Kevin McMahon is a veteran filmmaker, who has been spending time in the Arctic since the early 1990s when he researched the growing militarization up north for the CBC radio program, Ideas. That led to him authoring a book and a feature doc In the Reign of Twilight (1995), both of which were highly successful. Since that time, McMahon has gone northward many times, most notably for the ten-part series The Polar Sea (2014) and Borealis (2020). Now he has ventured to Alaska to document the brilliant scientist George Divoky, who has spent 50 years documenting black guillemots, the seabirds, whose patterns are key to mapping the food chain up north. The Birdman of Cooper Island premiers at the Planet in Focus Environmental Film Festival and will broadcast later on TVO.
Marc Glassman, POV’s editor, interviewed Kevin McMahon on the film.
(Watch the trailer for the film below.)
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POV: Marc Glassman
KM: Kevin McMahon
POV: Kevin, let’s start with George Divoky. How did you find out about him?
KM: I first met George when we were making the Polar Sea TV series, which was more than 10 years ago. The series travelled from Iceland to Alaska through the Northwest Passage, which can be navigated each summer due to global warming. We were following some middle-aged sailors, but we also interwove their story with those of Inuit artists and scientists who were working in the North. I heard about George from them and so I flew to Alaska with a crew intending to go to the island. This was in 2012, and there’d been really bad weather, so he’d had to get off the island. I did a long interview with him in what was then called Barrow and remained in touch since. He’s a fascinating guy, and I always wanted to revisit his story.
POV: Was it strange for you as a Canadian to be telling an American story?
KM: I didn’t really think about it. I mean, it was great that TVO would allow us to tell an American story. The thing about George’s life is it that it feels like our story. I’ve been going to the Arctic for nearly 40 years. I’ve seen how climate change has impacted there over a long period of time. Everything that George has discovered and talks about are related to things that we know are happening here. So it didn’t feel like a foreign story, even though it is another country.
POV: George Divoky isn’t much of a romantic type, is he? I don’t see him waxing poetic about the black guillemots, the birds he’s been studying for so long. Why has he spent more than 40 years obsessed with that species of bird?
KM: In the film, he talks about why he likes the bird. It’s a garrulous kind of bird. I think he enjoys that they are monogamous. He is particularly fascinated with seabirds. From a scientific point of view, what fascinated him about the guillemot is that they are a key step in the Arctic food chain, and that if he studied them, he would know what was going on with fish and plants in the sea. It all starts with the Arctic cod, which exists because of its relationship with the ice algae.
POV: What is it about Divoky that made you decide to focus a film on him?
KM: It’s his obsession with science. I’ve spent lots of time in the field meeting biologists and wanted to make a film about them. They don’t have much money and they’re in the field, living in really crappy circumstances. I’ve always admired these people. I mean, “It’s cold, it’s wet, but you’re cheerfully going out to look at bears or birds or algae or whatever it is.” I wanted to make a kind of homage to those people in the first place. And George is the consummate example of that character.
George has made the longest study of a seabird by one person in the world, and one of the longest, by anybody on any creature. I admired him for that, and I just thought he’s a wonderful character. And I identified with the Cassandra element of his story. He’s going out there every year, seeing climate change happening, coming back and saying to people, “Hey, this is really important. You should really take it seriously.” And even though he has spoken to lots of people, and some have been moved by his journey, his story more or less, falls on deaf ears.
George was up there for almost 25 years before he started to understand what was going on with the change in climate in the Arctic. He only realized that when he went back and looked at the data, which is an argument for gathering that kind of information. It is hardly done anymore. A lot of stuff about the natural world we don’t know, especially, the impact that climate change is having. We don’t have a baseline for a lot of species because it never happened—and it won’t now. But that’s not the case with the black guillemots, thanks to George. And it obviously gave him an opportunity to be some distance from human beings on Cooper Island every summer, which I don’t think was too bad for him either.
POV: Is part of his appeal that he is a real loner for the summer, with the exception of the brief time he spends with his partner Catherine Smith on the island?
KM: It makes him an interesting character. As it happens, for our shoot, Catherine was with him at first because, as she says in the film, she goes out there every summer and helps him get established. But it’s that dogged lonely dedication to his quest that you can’t help but be impressed by.
POV: What kind of story did you want to tell, Kevin? A bio of a loner? Or a film about climate change? Or something about science and the Arctic?
KM: We wanted to immerse you in George’s world—the birds and the bears and the island. You want to give the viewer a feeling of discovery as they go through the story. It wasn’t necessary to hit you over the head with the climate crisis because you realize the weight of it soon enough.
POV: You’ve made an observational doc, but your reputation is based on being an essayist, whose writing is part of your films. What was it like to make something quite different?
KM: It was great. I’ve made four films recently, and every one of ’em is different. A lot of the films I’ve done are essays, but this was an opportunity to be with someone in a remote place and the result wasn’t the same. I don’t really know if it took different skills. It’s like a piece of writing. You just marshal your notes and sit down and start to do it. But it was a lot of fun to do. It was a really pleasurable experience to cut Birdman because you didn’t need to have words to make connections. I didn’t need to write a narration. I didn’t need to have that kind of intellectual struggle that you have with an essay. It was just a matter of following George’s summer and trying my best to be true to his story.
POV: George Divoky had a brief burst of fame back in 2002 when the New York Times’ magazine had his story as its cover piece. Did you know about Darcy Frey’s article before working on the film?
KM: I think it’s a wonderful piece of journalism. Darcy Frey is a great writer. He did a fine job of capturing George and the story. I didn’t ever actually read that piece until I set out to make this film, but I was aware of it. I already had a sense of George’s character, but I thought Darcy really captured it well and gave me a kind of a grounding. But the piece is quite old. Things have happened since then.
POV: Kevin, you’re spent a lot of time in the Arctic. How do you relate to George Divoky’s life up north every summer?
KM: I get it that George is able to do whatever he wants when he’s on Cooper Island. I totally get the freedom aspect of it, and I totally get the love of the Arctic, though it can be a brutal place to be. We were up there twice last summer, in June and then in August, and it rarely got above maybe two degrees. It’s very often windy and rainy. Mind you, when it’s nice, it’s unbelievable. So, I totally understand his fascination with the Arctic and the island. We don’t get into the community in the film, but he has friends in the Inuit community, which is a very mixed bag, but filled with lovely people. So I really understand. I don’t think I would personally have the mental strength for the amount of solitude that he’s endured, but I don’t think it’s really an endurance for him. I understand the romance of wanting to be there.
POV: How close is he to an Inuit community?
KM: He’s physically quite close. I think it’s about 25 or 30 miles away. But getting there is another thing. You have to fly in the summer because there’s still too much ice in the sea to get through. Even though the community’s nearby, he can’t go there, and he would only call in an emergency. Then he would have to hope that the rescue helicopter is available.
POV: How afraid should he be of the polar bears, who are now a part of the island?
KM: He’s not afraid because he’s so used to dealing with them, but I’ve been around lots of different kinds of bears. With Black bears and Grizzlies, you don’t have to worry too much, but Polar Bears will hunt you. George is not particularly afraid, but he’s very cautious and respectful because it’s very easy to be killed by them.
POV: What is the future for George and for Cooper Island?
KM: I wouldn’t want to say what the future is for George on the island. He was dodging bears all summer, and they killed a lot more birds this summer. So, I don’t want to answer what his future is, but I think the study has produced a master treasure trove of data. There are academics all over the world who are now studying his research. There are people in France that are working on it and a couple of groups in Canada. They go back into the data looking for new patterns about the birds, and they’re finding new things because he’s just recorded everything about these creatures’ lives for decades. There’s a future in mining the data on the guillemots and on climate change if you want to go in that direction.
POV: As a naturalist, should Divoky have interfered with what happened to Cooper Island after climate change forced the polar bears there 25 years ago? Once they started to destroy the guillemots’ nests and eat their eggs, shouldn’t the birds have abandoned the island? It was only because Divoky brought in plastic suitcases with holes that the birds could fit in, and the bears couldn’t enter, that they have been able to come back to the island to breed.
KM: George does say in the film that when the bears figured out how to get on the island and to flip all that old junkie debris that the navy had left, which the birds had used for their eggs, that if he were a pure naturalist, he’d have stopped his research. Most naturalists would have said, “the polar bear is here, and bird colony will get wiped out. That’s it.”
But he felt that it was worth continuing the study because the guillemots are the only measure of the state of the health of the Arctic cod food chain system apart from the seals, who are harder to follow. George felt it was worth making that human intervention to create those cases and keep the birds nesting in order to keep the monitoring going.
What he doesn’t really say, but it’s kind of obvious, is that he was totally in love with Cooper Island and guillemots. He didn’t want to leave. I’m not a scientist, so I don’t have an ethical stance on what he did. I think the fact is that had he not been there monitoring it, those birds probably would’ve been nesting in nooks and crannies across other Arctic islands, but nobody would’ve known it.
POV: After 40 years, what has kept you fascinated by the North?
KM: I went there by accident, really. It was Max Allen many years ago, who pulled me into the Arctic story to do an Ideas CBC radio show. I didn’t know anything about the Arctic then, but I ended up going there and writing a book, and then a film of the book. I guess I ended up loving it.
When I first started going there, there really was no Indigenous filmmaking community. There is now, there’s lots of people in Nunavut who are making great things, but 40 years ago, there weren’t really.
More generally, it was a way to get at the environmental story that you could tell anywhere. You could tell it in downtown Toronto. You can tell it in the Arctic. You can tell it in the South Pacific. You could tell it anywhere. For me, it’s more of the dedication to trying to get that story out than it is a particular fascination with the North. I’ve never been one for all those adventure stories about the Arctic. I don’t really care about all that explorer stuff. And of course, the indigenous story is not mine to tell, but the environmental story is everybody’s story—and it needs to be told.
The Birdman of Cooper Island screens at Planet in Focus on Wednesday, Oct. 16.
It airs soon on TVO.
