Lynn Lau
Northern News Services

Sachs Harbour (Mar 04/02) - A seabird never before spotted on Banks Island showed up at the hamlet's sewage lagoon last month.

A black guillemot like this was found in the sewage lagoon.

Hamlet employee Margaret Lennie was doing her regular rounds with the sewage truck when she spotted a strange bird frozen into the lagoon in early February.

"It was pretty weak and it was frozen, so I walked up to it and I grabbed it. It was black and white, and it had orange webbed feet. We looked in that bird book and it was either a black guillemot or a pigeon guillemot. It was the first time we seen one of those around here."

Guillemots are a water bird that live in rocky coastal areas and spend winters offshore. The pigeon guillemots live on the Pacific coast, while populations of black guillemots are found in the Eastern Arctic and the Beaufort Sea. The Beaufort black guillemots are rarely found further east than Cape Parry, north of Paulatuk.

Lennie took the bird to her truck and later brought it home in a borrowed cage. After reading that guillemots liked to eat fish, she tried feeding it tinned sardines, but the bird was too weak to eat and died a day later.

Lennie says she tried to contact to the Department of Resources, Wildlife and Economic Development about her find, but when no one phoned her back, she threw the carcass out.

"We've been having a lot of weird things happen up here with the climate change," she says. "To see an odd bird this time of the year -- it was strange this side of the North."

University of Alaska marine ornithologist George Divoky said to his knowledge, there have never been any reported sightings of guillemots on Banks Island. The Seattle-based researcher has spent the last 30 years studying guillemots, mostly at Point Barrow in Alaska.

He says the bird Lennie found may have come from colonies at Herschel Island or Cape Parry. The bird may have been following a natural crack in the ice but gotten stranded during a cold snap. "Having them winter that far east is certainly very interesting," he says.

Guillemots are a good indicator of climate change because their numbers are dependent on ice conditions and open water, Divoky says. "I've seen work that has been done about an area of open water around Banks Island -- if it keeps getting warmer, then more and more guillemots could be expected."