Dragonflies, open water reveal rapid Artic change
Pierre Tautu doesn't know whether it's global warming or something else, but over the summer he noticed strange things happening around his Nunavut home in Chesterfield Inlet, at the top of Hudson Bay.
"We still have ice year-round, but there's been a little bit of changes", he said. "Different kinds of insects and different kinds of birds that come around our area now".
His hamlet (population 330) is a prime nesting ground for a variation of birds, but last summer the 44 year old hunter and guide spotted a type of owl he had never seen that far north. For the first time, he also saw a dragonfly in his Inuit community.
"We don't have dragonflies around, but I've seen one" Mr. Tauto said. "This was just out in our backyard and I was pretty surprised to see one".
Changes to the environment and climate are usually imperceptible and are visible only when the increments build up over time and result in a trend. But in the summer of 2007 both anecdotal and quantifiable evidence emerged that showed dramatic changes are taking place in the Far North at a faster pace than anyone imagined.
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