Filming Birdlife in America's Arctic

We're in an extremely remote part of the United States. Not many people get to come here. For someone who loves birds, to walk around out here is thrilling. The more you walk around, you start finding these birds on nests everywhere. In some cases, these tiny birds who have traveled 5,000, 6,000, 7,000 miles over and over in their lifetime to reproduce up here. And this is the most important part of their lives. We're about 15 miles west of Teshook Brook Lake in the Arctic Coastal Plain in Alaska. We're a group of photographers and filmmakers. We're here to document the bird life, particularly that come here every year to nest birds from all over the world. From where I'm sitting, everything just looks pretty much flat and covered with sedges and grasses. But from the air, this landscape is absolutely spectacular. Most people know that a lot of birds travel north in the summer to nest. Many go to the Arctic. But what a lot of people don't think about is that most of these birds are water birds. They're waterfowl. They're shorebirds. They're mostly wetland dependent. And across the Arctic, wetlands are actually relatively scarce. This region of northern Alaska in the Arctic Coastal Plain is one of the largest assemblages of tundra wetlands in the Arctic. There's a tremendous diversity of wetlands out here from big lakes that hold fish to smaller sloughs to these polygon wetlands created by permafrost and freezing and thawing to big expanses of wet sedge meadow. It's a very diverse and productive ecosystem. So just sitting here, looking out in the tundra, I can see birds that have literally traveled here from different corners of the Earth. We've got pectoral sandpipers, which come here all the way from Argentina and Bolivia. We have red fallow ropes nesting right here by camp. They live almost their entire life out at sea, except for this brief period when they're here breeding. Then we've got the semi-palmated sandpiper, weighs about as much as 2 nickels. They nest here every year, and then they end up in the northern coast of South America and places like Venezuela. We have 3 different species of loons here. They're all fantastically beautiful to look at. The yellowbill loon is one of my favorite birds. It's the biggest loon in the world, massive body, big, bright, dagger-like yellowbill. Another species that's really wonderful to encounter up here is the bar-tailed godwit. They make a 7,000-mile nonstop flight from Alaska to New Zealand, take 7 to 9 days across open ocean, no eating, no landing, no resting. Their physiology is finely tuned to make that hemispheric route yearly to this place to nest. A lot of these birds are birds that people see in their own backyards or their local wetland in the lower 48. This is kind of a typical shorebird nest here on the tundra. Most of these shorebirds have 4 eggs, and we're checking it now to see how close they are to hatching. Usually they'll start to star. You'll start to see the chick breaking through the egg. And this little dunlin here flies all the way to the Asian coast of China, Japan for the winter. There's birds that go to New Zealand. There's birds that go to Southeast Asia. There's birds that go to the southern tip of South America, birds that go into Antarctica. They have these divergent lifestyles, different ways of traveling, different routes of traveling, different strategies for survival. But the one thing they have in common is they are out here in this vast mosaic of Arctic wetlands nesting every year. Just that alone is such a testament to the importance of these wetlands. So it's the beginning of July now, and the first nests that we found are just getting ready to hatch, and some of them are starting to hatch. And just around our camp here, we found the nests of about 30 species, dozens and dozens of nests, just in this little area of tundra. These parents have been diligently protecting this nest, camouflaged on their nest. It's really remarkable when you get up in the air and look at this landscape and just contemplate the staggering number of birds, millions of birds out there right now waiting for their babies to emerge. This Arctic coastal plain in Alaska is one of the most productive areas for bird life in the entire Arctic. Millions of birds nest here, and it's essentially unprotected. We have a tremendous opportunity to conserve a wilderness that is important to bird life, to neighboring communities that depend on these wild lands, and to all Americans.