Live my life as a researcher in the land of the ivory gull

It's a little book to put in the hands of students in search of a vocation. Thomas Broquet, a research fellow at the CNRS, recognizes this from the first pages of his logbook of two expeditions carried out during the summers of 2022 and 2023, to the northeastern tip of Greenland: "The scientific articles we publish, OK, but if just one kid, seeing this documentary, says to himself, 'Hey, that's what I want to do,' then frankly, it's worth it." Far from the Roscoff biological station (Finistère), his usual field of work on population genetics, Thomas Broquet was part of a research mission on the ivory gull. And he wrote this account of it, day by day.

The daily life of these field investigators is revealed in all its aspects: the endless days of waiting, during which these immaculate birds play with binoculars and traps set up to ring them; the life shared with the Danish military, responsible for maintaining Station Nord, this base occupied all year round, and scientific teams from all over the world who follow one another for research on flora, fauna, climate, paleontology, etc.; the emotion of reuniting with a specimen ringed twenty years earlier by the first French mission, launched in 2003 by the Arctic Ecology Research Group to study these birds that never leave the edge of the polar ice; the adrenaline at the sight of a polar bear a few hundred meters away on the ice floe and the sadness at noting, the next day, the damage it has caused to a colony of ivory gulls, of which nearly 90% of the young that populated the 55 nests on the rocky ground have disappeared. Eaten, or frozen to death after fleeing.

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