Alix Soliman

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On a sunny morning at the Lemon Creek Landfill, Steve Lewis, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, walks through the wetland toward the line of trees surrounding the dump. Bald eagles are squabbling over a big, salmon-colored plastic bag. 

They congregate here to eat. He counts more than 20 eagles swooping around the trash piles.

“It’s just unfortunate, because it’s basically like an unnatural occurrence that mimics natural occurrence,” Lewis said. “This is pretty similar to what you might see at the Chilkat.” 

He’s talking about the Chilkat Bald Eagle Preserve in Haines, where thousands of bald eagles from all over Southeast go in the winter to feast on a late fall run of chum salmon. 

But that’s not where they all go.

For Curious Juneau, KTOO listener Mark Branson asked where Juneau’s bald eagles go in the winter, and what they eat.

“Eagles eat a lot of fish and they eat a lot of waterfowl — those are probably the two big things,” Lewis said. “But, you know, they’ll eat things at the dump here.”

Lewis outfits the birds with little GPS backpacks to track their movements. He said bald eagles go where the food is, including hooligan and salmon runs, areas where waterfowl hang out, places they can scavenge dead animals — and yes — landfills. 

How far they travel for a meal depends on whether they’re going to have eaglets. Those who will be parents don’t go far. 

“We have birds that stay here all year,” he said. “There’s territorial birds that have nests.” 

Hundreds of bald eagles stick around Juneau through the winter, Lewis estimates. They feed on what they can find nearby so they can defend their territory from potential thieves and retain their nest to have eaglets in the spring. 

But Lewis said that not all eagles are interested in breeding. Those birds travel to Haines and even farther.

“There’s adults that are not territorial,” he said. “We call them floaters. They have a little bit less affinity to necessarily staying in one place.”

Since bald eagles can live around 30 years, he reckons the floaters probably don’t feel a sense of urgency about reproducing. Instead, they can wait until the conditions feel right and roam along the coast and up rivers in the meantime. 

Lewis estimates that 30% to 40% of adult bald eagles in Southeast are ‘floating’ in a given year. That’s not including juvenile eagles, which ‘float’ as well while they learn about their environment. 

The young birds can be identified by their splotchy brown feathers. They develop the characteristic white head and tail plumage at around four years old.

Many floaters visit the Chilkat Valley near Haines, where an odd upwelling of warm water at the confluence of the Chilkat and Tsirku Rivers prevents the water from freezing and allows a late fall run of chum salmon to spawn. The salmon provide a feast for thousands of bald eagles starting in November. 

Reba Hylton, the tourism director for Haines, said locals call it the “council grounds” since there are so many white heads poking through the trees like wigged legislators of old. She said the eagles are most active in the morning. 

“They’re still lazy,” she said. “I mean, there’s plenty of food to go around, but they’ll still try and come in and take each other’s food. So you get a lot of squawking that happens.”

But Southeast’s floaters don’t just fly to Haines. Some bald eagles that Lewis tagged in Juneau, Sitka and the Chilkat Valley have traveled as far north as the Peel River in Yukon Territory and as far south as Vancouver Island, British Columbia.

He said their movement patterns look as if he put GPS tags on his friends.

“The church would be important for some, and the bar is important for some and the library is important for some,” Lewis said. “Eagles are kind of that way, I guess.”

For some bald eagles, the dump is important. In Juneau, it’s common to hear people refer to the national bird a trash bird or a “dump buzzard,” Lewis said. But he still finds them impressive, no matter where they like to hang out. 

Researchers launched an interactive glacial outburst flood website today to help Juneau’s Mendenhall Valley residents plan for annual floods. It’s a project of the University of Alaska Southeast and the Alaska Climate Adaptation Science Center. 

The website features flood inundation maps the city published earlier this month. Instead of being sliced into multiple 2D image files, the maps are stacked in layers on an interactive viewer. Residents can now scroll over their property to see the projected water depth for different flood heights.

That detail is new to the public. Eran Hood, an environmental science professor at UAS who led the project, said it will ideally help people understand the risk to their home when the National Weather Service puts out a flood forecast. 

“Well the main outcome is just to allow people to have more information to plan ahead,” Hood said.

The website includes historical data and other information, like how Suicide Basin formed to create the floods and how scientists make flood forecasts. That information was already public, but Hood says it wasn’t accessible before.

“All of that stuff was somewhere, but it wasn’t in places where people probably ever would have found it,” he said. 

Now it’s all in one place.

Hood came up with the idea for the website. With a $30,000 grant from the Alaska Climate Adaptation Science Center, he hired a programmer named Sean Fagan to bring it to life. They hosted forums with residents to receive feedback on the website before launching it and incorporated suggestions to make things easier to understand. 

Hood says the new site compliments the National Weather Service’s Suicide Basin monitoring webpage, which is still the go-to spot for emergency flood information.

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Thunder Mountain Middle School sits beside Mendenhall River, which has surged over its banks and devastated homes in the Valley twice over the past two years. Floodwaters came close to inundating the school last year.  

Eighth grader Vivian Esmiol just learned why.

“The root problem is, well, it’s the Suicide Basin, which is between the Mendenhall Glacier,” she said. “It’s like a little area where water can build up, and the reason why it formed in the first place is because global warming, as we all know, has been melting down the glaciers.”

She described how rain and glacial meltwater collect in the basin over the spring and summer, causing pressure to build up against the ice. 

“Then, at once, it can burst through, like, an entire large amount of water,” Esmiol said. “That’s how these floodings are happening and why they’re happening yearly.”

She learned all of this in Jess Stanley’s Earth science class. Most students said they didn’t know what a glacial outburst flood was before taking the class.

“I came in absolutely clueless,” Esmiol said. “I’m surprised I didn’t even know about this stuff in the first place.”

Now, the students know all about the science behind how it happens, and what’s being done to protect their school and neighborhoods. They mapped the river, plotted rainfall and snowpack and learned about how the melting Mendenhall Glacier affects downstream communities. Local scientists even visited their class and walked them down to the river.

Stanley said this was her first year teaching Earth science at Thunder Mountain Middle School. Her goal was to engage the students on a topic that was close to home. 

“I just wanted to have an opportunity for the kids to learn something place-based, something that’s here — literally in the backyard of our school,” she said.

That approach to teaching about the climate clearly made an impression on the students. Allie Simonson is a seventh grader in the class. 

“I think it’s really cool we get to learn about something that’s happening right now. Because in school, usually you learn about stuff that’s gonna happen in the future or happened in the past,” Simonson said.

Now, when the students gaze out the big picture window in the common area at the end of the hall, they see bulldozers and a huge pile of sand by the river. The city is extending the levee further downstream to protect their school alongside several businesses and homes from possible floods that could be higher than those in the past.

Stanley said a row of trees is getting chopped down near the track and a gravel road has gone in for heavy machines to build the HESCO barriers that make up the levee. 

Ryder McMillan, an eighth grader, said the class learned about that project, too. 

“We talked a lot about HESCO barriers and how they’re being built,” he said. “The most interesting fact that I learned was that they’re really expensive to build, and you wouldn’t assume that because … you think they’re just like, little green blocks with a bunch of sand in them.”

In their notebooks, the students sketched HESCO barriers, including the small outflow pipes to drain rainwater. They also wrote their lingering questions about glacial outburst flooding — some that adults don’t have answers to yet. 

“Nobody really knows what we’re going to do to permanently fix the solution with the Suicide Basin flooding yet,” Esmiol said. “Of course, we have those HESCO barriers up. But besides that, people are still working on it. People are still making ideas, and that’s going to take a while.”

In the meantime, Esmiol said people should try to plan for flooding. For the last two years, the major outburst flood has occurred during the first week of August.

The students are taking what they’ve learned beyond the classroom. They’re making posters about how Valley residents can prepare for floods, featuring QR codes that link to more information. They plan to tack them up around town this summer. The kids say to pack an emergency kit, sign up for the city’s emergency alerts, and when the floodwater comes, don’t swim in it.

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On a sunny Monday afternoon in Juneau’s Evergreen Cemetery, more than 40 children and adults gathered to celebrate Arbor Day in Alaska, a holiday dedicated to conserving forests and planting trees. 

Linda Torgerson, a volunteer with the Juneau Urban Forestry Partnership, led the group in a song dedicated to city trees to the tune of the classic camp song We Love the Mountains.

“We love our urban trees, lofty cottonwoods, mountain ash and beech trees, hemlock and Sitka spruce, we love the birds they bring, our arbors make us sing on Arbor Day, Arbor Day, Arbor Day oh Arbor Day,” the choir sang. 

Trees provide clean air, wildlife habitat, and food. Their roots hold soil in place. They offer shade from the sun, cover from the rain, and wood for building and burning. Most other U.S. states honor their trees in late April, but Alaska’s Arbor Day falls on the third Monday in May to align with the planting season here. 

Ben Patterson, the city’s landscape supervisor, said that the cemetery became a certified arboretum last October. It is accredited as a level one arboretum since 41 species of trees and woody plants currently grow here. He’s working on getting to a hundred species which will give the arboretum level two status. 

“We’re adding this little mountain hemlock, which is one native to Southeast Alaska, and the other Southeast native that we’re planting this year are yellow cedar,” Patterson said.

He said the city adds a couple of species every year. The yellow cedars were a gift from a member of the community. 

“At the time, they were only about 10 inches high,” he said. “Now, the ones we’re going to plant, they’re probably three feet high.”

Students from Harborview Elementary School took turns shoveling dirt to make holes for the saplings. It was quick work with so many hands joining in. Adults joked that the kids might dig more holes than there are trees to plant in them. 

Patterson dropped some soil back into the holes before plopping the yellow cedars in and patting the dirt into place around the roots.

A gasoline spill in Juneau’s sewer system shut down half of the Mendenhall Wastewater Treatment Plant on Saturday morning. 

Officials have not identified the source of the contamination and are requesting help from the community. 

Chad Gubala is the production and treatment manager at the city’s wastewater utility. He said that they don’t know exactly how much gasoline spilled. 

“It was large enough to affect about half of the Mendenhall treatment plant. We had to shut down and isolate a portion of the plant,” Gubala said. 

He said that gasoline kills the biological agents the city uses to scrub sewage of harmful bacteria and viruses. 

“It essentially killed the bugs that were doing the treatment work in the plant,” he said. “So it would have resulted in a discharge of untreated sewage to the lower Mendenhall River.”

If that had happened, he said that it could have exposed people to fecal matter and affected wildlife in the river and sea. He said it is fortunate the operator caught the spill before untreated sewage was released.

Gubala said that treatment plant staff shut down operations and evacuated as soon as they smelled the gasoline. They searched for signs of spills at gas stations in the Mendenhall Valley and Lemon Creek areas, but did not find the source. He said gasoline is tricky to trace since it evaporates quickly. 

Rachael Krajewski, the state’s on-scene coordinator for spill prevention and response at the Department of Environmental Conservation, said they are still investigating the cause of the spill. 

“We are looking for the community to call and report anything that they may have seen relating to this incident,” she said.

The spill reporting hotline is 1-800-478-9300.

Officials say the spill looks like an isolated incident, and the wastewater treatment plant was back up and running as of Sunday evening.

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The Southeast Alaska Tribal Ocean Research network posted a paralytic shellfish toxin advisory for recreational and subsistence harvesting in communities across Southeast this week.  

The advisory warns of high toxin levels in all shellfish species in Sitka, Skagway and Ketchikan and in butter clams in Juneau, Kake, Craig, Hydaburg and Kasaan. 

John Harley, a shellfish expert at the University of Alaska Southeast, said that Sitka had a harmful algal bloom that led to high shellfish toxins in early April — the earliest since scientists started keeping a record in 2016. 

“I think that the window in which we have to think about harmful algal blooms occurring is increasing,” he said. 

An old adage was that months ending with the letter ‘r’ were safe for harvesting. Harley said researchers in this region don’t know whether that was ever a useful rule of thumb, since data only goes back about a decade in this region. But he said that as the ocean warms, blooms will likely become less predictable.  

Jeff Feldpausch, the resource protection director for the Sitka Tribe of Alaska, said to never assume is safe. 

“I wouldn’t recommend people eat shellfish unless it’s tested,” he said. “Other than that, you’re just going to be taking that risk.”

Feldpausch recommends tribal members and the general public send samples of their shellfish harvest to the Sitka Tribe of Alaska’s environmental research lab to test for toxins and wait to get results back before eating them. 

Alaska has one of the highest rates of paralytic shellfish poisoning in the world. The state reported 132 cases between 1993 and 2021, including five deaths. That’s in part because Alaska is the only coastal state in the U.S. without a state-run toxin testing system for recreational and subsistence shellfish harvesting. Feldpausch said testing would be a heavy lift for the state.

“The state of Alaska has countless miles of shoreline and potential areas that they would need to sample,” he said. 

In fact, Alaska has more miles of shoreline than all Lower 48 states combined. The state’s high rate of shellfish poisoning could also be due in part to a tradition of shellfish harvesting across remote communities where testing is less common.

Carol Brady, Alaska’s shellfish program coordinator, said the state does routinely test commercial operations, so store-bought shellfish is considered safe. The state ramps up testing in the spring and summer.

“Between May 1 to October 31 it requires testing of the first lot harvested each week, of each species,” she said. 

An alga called Alexandrium catenella is responsible for paralytic shellfish poisoning. The alga produces a neurotoxin that builds up in clams, mussels and other shellfish that feed on it. There is more toxic algae for them to feast on when conditions are ripe for a bloom, meaning there’s plenty of sunlight, nutrients, calm seas and the water is warm enough. Once the toxin concentration in shellfish is above the federal regulatory limit, it’s dangerous for people to eat. Just one milligram can kill a person. 

Symptoms of poisoning include tingling or numbing in the arms, legs and lips as well as nausea and difficulty breathing. People with these symptoms should seek medical care immediately. 

To prevent foodborne illness, state officials recommend checking advisories before going out to forage, avoiding shellfish that are sitting in the sun, harvesting as soon as the tide goes out, putting the harvest on ice immediately and cooking everything thoroughly. While freezing and cooking won’t kill Alexandrium catenella, it can kill harmful bacteria like vibrio and norovirus. 

To report paralytic shellfish poisoning cases, contact the Alaska Department of Health and Social Services at (907) 269-8000, or (800) 478-0084 after hours.