KCAW - Sitka

Researchers in the Sitka Tribe of Alaska are trying to figure out how far subsistence herring eggs travel across the state — and beyond — each spring.

The distribution network for herring eggs is complex and far reaching. It’s estimated that around 87% of eggs harvested out of Sitka are given away, and eggs are often shared several times before they reach their final user.

Kyle Rosendale is a fish biologist for the Tribe. He says they’ve been surveying harvesters in the post-season since 2002. This year they’re expanding their survey efforts to include folks on the receiving end of the eggs, which are traditionally gathered on hemlock branches in Sitka Sound each spring.

“We received some feedback from people, and realized there’s a lot of information we’re not capturing about the distribution network for herring eggs,” Rosendale said. “We ask harvesters about meeting their needs and how they share herring eggs in our post-season harvest surveys. And this survey looks from the other end of the distribution network. How are final consumers meeting their needs? How do they receive eggs?”

Rosendale says they’ve received around 200 responses, so far. The survey takes about five minutes, and they’re looking for anyone who likes to eat subsistence herring eggs to respond, whether they live in Sitka, Southeast Alaska or farther away.

“We know they go to Juneau. We know they go to Bethel. We know they go to Hawaii and Ohio,” Rosendale says. “We’re just hoping to hear from some of those people about how they get eggs, and if they’re able to meet needs both for themselves and to share with all the people they would like to share with.”

Rosendale says the Tribe hopes the data will paint a picture of the overall reach of local herring eggs and will inform future research. Participants who fill out the survey will be entered in a drawing to win cash prizes.

Carrie Fenton first learned about bats back in Long Island, through local bat revitalization programs. Then she went to college in New Orleans, the definitive vampire capital of the United States. She lived in Montana for a year, where she became accustomed to all kinds of wildlife — rattlesnakes, mountain lions, bears.

She even found a colony of bats in her home there.

“I had a very relaxed attitude about them, coming to Sitka, because I had lived for a year with bats, and we could hear them kind of crawling around in the ceiling and crawling around in the walls,” Fenton said. “And we would see them all the time outside at night, you know, swooping around.”

But in Montana, the bats never came in the house.

One September morning in 2020, around five o’clock, Fenton discovered the first bat in her house in Sitka, when it landed on her face.

“I had brushed this furry thing off of my face. And I was like, ‘Oh, there’s a mouse in the house,” Fenton recalled. “And I rolled over and it was flying. I was like, ‘Oh, my gosh, no! It’s a bat!”

She called the nurse help line at SEARHC. They told her she needed to come to the hospital right away.

“And I got to the hospital and the nurses, they were like, ‘Are you sure it was a bat? I don’t think we have bats in Sitka,’” Fenton recalled. “We spent like 15 minutes kind of going back and forth. And they were like, ‘Oh, yes, we do actually have bats, we need to have you come in. So I had to go through the rabies shots, which was not fun.”

I must disclose, here, that I too have lived among the bats. A colony inhabited my home in Alabama a decade ago. I remember them lurking in the folds of my bath towels and swooping at me in the kitchen as I cooked spaghetti. I once picked one up, thinking it was a magnolia leaf I’d tracked indoors, and it screamed at me. I’ve dined out on that story for a long time.

I thought it was unusual to discover a bat colony in your chimney. But it turns out that it’s pretty common, including in Southeast Alaska, where there are several types of bats.

Karen Blejwas is a wildlife biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, working in their threatened, endangered and diversity program. For the last 10 years, her work has focused primarily on the bat populations in Southeast Alaska.

“We have six resident species. And then we have a seventh that we’ve recorded acoustically, but we’ve never captured or had any further documentation of,” said Blejwas. So yeah, quite a few.”

Each fall, bats swarm, mate and go into hibernation. On the East Coast, bats will gather in large groups to hibernate in caves. That’s typically when bats spread white nose syndrome, a fungus that has been devastating to bat populations around the world in the last 15 years or so. The fungus has made it as far north as Washington. But Southeast’s topography has worked against the disease, forcing unique hibernation patterns that reduce the spread.

“So here in Southeast, where we’ve found the bats hibernating around these steep, forested hillsides with a rocky surface underneath,” Blejwas said, “it’s essentially just a jumble of rocks, and the bats are crawling into those spaces between the rocks.”

Because the bats are hibernating in much smaller, dispersed groups, they’re less likely to spread the fungus during their hibernation period.

After mating, females actually store sperm over the winter. They emerge in the spring from their hibernation sites and form maternity colonies, settling in warm environments where their pups will develop more quickly and have the greatest chance to thrive.

That’s what Fenton was most likely experiencing in the spring of 2021, around half a year after she spotted the first bat.

“We started seeing them more on the porch, flying around at night,” Fenton recalled. “We started finding poop in the house on the porch all the time.”

Once there’s a maternity colony nesting in your house, the real journey begins. It is illegal to kill bats, and Blejwas said extermination is not an effective way to deal with them, anyway. The bats present in a home on any given night are just a fraction of the total number of bats using the space — the females even switch roosts periodically during the summer, so there’s constant turnover.

“So really, the only way, if you don’t want them in your house, is to physically exclude them, and that can be challenging depending on how the house was constructed because bats need only need three-eighths of an inch gap to crawl in,” Blejwas said.

What about other relocation strategies, like bat houses? Blejwas added that while they’re successful in other parts of the country, they historically haven’t worked in Southeast Alaska.

Last summer, Fenton tried to start the exclusion process with a pest removal company in Ketchikan, but at the time they weren’t traveling due to the pandemic. That left Fenton with one option — seal up the house herself after the bats left to hibernate and hope they wouldn’t come back the following spring.

But as this summer’s warmth returned, the bats moved back in. Now she’s couch surfing.

“It’s definitely frustrating,” Fenton said. “My landlord has been pretty supportive, though. And she’s waived my rent, which has been really helpful.”

Fenton said she would have moved out of the house a while ago, but she’s had trouble finding a new apartment, and now she has a seasonal job and is unsure of whether she’ll stay in Sitka long-term, which makes it difficult to commit to a new lease.

She said the pest control crew and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game have been very helpful. In June, the pest removers came to Sitka, and surveyed her house  with plans to seal up more potential entry points. She said she’s glad that protections exist to keep bats safe, but she wishes there were more resources to support renters and homeowners in her situation.

“Bats are really incredible creatures,” Fenton said. “But I’m looking forward to the day I don’t live with them and they’re not my roommates.”

An insect infestation that was first reported in 2020 will continue to cause damage to a variety of trees throughout the Tongass this summer.

Last summer’s unusually warm weather fueled an explosion in the western blackheaded budworm, leaving masses of browning trees in many areas of Southeast. The worm, which is the larval stage of the budworm moth,  is known to feed on the new growth of trees, leaving them with a brownish-red appearance.

While budworms have been known to target hemlock trees, Dr. Elizabeth Graham, an entomologist for the USDA Forest Service Alaska Region, says they seem to be moving on to spruce this year.

“This is possibly the result of, you know, depleting the resource. There was so much defoliation on hemlock last year. And so the females may have chosen to lay their eggs on spruce instead, since there’s maybe more of a foliage resource available than with the Hemlock,” Graham said.

According to the Forest Service, this is the first large scale outbreak Southeast has seen since the mid 90s. While the damage may seem severe as worms continue to feed over the coming weeks, Graham says these infestations are a natural part of the changing forest.

“They’re basically a cool driver of change, that they’re creating new gaps in the canopy, adding some more light to the forest floor, adding some more fertilizers to the forest floor. And so there, there are many ways can be beneficial,” she said.

The infestations occur on a 30-to-40 year rotation. Graham says they usually persists over the course of several years before naturally crashing, but she’s hopeful that we’re in the peak stages.

“We’re kind of seeing that since they’re switching over to spruce now, and so they just can’t sustain at these levels. And so hopefully we’re reaching the peak, and that, you know, maybe this will be the last year,” Graham said. “They just can’t last that long.”

While most trees are expected to survive the outbreak, the Forest Service is encouraging visitors to document and share their observations of insects and tree damage through the iNaturalist app. Photos, videos or information related to the budworm or its subsequent damage that is uploaded to the app will automatically be included in the Alaska Forest Health Observations Project, a citizen science project in iNaturalist.

Three crew members were safely rescued after their fishing boat sank underneath them about 50 miles northwest of Sitka on Monday.

The U.S. Coast Guard reports that the 37-foot power troller Miss Amy radioed for help after it began taking on water in the vicinity of Porcupine Rock, just offshore of the entrance to Lisianski Strait. The Coast Guard issued an urgent marine information broadcast asking for help from any vessels in the area.

Two good Samaritan boats — the Cirus and the Lucky Strike — responded and pulled the Miss Amy’s crew from the water. They were then hoisted aboard an Air Station Sitka helicopter and transported to Mt. Edgecumbe Medical Center for treatment.

In a news release, Petty Officer Matt Bitinas of the Coast Guard Juneau command center said the two crews that responded “saved three lives.”

The Miss Amy is reported to be on the bottom, in about 150 feet of water. The vessel is registered to an owner in Hoonah.

Like many rural communities, Sitka struggles to keep up with its feral cat population. But because of the island’s limited genetic diversity, an interesting genetic mutation has made its way into the feline gene pool.

Two years ago, Anna Laffrey was out for a walk on the Sitka Cross Trail when she stumbled on something unexpected.

“I literally thought that I saw a three-headed cat,” Laffrey said. “And I stopped on the sidewalk, and then took a step closer into the brush, and they scattered.”

It was a litter of kittens. She knew she’d have to act quickly. It was winter in Sitka, and she thought they wouldn’t last long in the elements. Eventually, with the help of some friends, she was able to capture one of them.

“We used a butterfly net and a pot. Yeah, we picked her up with a jacket and we had a big stock pot and we kind of dropped her in the pot with blankets and took her home,” she said.

What she didn’t know when she brought home that tiny, terrified kitten is that she was a carrier of an unusual mutation.

“She’s polydactyl,” Laffrey says. “It looks like she has thumbs. She has huge paws. She can pick up a blueberry with her hand!”

Cats with polydactylism are born with extra digits. In Alice’s case, that means six toes on each front paw, for a total of 20 toes. Most cats have 18.

But while Alice’s mega-mitts may seem like a one-in-a-million, the mutation is common in Sitka. According to visiting veterinarian Nicole Caraway, Sitka’s lack of genetic diversity makes it a perfect breeding ground for the dominant trait.

“If one parent has it, and the other parent doesn’t, then there’s a 50% chance that all the kittens that are born will have polydactyl or extra toes,” Caraway explained. “The population genetically here is smaller, so you’re going to see more of that mutation.”

But Caraway says the gene can and does occur in all feline populations.

“I normally work at a very busy practice in Northern California, where animals are obviously less likely to be inbred, and I still see a great deal of it,” Caraway said.

No one really knows how prevalent polydactylism is on Baranof Island. There’s never been a study, but guesses range from 5% to one-third of the population.

According to Animal Control Officer, Jim Rodgers, there never seems to be a shortage of them at the local shelter. On a whiteboard, he pointed out the names of the kittens who’d recently been rescued, all of which were polydactyl.

While these unique felines are slinking around at a high rate in Sitka, vet Nicole Caraway says the condition seems most common on the Eastern seaboard, where they were historically kept as ship cats. It’s said that sailors once believed they brought luck, and that their extra claws made them expert mousers.

It’s impossible to know when the first polydactyl cat made it to the shores of Sitka. But as a town full of fisherman, it only seems right that these funky-footed cats should call this place home.

Sitka’s Search and Rescue team rescued an injured hiker on the evening of June 23 after he fell while hiking the Indian River Trail (Kaasda Héen).

According to Assistant Fire Chief David Johnson, 911 dispatchers received a call around 3:45 p.m. A fellow hiker made the 911 call and said they believed the man had broken his ankle.

Search and Rescue Captain Matthew Hunter said the hiker had been crossing the first bridge on the trail when the railing gave way and the hiker fell.

Hunter said ten volunteers and two fire hall staff responded to the call. They found the hiker around a mile and a half down the trail and brought him back to the trailhead on a rolling litter.

“The litter wheel is basically one big ATV tire that is underneath the center of the litter,” Hunter said. “So it allows us to go over anything from large rocks to boardwalk steps, if it makes a relatively cushy right in the litter and then allows us put most of the weight on that tire.”

Hunter said it took nine people carrying the litter around two-and-a-half hours to make it back to the trailhead. Still, the relatively flat trail made it a bit easier — rescues can be much more challenging on other hikes.

“If someone gets hurt on Gavin or Verstovia, it’s going to be hours and require more people, because it is exhausting work,” Hunter said. “Thankfully, we have a great crew, and working as a team we can do stuff that can’t be done individually, so it’s fulfilling to help someone and not just train.”

The rescue team made it back to the trailhead shortly after 7 p.m., where an ambulance met them to take the hiker to Mt. Edgecumbe Medical Center.