Wildlife

The night before Ryan Mong was scheduled to start his summer job on Buldir Island, the lanky 31-year-old ducked into the cargo hold of the federal research vessel Tiglax to make sure his supplies were in order.

“All these white boxes are the food that we’ve ordered from a distributor,” Mong said, gesturing past gently swaying piles of waterproof Pelican cases. “Packed up the things we really like — nutritional yeast, the Srirachas, the stuff you just always have a lot of back home.”

Mong was one of a handful of biologists hired by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service to work in the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge. They maintain nine field stations stretching from southwest Alaska to Saint Lazaria Island near Sitka.

But Mong and his colleagues — an adventurous couple, also in their 30s — signed up for a special challenge. Their job was to spend three months studying seabird nests on a windy speck called Buldir Island.

Located more than 300 miles west of Adak Island and 70 miles from the next nearest piece of land, Buldir is the most isolated island in the Aleutian Chain. It’s also the most pristine; the fox breeding operations that altered the ecologies of other islands never took here.

Without any threat from foxes, seabirds had free rein on Buldir. More species now build their nests among the island’s jagged rock faces than any other location in the Northern Hemisphere.

The Alaska Maritime refuge has been sending biologists into voluntary exile on Buldir each year since 1988. The program has become legendary among bird researchers such as Ryan Mong — and the scientist who first clued him in during a field season in Arizona.

“It was like, ‘Oh, you get to ride a boat for two weeks out to the end of the Aleutian Chain! And there are so many seabirds that they’re going to hypnotize you!’” Mong said. “So I immediately got on email, sent the resume off.”

It took three years and a stint at another Alaska Maritime research camp in the Pribilof Islands before Mong secured a spot on Buldir. “To describe it to family, I just call it National Geographic Syndrome,” Mong said. “You want to go to the wildest places, the places with the most species, and enjoy the show. And it’s quite a show.”

A “Swiss cheese” island

When the birds come back to roost on Buldir, it seems like there’s no number large enough to capture them all — and certainly not enough space. The island is just 4 miles long and two-and-half miles wide.

Nests are built on top of nests, filling every available nook and cranny.

“You might find like four or five burrows around this rock, and a storm petrel that’s nesting in the grass tussock on top and puffins underneath from different angles,” said assistant refuge manager Jeff Williams, pointing to an innocuous-looking boulder on the beach.  “Swiss cheese just really describes it.”

Williams got his start doing the same kind of work as the field biologists he now hires on an annual basis — hiking over rocky beaches and dense clusters of ferns to find a handful of diverse seabird nests. The researchers go back again and again to find out how many eggs hatch over the course of the summer, and what happens to the chicks.

Over time, that data can be used to uncover population trends. Seabird populations are in precipitous decline worldwide, with flocks reduced by up to 70 percent. But the refuge hasn’t detected that trend in the Aleutian Islands. The biggest change seems to be in where birds go to build their nests, which is usually driven by the availability of food in the surrounding ocean. Those observations get sent along to the North Pacific Fishery Management Council, so they can get a read on the ocean ecosystem before they set fishing quotas.

Williams said that might be part of the appeal for researchers — seeing their work get some use in the real world, instead of going “into a filing cabinet.”

There’s also the unique office environment to consider.

“If you think about it, every one of these birds poops,” Williams said. “There’s millions of them. So it’s like millions and millions of pounds of fertilizer coming onto this. It creates this vegetation that’s super dense and rank. I bring machetes and stuff for people to cut their ways through the paths.”

Williams also tries to set up the island’s radio antenna and make sure the rough wooden cabin and weather-port tents are in good shape. But this summer, a string of storms in the North Pacific Ocean almost disturbed those plans. It took days before the Tiglax, the refuge’s research vessel, could steer close enough to the island to launch an inflatable skiff and sail ashore. The ride was still choppy, and it wasn’t safe to land on the beach closest to the campsite.

That left the research team with no choice but to strap on frame packs and start carrying hundreds of pounds of fuel, food, and tools around the rocky point to their cabin. The crew of the Tiglax had to push on — conducting more research and checking on interpretive signs posted by Fish and Wildlife throughout the refuge.

The storms broke and the ship eventually turned back, unloading deckhands, biologists, and refuge staff to help haul the last boxes ashore. But it just as easily could have gone the other way. The rough arrivals are one of many reasons why Williams says any field worker who can handle Buldir “has earned their stripes.”

“Buldir’s a big life-changer”

McKenzie Mudge and Kevin Pietrzak had already been through the wringer before they were hired to spend a season on Buldir.

“Usually we say we do bird surveys because that’s something most people can understand,” Mudge said. “Nice and simple. We’re outside looking at birds.”

In reality, Mudge and Pietrzak have spent the last six years studying bird migration and diet together. Since they first met at a research site in Antarctica, they’ve traveled from Chile all the way up to the North Slope.

“When you get to working in remote field camps like this, at least a third of your time is camp maintenance and trying to keep the building from falling down,” Pietrzak said. “It’s work, too — trying to figure out how to survive in a place like this. It’s not always easy.”

Mudge and Pietrzak are not the first scientists to fall in love under these conditions. There are several couples who met working for the Alaska Maritime refuge (Williams, the assistant manager, met his wife that way). But it’s not as common to find a couple that chooses to stay in the field.

“It’s different,” Pietrzak said with a laugh. “It’s kind of weird to go back down to Southern California and see my friends that have houses and families and kids of their own, and I’m like, ‘Well, I got to see a lot of the world. That’s really cool, right?’”

Eventually, Mudge said, they would like to put down roots — adopt a dog, make their own home. But first, they wanted to find out what Buldir had to offer.

“You know, everybody always says Buldir’s a big life-changer,” Ryan Mong said. “But you feel lucky getting to do it, because most people just get to come here once or so.”

As Mong spoke, he tugged on a pair of hip waders. It was early summer, and the camp was ready — time to push the inflatable skiff back out to sea so the Tiglax could continue on its way.  I asked Mong if it bothered him that the field season he was about to start on Buldir could also be his last.

“I like living like that,” Mong said.

For two months, I didn’t hear another word from Mong or the rest of the camp.

It was to be expected. Besides a sluggish email connection and a satellite phone, there aren’t many opportunities to reach the outside world from Buldir. And there shouldn’t be any opportunity to post images of the island’s rolling green hills and endless views of the North Pacific to Instagram.

“My season got cut short due to an injury to my finger,” Mong said after I messaged him about his posts on the social media app. “I was done checking all the burrows that I needed to check and I was making my way back down a hill — slipped, dropped the machete I was carrying, and it cut right into my hand, really deep.”

Mong tried to work through it, but medical advisors for the refuge suggested he leave. The damage wasn’t permanent. And McKenzie Mudge and Kevin Pietrzak took it all in stride.

Even though it was truncated, Mong said the experience was everything he’d hoped — the sheer variety of seabird species, the headiness of living in isolation, the camaraderie among his crew.

In fact, spending so much time with a couple like Mudge and Pietrzak got him thinking.

“I kind of need to go settle down with my loved one and make her mine for the long run,” Mong said. “So I decided out on Buldir that it’s finally time to propose to my girlfriend.”

Once he made it back to the Lower 48, Mong rode his bicycle across the West to Mesa Verde National Park in Colorado, where his girlfriend works as an interpreter. When he got there, the answer was yes.

The YouTube video of a bear attacking a woman’s kayak near Wrangell has nearly 4 million views. Mary Maley was that woman, and she was on day five of what she was expecting to be a 20-day trip.

She pulled her kayak ashore 22-miles southeast of Wrangell to eat lunch and hike.

“And as I was eating lunch I heard something outside, so I went outside and the bear was eating my kayak. So, I immediately tried to make loud noises,” Maley said.

When the bear didn’t back off, Maley grabbed her pepper spray and her camera, which is where the video begins.

“Thanks for leaving my kayak alone bear. I’m going to pepper spray you in the face,” she said.

Maley thought she might email the video to the manufacturer of her kayak, Delta. But the video was too big, so, using the wireless internet at the Wrangell library, she uploaded the video to YouTube, and shared the link on Facebook.

She’s not visible in the video, but her stressed voice throughout makes it memorable.

“Bear, you are breaking my kayak. You are breaking my kayak why are you breaking my kayak?!” she hollers in the video. “Why are you doing that? Bear please stop. Please stop bear. It’s the end of September you are supposed to be asleep. Why are you here?!”

Maley says that’s not her regular voice. Her pitch goes up when she’s stressed. She says she was trying to talk loudly, so the bear might leave. She also has some professional experience being loud.

“I mean, I’m not deaf, so I realize it’s pretty funny to listen to,” she said. “I’m kind of famous as a tour guide for being sort of loud, yelling over engines and having the ability to do that on tour. This past summer, I was Little Nell in ‘The Fish Pirate’s Daughter,’ the Ketchikan production, and that’s her whole shtick. That she’s really high pitched and ridiculous and I was obviously perfect for that character. ”

Maley, talking from her family home in West Virginia, has remained lighthearted about the whole experience despite some astonishing online comments.

“It’s crazy to read that somebody wishes a bear would have eaten you,” she said. “For me to read that and be like, ‘What in the world?’ To try to put myself in the place of that person and try to understand what their daily lives must be like that they are capable of saying something like that to an anonymous person on the internet who just had something really bad happen to her.”

She has also received support, including from a friend who set up a campaign and raised over $1,000 for repairs. She says it’s not enough to replace the kayak, which is worth about four times that. Besides losing an expensive piece of sporting equipment, Maley says the biggest disappointment was not seeing the LeConte Glacier or paddling around the Stikine River because her trip was cut short.

“The trip itself was an exploration of the beautiful landscape that drew me there initially but the reaction from the people of Wrangell and the people of Ketchikan is really why I chose to stay there and come back year after year,” she said.

After arriving in Wrangell, Maley was offered a couch to sleep on and workspace to repair her kayak. She was able to patch the gashes, but won’t be relying on it for more than a day trip.

Maley will spend the winter mushing dogs in Wyoming and be back in Ketchikan next summer, where she hopes to give the 200-mile paddle another try.

There’s a slow invasion of a freshwater crustacean happening in Buskin River and Buskin Lake. It has a hard shell, two claws and tastes great in pies.

“Crawdads, crawfish, crayfish, it all depends on where you grew up,” said Blythe Brown of the Kodiak Soil and Water Conservation District.

Brown said they’ve caught a lot of crayfish this year compared to the roughly one per year they’ve found in the past. They went into the project last year hoping to find out whether crayfish were breeding and this year they did a little bit of experimenting with traps.

“The crawdad that was found last fall was quite large so we thought maybe our trap openings aren’t large enough, so we enlarged the traps, talked to other people from other places that had grown up with crawdads and they said, ‘Try an oily, stinky fish or something, some bait that they might like better. So we tried herring this year and it worked.”

Alex Hughes is a Fish and Game technician who volunteers with KSWCD. He said based on their studies at the Buskin river, crayfish are successfully breeding.

“I’ve caught a couple of them just visually, flipping rocks and looking through the river especially up near the weir, near the lake,” he said.

Hughes said crayfish are originally from the Pacific Northwest and as with many invasive species, it’s anyone’s guess how they got to Kodiak.

“I’ve seen crawdads used for fishing bait before … I suspect that someone brought them for that reason, but no one really knows the answer. It could’ve been a pet; it could’ve been used as a potential fishing bait,” Hughes said.

He said he’s concerned that if the crayfish population continues to flourish, it could spread from the Buskin River into other systems.

“We don’t really know the implications of that, what that’ll mean to the juvenile salmon that are growing or the eggs that are buried in the sediment of the river,” Hughes said. “Our worry is that the crayfish could start to sort of uncover those eggs and eat them. So, we’re trying to solve this issue before it expands into something that is more difficult to control.”

If you spot any crayfish, KSWCD asks that you remove them from the body of water, if possible, and report the sighting. If you come across a lot of them, you can always try some of the solutions listed here

The first week of moose hunting in the Petersburg, Wrangell and Kake area has seen a harvest of 35 moose. Seven of those moose were illegal kills.

Rich Lowell, the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s Area Management Biologist, says that those seven did not comply with the existing antler restrictions. And he says it’s cause for concern.

Typically, illegal kills make up about 10 percent of the season harvest but the first week of this season saw twice that. If the trend continues, Lowell says the state might have to close portions of the hunt early.

The antler restrictions are in place to protect younger bulls of a breeding age.

Most of the catches in the first week happened on the Stikine River. Twelve moose were taken there. Nine were killed on Mitkof Island, seven on Kupreanof Island, Five in the Thomas Bay area, one at Virginia Lake near Wrangell and one on Woewodski Island.

If the hunt does continue, it looks like it could be a high harvest year. Thirty-five moose in the first week matches the record year of 2009 when hunters totaled 109 bull moose.

Last year, hunters harvested a neared that record with 106 moose.

The season runs September 15 through October 15. It includes the several units: the Unit 1-B mainland, the Unit 3 islands, and the extreme southern portion of Unit 1-C.

 

It’s that time of year again. Bears have descended on Juneau dumpsters and garbage cans, which mean people have to be extra responsible about how they dispose of trash.

When employees of Tracy’s King Crab Shack went into work Sunday morning, they were greeted by cardboard boxes, trash bags and crab bisque containers scattered all over the alleyway. Three dumpsters had been overturned.

For the past couple of weeks, manager Tina Degarimore has gotten used to this.

“There seems to be one bear that terrorizes South Franklin Street with the garbages,” Degarimore said.

In June, the business tried to secure their two dumpsters properly.

“We did put a fence up. Well, the bear decided he didn’t like the fence so he did break the fence. We’re definitely going to be looking at different solutions and trying to find something more bear-proof,” she said.

In the meantime, Degarimore said the staff is securing the dumpsters with carabiners and doing what it can when a bear does get in.

“Clean it up, put the cans back up and continue on with our day,” Degarimore said.

That bear terrorizing South Franklin Street is getting ready to den. As summer comes to an end, bears try to pack on as much fat as they can.

“They’re certainly driven by their stomachs and they’re going to find food wherever they can and a lot of the time, that brings them into town,” said Stephanie Sell, wildlife biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game.

By not securing our trash properly, Sell said we’re training bears to have bad behaviors.

“Unfortunately every time a bear gets into garbage, it remembers that. It remembers that it’s gotten food there and it’s going to remember the source. Whether it be a garbage can or a dumpster or just bags of trash that are out, they’re going to remember that and from year to year, they’re going to look for that,” Sell said.

The city requires you to keep your garbage can in a garage or shed until 4 a.m. the morning of trash pick-up day. If you do not have a garage or shed, get a bear-resistant can like a Bearsaver, Toter or Kodiak Can. The gray garbage can with a black lid and red lock that many residents have are not bear proof or bear resistant. Another option is freezing food scraps until trash pick-up day.

Sell said Fish and Game has had to euthanize two bears this year – one in July and one earlier this month. On average, Sell says the agency puts down three to four each year and relocates the same amount.

Juneau’s Community Service Officer Bob Dilley said the city’s bear attraction nuisance law had a big rewrite in 2004.

“The year before the ordinance was rewritten, there was 23 bears that were shot and killed that year and that really got people fired up. Twenty-three in a summer is a lot of bears,” Dilley said.

Around this time of year, Dilley said Juneau police are giving out one to two bear citations a day. Those carry a fine from $50 to $300.

“It seems like this many years into the ordinance and trying to get people to do the right thing, I would have hoped we would’ve been further along with having less interactions with bears and people and their garbage,” Dilley said.

Dilley doesn’t think Juneau will ever completely solve its problem with garbage bears, but he says we can do better.

Starfish from Mexico to Alaska’s Kenai Peninsula have been hammered by a wasting disease that causes their arms to melt into goo and fall off.

Researchers believe a virus called a densovirus is behind the widespread outbreak.

Cornell University microbiologist Ian Hewson has come to one of the last starfish strongholds, the Aleutian Islands, to suss out what makes this disease so virulent.

“It is definitely the most geographically extensive marine disease ever seen. It’s huge,” he said standing on a beach on Unalaska Island. “It’s wiped out millions and millions of sea stars. In some cases, up to 95 percent of the sea stars are gone — completely changed the coastal ecosystem structure. But fortunately, it hasn’t been out here yet.”

With help from local divers, Hewson has collected healthy sea stars from several bays around Unalaska.

Divers brought up sun stars, mottled stars, and other species from as deep as 130 feet underwater.

Hewson is shipping the healthy invertebrates back to his lab in Ithaca, New York.

He said the long trip to the Aleutians and the hassle of shipping water bags with live sea stars across the continent is worth it to find out what’s driving the disease.

”This is the only population that’s left, pretty much, that’s unexposed,” Hewson said.

Researchers have peered into the disease’s gruesome outcome as the sea stars slowly liquefy.

“They’re basically undergoing what’s known as programmed cell death,” Hewson said. “They’re killing themselves.”

Without healthy sea stars to study, scientists have little hope of understanding how the disease takes hold.

Many sea stars are considered “keystone species”: remove them, and whole ecosystems can change dramatically. Hewson said in many areas hit by the wasting disease, sea urchins and mussel populations have exploded in the absence of a key predator.

Spotted in Adak

Brenda Konar with the University of Alaska Fairbanks reports that the sea star wasting disease has been spotted in a couple of sunflower stars found off Adak in the western Aleutians this summer.

Konar said UAF graduate student Ben Weitzman saw hundreds of sea stars, of many different species, as he did sea urchin surveys on various islands in the Aleutian chain. None of the sea stars showed signs of disease, except for the two sunflower stars, which are normally only found hundreds of miles to the east.

“Historically, they weren’t found on Adak,” Konar said of the pizza-sized sunflower stars that have up to two dozen arms. Their once-dense populations have wasted away in the Lower 48 and British Columbia.

Before the outbreak, populations of the predatory sunflower stars were “just ridiculous” in the inland seas of Washington and British Columbia, according to Hewson.

“There were undersea mountains of sea stars,” he said. “Divers were afraid of avalanches of sea stars down slopes.” Crab fishing became a waste of time: Crab pots would come up overrun with sunflower stars.

But sunflower stars aren’t native or common out in the western Aleutian Islands. Konar thinks the few seen there may have arrived in the ballast water of a big ship. None of the hundreds of native sea stars spotted off Adak showed signs of the wasting disease.

According to Ian Hewson, citizen scientists have played a big role in keeping tabs on the underwater outbreak.

“So if you see diseased sea stars, by all means, take a photo of it,” he said.

Hewson said to send photos to a site like seastarwasting.org or to a local scientist, like Melissa Good of UAF in Unalaska, who works on ocean conservation.

“That will help us a lot in figuring out when it actually hits this island,” Hewson said. “Hopefully, it won’t hit for a while, but from what we know about this disease, it will probably sweep through here at some stage in the future.”

Scientists still don’t know whether other widespread changes, like climate change or ocean acidification, have fueled the rapid spread of this disease in the past two years. Konar said the virus does better in warmer water; Hewson said the disease appears to have spread to new areas in the winter, not the summer.

“We know so little about the disease and how it spreads that it’s hard to predict,” Konar said.