Wildlife

Scientists have identified the dead killer whale found on a shoreline in Southeast Alaska last week. The dead whale was discovered by a moose hunter last week, about 25 miles from Petersburg.

National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration Fisheries spokeswoman Julie Speegle said a team of scientists made it to the Portage Bay on northern Kupreanof Island Monday.

“They were able to conduct a full necropsy, which they collected a full suite of necropsy samples which will help determine the cause of death,” Speegle said. “The necropsy team did not find any indication of external injuries, but they did discover that the killer whale had an infection in the jaws, so they’re doing some more research on that.”

The eight-person team was a collaborative effort of NOAA Fisheries, the University of Washington, the Vancouver Aquarium and the Petersburg Marine Mammal Center.

Speegle said photos of the carcass were taken by volunteers from Petersburg who made it to Portage Bay Friday and those photos have been used to identify the whale.

“The killer whale research community, including some folks from Canada, (was) able to identify the animal as 0059, a female offshore killer whale that was first identified in the early 1990s and has been documented from California to the Bering Sea,” she said.

Offshore killer whales eat sharks and are different from the fish-eating resident whales or marine mammal-eating transient orcas typically seen along the Alaskan coast. This orca had teeth that were flattened to the gum line, like other shark-eating offshore whales. The orca may have been at least 40 years old when it died. Female orcas can live about 50 years, but some may live as long as 100 years.

The next step for the scientists is testing the samples retrieved from the carcass to search for what killed this animal. The skeleton may be retrieved in the future for further research.

The whale was freshly dead, so the team was able to get good samples from the carcass. Anyone spotting a dead or stranded whale or marine mammal is asked to call the NOAA Fisheries hotline at 877-925-7773.

It’s been seven decades since U.S. soldiers recaptured Attu Island from Japanese forces, setting off one of the bloodiest battles of World War II.

Once they recovered the most remote island in the Aleutian Chain, American forces transformed it, briefly, into a strategic hub. But that decades-old infrastructure has been crumbling under influence of harsh winds, weather and time.

Now, Attu is scheduled for what may be the first of many stages of cleanup — but it’s unlikely the military will ever be able to turn back the clock to a time before conflict.

Long before the war, Attu was home to a small village. It was also a haven for birds.

“These common eiders, they just make this cooing — rrr, rrr. On a day like this, it carries across the water,” said Jeff Williams, assistant manager for the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, standing on the shore of Attu’s Casco Cove in early June. The sun shone brightly, with only the barest breeze pushing its way through tangles of beach grass.

Attu has been a refuge for wildlife since 1913. President Theodore Roosevelt set it aside, along with a handful of other islands that were important to seabirds and marine mammals. But refuge status didn’t stop the military from using those lands during World War II.

There are now more than 20 former defense sites located within the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge. Attu is the most remote — nearly 1,500 air miles from Anchorage — and one of the most deeply affected. Besides collapsed Quonset huts and spent shells, the tundra is covered with rusting tank farms, decaying fuel barrels and miles of pipeline.

This summer, Williams and a few volunteers for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service stopped to check on one of the worst areas — a field of above-ground storage tanks near an area called Navy Cove.

“I mean, you can see the valve right there, just coming out,” Williams said, pointing to a viscous puddle of black liquid that had oozed from one tank. “It’s a direct source.”

The bodies of at least a half-dozen birds dotted the puddle; their decaying wings jutting out at odd angles — “almost like the La Brea tar pits.”

“It’s not as thick — only a few inches thick. But it’s just enough,” Williams said. He gestured to-ward the edge of the puddle. “See a carcass right over here?”

Over the years, investigators for the Fish and Wildlife Service have found the remains of many more birds trapped in this puddle. It’s the most obvious example of a much broader problem, as infrastructure built to support the Attu Naval Station and the Attu Army Air Base disintegrates.

Both facilities closed in the years following World War II. The naval station came back into use in 1959 amid rising hostility between the United States and the Soviet Union. Within a decade, it had closed again, though, and the military returned all but a sliver of its 82,400-acre reservation to the wildlife refuge. (The remaining 1,800 acres were kept for the U.S. Coast Guard, which continuously maintained a navigational station on Attu until 2010.)

Fish and Wildlife and federal contractors have conducted multiple site studies and reviewed as-built blueprints over the years, but they’ve never determined just how many gallons of petroleum products are still here. There have been some attempts to remove them: Williams said the Navy tried to decommission some of the fuel tanks they installed when the base finally shut down.

“They burned a lot of them. There are pictures of guys with flamethrowers going right up to the tank. It’s really remarkable to see flamethrowers going on gunk like this, just igniting it and black flames flying up,” Williams said. “You know, I think we’ve changed some since then.”

When the Army Corps of Engineers arrives on Attu in summer 2016, their operations will look much different. The agency has hired Bristol Environmental Remediation Services, LLC — a subsidiary of the Bristol Bay Native Corporation — to remove old storage containers and polluted soil from two sites, including the leaky tank farm.

“We are also aware of a pallet-sized pile of old lead batteries,” said Army Corps project manager Andy Sorum. “And we’re going to target not only the remains of those batteries, but the contaminated soil around it.”

The Army Corps received an extra burst of funding from Congress for this work. The price tag is $10 million; at least 40 percent of that covers a season’s worth of logistical expenses. “There’s nothing easy about getting heavy equipment to Attu and removing the volume of potentially contaminated material that we’re dealing with here,” Sorum said. He expects to deploy a mix of barges and aircraft, since Attu’s runways are still operable.

Sorum also hopes to clean up other sections of the island down the road, working with federal site managers and the Alaska Department of Environmental Conservation on details.

But there are limits to what the Corps can do. Ken Andraschko oversees environmental restoration at old defense sites for the Army Corps of Engineers in Alaska. He said his teams will focus on chemical hazards; munitions and explosives expended during the war are beyond the scope of their program as outlined by Congress.

“Anything that’s actually in a battlefield, anything that was released as part of the battlefield would be ineligible, because that’s defined as an Act of War,” Andraschko said. “And under our program, that is exclusively forbidden for us to go address.”

The battlefield was confined to the easternmost corner of Attu, but it casts a long shadow. American forces invaded by sea and slowly charged inland, through fog and frigid rains. Cut off from reinforcements, many Japanese soldiers decided it was more honorable to perish in battle — or by suicide — than to surrender. About 2,900 men are believed to have died over the course of 18 days.

Now, the battlefield is a national landmark and part of a national monument to World War II in the Pacific Theater. “It’s not like your typical Civil War battlefield or your European battlefield where everything’s manicured,” said historian John Cloe. “These things are in a real wild state.”

Cloe knows that firsthand. After retiring from a long career as a reservist and Air Force historian, Cloe is now a guide for a California-based company called Valor Tours. He’s been leading small groups of World War II buffs on sailing trips to Attu since 2013.

When it comes to cleaning up the island, Cloe is strongly in favor. “Go to a Civil War battlefield — you don’t see a lot of junk lying around, do you?” he asked. “It’s unsightly, all this twisted metal lying around. It has very little historical relevance. Somebody needs to look at it and make sure, though.”

It’s still being debated, but that twisted metal may stay put. The federal agencies responsible for managing Attu Island aren’t as concerned about debris, so long as it doesn’t leach chemicals or harm wildlife.

The wreckage wasn’t enough to keep Aleutian cackling geese at bay. This summer, their high-pitched honks rang out from the shoreline all the way up to Attu’s mountain passes. The entire species was nearly extinct before the Fish and Wildlife Service launched a huge effort to bring the cackling goose back into its old nesting grounds on the refuge.

“We didn’t bring these birds to Attu,” said Billy Pepper, captain of Fish and Wildlife’s research vessel. “All we did was remove the fox from here — and all of a sudden we come here one year and hear the [honking] just like you’re hearing right now. It’s like, wow. Now they’re everywhere. It just goes to show you what a little bit of work can do.”

Pepper sailed to the island in June to drop off researchers who wanted to study the island’s birds. As they went about their work, the captain jumped on a four-wheeler and set off down old military roads with a few other Fish and Wildlife employees. They arrived at a small interpretive site the agency installed for the 70th anniversary of the Battle of Attu.

There are a few signs explaining the significance of the Aleutian Campaign during World War II and the bravery shown by Army Private Joseph Martinez, who died leading an assault on a rocky hillside pocked with enemy foxholes.

Pepper sat on a small bench looking out at Engineer Hill, where the final fight took place.

“If you can try to let yourself run with the thought of what that would have been like for a 19-year-old kid, it’d be a lot,” Pepper said, shaking his head. “But they did it. And now it’s kind of gone full circle. It’s back to birds. A little interpretive site here, but it’s mostly birds.”

 

At its worst, a bad taxidermy job is gaudy and unsettling. At its finest, taxidermy turns animals into art, preserved for a lifetime or more. Where a specimen falls on that spectrum is up to the skill and ardor of the taxidermist.

When you step into Larry Golden’s workshop near Palmer, it’ll remind you of that scene in Ace Ventura where the pet detective gets home to his animal kingdom. But in Larry Golden’s animal kingdom, all the animals are dead. And that’s why Larry has a really difficult job — to make them look alive.

Fortunately, Larry is really good at his job. If you’ve been to a sporting goods store in southcentral Alaska, like Cabela’s or Sportsman’s Warehouse, odds are you’ve seen his work. He’s been at it a long time. And like a lot of taxidermists, Larry’s self-taught.

“It was $10, I think, to send off for these little booklets, this home course,” he remembers. “And so at about 10 years old I started playing around with frogs and birds and squirrels and what have you.”

Larry grew up in Missouri. By the time he was 16, he’d gotten his brother into taxidermy, too.

“So My dad said, ‘Well ya’ll seem like you’re doing pretty good. Why don’t you let me run you a little ad in the phone book?’ And so he did. And we happened to be the only taxidermists in the yellow pages and we were in business overnight,” he says. “I’ve been doing it ever since.”

For the Goldens, taxidermy is a family affair. If you think Larry started early, his son Micah started even earlier.

“He was actually playing around the shop when he was in diapers,” Larry says. “By the time he was about 6 years old he’d be skinning deer heads for me for the commercial customers.”

At 34, Micah is still the best flesher in the shop.

“He’s probably one of the fastest with a knife I’ve ever seen,” his dad says.

Micah unfolds a frozen caribou hide a hunter dropped off the night before.

“All this fat here has to come off. … All this meat,” he says.

If there are bits of fat and flesh left on the skin, it could cause the mount to rot down the road.

Micah slings the hide over a skinning post, sharpens his knife. Stroke by stroke, he deftly cuts off the fat until the hide looks translucent and almost white.

“Then we’ll put salt on that and hang it to dry. And then it’s ready to go to the tannery,” Micah says.

Micah can do a caribou hide in about 30-35 minutes. Having tried this myself on an elk hide — a mediocre job that took many hours — I can tell you that Micah’s pretty much the Usain Bolt of skinning.

So that’s step one. The skin.

We move on to another project Larry’s working on, a sheep. It’s a shoulder-mount, which is just an animal’s neck and head. Larry pulls out a mannequin, which is the taxidermist’s equivalent of a blank canvas. It’s got the general shape of a sheep, but it really doesn’t look sheep-like. Not yet.

“Before we glue the skin to it we have to rough this up,” he says. “And this is the technique we use. It’s a special little tool for scratching the slickness off of the foam. You rough it up so the glue will stick good. The hide dries to that. It’ll conform to all the contours of the mannequin.”

And after the skin’s securely on, “Screw the horns on here, put the eyeballs on here, the eyes are made of glass of course.”

And this brings us to one of the coolest parts of Larry’s shop. A tackle-box full of eyes.

“Yeah, a drawer full of eyes,” he laughs. There are all kinds of eyes in here. Bear eyes, deer eyes, cougar eyes, giraffe eyes, even crocodile eyes.

Eyes are everything. In the world of taxidermy, anyone can slap a hide on a mount and call a job done. But expression is the mark of a master taxidermist. Even though most taxidermists use eyes from the same supply stores, how they’re mounted makes all the difference.

“You can change the total expression on an animal with its eyes,” Larry says.

For our sheep, Larry says they’re going for a soft, but fully alert look.

“You don’t want that blank stare look, you know.”

Giving the sheep the right expression gives the mount authenticity. When you look at it, you should feel like you’re seeing this sheep in the Chugach, looking up from his grazing to scan the landscape for predators.

Larry’s gone to great lengths to make his work authentic. One time, for example, he was working on an African mount.

“In Africa a lot of the dirt is reddish-brown, and you don’t find too much reddish-brown dirt up here,” he explains.

He happened to be on vacation in Texas, saw the right shade of red.

“I stopped on the side of the road, I scooped me up a bunch, went to the post office and mailed it to myself!”

He used it on the mount’s base, along with some Texas stickler bushes, which look like the dry, thorny shrubbery you might find in a desert a continent away.

Authenticity is Larry’s Holy Grail. He’s been at it a lifetime, and he says he has no plans to quit.

“I tell people I’ll probably die at my workbench,” he jokes.

With hunting season underway and a freezer full of animals to mount, it better be long time before Larry goes the way of his subject matter.

 

A team of scientists is investigating a dead orca whale found on the Kupreanof Island shoreline near Petersburg.

Greg Lutton was moose hunting on Kupreanof Island this week and said he saw the dead whale on his way out of Portage Bay.

“I’ve been fishing for 40 years now and never seen a dead killer whale,” he said.

Lutton said the large female orca had no signs of trauma and he measured it to be 17 feet and 4 inches long. The carcass is on the beach, right at the entrance to the narrow bay. Portage Bay is on the northern side of Kupreanof Island, between Petersburg and Kake. Lutton said the dead whale still looked pretty fresh and thinks it just washed up there.

NOAA Fisheries spokesperson Julie Speegle said marine mammal experts planned to secure the killer whale and get some initial samples, “We are going forward with plans to do a necropsy in the next few days.”

Speegle cautioned people to stay away from the whale carcass, “For your own safety, we don’t know what killed this marine mammal and it’s also part of federal law to stay your distance from marine mammals.”

Sometimes the cause of a whale’s death can be determined quickly but it can take several months before necropsy results come back. Anyone else seeing a dead or stranded whale should report it on the NOAA Fisheries marine mammal stranding hotline 877-925-7773.

During Sen. Lisa Murkowski’s speech at the Alaska Federation of Natives Convention in Anchorage Friday, protesters marched dressed as a salmon, a caribou and a walrus. It was part of an effort to call out Murkowski for her support of Arctic oil drilling. It was the second protest at AFN in two days.

Among the protesters in costume was George Pletnikoff Jr., originally from St. Paul Island, and who now lives in Palmer.

“We are here to make a statement that Lisa Murkowski needs to address our demands that we refuse fossil fuel use as continuing it. No drilling in the arctic, no drilling in the National Wildlife Refuge and we must switch towards renewable energies and create a sustainable future.”

Pletnikoff said the protest was organized by members of Alaska Rising Tide and REDOIL, which stands for Resisting Environmental Destruction on Indigenous Lands.

“The walrus said, ‘Eat me, Murkowski, don’t roll the dice with my ice!’”

That’s Faith Gemmill, with REDOIL. AFN officials escorted Gemmill and a protester out after a few minutes.

“We’re losing walrus habitat and their numbers are in decline because of melting ice. We wanted to send her a message that as a decision maker, she can do something to promote and protect indigenous peoples way of life here.”

The senator chairs the Senate’s Energy and Natural Resources Committee. Murkowski said she didn’t hear or see the protest, but she defended her record.

“I challenge people who suggest that my focus is all on development of fossil fuels. Look at what we have been doing to build out renewables not only in this state but from a national perspective. Look at what we’re doing here to encourage microgrids, so that our communities will be sustainable.”

In a small claims case between a trapper and a trap springer, a judge found the trap springer liable, but didn’t award any damages to the trapper.

Trapper John Forrest sued hiker Kathleen Turley for springing his lawfully set traps on Davies Creek Trail in Juneau. Turley had made headlines in January for also freeing a bald eagle from two traps.

In his decision, Judge Thomas Nave addresses each trap Kathleen Turley admitted to springing last December.

Nave wrote that Turley was justified in springing the marten trap closest to the unintentionally caught eagle she was freeing.

Regarding the other trap near the trailhead that she sprung twice over two days, the judge didn’t find Turley justified. In her concern for dogs and other hikers, Nave wrote, “Other alternatives existed.”

Even though Nave found Turley liable, he stated John Forrest failed to prove his damages during the small claims case that took place over two days. Forrest had testified he was owed up to $750 but Nave wrote he offered no evidence, like a weekly log of what animals he traps.

Forrest’s lawyer Zane Wilson asked for an additional $500 in punitive damages. That was denied as well because he didn’t prove Turley sprang the traps out of malice.

Turley saw the decision as a win-win. She was relieved because she doesn’t have to pay anything toward what started out as a $5,000 complaint. And she hopes it’ll make Forrest and other trappers happy.

“They wanted to make a point that it’s not OK to spring people’s traps and they’ve made that point because they won as far as that goes,” she said. “And for me, it’s more important that I didn’t have to pay anything.”

Turley said the whole experience has been frustrating and stressful and she’s glad it’s over. She stands by what she did, but said, “I definitely don’t condone springing traps. (The) situation I did it in were extreme circumstances but I don’t condone springing traps just because they’re inconvenient to you or because you feel like they shouldn’t be there.”

Her lawyer Nick Polasky, who took the case pro bono, called the judge’s decision “splitting the baby” and wrote in an email “each side has something to be pleased with.”

Neither Forrest nor his attorney Zane Wilson returned calls for comment. Pete Buist, a spokesman for the Alaska Trappers Association, was pleased with the decision, “As a trapper, as a guy who occasionally speaks for trappers, I think it’s pretty good.”

Buist said it’s unfortunate Forrest didn’t get an award for damages, but he calls the decision fair.

“The bottom line was this was not about an eagle, nor was it about money. It was about showing the defendant–and the DA for that part–that we’re a country of laws. There’s a law that you can’t do those sorts of things and she ignored the law and went ahead and did it,” Buist said.

Alaska Wildlife Troopers originally cited Turley for illegally hindering lawful trapping, but the district attorney asked for the judge to throw out the case.

Buist said the whole situation has spurred interest for trappers in Juneau to organize.

“They held a little meeting in Juneau about forming a formal trappers association or a chapter of ATA in Juneau so people could sort of stick together,” Buist said.

He says it would help trappers to communicate with each other, help coordinate efforts to work with other trail users, educate trappers about where they should and shouldn’t trap and educate the public about the law that says you can’t just go around springing traps.

Editor’s note: A separate, earlier story on KTOO.org was updated with a similar headline.