Wildlife

There was a time when Christine Gabriele wondered if she’d ever see one of her favorite creatures again.

That 42-year-old female humpback whale — known as whale #219 to Gabriele and other biologists at Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve — had been missing from her favorite Icy Strait herring-fishing grounds in Alaska.

No one had seen the whale in two years.

Gabriele feared the worst. A heat wave from 2014 to 2016 that warmed the Gulf of Alaska and North Pacific Ocean had killed sea birds en masse. She and others also documented a nosedive in the Alaska population of humpback whales, likely because of warmer waters that did not favor the krill and small fish that marine mammals and seabirds eat.

But as she motored along doing her whale surveys in Glacier Bay, Gabriele hoped.

Then, one late August day in 2017, Gabriele’s colleague Janet Neilson spotted a familiar whale tail in Icy Strait, just southeast of Glacier Bay. It was 219.

“I was ecstatic,” Gabriele said recently from her office in Gustavus, Alaska, just before she stepped into her boat for another whale survey in late August 2023. “She is special to me. She’s one of the first I learned to recognize when I started to work as a whale biologist in the early 1990s.”

That whale, the mother of at least 13 calves biologists had seen in Alaska waters over the years, had traits that might serve her well in tough times.

“She’s very unflappable, solid and solitary. She’s a calm whale,” Gabriele said.

Though 219 has greatly enhanced the whale population during a lifespan that is similar to a human’s, she by chance did not have a calf alongside her in 2014. That was lucky.

“Females that had a calf at the start of the heat wave had it tough,” Gabriele said. “Gestation and lactation take a lot of energy, so they were starting out in a depleted state.”

Even though 219 made it through the warm period — when waters of the northeastern Pacific Ocean were 4 to 10 degrees Fahrenheit above normal from California to the Gulf of Alaska — she looked stressed.

“In 2018 and ’19, she looked skinny and her skin looked bad,” Gabriele said. “We could see her shoulder blades; that’s how thin she was. I would bet money she stopped reproducing during the marine heat wave, went somewhere else and came back looking terrible.”

The Alaska population of humpback whales migrate between here in the summer and Hawaii or Mexico in the winter. Gabriele thinks that 219 must have found adequate food somewhere other than Alaska in the summers she was missing from Icy Strait.

“I don’t know where she went, but she had to do something different,” Gabriele said.

Baleen whales like the humpback have an incredible ability to fast: When migrating in December, January and parts of February, humpbacks can survive on their fat reserves. But they rely on finding plentiful food when they return to Alaska waters in spring.

Gabriele and her colleagues estimated that Glacier Bay humpbacks declined by more than half during the recent marine heat wave. More recently, in 2019 to 2023 the whale population in the area has stabilized at about 70% of its previous abundance.

“It really hit home for me watching this very stable whale population fall apart,” she said. “I realized just how close whales and I are in the food chain. My dinner plate is not very far from the whales’.

Gabriele points out that biologists have executed the humpback population study every year since 1985 using the same method: photographing the whales’ tails — each as distinctive as a fingerprint — as the whales dive. That has helped tell a long-term saga of the whales.

“Lately, it’s a sad story to tell, but I’m glad we’re able to tell it,” she said.

On the bright side, Gabriele reported that she and Neilson have documented 11 calves in summer 2023, “a fairly good number.” When those calves return in the future, eventually the females among them bring their own calves, which builds the population.

And — yes! — they have also spotted and photographed 219 this summer. Seeing that familiar gray-black body arcing through blue Alaska waters is a comfort to those who know her.

“When the whales are doing well, we are too,” Gabriele said.

Thirty miles off the coast of the village of Togiak in Southwest Alaska sits Round Island, known in Yugtun as Qayassiq. Surrounded by the Bering Sea, the island’s steep, grassy slopes are covered in shrubs, lichen, and wildflowers, ending in rocky beaches. Seabirds like kittiwakes, murres and cormorants nest here in the spring and summer. During that time, the island becomes home to thousands of massive white-tusked Pacific walruses, which swim to its beaches to rest after the breeding season.

Frank Woods, who is Yup’ik, first hunted walrus at Qayassiq in 1997, though his family has harvested walrus there for generations. “It was an El Niño year, it was really warm in October. Beautiful weather,” recalled Woods, who lives in Dillingham and now works at the Bristol Bay Native Association.

Qayassiq had “the most concentrated herds of walrus in the Bay, and that’s where they traditionally hunted,” Woods said. During that season, 15 walruses were harvested, and the hunts didn’t seriously disrupt the haulout.

Native people in Bristol Bay have harvested walrus at Qayassiq for thousands of years for food, clothing, tools and artwork. But they weren’t always able to hunt there. For decades, starting in the 1960s, the state banned hunting at the island as part of its efforts to preserve walrus habitat. It did so without consulting the tribes, even though state policy cut off their access to traditional hunting grounds. As a result, tribal leaders had to fight for years to regain access to the hunt and in doing so, created a model for communities to act as equal management partners that still exists today.

Woods’ 1997 hunt came soon after the ban was lifted. It was one of the first in more than 30 years. He wanted to go because of his family.

“My family still loves walrus,” he said. “And it was like a spiritual experience to actually have that – being able to take an animal, harvest it efficiently, and then dish it out to the community when you get back.”

A sanctuary for walrus

Over the past two centuries, Alaska Native walrus hunting traditions like those in Woods’ family have faced acute threats. In the 1800s, commercial hunting – especially by non-Native whalers – decimated the species, and as a result the federal government banned commercial hunting in 1941. After Alaska became a state in 1959, it also took extreme measures to conserve walrus habitat – without differentiating between who was responsible for the plummeting populations.

In 1960, the Alaska legislature created the Walrus Islands State Game Sanctuary in Bristol Bay and took over management of seven islands in the area. The state banned all hunting at Qayassiq, one of the main walrus haulouts in North America.

During this process, however, the state didn’t hold hearings in Togiak or any other Bristol Bay village before making the decision. This was consistent with the state’s approach to conservation at the time, according to State Lands and Refuges Manager Adam Dubour, who stepped into the role in 2022.

“I think opinions and attitudes and practices in the 1960s were a lot different than they are now,” he said. “I wouldn’t be surprised if there wasn’t any formal consultation with those groups.”

Peter Lockuk Sr, who serves on the Togiak Traditional Council, recalls how the sanctuary was created with no communication between the state and the tribe.

“The community of Togiak never knew Qayassiq Island became a sanctuary. People never knew of it, and some folks got arrested,” he said. “They got in trouble for it, to go down and get walrus.”

The closure lasted for over 30 years.

Read more: The Round Island Walrus Hunt: Reviving a Cultural Tradition

A community effort

Walrus hunting revolves around the community — providing food, but also teaching new hunters how to harvest safely and efficiently. Hunts are grounded in cakarpeknaki, or “with respect and without waste.”

Lockuk said if crews haven’t hunted for a time, the excitement to go out can be palpable.

“You could notice when people are getting restless: ‘When, when, when is that walrus hunt going to be happening?’” Lockuk said.

People used to travel in skin-covered kayaks to hunt walrus at Qayassiq, which means “a place to kayak” in Yugtun.

Now, 18-foot skiffs are common, and depending on where they are, some hunters even use 32-foot power boats to get the walrus back to town. Anywhere from five to 20 people can make up a hunting crew, and they need to decide ahead of time who will shoot, who will drive the boat, and how exactly to wrangle the carcass of a two-ton walrus.

“You got to have everything planned, because to us, it’s a big thing. And it’s only seasonally,” said Mickey Sharp, a Twin Hills hunt captain and a commissioner on the Qayassiq Walrus Commission. (Sharp hunts at another island in the sanctuary and hasn’t been hunting at Qayassiq yet, though he hopes to go one day.)

It takes about two hours to get to Qayassiq from Togiak, riding out into the Bering Sea across open water, which means calm conditions are best.

Daryll Thompson, who has participated in Togiak’s community hunts on and off for years, said it’s better to show newer hunters how to hunt on beaches. It’s easier, and they can choose which animals to kill and butcher quickly.

“It’s a little bit more adventurous when they’re all in the water,” he said. “You got to take your boat and get up and get the good shot, and then you got to harpoon them. With a harpoon, you keep them from sinking, and you can retrieve the animal.”

Hauling a walrus onto a boat can be like “dead weight lifting,” Sharp said. It’s also important for the crew to start gutting the walrus immediately. Otherwise the meat can spoil. Working nonstop, several crew members can butcher a walrus in a few hours.

“It’s just really a lot of work,” Sharp said. “Holy, yeah. It makes butchering a moose like a piece of cake.”

After a successful hunt, the crew will bring the meat back to the village, where it can feed people all year. “We help each other and cut it up into smaller pieces. So we could distribute first of all to the elders, and to the folks that can no longer hunt,” said Lockuk.

Fighting for the hunt

In the decades following the 1960 hunting closure at Qayassiq, the Togiak Traditional Council and other tribes in the region went through the state’s regulatory system and federal courts to regain access to walrus hunting.

The state limited walrus hunting in western Bristol Bay until 1972, when the federal Marine Mammal Protection Act passed. That act acknowledged Alaska Natives’ right to hunt walrus and other marine mammals as long as the populations were healthy.

But the state regained management authority of Pacific walruses several years later, and again limited hunting outside the sanctuary in western Bristol Bay. The people of Togiak sued, challenging the state’s authority to do so. They won in 1979, when the court ruled that the federal law means Alaska Native people must be allowed to hunt. Because the state held that its constitution couldn’t include such exemptions, walrus management in Alaska returned to the federal government.

Still, because Qayassiq was in the state game sanctuary, the state was able to keep it closed to hunting.

In 1991, Togiak’s elders petitioned the state Board of Game for a limited hunt on Qayassiq. They had to petition three times to get the hunt authorized. Larry Van Daele, who worked as the regional wildlife biologist in Bristol Bay at the time, said some of his superiors told him not to work with people there. But he thought there was room to compromise.

Recalling the state’s hardline approach, Van Daele said his supervisors would say “they’re going to tell you that they have to be able to hunt on Round Island, because that’s their traditional area. Say no, you can’t have that. Hunt anywhere else you want, but don’t come to Round Island, because that’s illegal to go there.’”

After one rejection of a proposal to establish a subsistence hunt on the island from the state Board of Game, two Togiak residents – Marie and Adam Arnariak – went out to the island and shot a walrus in civil disobedience. That became known as the Arnariak Case, which challenged the state’s authority to regulate walrus hunting at the sanctuary. The case — and the potential of an unauthorized hunt at the island — further pressured government agencies to negotiate with hunters.

Finally, in 1995, tribal leaders from Togiak and other villages successfully advocated for the state to reopen a subsistence hunt. Now, Alaska Native commissioners on the Qayassiq Walrus Commission manage a fall hunt every year on equal footing with state and federal agencies.

“Co-management meant you had equal say in what was going on,” Van Daele said. “That’s what walrus on Round Island ended up being, was a true co-management program.”

A work in progress

At last May’s Qayassiq Walrus Commission meeting at the Bristol Bay Native Association in Dillingham, commissioners gathered around a conference room table near a large screen that displayed the names of the co-management partners. At the far end of the room was a Ziplock bag of herring eggs on kelp that someone had brought from Togiak. A hunter had supplied fresh beluga muktuk, and there was also soy sauce, crackers and salmon dip.

The commission was working to change the hunt dates so that hunters could go out to Qayassiq earlier in September – an effort to avoid some of the stormy fall weather. Members were also re-upping a resolution to restrict the trawl fishery near Togiak to address long-standing concerns about the fleet’s impact on clambeds that walrus feed on.

Understanding how to be part of decision-making within co-management is vital, said the Dillingham hunter Frank Woods, who sat in on the May meeting.

“This type of activity is just as important as the subsistence activities outside the room,” he said in an interview after the meeting.

The Eskimo Walrus Commission is another Alaska Native organization pursuing that work. It was part of the task force that examined the potential of renewing a hunt at Qayassiq in the 1990s and eventually signed the co-management agreement when resurrecting the hunt.

As communities adapt to the changing climate, the need for Alaska Native organizations to have sufficient support and funding is greater than ever. Sea ice is melting, meaning that female walruses must travel further in order to calve on ice floes. Along with a shrinking habitat, less sea ice means more shipping traffic.

“The issues that we’re facing are becoming bigger and more broad, because we’re also experiencing climate change effects on our communities and the environment,” said Vera Metcalf, the executive director of the Eskimo Walrus Commission. She had just returned to Nome after a June trip to Washington, D.C. to talk with the congressional delegation about funding for co-management agencies.

Read more: 2019 Marine Mammal Commission co-management report

The ability to meaningfully participate in co-management – traveling to meetings, giving public comments, and conducting research – is closely tied to capacity as well. For instance, Metcalf has sometimes been the commission’s only full-time staff member. She said the responsibilities of co-management must be shared equally by partners in order to best serve Alaska Native communities and the species they rely on.

“We’re facing harmful algal blooms, shipping disturbances and all these things that are affecting us, and we want to ensure that the walrus population and other marine mammal resources are healthy,” she said. “If the environment is healthy, so will our communities remain healthy.”

Looking ahead

At 27 years old, David Williams of Ekwok is the youngest member of the Qayassiq Walrus Commission. At the May meeting, he and other members talked about organizing a joint hunt between Bristol Bay communities and involving more young hunters.

“If we could get 20 hunters within the region as one joint hunt, and get 20 walrus for all of our communities, I think that would definitely help everybody here, especially the elderly,” Williams said. “Personally, I would love to get my very first walrus and provide my community with my very first walrus.”

Another key part of sustaining co-management is teaching and involving young people. Last October the Eskimo Walrus Commission held the Young Hunters Walrus Summit, the first of its kind.

Metcalf, the executive director, said the idea for the hunters summit came after she heard about a young fishermen’s summit at the Alaska SeaGrant Advisory meeting.

Along with a focus on laws around co-management, Metcalf said, she also wanted the discussions at the summit to help prepare the young hunters to respond to environmental changes and meaningfully engage in management.

The fundamental purpose of the walrus commission, Metcalf said, is to protect their right to harvest walrus for food and ivory for artwork. She said there are extensive traditional practices around harvesting and sharing the harvest, and doing those things helps to strengthen communities’ traditional values.

“One of our goals is local self-regulation of walrus harvest management,” Metcalf said last year. “Helping to ensure our Indigenous food sovereignty and security is there for us for many years, well into the future.”

This story was made possible through a field reporting grant from the Institute for Journalism and Natural Resources.

Over the course of three weeks, scientists documented more than 90 sites where dinosaurs left their footprints along the middle section of the Yukon River. It’s the first time researchers have dug so deep into the region’s ancient history.

Paleontologists Tony Fiorillo and Yoshitsugu Kobayashi spent many hours considering the details of footprints left behind by at least half a dozen ancient species.

The most common footprints this team found here along the Yukon River this summer were plant-eating dinosaurs that made three-toed prints. Fiorillo and Kobayashi also found footprints left behind by a four-toed, armored ankylosaur.

For his part in the research, Kobayashi, who is a professor at Japan’s Hokkaido University, brought a lot of tools. He uses a technique called photogrammetry to create a 3D image of the fossils. This kind of imagery can help parse out finer details human eyes could miss. He also used a drone to fly over sections of the riverbanks that hold clues about the ancient landscape.

This kind of research is kind of like reading a book and filling in the details. The various dinosaur footprints indicate who the characters in the story are, but at least one of those characters also raised some questions. Nearly 100 million years ago, a species Fiorillo couldn’t immediately identify left a large print with three long, slender toes behind.

Once he returns to his office at the New Mexico Museum of Natural History and Science, Fiorillo will dig through literature and other museum archives to figure out what kind of ancient species left its mark here.

Halfway through the trip, the team stumbled upon a stretch of riverbank about the length of a football field. It was littered with large sandstone blocks that were covered in footprints left by at least two shorebird-like species. Fiorillo was floored by the find: at least 16 blocks covered in the same footprints.

“This must have been a place that they found something to do, like lots of food,” Fiorillo said.

The next day brought another interesting find: a series of small, knobby bumps on a dark gray siltstone that gave Fiorillo and Kobayashi pause. It was a dinosaur skin imprint. They said that the imprint indicates that this environment is also ripe for the preservation of bones.

In all, the team recorded more than 90 track sites left behind by at least half a dozen different ancient species — so many discoveries that both Fiorillo and Kobayashi nearly ran out of pages in their hard-backed yellow field notebooks.

“I was starting to wonder, what am I going to do if I run out of pages? But I never had a field notebook this full,” Fiorillo said.

Kobayashi laughed. He said that he was also running out of space. “So my figures, drawings, and letters are getting smaller and smaller.”

This summer’s work informs a larger body of research, nearly a quarter century’s worth, on how large reptiles survived this far north. Kobayashi said that the story isn’t yet fully told.

“So once we get back and we get the data together, then we will have another question to ask. More than one, probably,” Kobayashi said. “This stretch of river, just one chapter of the book. We know there are more outcrops down the river. So we try to understand this chapter, and if there’s any holes left unsaid, we’re going to come back.”

Alaska does not count cows as a native species, but on far-flung Chirikof Island, in the Kodiak Archipelago, feral cattle dominate the harsh landscape.

It’s a hard life out there for an unmanaged herd of roughly 2,000 cows, though, and some have wondered whether the island, trampled by hooves and sitting within the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, should instead be returned to seabirds that could desperately use more habitat.

One of those people is Hakai Magazine writer and editor Jude Isabella, who wrote about what she called “The Republic of Cows” in a recent story. With an open mind, Isabella traveled the Chirikof last summer to see the cows for herself.

Listen:

The following transcript has been lightly edited for clarity.

Jude Isabella: I’m terrified of large herbivores. Cows and bulls and horses, and even llamas. I find them all a little bit terrifying and unpredictable. When I do things outside, I’m in British Columbia, and I’m worried about grizzly bears and black bears and cougars and that kind of thing. On Chirikof, when we first see these cattle, we see this one bull that keeps trotting closer and closer to us, and he’s quite large. You turn around, and there’s a herd running towards, I’m thinking, they’re running towards us. And you know, they’re pretty loud. At some point, and it really wasn’t that close, although my heart’s pounding, they turn 90 degrees and just go off somewhere else, and the bull joins them. And, of course, like, “Well, that wasn’t so bad, was it?” I guess not. But, you know, it was funny, because other people had mentioned, when they knew I was going there, some people bring a gun, because they can be very aggressive. And we did bring pepper spray. You know, I was carrying it, I was ready to use it. But we didn’t need it. We really didn’t.

Casey Grove: That’s interesting. It probably makes you feel better to have it, though, I imagine. Well, maybe we should back up: How did the cows get to Chirikof Island to begin with?

Jude Isabella: It’s hard to pinpoint an exact date and time that they came. But it’s most likely the Russians brought them. They were trying to establish colonies. So probably 200 years or so ago, they brought them, but then when they left in 1867, when the U.S. bought Alaska from the Russians, the Americans kind of inherited, you know, these introduced species.

Casey GroveBut I guess, you know, in the years that followed the Russians leaving those cows there, there was at least one attempt to kind of manage that herd. and that failed. And for many years they’ve just been, like, feral cattle out there. So why have they been allowed to stay? I mean, is it that people think they’re valuable still? It’s just too much of a problem to do something about them? What is that?

Jude Isabella: You know, at this point, I think it’s less contentious than it might have been starting like 20 years ago. I think people are starting to understand that a feral herd of cattle is not a healthy herd of cattle, with far too many bulls. If you have one bull, you know, he’ll inseminate the 30 cows around him, right? You don’t need that many bulls, and when you do have a lot of bulls, it’s a kind of an unpleasant cattle society, especially for cows, especially for young cows. And they’re domesticated animals, so they’re meant to be managed by humans.

Also, they live and die by how good the winter is, or how bad the winter is, and how much they have to eat. So the island was just covered with cow bones everywhere. You know, tibias and femurs, and scapulars and skulls and horns and teeth. And, you know, there was a lot of bones, I’m not sure I’ve seen that many bones in one place. So, I think I think the Alaskans I talked to kind of understood that. But why they’re still there, I think it goes back to maybe when Alaska Maritime (National Wildlife Refuge) first came about, in like the 1980s, and they had public consultations. But when it came to cattle, yeah, people got a little emotional. And so partly, I think it comes down to the fact that they didn’t want that top-down edict, or the what they saw as a top-down edict, but it wasn’t one. I think, also cattle ranching has a romance around it, and it’s got some kind of legacy. And the people who maybe speak the loudest care about that legacy a bit more.

Casey Grove: And you made this point in the story, too, that, for seabirds, that you you wouldn’t even see those at your bird feeder, it’s like a problem of people not seeing them and not understanding, maybe, their plight. And then here you have an island that is literally being trampled by cows that, if that grass was a little bit higher, it’d be better habitat for the birds, right?

Jude Isabella: Yeah, yeah, exactly. So I didn’t go into this thinking, “Wow, cattle are getting a free pass.” It really, really was an organic kind of result of being there, of researching, and talking to all sorts of people. Actually the first ornithologist I talked to, he thought of birds, seabirds, more broadly, seabirds and shorebirds, more broadly. One island like Chirikof isn’t necessarily going to make or break a population, but it’s death by a thousand cuts. And that’s what’s happening with seabirds and shorebirds around the world is we don’t see this massive range. Like we see it on a map, but we’re, you know, we’re talking thousands of kilometers. You can’t see us chipping away at that in a broad kind of way, right? It’s kind of tough. Some people think like in the last 200 years, seabird populations have declined by 90%. With what habitat they have left, why give it to another animal, a domesticated animal that really has absolutely no need for it?

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has again rejected a request to list Southeast Alaska’s Alexander Archipelago wolves as endangered or threatened.

The wolves, found in Southeast Alaska and British Columbia, range among the region’s large, old trees and are a subspecies of gray wolves.

Putting the wolves on the Endangered Species List, either as endangered or threatened, likely would have resulted in new restrictions on development, logging and construction in the region, and the state of Alaska opposed the idea, which was put forward by three environmental groups.

“Alaska is pleased with the Service’s decision that listing the Alexander Archipelago wolf is not warranted at this time,” said Commissioner Doug Vincent-Lang of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game by email. “The Service found these wolves are not at risk of becoming endangered with extinction, and that Alaska’s management of these wolves is sustainable.”

It’s the third time since 1993 the federal government has declined to put the wolves on the Endangered Species List despite petitions and lawsuits filed by environmental organizations. Prior petitions were rejected in 1997 and 2016, but the Fish and Wildlife Service had indicated that it might decide otherwise this time around. In 2021, it published a notice saying that a listing might be warranted.

It concluded otherwise on Tuesday: “The extensive review process found that Alexander Archipelago wolf is not currently endangered throughout its range, nor likely to become so within the foreseeable future,” the agency said.

The official rejection notice will be published Wednesday in the Federal Register.

Cooper Freeman is a senior advocate for the Center for Biological Diversity, a group behind all three Endangered Species List requests.

“We’re reviewing the impacts of the decision, but the Fish and Wildlife Service continues to fail to protect these unique and imperiled wolves,” he said, adding that his organization will “continue to do everything possible to keep them from sliding into extinction.”

Environmental groups have been particularly concerned with wolves on Prince of Wales Island, which are still subject to legal hunting and trapping.

Those wolves roam among the island’s old-growth forests and hunt Sitka blacktail deer between logging parcels.

Resident hunters and state biologists have concluded that the hunts are sustainable, a belief challenged by environmental groups who say the state is overestimating the wolf population. That belief has driven the request for federal protections.

In its analysis, the Fish and Wildlife Service concluded that the Prince of Wales Island wolves are the most threatened group of wolves in Southeast Alaska, but scientists said that even they demonstrate “stable population trends.”

Even if the Prince of Wales wolves died off — something that occurred in one of three scenarios analyzed by Fish and Wildlife — those wolves represent less than a fifth of all wolves in the subspecies in Southeast Alaska and coastal British Columbia.

That was a key finding, said environmental groups familiar with the new decision.

“Thus, after assessing the best available information, we conclude that the Alexander Archipelago wolf is not likely to become endangered within the foreseeable future throughout all of its range,” the agency said.

This story originally appeared in the Alaska Beacon and is republished here with permission.

It has been more than a decade since researchers first announced that they’d found dinosaur footprints along the middle section of the Yukon River. And when that team did make their discovery public, they also said that it was unlikely that people who live along the river even knew dinosaur footprints littered the riverbanks near them.
But Nulato resident Rita Painter can prove them wrong.

“It was maybe about 30 to 35 years ago, and that’s when they had a fish wheel right down here,” Painter said.

Painter stands in her family’s long, aluminum boat near the riverbank at Halfway Camp, a fish camp about 12 miles downriver from Nulato. She tells the story of a large fossilized dinosaur footprint that had been found nearby.

“We were coming up from Grayling; they invited us to have some tea,” Painter said. “And while we were visiting with them, they showed us this rock. It was huge, and there was, like, a footprint on the rock.”

Painter said that the rock was maybe a foot or so wide and about 8 inches long.

“It was clearly a foot, but the toes looked different. And it was embedded in a rock,” Painter said.

Her husband, Dean Painter, said that the footprint had three toes.

The Painters told their story to three scientists who spent 16 days on the Yukon River in August. The team was hoping to find out more about the ancient reptiles and birds that once lived in this area.

The Painters’ description pretty accurately describes the footprint made by a bipedal, plant-eating dinosaur known as an ornithopod. And it’s helping the researchers meet their goal to better understand what locals know about the footprints.

Martha Turner grew up fishing along the span of riverbank where the Painters told the story of their dinosaur footprint encounter. It’s also a place where researchers found dozens of similar footprints. “Oh wow. That’s so cool. Like, our camp has all these dinosaur tracks,” said Turner when she heard Painter’s story.

Turner, who is Nulato’s tribal administrator, said that her grandmother, who was born at Halfway Camp, never mentioned any large, three-toed footprints to her before. Now she’s eager to ask about it.

In Kaltag, a village just over 30 miles downriver from Nulato, news that a research team was finding dinosaur tracks there this summer came as no surprise.

“Ever since we were this big, ever since we were 3-foot high we knew,” said Patrick “Paddy Bun” Madros Jr.