arctic

Arctic Journeys: A Journalist Across the Circumpolar World

/ Jane George / Leave a comment

I am ready to take you all on a ten-year trip around the circumpolar world in my new book “Arctic Journeys: A journalist around the circumpolar world.” You can now order “Arctic Journeys” on Amazon.

What is it? This book is a history, a bit of a travelogue and sometimes a memoir, sort of the sum of my life, too, during that time.

You’ll get to know people like Sámi leader Ole Henrik Magga, artist Hans Ragnar Mathisen, Sheila Watt-Cloutier, Bob Corell, P.J. Akeeagok, and Aqqaluk Lynge.

You will meet amazing ladies in Cambridge Bay, geologists, miners, scientists and even wanna-be Mars astronauts on Devon Island.

You can order “Arctic Journeys” on Amazon. The Kindle ebook can be free or you can buy it as a paperback or even as a hardcover. I kept the cost as low as possible so anyone should be able to afford it. But I wanted to have some nice photos in it.

And in the North bookstores are a rarity so ordering online is often the easiest option. The book is a bit of a follow to “Like an iceberg: Confessions of an Arctic Journalist,” but I hope it’s a softer more reflective book.

Birding book puts spotlight on Cambridge Bay, Nunavut

/ Jane George / Leave a comment

When a new book on the birds of Cambridge Bay arrived last week in my mailbox I was thrilled: “Birds of Cambridge Bay, southeastern Victoria Island and adjacent small islands, Nunavut, Canada,” by Jim Richards and Richard Knapton provides as much information as any Arctic birder, wannabe or otherwise, could hope for.

That’s in addition to many spectacular photos of the birds you can see around this area of western Nunavut.

The book brought back memories many personal sightings of birds around Cambridge Bay, such has this hawk basking in warm September sun with Ovayok (Mt. Pelly) in the distance.

The new bird book, published by Polar Knowledge Canada, notes you could stand to see about 156 birds with 51 breeding in the region. Some 74 vagrants have also been recorded, with species diversity likely to increase under climate change, the book notes.

The birds you can now see regularly around the town of Cambridge Bay include buntings, red polls, trumpeter swans, loons, falcons, snowy owls, cranes and stunning king eiders, just to mention a few I have seen.

While there a still a lack of year-round birding observations, the book says, it meticulously reflects what Richards, who first visited Cambridge Bay in 1990, has recorded as well as information from the various birding trips of Knapton and notes from others on local birds (including me,) before and after.

Ornithologist Richards also authoured the magnificent two-volume “Birds of Nunavut,” which I reviewed for the Nunatsiaq News. My review copies of that landmark publication on Nunavut’s birds are now at the May Hakongak library in Cambridge Bay, along with other volumes from my other Arctic book collection.