to get out in the field.
As for me, I have almost finished packing up my gear and am getting ready to go. Tomorrow morning I will get a lift from Pat, a wolf expeditioner of the first hour. We leave from Belgium and will make our way up to Bockum and our new expedition base. There we will meet our host Suzanne and our Executive Director Matthias, who will help set up in the coming days. It will also be great to be reunited with our expedition scientists, Peter and Lotte, our wolf experts, who have been busy preparing.
The weather forecast looks good with temperatures around 20°C for the first few days. Make sure to pack clothing for all weather conditions and foresee at least 2 liters of water a day to stay hydrated. Lots more relevant tips you can find in the packing list in your dossier. Make sure you read it before you depart.
I wish you safe travels and look forward meeting our first group of expeditioners on Saturday 1st July here.
Reading the research report for last year’s Biosphere Expedition to Tien Shan reminded me of the importance of our research into snow leopards and the success of the 2022 expedition. I am looking forward to be returning to Tien Shan for the 2023 expedition, run in partnership with the conservation organisation NABU. The expedition start is fast approaching.
This is Roland, the expedition leader for group 1. I will be accompanied by Henry who will learn the ropes with group 1 and then take over as expedition leader for groups 2 and 3. Henry and I will be flying out to Kyrgyzstan soon to prepare for the expedition on the ground. We will join Taalai, our Kyrgyz expedition scientist, who also led the research on last year’s expedition, as well as some rangers from the NABU anti-poaching patrol and our new expedition cook, Azamat.
We are feeling ready. We have checked all the equipment, resupplying as needed. We have replaced the yurt and tents that were spectacularly destroyed by the storm at base camp last year. Other new equipment and supplies have been bought in Kyrgyzstan and in the UK: Henry and I will be travelling with large bags. We will set up base camp next week, ready for the arrival of group 1 on 10 July.
For those of you who are coming out this year, I hope you are as excited about the expedition as I am. If the expedition is like last year, it will be rewarding, memorable – and hard work! Get ready for good days with a lot of walking in the hills.
Some reminders:
> Study the kit list in your dossier and make sure you have all the essential items on it
> Trekking poles are also very useful; collapsible ones especially so
> Make sure you read at least the abstract of the 2022 report; it’s a good idea to also read the 2022 diary, or at least the round-up
> Make sure you bring a copy of the field guide with you
More diary entries to follow before then. In the meantime, here are some photos from last years’ expedition, to whet your appetite.
All good things must come to an end. Our Sweden Brown Bear Research Expedition 2023 has finished now. Following a review last year, it was a few days longer than our 2022 expedition, which Andrea and myself really valued. We gathered significantly more data following the initial training and Andrea was thrilled to discover by the end of the expedition we had surveyed the vast majority of all the dens on her target list for the year. Another great Biosphere Expeditions achievement!
The last days of the expedition saw us working as hard as ever, navigating very much off-piste to find winter dens and recent day beds hidden in the forests. We also found several moose carcasses or remains of moose at day bed sites, giving an insight into the types of food that at least some bears hunt or scavenge on at this time of year.
Our last night was celebrated with wonderful food, a review of everything we had achieved, with much appreciation from Andrea for the amount of quality data gathered by a hard-working team of committed citizen scientists and a late night impromptu game of Viking Chess outside as the sun dropped below the trees.
Altogether our expedition team visited 68 sites in eight days of field work. This included 38 winter dens, 3 sites where the den could not be found and 27 day bed or likely scat sites. We collected 35 scat samples to be sent off for analysis. Ten of these were ‘first scats of the season’: especially valuable samples that can reveal much about hibernation.
All this is a significant achievement and scale of effort by a top team of citizen scientists. I would like to give my heartfelt thanks to everyone on this very successful expedition – to Andrea, who explained and trained us in the research so well (and welcomed us on to her property to use as our base camp), to Louise who fed us so well and to our magnificent group of citizen scientists who threw themselves into this expedition with a great attitude, got on really well as a team and gathered a considerable quantity of high quality data. You make a vital contribution to the evidence base needed for successful conservation of Brown Bears in Scandinavia.
We have been working hard, finding bear dens in difficult places, investigating the sites where tracked bears have spent time on one spot and then returning to base to enter the hard-won data into the computer. The rewards for this work come from the pleasure of contributing to a research programme that forms the basis for brown bear conservation action – but also good company, excellent food, the beauty of the Swedish forest, and a small break we enjoyed together on day 6.
Conveniently near to a bear day bed site we needed to visit that day, is a delightful spot where the river Voxnan rushes down through a rocky gorge in a forest of pine and birch. Here we all met up for a mid-expedition celebratory lunch of pea soup and pancakes – the traditional Swedish Thursday meal – cooked on a camp fire. Some of the team insisted on immersing themselves in the cold waters of the calmer parts of the river.
Yesterday, Andrea gave one team an extra job to do. She wanted to know if a particular bear family of mother and two yearling cubs had split up or not. The GPS data from mother and one cub gave recent locations, but had not been updating recently. The second cub did not have a GPS collar, so his location was simply unknown. But all three bears did have radio tracking devices, so our mission was to try and locate all three bears in real time using a directional radio receiver and triangulate the results on a map. This took more time, care and luck than we anticipated! A bear lurking behind a rock or moving off while we are in the middle of trying to locate it can make the whole exercise very difficult. We did at least obtain some partial results showing the cubs in the same approximate area as each other, with the location of mother bear uncertain. Such are the practical realities of conservation research. Some of us ended that long day with a much-earned sauna in the woods at base camp.
Every morning we are tasked by Andrea, the expedition scientist and bear expert, to visit bear dens and day beds, at specific locations in this beautiful part of Sweden. The den sites are the locations where bears have been seen to hibernate in winter or where the GPS collars of tracked bears report that they stayed over winter. The day bed sites are simply where a tracked bear stayed for a few hours recently – perhaps only the day before – and which give us a chance to find their scat to collect for later analysis or perhaps evidence of a moose that the bear has hunted or scavenged. Bears are not aggressive and avoid humans, but just to err on the side of caution we also sometimes need to use a directional radio receiver to triangulate the latest position of a bear with a radio collar to make sure it is not still loitering in the location we plan to visit.
Finding a den always brings a thrill. Sometimes, they are obvious – a big old anthill in a forest clearing, exactly where the GPS pin shows it. Other dens need more work to find and we need to spend an hour or so fighting through the undergrowth, climbing through a maze of fallen tree trunks or investigating every rock crevice before we come across the den. Each den is unique. The expedition’s research aims include learning more about how the bears’ choice of den relates to the available habitat, any impacts of climate change and the bears’ condition. This year we have discovered a notably wide variety of bear dens. Dens built in uprooted tree roots, dens dug into the side of a hill, anthills excavated to create a cosy igloo of pine needles, open nests and rocky caves. We categorise and measure each one.
Yesterday we had our first moose sighting: a mother and calf, wandering along the forest edge. We stopped and watched: the mother walked off to a safe distance, the calf took cover in plain sight in a ditch right next to us. It was a special moment.
Twenty-nine expeditioners from eight countries across the world joined the Azores expeditions in March and April 2023. This was the 17th edition in the Azores monitoring the movements, migrations, numbers, group structures and ecology of cetaceans.
Here’s a summary:
Whale watching can be done in a matter of hours, but monitoring cetaceans better to understand their spatial and temporal patterns and how they use of different areas of our oceans, takes years. Biosphere Expeditions has just completed their latest expedition in the Azores and is rapidly approaching two decades of monitoring, in an area of the Atlantic ocean. which is home to over 25 different cetacean species.
Cetacean data collection takes a decade or longer, to reveal meaningful patterns and therefore the value of our research cannot be quantified now, but it will uncountably be invaluable in the upcoming years.
Some feedback is more immediate. Images of sperm whales and blue whales taken this year, have already be matched to other locations in the Azores, and northern Europe. But many more whales have yet to be matched in our database, revealing the vast stretch of ocean they occupy around the Azores. Some individuals have been recorded for the first time this year, again contributing to our understanding of their population.
This year’s project still has a lot of data to process from over 179 cetacean encounters over 15 days at sea, sighting over 2,000 individuals. But some species are absent from this year’s research findings and dolphins have been found in lower numbers.
With the expedition fieldwork continuing in March, Lisa Steiner, the expedition scientist, an expert on sperm whales, expresses that “it has been great to extend the data collection beyond the normal tourism season and collect data on a range of species, across a broader time span. The value of this work is very significant as without Biosphere Expeditions we wouldn’t have documented the range of species, including several Sei, Humpback, Fin and Blue whales, since there are fewer tour boats out at this time of year”.
Being able to conduct field research during the ‘off-season’ reveals new information such as species being absent or present in lower or higher numbers compared to other years.
“The ability to collect such data is greatly enhanced by the annual contribution of Biosphere Expedition’s participants,” says Craig Turner (expedition leader), “and underlines the value of long-term data sets in illustrating the importance of the Azores for certain cetacean species.”
This data collection approach is being applied to other species of whale, along with dolphin species, such as bottlenose and Risso’s. The scale of the data collection both in terms of time and space serves to demonstrate the importance of the Azores for several cetacean species and highlights the importance of appropriate conservation management, to ensure these species continue to thrive not just in Azorean waters, but elsewhere in the wider Atlantic Ocean.
The first two days of the expedition are dominated by intense training, and this team has hit the ground running. Much of the training is in the practical methods used to collect data at each winter den: from the den measurements through to a methodological approach to defining the habitat around the den, as well as much information to record about bear scats. Research equipment that the team are trained to use range from the specialist densitometer, which measures the extent of tree canopy above a den, to the humble compass (you need to put Fred in the Shed).
We also train the expedition team in how not to get lost. The bear dens and day beds that they are tasked with finding are deep in the woods, often a long way from the road. As adventurer-scientists, the team have to fight their way through some pretty challenging and pathless territory – typically rocky, boggy and/or hard going (usually all three), trying to locate a waypoint on a GPS device, and ideally not losing anyone en route. Finding the way back to the car afterwards can be a difficult task when you look up after an hour of focussed survey work and being confronted with a view of indistinguishable forest in all directions. Fortunately the team are trained in various navigational techniques, complemented by cool heads and common sense, so have successfully failed to get lost so far.
We have already surveyed two winter dens – a beautiful den under a massive boulder and a very different ‘nest’ type den where a bear and her cubs spent winter covered by nothing more than a thick blanket of snow. We have also begun to collect our first bear scats, carefully labelled and stored ready for later analysis to reveal what the bear has been eating before and after hibernation.
The team have taken all this on with little rest and in good spirits. A special mention here to Torsten, who cycled over 1000 km from southern Sweden to join the expedition and immediately threw himself into expedition life without pause.
With the training part of the expedition almost over, the team is ready to devote the next week to exploring the tangled forests of mid-Sweden to record high quality data for the transnational Scandinavian Brown Bear Research Project.
Greetings from base camp. I am excited to be back! The Advanced Team have assembled: Louise and I arrived here last night and Andrea, the expedition scientist, joined us today. We have bought the food and supplies for the expedition: there is a lot of it, so I hope you will be hungry.
Base camp is looking glorious in the Swedish spring sunshine. The iconic Swedish red wooden cabins are almost glowing in the morning light, the birch and pine trees are bursting with green vitality and we saw a fox running past the sauna and across the stream when we were out exploring late last night.
The snow has gone, apart from a few patches in forest clearings, revealing the grass at base camp, along with some old moose scat. Our job for the next two days is to get base camp tidy and organised ready for the expedition, and to check and prepare all the research equipment.
Andrea has been a little tense: the tracked bears’ GPS collars often only transmit their entire winter’s data after they have left their winter den and walked into an area with phone signal. Due to the late arrival of spring here, Andrea has been left waiting for these data uploads. Thankfully, as of yesterday, she now has the data and she looks positively happy now!
We are getting excitingly close to the start of the 2023 Sweden Brown Bear expedition, and preparations are going well. I am Roland, your expedition leader, and this will be my second time leading this expedition. I am really looking forward to returning. This year, my partner Louise, a professional events caterer, will also be joining us as expedition cook. It will be interesting to see what that will mean under expedition conditions. We will be working alongside Dr Andrea Friebe, the local expedition scientist who manages a long-term research programme monitoring the brown bear population in this region.
Louise & Roland
Our daily research tasks will include finding and recording the dens that the bears have been using to hibernate in over winter, as well as their day beds, which we will visit sometimes shortly after they have left them.
Andrea sent an update from the field today saying that 10 cm of snow fell last night and that some of the tracked bears have not yet left their dens, so we may have some interesting challenges coming our way…
As always with Biosphere Expeditions, we will review and adapt our plans according to the conditions we find. The weather forecast for Dalarna province, at least for the first few days of the expedition, predicts warmer conditions – up to 27 C , with some sunny, some cloudy and some rainy days. The best advice is to pack clothing and footwear ready for any and all weather conditions!
The research methodologies we use on this expedition are relatively detailed and specific, especially when it comes to surveying the winter dens. But fear not, we will provide ample training in the methods and using the research equipment in the first two days. I will send another update once Louise and I get to our expedition base, on 24 May. In the meantime, feel free to start getting excited about this expedition – I certainly am!
Biosphere Expeditions: blogs from the frontline of wildlife conservation and the fight for a more sustainable planet 