Wildlife

The Fish Creek Fire in Interior Alaska isn’t much to look at. It’s about 7,500 acres in size, sitting about an hour south of Fairbanks near the twisty Tanana River. The main fire front — the made-for-TV part, with torching trees and pulses of orange heat — flamed out more than a week ago, leaving behind a quiet charred landscape.

But the fire is far from over. It’s one of nearly 300 fires still burning in Alaska, after a spectacular lightning storm late last month sparked hundreds of blazes and a wave of fire larger than any in the state’s history — nearly 5 million acres in total.

And though the Fish Creek Fire looks benign, with little wisps of white smoke as its only sign of life, it’s not.

A little fire like this could have a huge impact on the surrounding environment and ecosystem — not just here in Alaska, but across the planet.

Hidden Masses Of Organic Matter

“It’s really a different kind of fire,” says Teresa Hollingsworth, a research ecologist and professor at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

The Fish Creek Fire is mostly done burning the trees and brush above ground and has moved on to the organic matter underground — organic matter that goes, Hollingsworth says, “meters and meters deep.”

That’s why fires in the higher latitudes, in places like Alaska, are different than other wildfires. Here, Hollingsworth explains, the vegetation above ground is just the tip of the iceberg.

There are layers and layers of organic material called duff — things like pine needles, grasses and trees — that have fallen and accumulated on the forest floor over time. They haven’t fully decomposed, like they would in a place like Florida, because of the frigid temperatures.

In places, the duff can pile up to be feet deep.

Below that duff, there’s permafrost — which, as the name implies, is permanently frozen ground. It can include dirt, rocks and water, as well as trees, twigs and mammoth bones.

The result, Hollingsworth says: There can be way, way more organic material, or biomass, below ground than there is above.

And all of that biomass is made up of carbon — the same carbon that’s a leading cause of climate change.

A Frozen Carbon Threat

That’s why ecologists and climatologists are watching this year’s fire season with so much interest.

Roughly 4.7 million acres of boreal forest and land have burned in Alaska this summer. Millions more have burned in Canada, where scientists estimate half of the land is underlaid with permafrost.

In total, more than 11 million acres have burned between the two places — an area roughly the size of Connecticut.

Fires in the subarctic are nothing new. The vast majority of the land burned by wildfire in North America every year is in Alaska and Canada, far from cities and towns.

Still, Alaska has never seen that much fire so early in its fire season. And many of those fires are burning with greater intensity.

That’s worrying to research ecologists like Ted Schurr, a professor at the University of Northern Arizona who spends his summers in Alaska studying permafrost.

“It’s understood that there’s about twice as much frozen carbon [in permafrost] as there is in the atmosphere, to the tune of about 1,700 billion tons of carbon stored frozen,” he says.

Put in context, he says, there’s maybe another 2,000 billion tons of carbon stored in soil and vegetation in the rest of the world.

“The Arctic and the boreal regions are a hotspot of carbon that’s stored in the biosphere that has some vulnerability of ending up in the atmosphere as the climate changes,” Schurr says.

One of the more rapid ways a climate or ecosystem can change, he says, is through fire.

Solid Permafrost Gone Shaky

A good example of that can be found just a half-hour drive from the Fish Creek Fire, in a wide, densely vegetated area called the Tanana Flats, south of Fairbanks.

Merritt Turetsky, a research ecologist from the University of Guelph in Canada, runs a field site there.

She kneels on the spongy, springy ground and starts sawing through the surface with a long knife, cutting away at that duff layer that’s burning in many of the fires around the state.

“Feel how dry that is,” she says. “I mean, we had rain last night and it’s still this dry. This stuff burns like crazy.”

She cuts more of the earth away, reaching into the hole up to her elbow. The dirt at the bottom is cold and wet, which means it’s the layer just above intact permafrost, Turetsky says.

She grabs at a piece of the rooty soil she just cut away.

“This is 40 centimeters of a blanket that protects [permafrost] from what’s happening at the surface,” she says. “But when a fire comes through it might remove 15 or 25 centimeters of this organic mat.”

The result is a thinner blanket — providing less protection for the permafrost below.

That’s particularly problematic given the changing climate in the planet’s higher latitudes. Alaska has already warmed by more than 3 degrees Fahrenheit in the past 50 years, rendering much of the permafrost here unstable.

Fire makes it even worse, Turetsky says.

For proof, she walks just 10 yards away, through thick trees to a bald patch a few acres in size. As she walks from the forested area to the open area, her steps slow and her feet sink. Each step comes with an accompanying splash.

“We call that a quaking bog,” she says. “It’s like you’re on a waterbed.”

It’s a thin layer of vegetation on top of muddy, soupy water — water that was frozen in permafrost not long ago.

Can The Ecosystem Compensate?

Turetsky is here with a group of graduate students and researchers from the University of Alaska Fairbanks to determine why the permafrost thawed.

They take core samples of trees around the bald spot’s perimeter and samples of the water below that thin layer of vegetation.

Nearly all of the samples show signs of a fire that burned through the area maybe 40 years ago: a fire that burned off that top layer of duff, leaving the permafrost vulnerable to the hotter temperatures of the last couple of decades.

Now, Turetsky says, all of the carbon that was trapped in that permafrost, frozen in time, is available to be put back in the atmosphere.

What that means is debatable. Some scientists think that the ecosystem will be able to compensate for all of that new carbon with new plant life. They point to an increase in the number of hardwood trees in Alaska, which grow faster and absorb more carbon, as a potential sign of that.

Other scientists, like Turetsky, are less optimistic. She does believe that the environment can compensate for the carbon that’s released when a fire burns up trees and brush, and even the carbon that’s been piling up for hundreds of years in duff.

The carbon that can get released from thawing permafrost, though?

“The atmosphere thought it lost that carbon and all of a sudden it’s being returned to the atmosphere after a prolonged period of time,” Turetsky says.

“That’s the kind of carbon pulse to the atmosphere that actually can invoke additional climate change, above and beyond human emissions.”

And more climate change, she says, could mean hotter temperatures, which could mean more fires, which could mean more permafrost lost.

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Citing a state study that shows a sharp decline in the wolf population on Prince of Wales Island and surrounding islands, six conservation groups have asked state and federal officials to take steps to help preserve the remaining animals.

Specifically, the six organizations want the state to cancel the upcoming wolf trapping and hunting season on POW, the federal Office of Subsistence Management to cancel the subsistence wolf harvest, and the Forest Service to halt logging activity on the Big Thorne Timber Sale.

Gabriel Scott is the legal director with the Alaska office of Cascadia Wildlands. He said the population numbers for POW wolves has not been clearly known for a long time.

“There’s new data, just come out, with a reasonable population estimate. And it’s much, much lower than it ought to be,” he said. “So that’s the bottom line: The population appears to be crashing on the island, and we can’t afford to let that happen.”

The Alaska Department of Fish and Game last month released a report showing that the number of wolves in Game Management Unit 2 had dropped in a single year from 221 to 89. The numbers are estimates, based on a relatively small study area on Prince of Wales Island.

To get that estimate, the number of wolves in the study area is counted, and that number is expanded to the rest of the game management unit. The estimate of 89 wolves is the midpoint of a range. The population could be as low as 50, or as high as 159, according to Fish and Game.

Gabriel Scott said the only way to get those numbers up is to halt all hunting for the time being, and make sure adequate habitat is in place for the wolves and their main source of food, which is Sitka black-tailed deer.

“One of the big pieces of this puzzle that often gets overlooked is the habitat component,” he said. “That’s where the rubber meets the road. The deer population is not high enough to support human hunters and wolves. And when that happens, the wolves are the ones who go.”

Habitat, in this case, means old-growth forest, which is why the groups want to stop logging on the Big Thorne Timber Sale.

Tongass National Forest Spokesman Kent Cummins confirms that the Forest Service has received the letter from the six conservation groups. He said officials will revisit the issue to see whether there is a need for a Supplemental Environmental Impact Statement, which is one of the requests in the letter.

“I think, with a sense of urgency, they’ll look at this information,” Cummins said. “If necessary, they’ll proceed with another supplement.”

He said the Forest Service takes its role as a steward of the land seriously. But, he said, it can be a delicate balancing act.

The Big Thorne Timber Sale is a critical project from an economic point of view, and it’s meant to help the timber industry stay afloat as it switches from old-growth to second-growth harvest.

“It gives a multi-year supply of timber there on Prince of Wales and stability for jobs and giving local businesses the opportunity to retool and seek new markets for the young growth trees,” Cummins said. “That’s the dilemma.”

He said logging is taking place now on the Big Thorne Timber Sale. Halting that activity immediately while the Forest Service looks into the wolf population report is unlikely without a court-ordered injunction.

And then there’s hunting and trapping.

Ryan Scott is Southeast Region Supervisor for Fish and Game. He said he hasn’t read the letter sent to the state asking for suspension of the coming wolf harvest on POW. However, he said that from the agency’s perspective, there isn’t a conservation concern about that wolf population.

“Even with the lower estimate, the number of animals there, and what we know about the animals there, suggests that they’re viable and they’re going to persist well into the future,” he said.

Ryan Scott said the state’s hunting and trapping season starts Dec. 1, which gives officials time to look into wolf numbers and options for the season. They’ve already reduced the maximum allowed harvest from 30 percent to 20 percent of the estimated population.

“Recognizing that we had such a decline in the estimates, I don’t think it’s very likely that we would open it to the maximum allowable harvest of 18 wolves,” he said. “Where that harvest quota would land, that’s undetermined at this point.”

Gabriel Scott of Cascadia said he doesn’t share the state’s confidence that POW wolves will be OK. He points to the fact that his organization is asking for a halt to the subsistence harvest as evidence of how serious they believe the situation has become.

“Asking to stop a subsistence hunt is a really extraordinary step for us to take,” he said. “It’s the absolute last thing that we would want to do.”

The subsistence harvest is set to start on Sept. 1. A call to the Federal Office of Subsistence Management in Anchorage wasn’t returned.

The six organizations that submitted the letters are Cascadia Wildlands, Center for Biological Diversity, Greater Southeast Alaska Conservation Community, the Boat Company, Alaska Wildlife Alliance and Greenpeace.

In Angola, a civil war that raged for decades has left lingering, and dangerous, reminders of the violence across the countryside. Long since the worst of the fighting ended in 2002, land mines continue to claim lives — and not just those of humans.

Even as the elephant population there saw a replenishment in numbers following the war, many of the mammoth animals were being killed by leftover land mines, as well.

But Angola’s wildlife observers have gradually noticed something curious going on. A number of elephants in Angola now appear to steer clear of land mines, even trumpeting warnings about them to other elephants.

That caught the attention of the U.S. Army Research Office, which funded some initial research to see just how, exactly, these lumbering giants manage to sniff out, and step around, the dangerous devices. The idea was to verify whether the claims coming out of Angola were to be believed — and, if so, whether there was any chance of turning these elephants’ talents to the purpose of saving lives.

As The Economist has reported: “The US Army’s Research Office has been testing the ability of a group of tame elephants in South Africa to find traces of TNT, an explosive, amid decoy odours of bleach, petrol, soap and tea.”

Sean Hensman, a South African researcher with the group Adventures with Elephants, took part in that study.

“After a long time,” he tells NPR’s Scott Simon, “we found out that the [elephants] are very, very good at identifying the scent of TNT and other things, and are very, very quick learners.”

And they don’t just learn quickly; they also retain that knowledge long afterward.

“We tested one elephant a year after we had done the initial research, and he still passed the whole test with flying colors.”

Hensman chalks it up to the elephant’s hefty schnozz. “They’re reported to have a sense of smell 14 times better than a good dog,” he says, “and a good dog is reputed to be about 2,000 times better than you and I.”

Hensman is careful to note that the researchers have no intention of actually taking elephants into areas littered with land mines. Rather, he says the U.S. Army is testing the animals’ sense of smell in order to design better land mine sensors of their own.

“They spent billions on sensors and understanding a dog’s nose. And, you know, if an elephant is that much more sensitive than a dog, they have learned a lot from it. And they’ve applied that to some of their sensors, which they’re testing at the moment.”

But that’s not where Hensman’s ambitions end.

“They’re using dogs to detect cancer, they’re using dogs to detect diseases,” he says, “and if we could use an elephant do the same, then hopefully we can save a lot of people.”

For that, elephants could use a little breathless praise. And Hensman’s not hesitant about offering them just that.

“They’re highly intelligent, they’re good fun to be around and to be awed by them is putting it lightly,” he says. “They really are very, very special animals.”

Copyright 2015 NPR. To see more, visit http://www.npr.org/.

Saxman resident Lee Wallace testified Wednesday in Washington, D.C., during a hearing in front of the House Subcommittee on Indian, Insular and Alaska Native Affairs.

The subcommittee is chaired by Alaska Rep. Don Young, who has sponsored a bill that would change the Federal Subsistence Management Program’s process for designating a community’s rural status, which allows community members to harvest subsistence food.

Wallace heads up the Saxman IRA, and has been outspoken about reinstating the Organized Village of Saxman’s rural designation.

Saxman lost its designation during a 2007 Federal Subsistence Board review. The board decided that Saxman’s connection to the larger community of Ketchikan meant that Saxman can’t be considered rural.

Saxman has about 400 residents, compared to about 7,000 in the City of Ketchikan.

Wallace recalls coming home after the board’s vote to make Saxman non-rural.

“Upon arrival, the Cape Fox dancers and elders, they came and met the plane from Anchorage,” he said. “They knew I was sad and downhearted. They wanted to lift me up. They greeted me with a song and prayer for encouragement that we should continue on to fight our battle to regain our rural determination status.”

Since then, the Federal Subsistence Board has proposed a rule change that would allow more flexibility when determining rural designations, and has conducted public hearings on that rule. Numerous Southeast Alaska residents – including Wallace — commented during those hearings in support of Saxman’s claim to subsistence rights.

Wallace told the subcommittee that while a rule change would be a step in the right direction, Young’s proposed bill would provide more security.

“Saxman supports this legislation because it creates permanent and procedural protections for rural communities,” he said. “It eliminates the fear and anxiety caused by the unnecessary process in which the FSB essentially evaluates whether we can carry on our traditions and our way of life.”

Young’s bill would require congressional approval before a community’s rural designation could be removed in the future. Alaska Sen. Lisa Murkowski has sponsored a similar bill in the U.S. Senate.

Young said during Wednesday’s hearing that removing Saxman’s rural status didn’t make any sense.

“Saxman was a Native village long before Ketchikan was ever created. And then Ketchikan became a fishing town and a timber town and sort of grew up next to them,” Young said. “Then for some reason, someone had an issue that they weren’t rural anymore, because the city grew to them.”

Rep. Don Young’s bill has not yet passed out of subcommittee. If it does, its next stop would be the House Natural Resources Committee.

Representatives from four agencies arrived in Wales recently, equipped with 40 pizzas and a slideshow on polar bear deterrents. It was one of the final meetings in a yearslong effort to start a community-run polar bear patrol with help from the Alaska Nanuuq Commission, the North Slope Borough, the World Wildlife Fund, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Events kicked off June 14 and continued all week with training sessions and discussions of patrol logistics.

There aren’t many polar bears passing through Wales, but the community has had several close encounters. During one session, people shared stories of opening the front door to find a polar bear just outside and even seeing one chase a teacher into the school.

For Christine Komonaseak, school safety is a key reason for creating the patrol. She’s a cook at the Wales School and said she worries about students during the winter when they walk to class in the dark.

“The kids who have been beating me to work — I want the safety for them, because they walk from up here to down there,” she said. “The bears have been spotted by the parsonage, by the school. The one that they last killed — I spotted that one below the house eating on a walrus. That was the one they killed by the playground.”

The patrol’s mission is to minimize conflicts between people and polar bears for the safety of both. If bears do enter the community, the patrol will scare them away with noise, light or nonlethal ammunition. Protecting the people comes first, but conserving the bear population is important too, given their status as a threatened species and their role as a subsistence resource.

When the volunteer patrol starts, as early as December, Greg Oxereok will be on the squad. He said creating a patrol in Wales just makes sense as a proactive safety measure.

“Safety should be No. 1, especially somewhere like this where it’s rural and it’s hard to get transportation and facilities,” he said. “It’s good to try to stop a problem before it starts. It just makes sense to protect and try to serve our community.”

For now, details are still being discussed — where the patrol will be based, when it’ll sweep the town’s perimeter, and how many patrollers will be on duty at a time. While the agencies are providing equipment like ammunition, radios and a snow machine, the Wales community will manage the patrol itself. The IRA will take the lead, but the City Council and the Wales Native Corporation are also involved, with all three bodies recommending patrollers for the job.

Jack Omelak, executive director of the Alaska Nanuuq Commission, emphasizes the patrol is a Wales initiative. The community makes the decisions and the agencies are there to help with training and supplies.

“We get our authority to work on your behalf from you,” Omelak told the community. “We don’t just take it upon ourselves to do it. So we need to be informed and people (from Wales) need to be involved.”

That includes letting traditional knowledge shape the patrol’s strategy. Craig Perham, a biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, encouraged patrollers to work with elders and learn how the community has dealt with polar bears for generations.

“Certainly, there are biologists like myself in Anchorage, and we can help when we can. But you’ve got that experience right here — the older guys who have been out hunting,” he said.

Oxereok, who’s 30, says he looks forward to connecting with elders through the patrol, especially since he doesn’t have much firsthand experience with hunting or warding off polar bears.

“There is a generation gap. And this might help dispel some of that distance between the older generation and my generation,” he said. “The more we can work together, the more we can grow as a whole.”

The four agencies will evaluate the Wales polar bear patrol once it’s up and running to identify what works and what doesn’t. Omelak said they’re treating it as a pilot program for a polar bear management plan that will develop over 10 years and cover the Bering Strait Region.

An invasive species of dove was spotted in King Salmon Tuesday afternoon. It’s the farthest west the Eurasian collared dove has been found in the U.S.

Matthew McFarland was working outside of the inn he co-owns when he heard a whistling from the porch behind him.

“And I heard that noise, that distinctive noise that doves make. So I said ‘Oh, it’s just a dove!’ But then I thought to myself, ‘Well, we don’t have doves here,’” McFarland says.

McFarland thought he must be mistaken. But his cousin, who was working nearby, heard it too.

“He poked his head around the corner out and asked if we have doves here. I said, no, we don’t have doves here at all! And he said ‘Well, that was a dove!’ So we went around the house and it had flown up and landed on one of the power lines.”

McFarland quickly took a few photos. It was a gray dove, with a big black band across the back of its neck and a straight edge on the bottom of its tail.

He was pretty sure he knew what kind of dove this was – he’d seen them when he lived in Arizona – but he called Stuart Fety, a biological technician with Fish and Wildlife in King Salmon.

“It was in fact a Eurasian collared dove, surprisingly enough,” Fety says.

He says this particular species has a long history of moving in where it shouldn’t. It’s native to Europe and Asia, but first became established in the U.S. in 1982 after escaping a pet shop in Florida, Fety says.

“And they were first seen in Alaska in 2009 along the Denali Highway… and they’ve kinda rapidly expanded their range,” he says.

Until now, the furthest west the dove had been seen was in Homer, a few weeks ago.

So how can these doves thrive in habitats ranging from Florida to Alaska? Fety says they’re just really good at finding a niche wherever humans live.

“They’re well adapted to utilizing food put out by people in their feeders and just utilizing resources around urban or developed areas,” he says.

Fety says Fish and Wildlife isn’t too worried about the dove.  Unlike some invasive species, such as Chena Slough elodea or Adak Island rats, he says the Eurasian collared dove doesn’t really threaten native wildlife, and he was planning on leaving it alone.

As many Lower 48 hunters will attest, doves are quite a tasty prey. Whether this dove is a lone wanderer, or a forerunner for a whole new population, birdwatchers in Bristol Bay can keep an eye, an ear, and maybe a shotgun out for this unique visitor.