Environment

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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. 

In a corner tank in the Sitka Sound Science Center, there’s a soft creature about the size and shape of a plum. She’s a deep, ruddy purple, and she blasts little puffs of sand when someone gets too close to the tank.

Matt Wilson has worked as the aquarist here for a few years. He manages the care of about 200 species in the aquarium. He says this stubby squid — also known as a dumpling squid, or Rossia pacifica — isn’t really a squid at all.

“With every, you know, group of animals, there’s some weirdos that are out on the fringes,” he said. “They are most closely related to cuttlefish, more than they are squid or octopus. But they are not quite cuttlefish.”

Wilson found the stubby squid by accident. In March, he was walking along the beach next to the Science Center, looking for live crabs to feed to aquarium animals.

“I think she was trying to go after shrimp that were eating the herring eggs right after herring spawn,” he said. “She was only in a couple inches of water when I spotted her.”

Stubby squid usually live in deeper waters and burrow in the sand during the day. Wilson says finding one out in the open like that was a sign she was in bad shape.

“She was a dark purple, which means that all of her color-changing cells had completely relaxed,” he said. “So she probably was almost sort of unconscious at the time, and she could barely move, and she couldn’t burrow in the sand.”

Wilson scooped the stubby squid up in a bucket. Over several days, he adjusted the temperature and salt levels in the tank to better resemble a typical habitat. Wilson said the animal stayed ghost white for two days — a bad sign — but then changed colors and started burrowing again.

“That was our first sign that she probably was going to start to improve, and from there, she has continued to make a full recovery from that, and is now doing all the normal behaviors we’d expect,” he said.

It was a fortuitous outcome – Wilson happens to be one of a handful of aquarium biologists with experience caring for the species. He first worked with them more than a decade ago, learning from guidelines left by the late octopus specialist Roland Anderson. Anderson cared for stubby squid during a three-decade career at the Seattle Aquarium — one of the only public aquariums that displays the species.

“It was about probably four years off and on working with these animals before I really felt like I was getting positive, good interactions with them,” Wilson said.

Kathryn Kegel is a curator at the Seattle Aquarium. She says stubby squid don’t often show up in aquariums because they can be hard to find, don’t live long, and they’re not easy to keep – they’re really picky eaters.

“They hunt small crustaceans, and don’t always like to eat dead food,” she said.

Kegel says reviving an unhealthy stubby squid, like the one Wilson found, can be especially difficult.

For Wilson, keeping the stubby squid alive and happy is a lot of work. He doesn’t often get to watch her hunt, but when he does, it’s quite a show.

“They pop up completely out of the sand, start to basically hover and rise just above the sand and shoot those tentacles out really, really quickly, like just lightning speed, grab that animal, pull them back and bite it with their beak to immobilize and paralyze it,” he said.

Stubby squid typically live for one-and-a-half to two years. Wilson says that this particular pint-sized predator was already full-sized — a whopping three inches — when he found her. He estimates that she has another four-to-six months left.

“That’s the downside to working with cephalopods, is that they don’t live for very long in most cases,” he said.

After she dies, this stubby squid will be preserved as a learning tool. Wilson sees that as another way to respect the animal.

“Skeletons, preservations, all of those are really important to me as somebody who wants to continue to respect that animal and have them continue to teach even after death,” he said.

He considers his relationship with the animals as a collaborative one – and he says that’s why he avoids giving pet names to animals in his care.

“These are not my pets,” he said. “These are my colleagues.”

Wilson also hopes to expand the existing care manual for the species, sharing what he’s learned, so that other biologists can effectively care for this not-quite-a-squid, not-quite-a-cuttlefish creature.

In the meantime, visitors can meet the stubby squid at the Sitka Sound Science Center.

Heavy rains and flooding in Southeast Alaska triggered a series of small landslides in Ketchikan on Wednesday that blocked roads and damaged a home.

The most destructive slide came down just after 1 a.m. Wednesday off North Tongass Highway. The slide happened on private property north of town. Ketchikan Fire Chief Rick Hines said that the earth of one property gave way, taking a large chunk of the homeowner’s driveway with it. The slide then hit the first floor of another home below, damaging it and the residents’ car. Hines said the people in the damaged home were evacuated without injuries.

City spokeswoman Kim Simpson said in a text to KRBD that there have been no additional slides on the property. She said that Assistant Fire Chief Greg Karlik and Public Works Head Seth Brakke met with the victims Thursday morning to provide guidance but since the slide was on private property, the city and borough won’t be handling the cleanup.

Airport weather data shows Ketchikan saw nearly seven inches of rain in the couple of days before the slide. It’s one of the wettest Mays on record in the First City. The U.S. Forest Service is also reporting significant flooding in the Ward Lake campground area north of town.

Another slide came down Wednesday blocking White River Road. The Ketchikan Borough said that the slide trapped a logging crew, a construction crew, and a handful of employees of a local outdoor adventure tour company on the other side. Alaska Department of Transportation crews managed to clear a path through the slide zone after about seven hours. No injuries have been reported in any of Wednesday’s landslides or flood events.

When bowhead whales pass Utqiagvik on their way north, it’s a good time to count them. So ever since April 1, observers have been climbing a perch built on sea ice, right at the edge of an open lead, to count the whales as they swim past.

Every 10 years, scientists and local hunters team up to carry out this census of bowhead whales that migrate between Bering, Chukchi and Beaufort seas. It is an effort to evaluate the health of the whale population up north, and it helps set subsistence harvest limits for the years to come.

“We do it for the whaling captains, and we do it in collaboration with them,” said John Citta, a senior wildlife biologist with the North Slope Borough Department of Wildlife Management who is leading the effort. “They’ve taught us how to be on the ice safely.”

Bowheads might be thriving as ice declines 

Whaling captains trained the observers on how to work safely on the ice. They will continue counting whales from the perch throughout the spring bowhead migration.

That visual count is only the first step of the census. Scientists will need to statistically adjust the data to account for the whales the observers don’t see. But so far, Citta said the raw numbers have been high. He said the final abundance estimate might turn out at around 20,000 whales or more. The highest counts in recent years found around 17,000 whales.

“We think there are a lot more whales out there now than what there used to be,” he said. “We suspect the populations continue to grow, but we just don’t know that for certain yet.”

Citta said the bowheads might be thriving as the sea ice in the Arctic declines. Past bowhead research suggests that the whales were in better physical condition in years with less sea ice, he said.

But the shrinking sea ice and increasing open water habitat can also lead to more competition with humpbacks, predation from killer whales or collisions with ships. Citta said the only way to know is to continue monitoring the bowhead population.

Hunters’ contribution to whale count

Whalers have been involved in the bowhead census since the early 70s. That’s when the International Whaling Commission, an organization that regulates whaling, estimated that there were fewer than a thousand whales in the Bering-Chukchi-Beaufort stock. That estimate was so low that the commission first tried to place a moratorium on whaling and then reduced the harvest.

Hunters protested the limit, saying it was based on an undercount.

While that early count only included whales passing through the open lead, hunters knew that some animals traveled far from shore or under thick ice. Over the years, the late Craig George collaborated with local whalers to improve the census methods and account for those whales.

“We were able to improve our techniques over the years,” said Geoff Carroll, a retired wildlife biologist who worked with George. “We were able to show that there’s plenty of bowheads to support the subsistence hunt.”

An acoustic component of the count, pioneered around 1984, helped determine how many whales could be heard migrating when the lead is closed or the weather is too poor to see whales. Kate Stafford, a researcher at the Marine Mammal Institute at Oregon State University who studies bowheads using acoustic monitoring, has worked on the past five bowhead censuses.

“This combination of methods makes for a more robust population estimate and confirms what Native whalers have always known – that whales migrate in heavy ice, sometimes far offshore and at all times of the day,” Stafford said.

Declining sea ice could change the census

Last August, scientists deployed hydrophones – underwater devices that record ocean sounds – on the sea floor. They plan to retrieve them this fall.

“It turns out that bowhead whales really talk a lot when they’re migrating,” said Carroll, who is also an advisor for this year’s census.

An aerial survey will happen later this summer.

The North Slope Borough is collaborating with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration on flights over the Alaskan and Canadian Beaufort seas to photograph migrating whales, Citta said.

While counting whales from the observation perch has been a success this season, Citta said that with sea ice becoming less reliable each year, the method is getting more dangerous.

“We’re worried that those ice-based counts will not be a viable way to count bowheads in the future,” he said. “If that’s the case, we need alternatives, and one of the leading alternatives is an aerial survey.”

After the count is done, scientists will need to process the data, which can take up to two years. The International Whaling Commission expects the final estimate, which will be used to decide whether to renew the region’s subsistence whaling quota, in 2029.

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.

A Trump administration effort to limit protections for endangered species’ habitats could have outsized consequences in Alaska. That’s according to environmental scientists who warn of “severe” implications for ecosystems that could be targeted for resource extraction, if the proposed change goes through.

On Apr. 17, federal wildlife management agencies proposed redefining “harm” under Section 9 of the Endangered Species Act. The Act says it’s unlawful for anyone to “take” an endangered species, with the word “take” meaning to harass, pursue, wound, kill — or to harm.

For almost half a century, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Marine Fisheries Service have understood “harm” to mean any “significant habitat modification or degradation” that results in death or injury to protected wildlife. The new definition would exclude habitat — “harm” would only apply to actions that directly harm the protected animals.

Splitting protections for species from their habitat

It’s a step in the Trump administration’s broader plan to roll back environmental regulations to remove barriers from energy and resource development — one that many environmental scientists in Alaska say they’re unsettled about.

Falk Huettmann, a University of Alaska Fairbanks wildlife biologist who studies seabirds, said he’s worried about what comes next.

“The implications of this are pretty severe,” he said.

Huettmann added that habitat conservation is imperative to the survival of endangered species across the United States — and, especially, Alaska.

“For instance, the boreal forest is a big, big chunk that we have in Alaska,” he said. “There’s a lot of it left, it’s pretty pristine in some areas. Old growth forest — we have a lot of it. That includes Tongass and others.”

Huettman said his worst fear is that some habitats will be thrown into what he calls “a legal vacuum,” giving developers carte blanche to do whatever they want, short of directly harming an endangered species.

Retired environmental consultant Torre Jorgenson offered another hypothetical outcome.

“If a company only has to worry about taking out a Steller’s eider or a bowhead whale, they can easily avoid harming or killing an animal directly,” he said. “But if they alter or damage the habitats through their development process, they don’t have to be concerned about that under this rule.”

A key source of conservation research could be lost

Jorgenson performed environmental impact surveys in the Arctic for about 40 years, making sure big oil and gas developments up north weren’t interfering with local vegetation, permafrost and bird habitats.

He said that over his long career, not all companies were hostile to that process — some even shared important conservation research they gathered through impact studies.

“Some companies were very proactive on their work,” Jorgenson said. “BP spent tens of millions of dollars on environmental studies gathering information for their environmental assessments. It actually benefited environmental management having all that data, and they produced a lot of data through their studies.”

But if the regulations change, he said that relationship could also dissolve.

Huettmann, the biologist, is awaiting the change with a mix of frustration and apathy. He said the Endangered Species Act, even in its original form, catalogued imperiled species less thoroughly than other lists, like the International Union for Conservation of Nature Red List. But this move, Huettmann said, could pull out any teeth the act had left.

He added that Alaska will shoot itself in the foot if it spoils its natural beauty, which draws in people from all over the world.

“Alaska owns a very high percentage of protected areas, like national parks,” Huettmann said. “People want to see about the wonders of nature and of the environment — if you get away from that and turn it into a mining state where everything can be done, everything can be drilled, then we lose that market.”

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service received over 200,000 responses to its call for public comments about the proposed change, which closed on May 19. In an email, a Department of Interior spokesperson pointed to the Federal Register Notice and declined further comment.