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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. 

On this episode of Juneau Afternoon’s Rainy Day Conversations, true crime enthusiast and author Betsy Longenbaugh shares her lifelong passion for mystery and how she and her husband, Ed Schoenfeld, uncovered a long history of murder and mayhem in Southeast Alaska.

Host Bostin Christopher talks with Longenbaugh about her origins in Sitka, finding a love of mystery from her mother and grandmother, working for her aunt at the Sitka Sentinel, and how, after retiring from a career in journalism and social work, she and her husband began finding tales of murder in Juneau and continue to share them in presentations, history walks, and two books, with a third on the way.

You can find and follow Betsy Longenbaugh online via Facebook or at the website: truecrimealaska.com.

Bostin Christopher hosts the conversation. Juneau Afternoon airs at 3:00 p.m. on KTOO and KAUK with a rebroadcast at 7:00 p.m. Listen online or subscribe to the podcast at ktoo.org/juneauafternoon.

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Juneau Afternoon is a production of the KTOO Arts and Culture Team.
Bostin Christopher produced today’s show with help from Erin Tripp.

If you ask longtime Juneau residents what cake they want on their birthday or for special occasions, one answer comes up a lot — North Douglas chocolate cake. 

“People love this cake,” said Abigail Sweetman, a Juneau resident originally from Ketchikan. She spends nearly all of her free time coming up with new recipes in her Starr Hill apartment.

“I am a huge sugar person, and I grew up making a lot of desserts because it was something I like, something I couldn’t get much of in Ketchikan,” she said. “Most of my love of food came from baking at a young age.” 

For Curious Juneau, Sweetman asked KTOO about the cake’s origin.

While I started looking around for the people who named it, Sweetman gathered ingredients to make it at home.

“It has butter and oil, which is pretty decadent,” Sweetman said, reading aloud from the recipe. “She says to combine, basically like, most of the wet ingredients in the cocoa and bring it to a boil.” 

The recipe lives in the Fiddlehead Cookbook. The cookbook, which is older than Sweetman, is based on a restaurant that operated in Juneau for nearly 30 years. The Fiddlehead Restaurant closed two decades ago, but the cookbook — and North Douglas chocolate cake — has taken on its own life.

“It was a cake that I had in childhood,” she said. “and I’m like ‘I didn’t realize that they named a cake after North Douglas’ and I was like ‘There’s gotta be a story there.’”

The story is rather simple actually, according to Linda Zagar. She’s the baker the cookbook credits with bringing it to the restaurant. 

“My best friend’s mom made this cake, and it was called choco bake,” she said. “It has a real name. It’s a real recipe. I did not create the recipe. That’s what I always tell people. I just brought it.” 

Zagar moved to Alaska with that same best friend in the 1970s, and followed her now husband to Juneau. They’ve lived in North Douglas for decades.

She worked at the Fiddlehead Restaurant for several years, and worked in just about every role there — waiting tables, washing dishes, prep cooking — before she became the morning baker. Zagar said a lot of staff would bring in favorite recipes they had accumulated over the years. 

“For some reason, this one stuck,” she said.

Zagar added a couple of twists: she made it a layer cake, with more frosting, and added walnuts around the edge — though the nuts didn’t make it into the cookbook version. And, Zagar said, she loves chocolate, so instead of plain cocoa powder, she used dark. 

The name, however, was a savvy act of branding. 

“My boss at the time said, ‘Well, what’s the name?’ And I said, ‘choco bake’. And he goes, ‘Hmm, no.’ He goes, ‘You’re the North Douglas Baker. Let’s call it the North Douglas chocolate cake.’ And I think that’s half of it,” she said. “It has a cool name, yeah? But then it just became a thing.”

Nancy DeCherney was part of the Fiddlehead Restaurant too, as a cook and manager. 

“All of us were getting out of college, and there was money up here, and so we had the blessing of having a staff that was highly educated and full of — you know — it was the 70s,” she said. “Everybody was full of exciting ideas.”

DeCherney remembers what it was like to walk into the Fiddlehead. She described dark wood furniture and ferns, a smoking and non-smoking section.

She wrote the Fiddlehead Cookbook in the 90s and she said she loves hearing people talk about their favorite recipes from the cookbook. She’s glad it’s lived on. 

“I think partly, it’s not real difficult food,” she said. “It’s accessible. Some of it is a little unusual, but I think the average bear can cook it, and it’ll turn out okay.”

Back in her apartment, Sweetman pulled the cake out of the oven and started to assemble it. 

“I always want layer cakes to turn out a little better than they do, and then I usually get to the end of it and I’m like, it’s more important to me that this tastes good,” she said as she started frosting. 

For the record, it also looked good, with some extra decoration that wasn’t in the cookbook – edible eyeballs. 

The cake is rich and moist. You’ll probably want a glass of milk nearby. And Zagar says, it’s always better on the second day.