Yesterday I got up early and hiked up into the hills outside of town with one of the professors. We found a beautiful pond at the top and were at last greeted with a view of the elusive Mallard. Still, it’s the first one of the trip. Yay! Then a pair of Phalaropes then came around the corner to smooth things over--that was a nice treat.

This morning getting up early to look for birds, this time down by the rapids at the bridge, proved sadly fruitless. Except there were rapids, which was in itself neat.

Morning in Kangerlussuaq was not much different from afternoon or evening—sun shining cheerfully away, temperatures of around fifty degrees, and a light wind keeping away the hungry swarms of Satan’s air force known colloquially as “mosquitoes”. I got up early so I could get a first crack at wildlife, Greenland-style. It turns out KISS is right on the Watson River, which was a lovely morning scramble down fine silt dunes and over glacier- and water-carved rocks. I got my first looks of the trip at Snow bunting, Common redpoll, and Northern wheatear.

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Tuesday. Greenland.

It’s finally starting to sink in that I am, in fact, leaving for Greenland on Tuesday. TUESDAY.  GREENLAND.  For the sake of you, the reader, as well as to drill the reality of what we are actually doing into my own head, here’s an introductory post.

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Hannah Owens is an Ichthyology graduate student at the University of Kansas in the Biodiversity Institute.  She is particularly interested in the role of climate change in the evolutionary history and biogeography of fishes, especially cods.  Hannah will be travelling to Kangerlussuaq, Greenland for a week as part of KU’s Climate Change, Humans, and Nature in a Global Environment (C-CHANGE) National Science Foundation Integrative Graduate Education and Research Training (IGERT) program.  She and her fellow trainees (in diverse disciplines ranging from sociology and anth