Wildlife

A disease that’s killed millions of bats on the East Coast was recently found in Washington state. Experts fear it’s only a matter of time before it reaches Alaska. Very little is known about bats in the state. To help learn more about bats in Southeast region the Alaska Department of Fish and Game has started a program that asks the public to help survey the flying mammals.

White-nose bat syndrome keeps bats from hibernating properly. It’s a fungus that irritates them and wakes them up too early. And since it’s cold out the bats can’t find insects they need to survive so they starve.

“So it’s really serious,” said Steve Lewis with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. “It may cause a couple of extinctions of our North American bats.”

Lewis and other bat experts don’t know how the disease could affect bats in Southeast because very little is known about bats in the region. People have long known they exist because they can be seen at night. But only in recent years have scientists identified seven species of bats in Southeast. Two larger-sized bats — the silver-haired bat and hoary bat — weigh between 20 and 25 grams, which is about the size of a mouse. Then there are five kinds of little bats known as myotis. They are really tiny.

As Lewis likes to say, “You could put three of them in an envelope and [it’s not] overweight.”
They weigh just 5 to 7 grams each. But the ravenous little guys love their insects. Just one bat can eat 1,000 insects in an hour. They prefer moths but also go after mosquitoes.

The five little bats look so similar that you can’t tell them apart just by looking at them. You have to test their DNA or find out their call, which is distinct.

“They all sound a little bit different,” Lewis said. “They have echolocation calls that and they’re all ultrasonic so they’re all above what we can hear but some of them are in the 30-kilohertz range, some of them are in the 40-kilohertz range and then they have different patterns so the sweeps when you look at a sonogram are all different.”

There is acoustic equipment that can pick up bat calls and translate them into something human ears can hear. Lewis has been traveling around Southeast training the pubic on the equipment as part of a citizen bat monitoring program. The program relies heavily on the public to do the surveys. Half a dozen Petersburg residents have signed up to participate.

This is their part: They drive a specific route 45 minutes after sunset. There is a microphone attached to the roof of the car by a magnet. A cable connects it to a bat detector in the car. There’s also a GPS on the dashboard. You need two people, one to drive right around 20 miles per hour and the other to watch the equipment. In Petersburg, the route makes a loop on Mitkof Island and takes about an hour and a half to complete.

Lewis says you will know when you’ve heard some bats.
“Because you’ll have your bat detector turned up with the volume and so you’ll go along and you’ll hear tah-tah-tah, and that will be a bat,” Lewis said.

The longer part of the drumming call when the sound changes is the bat eating an insect. But it actually happens a lot faster. What we hear has been slowed down eight times.

Between the data stored on the bat detector and the GPS, scientists will know what bats were heard where. All of the digital data will be stored on a memory card and later e-mailed to Juneau.

Scientists want to find out where the bats are hanging out. They are guessing that it’s a bit different from larger bat caves down south.

“We’re getting a feel that they hibernate less in caves and more in cracks in the ground, talus slopes and things which makes us hope that white-nosed syndrome won’t be quite as serious up here because there’s not hundreds of thousands of bats all aggregated into a cave hibernating together so it may not spread as fast anyway but we really don’t know at this point,” said Lewis.
They do know that at night the bats are foraging in open places like over muskegs and water. In the daytime, they like roosting in old growth trees, especially mothers with their pups who prefer being under the tree’s peeling bark on the south side where it’s warmer.

In general, Lewis says bats have a bad reputation for being scary which is undeserved. He says while you don’t want to handle them because they could carry rabies, they aren’t a scary creature of the night nor are they a kind of flying mouse as they’ve often been called.

“They’re not flying mice at all,” Lewis said. “They’re very small but they’re long lived so our bats here, the little brown bat lives anywhere from 20 to 35 years. And they have one pup a year if they manage to raise it. So, when they get knocked down by something like white nose, it’s going to take a really long time for our bat populations to rebound.”
The citizen bat monitoring program will run May through September in Southeast. The goal is to get a survey done every two weeks at each location during that time.

The program began in Petersburg last summer. So far, five different kinds of bats have been detected.

The Petersburg Public Library has a sign-up sheet for the bat detector equipment. You sign up for a week at a time. It’s sensitive equipment and can’t be used in rain, dense fog or wind. You have to be trained before you can use it. Librarian Chris Weiss is able to do that training.

For the third time in six years, Sitka Sound Sac Roe Herring Fishery has closed far short of the target harvest level.

Alaska Department of Fish and Game biologist Dave Gordon gave seiners the news Monday afternoon.

He says rapid spawning and smaller-than-usual fish combined to bring the fishery up short this season.

“You know the market likes larger fish, the bigger the better as far as sac roe herring goes. And with this smaller mix of fish, we knew we might find it difficult to prosecute the entire fishery.”

Seiners target herring just before spawning when the eggs — or roe — are still in skeins inside the females. The sac roe is marketed as a delicacy in Asia.

Gordon says the department knew that this year would probably be dominated by large numbers of smaller fish. Last year, biologists found a high percentage of 3-year-olds in the Sitka Sound herring stock — the first year that they reach sexual maturity. Gordon says that’s good news for the future, but for this season, it meant that there were a lot of 4-year-olds around.

“We did get one opening in — the second opening — where we did manage to find some larger average weight sizes to harvest. And the quality of the fish during that opening was very good. But from there it was downhill.”

Gordon does not second-guess himself much, but he does wonder if he waited a day too long between the second and third openings. There are 48 seine boats in the fishery, about half as many tenders, and maybe a dozen aircraft. Still, with all these resources, there is a limit to how many herring can be taken in a day — around 4,500 tons, or about one-third of this year’s total catch limit.

It’s a tricky fishery to pull off.

“One of the most difficult things about managing the sac roe fishery is that you have this very narrow window of time to harvest good quality herring when they’re ripe, mature, to when they spawn. But on top of that, you’ve got limited capacity to handle the fish. You can’t just go and harvest as much fish as you can — you know, harvest the quota at one time. You’ve got to take it in pieces because there’s only so much tendering capacity and processing capacity.”

Sac roe seiners harvested 10,050 tons in three openings but fell 4,690 tons short of their harvest goal this season. They experienced similar early closures in 2012 and 2013.

With the closure of sac roe herring in Sitka, ADF&G now turns its attention to other herring fisheries, like the roe-on-kelp pound fisheries in Hoonah Sound and Tenakee Inlet — both of which have had poor or closed seasons recently.

On the upside, the herring spawn — which contributed to the early end of commercial fishing — has been strong in Sitka Sound, with 42 nautical miles of shoreline mapped as of Saturday.

Cooperation across the Bering Strait was strengthened this week when the United States and Russia signed a joint wildlife agreement.

Officials from the two Arctic nations met in San Diego to discuss polar bear and snow goose monitoring efforts in Alaska and Chukotka.

James Kurth, Deputy Director of the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, signed off on the agreement alongside his Russian counterpart Amirkhan Amirkhanov, deputy head of the Federal Service for Supervision of Natural Resources.

The two have worked together on wildlife management in the past. A similar joint management effort took place between 2013 and 2015. At this week’s meeting in San Diego, Russian and American officials also discussed results from their joint study on the dynamics of the Bering and Chukotka Seas’ ecosystems.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was unavailable for comment on the agreement.

The Department of Fish and Game plans to trap a flock of birds not native to Alaska that is trying to move in. The agency says starlings could cause big problems for birds native to the area. They want to get rid of the flock before their numbers grow.

The trap sits near the entrance of Ben Walters Park near the northwest shore of Beluga Lake. It looks like a chicken run. It’s fenced in with one-inch chicken wire so smaller animals that Fish and Game doesn’t want to capture, can easily get out if they wander inside.

“In the center of it in the middle, it has a slope design with the roof coming down, and then large slats about an inch and a quarter [or] an inch and a half in diameter just big enough for a starling to get through to get down to a bait tray in the center of the trap,” said Herreman.

Jason Herreman, assistant area management biologist with Fish and Game, says starlings are an invasive species from Europe. They have a unique migration story. They were given a foothold in the U.S. in the late 1800s when Shakespeare fans released a number of the birds in New York City. Their goal was to bring every bird featured in Shakespeare’s work to the country.

But, as far as Herreman knows, starlings have never lived in the Homer area. He says starlings are cavity nesters and they could force other birds out of prime nesting spots.

“… such as chickadees, woodpeckers, nuthatches,” said Herreman.

“And then they also have been known to be a problem as far as crop degradation goes. With airports…here we are close to the air pond and the airfield here in Homer. Large flocks of these have been known to be quite problematic around airfields before,” said Herreman.

Fish and Game wants to trap the birds that are here before their numbers grow. Herreman says once a strong population is established it will be much harder to remove them from the area.

“I’m sure folks have noticed we have pigeons out on the spit. That’s a species previous biologists tried to get rid of when they first showed up in town. They weren’t necessarily successful and they have become established. And they’re a nuisance problem we get complaints about every year,” said Herreman.

Herreman says so far he’s only seen one flock of starlings in the area and it had between 35 and 40 birds.

He says other traps the same size as Fish and Game’s have held up to 100 birds at a time. He checks the trap every morning to make sure it’s not damaged and, of course, to see if he has caught anything.

“I’m unsure about that. Yesterday morning when I went and checked the trap, the trap had been tampered with. The lid had been ripped off and some of the wire pulled back. The screws had been unscrewed so it looks like it was a human who probably let something out of the trap,” said Herreman.

Herreman says trap tampering can be an issue no matter what animal is being targeted. He says Fish and Game clearly labels their traps to discourage people from bothering them.

“So folks know that it’s an official effort. It’s not just some individual trying to do something nefariously. But yeah, it’s not uncommon,” said Herreman.

The opening at the top of the trap is sized specifically for starlings but there is a chance for other animals to get locked in. If that happens, Herreman says he’ll let them out.

If a starling wanders into the trap he plans to leave it there in hopes it will call out to the rest of the flock and lure more of the birds inside. If the trap works, Herreman says, the birds captured will be euthanized.

The US Army Corps of Engineers has completed a week of back-to-back meetings collecting public comment on the Donlin Gold draft environmental impact statement, or EIS, with a visit to Nunapitchuk.

The Army Corps is the lead federal agency on the document and has contracted the international environmental and engineering firm AECOM to create the draft.

About 25 people from Nunapitchuk, Kasigluk, and Atmautluak attended the gathering on Thursday to testify on the proposed open pit gold mine located about 10 miles north of the village of Crooked Creek and the Kuskokwim River.

The comments at the meeting remained consistent with concerns expressed in other villages throughout the Yukon-Kuskokwim region on the project; mainly residents want the economic benefits of jobs without assuming the environmental impacts mining could have on subsistence.

But Bobby Hoffman, a Calista Corporation board member, says subsistence users can’t have one without the other.

“If we don’t have money we can’t get subsistence. Since our subsistence is away from our villages and our towns, we have to go get them. Without gas, without equipment— snow machines, shells, food— we can’t get them,” Hoffman said.

Calista owns the mineral rights to the mine site and plans to increase shareholder dividends with revenue generated from its operations—an estimated $1.5 billion over the life of the project and an additional quarter million dollars in right-of-way lease payments from a proposed pipeline, according to the draft EIS.

Nunapitchuk resident Barbara Evan says she’s torn about the mine.

“I know there (are) a lot of unemployed people all over these small rural communities. It’s a good opportunity for them, but then there’s that side where the elders are concerned about our subsistence,” Evan said.

Her son is one of those unemployed people. He’s 21 years old and living at home. She says he dropped out of high school, and she’s encouraging him to get his GED so he can work.

Evan says even though she’s concerned about environmental hazards if the mine offered her son a job, she’d encourage him to take it. And if the mine were operating, she says maybe he wouldn’t be in his situation, because more employment opportunities would motivate young people to finish school.

But Morris Alexie, a subsistence hunter from Nunapitchuk disagrees.

“It’s been 20 years since these guys showed up,” Alexie said. “I haven’t seen any improvements in our graduation rates.”

According to the draft EIS, in 1995 Placer Dome US began exploring the mine site, setting up camps and support facilities like an airstrip and roads to advance their assessments.

In 2007 Barrick Gold North America and NOVAGOLD Resources Alaska, Inc. formed Donlin Creek LLC in a 50/50 partnership. They changed the company’s name to Donlin Gold LLC in 2011.

Since then Donlin has committed to a Calista shareholder hiring preference, and the draft EIS estimates the mine would employ 1,600 to 1,900 YK residents during construction and 500 to 600 residents during operations.

Alexie says those numbers don’t substantially benefit the region.

“They say jobs. But there (are) 13,000 shareholders right now, and if we add the descendants, it’ll be 40,000 shareholders,” he said. “It outweighs the shareholders for the number of jobs available.”

Alexie says the possibilities for environmental impacts override the possibilities for employment. Jobs, he says, would benefit a few while subsistence consequences would affect everyone.

No matter what happens, Henry Tikiun Sr., an elder from Atmautluak, wants the region to hold the mine’s estimated 27-year lifespan in perspective.

“Subsistence outweighs jobs. You can have a job for so long. The gold mine can be open for so long and then close. Subsistence,” Tikiun said, “will last forever.”

The Army Corps will return to the YK region the final week of March to collect public comment on the draft EIS in Chuathbaluk, Holy Cross, and Lower Kalskag.

Lillian Michael provided Yup’ik translation for this story.

A federal appeals court last week ruled the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service was following the law when it designated a California-sized piece of the Alaskan Arctic as critical habitat for the polar bear. The ruling dismayed the state of Alaska, the oil industry and several Native groups. They’d challenged the habitat designation, saying it was too broad and would deter activity in the region. Let’s take a look at this designation and what it could mean for the industry.

The first thing to know is that this habitat is an enormous area, but 96 percent of it is off-shore, covering sea ice or sea. The 4 percent that’s on land is a band of coast that stretches from the Canadian border in the northeast to Barrow, and all the barrier islands, down to Hooper Bay in Western Alaska.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Biologist Ted Swem says the habitat designation won’t require anyone to get any new permits. For oil companies, he says, it just adds a question for federal permits they’d have to get anyway.

“In my experience it adds paragraphs or pages to the length of a document, and that requires the project applicant and the federal agency with which we’re working to add more text, and we have to have more thought and more discussion …. But it doesn’t add weeks or months to the process.”

That’s because, Swem says, regardless of whether the habitat is designated, the polar bear is listed as a bear2threatened species. Under the Endangered Species Act, he says, any federal permit for development in this area of the Arctic already requires consultation with his agency, to evaluate its impact on the bear. And here’s the thing: even without the habitat designation, Swem says Fish and Wildlife still has to look at the impact on the habitat, because harming the habitat could harm the bear.

“Every place there’s critical habitat, there is also polar bears,” as Swem put.

The habitat designation adds a new question– what’s the impact on the bear’s habitat? — but the answer is roughly the same.

“Not just roughly, but I would say it would be the same.
Swem says. “It has been the same. In my experience, the answer is the same.”

Swem cites Point Thomson, the Exxon project on the North Slope, as an example. Exxon got the crucial wetlands permit for that in 2012 when the polar bear habitat designation was in place before the legal challenge put it on hiatus.

“And it was right on the coast and it is in critical habitat, and I would contend that it didn’t affect that development at all, to have that project within critical habitat,” Swem says.

The Corps of Engineers’ wetlands permit required Exxon to bring two drilling pads in from the coast a bit and shrink a third, to accommodate polar bears coming ashore. The Corps also required Exxon to pay compensation for filling 267 acres of wetlands, at a 3-to-1 ratio. That meant paying a conservation fund to preserve 801 acres elsewhere. Exxon won’t say how much they had to pay, but safe to say it was several million dollars.

Joshua Kindred, an environmental attorney for the Alaska Oil and Gas Association, an industry trade group, contends the habitat designation adds exponentially to that kind of cost.

“If an area of land in which say a developer want to develop is critical, then the Corps puts sort of an automatic multiplier on the value of that land, from a wetlands mitigation standpoint,” he said.

That’s not how the Corps of Engineers sees it.

“There’s no one thing that says ‘OK this is habitat for a polar bear, therefore the wetland mitigation ratio is X,” says Sheila Newman, chief of the Special Actions Branch, in the regulatory arm of the Corps of Engineers-Alaska District.

It’s not easy to explain the Corp’s evaluation methods. Newman says they examine wetland “functions” but have no standard assessment tool. They use several. Newman says they’re trying to pare down the methodologies so companies can better predict their mitigation costs.

“But, you know, we are not there yet,” she says.

But, she says, on all the assessment tools in use, it wouldn’t make a difference whether an area is a designated critical habitat or just a place where polar bears tend to be seen.

“So the critical habitat designation, in itself, does not make a difference at all,” she said.

Kindred, from the Alaska Oil and Gas Association, says the designation, if nothing else, adds uncertainty to a project. He says AOGA and the other plaintiffs haven’t decided yet whether to pursue their legal challenge further.