From weed pulls to gelding feral horses, Friends have been concerned and involved in invasive species on Alaska Refuges. We continue that involvement with Lisa Dlugolecki sharing her results and thoughts from this summer’s field work surveying several northern wildlife Refuges for invasive species. Refuges in northern Alaska have been traditionally spared from invasive species, but the risk of introduction is increasing. This is especially true for Refuges along or downstream from the road systems.Consistent surveying for invasive species has also been challenging in this region because of the large land mass and unavailability of staff resources. From Kanuti Refuge to Tetlin Refuge, Lisa’s team conducted road surveys looking for invasive plants such as white sweet clover. Some findings included finding white sweet clover growing along the Dalton Highway, but finding none growing on the gravel bars in the surrounding waterways. Friends volunteered for many years eradicating white sweet clover along the Dalton in the hopes of preventing its spread downstream into the refuges. Join us on Zoom to hear the latest on what else she discovered and what her thoughts are on the future of invasive species management on northern refuges.
(pc: USFWS)
Lisa Dlugolecki is the “North Region Early Detection Rapid Response Project Manager Alaska” for the Fish and Wildlife Service. She is based out of Fairbanks. Lisa has worked across the country in wildlife and habitat management. She began working full time for Fish and Wildlife Service in 2015 in invasive species management and habitat restoration. Before moving to Alaska to continue her work in invasive species management, Lisa worked in Idaho on Endangered Species Act consultations.
Dial(for higher quality, dial a number based on your current location): US: +1 253 215 8782 or +1 346 248 7799 or +1 669 900 6833 or +1 301 715 8592 or +1 312 626 6799 or +1 929 205 6099 Webinar ID: 848 4313 9530 Passcode: 018201 International numbers available: https://zoom.us/u/aBX3IPxrw
Membership Meetings & Newsletters Our monthly meet-ups and newsletters provide unique opportunities for us all to listen, learn, and speak up about important and fun happenings on Alaska’s 16 Wildlife Refuges.
We’ll be taking a pause for the summer, so look forward to a July/August Newsletter and set a reminder for 9/21/2021 when we’ll all meet again for our membership meeting!
pc:After a long winter of feeding on tree bark, the North American porcupine (Iluqtaq) is on the search for nutrient rich food sources. In addition to fresh leaves and buds, you may notice chew marks from porcupines on antlers, bones, glued plywood and even paint. What summer meal are you looking forward to? Photo of porcupine eating fresh green leaves by Moosealope FlickrCC/Selawik NWR
Insight into Izembek: From Unangax Culture to the Incredible Wildlife of its Magnificent Lagoons Tuesday, April 20, 2021, 5-6pm (AKDT) Patrick Magrath, Izembek National Wildlife Refuge
If you love gigantic bears, clouds of migrating birds filling the skies, waves of salmon running up the rivers and truly wild conditions — then you will love Izembek Refuge. Patrick Magrath will give you a whirlwind tour of the anthropological history, biodiversity, and significance of Izembek’s magnificent lagoons with their extensive eelgrass meadows. In addition, long time Arctic nesting waterfowl researcher, David Ward, will contribute to this presentation. Most of the world’s population of Pacific Black Brant as well as Steller’s Eiders, Emperor Geese and Cackling Geese visit these lagoons during migration. Located in Southwest Alaska, it is the smallest of the National Wildlife Refuges in Alaska but mighty in terms of sheer numbers of birds and species diversity. It was the first area in the US to be recognized as a Wetland of International Importance by the Ramsar Convention and was designated as a Globally Important Bird Area by the National Audubon Society.
. Brown Bear at Grant Point, Izembek Refuge, pc Kristine Sowl/USFWS
Patrick Magrath grew up outside the nation’s capital. He would get in trouble for skipping classes to hike in solitude and visit the National Zoo. Where traditional studies were lacking, Patrick found his education being supplemented by nature and museums. He gained a footing in public lands through the conservation corps with the Forest Service in central Idaho in 2013. Since then, he has worked at: 6 National Parks, 2 National Monuments, and 1 other National Forest, all before arriving at Izembek for the Fish & Wildlife Service. His esotericism includes art, wilderness, ruins, and international cuisine. Good wine, good cheese, and a great conversation make for an entertaining night for Patrick and his far better half Kayleigh. Patrick lives in Cold Bay, Alaska headquarters for the Izembek Refuge.
David Ward recently retired as a research wildlife biologist with the U.S. Geological Survey- Alaska Science Center. During his 33 year career, he led an international research program on the population ecology of arctic-nesting waterfowl and their use of coastal habitats, principally seagrass ecosystems. He has authored numerous papers on the waterfowl and eelgrass habitats of Izembek Refuge.
Pacific Black Brant in Izembek Lagoon, pc Kristine Sowl/USFWS
Wild, Outstanding, and Remarkable: Meet the Seven Wild and Scenic Rivers Flowing on Alaska’s National Wildlife Refuges Tuesday, March 16, 2021, 5-6pm (AKDT) Jennifer Reed, Arctic Refuge and FWS Wild and Scenic Rivers Program Lead
Jennifer Reed of the Arctic Refuge will bring you on an unforgettable adventure exploring each of these distinct and thriving waterways. While Alaska’s Refuges TEEM with countless amazing rivers, the rivers Congress deemed superlative and distinct within the Alaska Refuges include: Andreafsky (Yukon Delta); Beaver Creek (Yukon Flats); Ivishak, Sheenjek, and Wind (Arctic Refuge); Nowitna (Nowitna Refuge); and Selawik (Selawik Refuge). Some are great salmon highways; others host more northern species like grayling and sheefish. Some are corridors for vast caribou migrations and all furnish important riparian habitat and travel routes for waterfowl, songbirds, furbearers and all grazing species. People have used them as transportation corridors and food sources for millennia, since they are within the homelands of Alaska’s indigenous peoples. Subsistence users have now been joined by adventurers and fisherfolk seeking solitude and the joy of rivers.
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Sheenjek Wild and Scenic River, Arctic Refuge (USFWS/A. Bonogofsky)
Jennifer Reed is the national and regional Fish and Wildlife Service lead for the Wild and Scenic Rivers Program. She has lived between the Alaska Range and the Brooks Range since finishing college and leaving Detroit for her first Alaska job as a Denali Park Ranger. She taught school for 8 years, part of the time on Nelson Island, before developing a federal career focused on connecting people with their public lands. Jennifer confessed that she was not initially a rivers person beginning her love affair with landscape-meets-human as a backpacker. Dog mushing and hiking are more natural to her but she became a boater because of her dedication to relating to the visitors to the Arctic Refuge. Since then she has boated most of the major rivers in the West. Jennifer lives in Fairbanks.
Vets, Kids and Fly Fishing; Finding Healing and Leadership in Wild Places Tuesday, February 23, 2021, 5-6pm (AKDT) Friends monthly meeting with guest speaker, Chad Brown of Soul River Inc.
Navy Veteran Chad Brown was homeless and medicated for PTSD when he discovered fly fishing and the healing power of rivers. Brown said that the first tug on his line from his first fish was like a bolt of nature’s electricity bringing him back to life. He founded Soul River, Inc. to share what rivers and fishing had done for him. He pairs vets and inner city kids on “deployments” to wild rivers including several trips to the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. Amid the grandeur of the Refuge, the vets found purpose as mentors and the youth flourished in this new world of nature, adventure and fishing.
Brown will share with us his story, the success of Soul River and how his mission has grown into protecting the Arctic Refuge and being of service to Native communities. He will tell us about his new non-profit, Love is King, which is dedicated to creating equitable and safe access to the outdoors for people of color.
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Chad Brown grew up in Texas hunting and spending time on his grandparents farm. He joined the Navy to get the GI Bill and served in Desert Storm, Desert Shield and Restore Hope Somalia. After the military, he earned a Master of Science in Communications Design and had a successful career as an art director and photographer before his PTSD caught up with him and brought him down. After fishing and rivers and the VA healed him he started Soul River as well as serving as creative director of Chado Communication Design and Soul River Studios. Besides being an avid fly fisherman he is a bow hunter, outdoor adventurer and conservationist.
Arctic Refuge, A Symbol for a Time of Global ChangePlease join us online or by phone Tuesday, January 19, 2021, 5-6pm (AKT), for our Friends monthly meeting with guest speaker, Roger Kaye of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Roger Kaye has done it all – worked the Slope, spent a winter on a trapline, flew his own float and ski planes, hunted, hiked, explored all over Alaska, wrote a book on the Arctic and earned a PhD at University of Alaska Fairbanks. He has spent much of his 41-year career with the Fish & Wildlife Service experiencing, thinking about and advocating for true wilderness, particularly of the Arctic Refuge. On this 60th Anniversary of the Refuge, Roger Kaye will share some of his vast knowledge and take us back to the seven-year struggle to establish the Arctic Refuge. He will explore the similarities with the struggle to defend the Refuge today.
Olaus and Marti Murie, two giants of Alaska conservation and science,
were instrumental in protection of the Arctic through the designation of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Arctic Refuge establishment was among the first, unprecedented American conservation initiatives of the 1960s that came about in response to concern over the worsening environmental degradations accompanying the prosperous postwar march of progress. The campaign to establish the Refuge became emblematic of the larger contest between competing views of the appropriate relationship between postwar American society and its rapidly changing environment. Which notion of progress should this landscape represent—that underlying the prevailing rush toward attaining an ever-higher material standard of living, or that underpinning the emerging ecology-based perspective that emphasized sustainability and called for restraint? The question of whether or not to preserve this preeminent wilderness symbolized “the real problem,” as campaign leader Olaus Murie characterized it, “of what the human species is to do with this earth.”
Now again we face a new order of environmental threat, a convergence of global energy and resource scarcity, climate change, and widespread biospheric alterations. And now the Arctic Refuge is at the center of one of the nation’s longest and most contentious environmental debates. The question of oil development verses wilderness preservation here transcends the issue of potential resource impacts within the Refuge’s boundaries and has become symbolically intertwined with these larger, global issues. Again, the Arctic Refuge stands as a national symbol of pivotal questions and decisions Americans face: How does our consumption and material standard of living affect the national and global environments, and what quality of them are we to leave to future generations?
Roger Kaye skipped his college graduation ceremony in 1974 to come to Alaska and work at Camp Denali for famed Alaskan conservationists Cecelia Hunter and Ginny Woods. He started grad school but dropped out to earn enough money working on the Slope to buy his first airplane. Once he met that goal, he took off on a series of Alaska adventures until the money ran out. Then, he started his wildlife career first with ADFG and for 41 years the Fish & Wildlife Service. He has been a planner, refuge pilot, Native liaison and in recent years, the agency’s Alaska wilderness coordinator. He has a Ph.D. from the University of Alaska where he has taught courses on wilderness, environmental psychology, and the Anthropocene. He is the author ofLast Great Wilderness: The Campaign to Establish the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge and numerous journal and popular articles related to wilderness. Currently, he is working on a book considering the future of the wildness of Wilderness in the Anthropocene. Roger lives in Fairbanks and works for the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Bird Camp! Birds and Biologists on the Canning River
Please join us online or by phone Tuesday, November 17, 2020, 5-6pm (AK), for our Friends monthly meeting with guest speaker, Timothy Knudson of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge.
Come along on a journey to Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to explore a remote field research camp on the Arctic Coastal Plain. For more than 40 years, biologists have flown into this distant place to study tundra nesting birds. Hear stories from the Canning River Delta ‘Bird Camp’ first hand from one of Arctic Refuge’s wildlife biologists. Learn about the different types of research carried out on the Canning River. See the preliminary results and catch the latest updates on the future of these projects. Get a glimpse of the ecosystem through the interactions of the lemmings, foxes, and the birds that connect this remote place to YOUR backyard.
What does it take to live and carry out research in this isolated place for nearly two months? What changes have occurred to the tundra nesting bird population since research began at the Canning River Delta more than 40 years ago? How does the range expansion of the red fox into the Coastal Plain impact nesting birds and arctic foxes? Tim will address these questions and more.
Timothy Knudson is the Logistics Coordinator for projects on the Coastal Plain of the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge. He ran the Canning River Delta Research Camp and was the tundra nesting bird field lead in 2019. Tim has a B.S. in Natural Resources Wildlife and Water Resources Management from the University of Minnesota Crookston and an MS in Zoology from Southern Illinois University. He did his thesis research on seabird ecology with the Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge. Prior to coming to Alaska, Tim worked on the Audubon and Mississippi Sandhill Crane National Wildlife Refuges.
This meeting and presentation was recorded. Watch video below:
Please join us on Tuesday, October 20, 2020, 5-6pm (AKDT), for our Friends monthly meeting.
Tracking Lynx Across Alaska: What Have We Learned?
Guest Speaker Yukon Flats Refuge Wildlife Biologist Mark Bertram will share with us what they are learning about lynx movement and prey interactions from tracking over 160 lynx captured on four different Alaska Refuges.
Where and how fast will lynx move when the hare population crashes? Are there barriers to movement across the landscape or geographic features that enable movement? What new technologies are being used to monitor lynx movement? Bertram will answer all these questions and share fabulous lynx photos.
Mark Bertram, a wildlife biologist with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service since 1986, has been studying a variety of animals and other resources on the third largest refuge in the nation, the 11 million acreYukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge for the past 27 years. Mark says“The Yukon Flats is an awesome place to work – a 10,000 square mile pristine wetland basin home to thousands of breeding waterfowl and healthy intact predator/prey systems – it’s a biologists dream.” He resides in Fairbanks.
By Matt Bowser, Entomologist at Kenai National Wildlife Refuge
In early June, I received multiple accounts of abundant black caterpillars stripping foliage along the Marsh Lake Trail on Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. Dark caterpillars were subsequently reported from Cooper Landing to Sterling to Kasilof. These larvae consumed leaves of aspen, highbush cranberry, birch, willows, roses, soapberry, and almost any other broad-leaved plant.Steve Swenson of the USDA Forest Service tentatively identified them as caterpillars of the battered sallow moth (Sunira verberata). This identification was confirmed when caterpillars my kids and I raised in canning jars eventually emerged as adults in July.
Battered sallow moth caterpillars finish off a leaf on Marsh Lake Trail on Kenai National Wildlife Refuge. Multiple years of defoliation can lead to tree and shrub mortality. Credit: Cynthia Detrow
We periodically see outbreaks of these caterpillars in southern Alaska. The last event was in 2017, whenthey were seen in numbers along the Richardson Highway and in the Mat-Su, Anchorage, and Kenai Peninsula.The largest recorded outbreak of battered sallow moth caterpillars happened during 2003–2006 on the Alaska Peninsula, when up to 20,000 acres of alders and willows were damaged annually.That outbreak, which may have included speckled green fruitworm moths, killed alders on mountain slopes over large areas. Deciduous trees and shrubs like alders and willows can usually withstand multiple years of their leaves being consumed without suffering lasting damage, so the severity of that event was notable.
Although the battered sallow moth naturally occurs from Alaska to central Canada and south to Colorado, there is no record of outbreaks of this species outside our state.I wonder why battered sallow moths become so abundant in Alaska but nowhere else.As with other forest caterpillars with periodic cycles of abundance, declines are likely caused mainly by diseases and parasites that pass through the populations.At least one other sallow moth species is attacked by short-tailed ichneumon wasps.The female wasp deposits an egg into a mature caterpillar, and the developing wasp larva will eventually kill its host during the moth’s pupa stage.
A Forest Service report links the 2003–2006 outbreak to higher than normal temperatures, but there’s not enough information yet to explain why higher temperatures might lead to increased populations. In related moths, outbreaks are often terminated by “zombie viruses” that rapidly sweep through dense caterpillar populations. The virus alters the caterpillars’ behavior, causing them to stop feeding and climb to the tops of trees. There the caterpillars die and disintegrate, spreading virus particles over the foliage below, where they can be eaten by other caterpillars. In some species the infected cadavers become attractive to other caterpillars, which cannibalize them and then become “zombie caterpillars” themselves.
An adult battered sallow moth that emerged from caterpillars raised by Matt Bowser (Kenai Refuge entomologist) and his kids this summer.The caterpillars were provided by Dan Thompson (ADF&G biologist)
Adult battered sallow moths began emerging in late July, continuing into this fall when they presumably lay eggs. The life history of this species has not been worked out, so we do not know when the eggs hatch and larvae begin feeding. The larvae may hatch in the fall, feed and grow some, then overwinter as small caterpillars. Alternatively, the eggs may hatch in early spring. We do know that the caterpillars are out by the beginning of June.
I will pay attention to what happens on the Kenai Refuge this year and next. In general, we would expect trees and shrubs to recover quite well from this year’s damage unless there are high numbers of battered sallow moth caterpillars consuming leaves for multiple years. It’s also possible that other defoliators, like the recently introduced green alder sawfly, may have additive effects on mortality events, an increasing problem as nonnative insects and a warming climate collide.
Want to “Live Your Wild” in a refuge cabin?Kodiak, Kenai and Tetlin all have public use cabins and Kodiak just added a new one.There are now nine public use cabins scattered across the Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge.The most recent addition to the cabin system came “online” in September, and graces a serene site along the Chief Cove shoreline.
Since all of Kodiak’s cabins are remotely located, the logistics werea bit more involved to get construction crew and materials on-site.Successwas enhanced by all of the pre-planning and preparations thattook place prior to leaving the refuge headquarters.In most years, support could also be provided by refuge pilots, but this year because of COVID-19 concerns, gear and personnel transportation depended entirely on using the refuge vessel Ursa Major II.
We have maintenance workers Danny Hernandez, Darrel Fox, and Kyle Coleman to thank for their efforts and expertise in building the Chief Cove cabin over two weeks in early September.The construction crew is happy that their work will allow increased access to and appreciation of refuge lands.
The previously established cabins are in Blue Fox, Deadman, and Viekoda bays, North Frazer, South Frazer, and Uganik lakes, Uganik Island, and Little River.Each cabin allows visitors to spend extended time exploring the beautiful and breath-taking Kodiak NWR lands and wildlife.While the cabins are sturdy, nicely appointed, and comfortable, they will, no doubt, also serve as safe shelters from the elements.All are priced at $45/night, and all have bunk beds to accommodate 4 people (except the Deadman Bay cabin that accommodates 8).
To browse refuge public use cabins and what they have to offer or reserve a cabin follow these links for Kenai and Kodiak on recreation.gov and this link to the refuge website for information on Tetlin’s.All refuge cabins are very popular so plan ahead.
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