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Bridging the Gap/Usguciaraq: Tuesday, 1/18, 5 – 6 p.m. (AKT)


This meeting’s presentation was recorded: watch below.
This recording does not include Jacqueline Cleveland’s video (not yet released).




Christopher Tulik of the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge and Jacqueline Cleveland of the Togiak National Wildlife Refuge, both Yupik, will present on their work as Refuge Information Technicians (RITs).  Christopher’s intimate knowledge of the Yupiaq language and culture, the local area and the people make him a valuable liaison between the Refuge and those who live in the communities on and around the Yukon Delta Refuge. He travels by boat, snowmachine and plane to make personal visits to dozens of small subsistence communities. During the visits, he informs residents about Refuge-related conservation work, hunting and fishing opportunities, and other topics that are important to subsistence harvest.  He also hears their concerns and local knowledge of fish and wildlife matters and ensures this is communicated to Refuge staff back at refuge headquarters.   Jacki is new to her role as an RIT for Togiak National Wildlife Refuge.  She will share with us the essence of subsistence life in her village of Quinhagak through her outstanding photography and videography.

   

  Jacqueline with sauropod dinosaur tracks on the Togiak Refuge.

Christopher Tulik was born in Bethel and raised in Nightmute, a small village on Nelson Island along the western Bering Sea coast of the refuge. Growing up in a traditional subsistence lifestyle has given Christopher an understanding of the importance of fish and wildlife to the culture of local Alaska Native people.  Christopher has said he became interested in working with wildlife when he was very young and became aware of the fish and wildlife all around him that sustained his family in all seasons.  He learned respect for nature from watching his father and older brothers returning from the hunt and how the catch had been properly handled.
 Christopher Tulik

He was one of the youngest Refuge Information Technicians (RITs) hired when the program began in 1984. After a break, he returned to serve as an RIT in 2014 to assist the Refuge with outreach, education and tribal consultation. Christopher Tulik recently accepted a position as the Lead Refuge Information Technician (RIT) for the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge. In this position Chris will supervise up to five permanent RITs. You can read more about Chris’s life and work here.

Nalikutaar (in Yup’ik) or Jacqueline Cleveland was raised in Quinhagak, Alaska where she currently lives with her fiancé, Franko and dog, Pumba. Jacki received her Bachelor of Art’s degree from Montana State University in Media and Theatre Arts and Native American Studies. She is a subsistence hunter, fisher and gatherer, a freelance photographer/videographer, and recently accepted the job of Refuge Information Technician for the Togiak National Wildlife Refuge.  

  Jacqueline Cleveland with the book that features her photographs.


Jacki has had her photographs published in numerous publications most notably in the 2020 book from the University of Alaska Fairbanks press, Yungcautnguuq Nunam Qainga Tamarmi/All the Land’s Surface is Medicine: Edible and Medicinal Plants of Southwest Alaska, for which she did most of the photography.  Jacki recently completed a film project with BBC on Nelson Island in which she served as location manager.  The segment on muskox in rut filmed on the island will be part of the Earth’s Great Rivers II to be out this spring on BBC.  Jackie is currently finishing up work on a film about climate change that she co-directed, served as cultural advisor for, as well as did some of the filming.  Ellavut Cimirtuq/Our World is Changing will also be out this spring.

 



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Tuesday October 19, 2021, 5pm AKDT

From Caribou Corrals to Seaplane Hangars: A Cultural Resources Overview of Alaska’s National Wildlife Refuges

 Tuesday, October 19, 2021, 5-6pm (AKDT) 
Jeremy Karchut, Regional Archaeologist/Regional Historic Preservation Officer USFWS, Alaska Region

Webinar Recording 

Join us to discover the rich cultural and historic legacy of Alaska’s Refuges.  Jeremy Karchut will provide an overview of the refuges’ vast array of cultural resources representing 14,000 years of human history.  Sites range from those associated with the earliest humans to set foot in North America to mid-20th century aircraft hangars. Prehistoric archaeological sites in the Arctic, rock art on the Kodiak coast, historic cabins on the Kenai Peninsula, WWII battlefield sites in the Aleutians, and historic Fish & Wildlife Service (FWS) facilities critical to the agency’s Alaska mission are some of the cultural resources to be highlighted in this talk.

The FWS recognizes cultural resources as fragile, irreplaceable assets with potential public and scientific uses, representing an important and integral part of the heritage of our Nation and descendant communities. It is FWS policy to identify, protect, and manage cultural resources located on refuge lands.  Jeremy will consider some of the challenges and rewards of managing these nonrenewable resources in an era of rapid environmental change and include highlights of key federal historic preservation legislation.

B-24D Liberator Bomber that crashed in 1942 on Atka Island, in what is now part of the Alaska Maritime NWR. Photo by Steve Hillebrand, USFWS.

Jeremy is the FWS Regional Archaeologist in Anchorage.  He is interested in high altitude and high latitude archaeology and for more than 20 years he’s been involved with projects focusing on the effects of climate change on archaeological resources and what archaeology can teach us about how humans adapted to environmental change in the past. Jeremy is a native of Colorado, having earned a BA in Anthropology from Fort Lewis College, Durango in 1998, and a MA in Archaeology and Ancient History from University of Leicester, UK in 2003. He has served as a federal archaeologist since 1995, including with the US Forest Service and the National Park Service in the US Southwest, Central and Southern Rocky Mountains, Great Plains, and 12 years in Alaska.



This presentation was recorded; view below.






 



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Membership Meeting, January 19, 2021, 5 pm AKT


Arctic Refuge, A Symbol for a Time of Global Change   Please 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.  

Webinar Recording


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 of Last 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.


This webinar was recorded.  Watch below:



Download Presentation




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Membership Meeting: July 21, 5pm

Emergency Meeting
Tuesday, July 21, 5 pm
Online Only

This meeting was recorded; view the recording below.

What You Need to Know to Help Save the Kenai Refuge  with guest speakers retired Kenai Refuge Supervisory Biologist John Morton, retired Kenai Refuge Ranger/Pilot Rick Johnston and Friends President David Raskin.  This panel will explain Kenai’s new proposed rules which would allow brown bear baiting on the Refuge and remove all the Refuge’s ability to regulate trapping as well as some other lesser provisions.  You will have a chance to ask questions.

This serious threat to the Refuge, which contradicts prior refuge decisions, prompted this unusual midsummer meeting.  Comments on the proposed changes will only be accepted until August 10.  There will be no public process other than the comment period.  For details about the issues, the Federal Register Notice, the draft Environmental Assessment, talking points, and instructions about submitting comments, please see our Proposed Kenai Regulations post. 
 
This meeting was recorded; view the recording below.






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Tracking red-legged kittiwakes across the Bering Sea

By Brie Drummond, Wildlife Biologist at Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge

A special bird that few people see, red-legged kittiwakes nest on only a few remote islands in the Bering Sea.  With few breeding colonies and a highly specialized diet of myctophid fish, red-legged kittiwakes are especially vulnerable to changes in their breeding and marine foraging habitats, including those brought about by climate change and introduced predators.  All red-legged kittiwakes in Alaska (85% of the global population) breed on Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge.  For the last four decades, Refuge staff have collected extensive data on this species during the summer breeding season, including numbers of birds returning to colonies each year, numbers of chicks hatching and fledging, and what chicks are fed.  However, we know very little about what happens to red-legged kittiwakes the rest of the year.  Research on other seabird species shows that winter conditions can play a large role in both survival and success at the colony the following summer, so we wanted to learn more about what kittiwakes experienced when away from the colony. 


Red-legged kittiwakes (photo by Brie Drummond, AMNWR)

We used geolocation loggers (or geolocators) to record locations and behaviors of red-legged kittiwakes during the winters of 2016-2017 and 2017-2018.  Geolocators are small data recording devices (~1 gram or the size and weight of a large raisin) that attach to a plastic leg band and record light levels and immersion in saltwater.  From those data, we generate twice-daily latitude and longitude positions for each bird and estimate how birds spent their time (flying, sitting on the water, or actively foraging). 

To explore whether red-legged kittiwakes from different colonies had similar wintering locations and behavior, we deployed geolocators on birds from the two largest breeding colonies in Alaska, St. George Island in the Pribilof Islands and Buldir Island in the western Aleutian Islands, separated by1000 kilometers.  We captured and tagged kittiwakes during the summer breeding season when birds were attending nests at the colonies.  Geolocators do not transmit data remotely, so biologists must recapture the birds in subsequent breeding seasons in order to retrieve devices and download data.  For the St. George component of the study, we collaborated with Dr. Rachael Orben, an Oregon State University researcher.

We found where red-legged kittiwakes from the two colonies spent the winters depended on the time of year.  Birds from both locations left their breeding colony in late August or early September.  During the fall and early winter (October-December), St. George kittiwakes were in the Bering Sea whereas Buldir kittiwakes were thousands of miles west off the Russian coast in the Sea of Okhotsk.  However, during late winter (January-March), the two colonies overlapped in their distribution, especially in an area east of the Kuril Islands.  By April, birds were back at their respective breeding colonies.  These patterns were almost identical during the two winters of our study.

From the behavior data, we learned that birds from both colonies had similar activity budgets during the non-breeding season, spending most of the night sitting on water and flying during the day.  Most active foraging occurred the hour before and after dawn; this may reflect foraging for myctophids, which are generally available at the ocean’s surface only at night.

We learned important information about where and how red-legged kittiwakes from Alaska’s two largest colonies spend their time when away from the breeding grounds.  The region east of the Kuril Islands appears to be crucial for the global red-legged kittiwake population; interestingly, this area is a winter vacation hotspot for many other Alaskan seabirds.  We hope to publish these data in a scientific journal soon to share this information with other seabird researchers.



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Hot Topics in Alaska Wildfire

Please join us on Tuesday, March 17, 5-6pm (AKDT), for our Friends March membership meeting with featured guest speaker and fire ecologist Lisa Saperstein.

This was a virtual meeting; watch a recording of Lisa’s presentation below.

How will wildfire affect refuges in a changing climate?  Wildfire was always a major driver of habitat change in much of Alaska but last summer was one for the record books​ in terms of the number of people impacted by smoke, road closings, activity cancellations and fear for life and property.  Scientists and managers are scrambling to understand what Alaska will look like in the future with predicted increases in fire occurrence and to figure out how to manage fire with a changing climate.  Lisa will give an overview on fire in Alaska from fire history and habitat changes to current research topics and refuge projects to reduce risks. 


Lisa’s current work focuses on post-fire effects on wildlife and vegetation, burn severity and fuel treatment planning and monitoring.  She is a collaborator on research on climate change and fire in boreal forest and tundra and on modeling fire behavior during wildfires.  After working on the Selawik, Koyukuk/Nowitna, Yukon Delta and Kanuti refuges, she was hired in her current position as fire ecologist for all Alaska refuges in 2010.  Lisa began her Alaska career as a Master’s student at UAF in 1989 investigating the effects of tundra fire on caribou winter range.



Missed this meeting?  Watch a recording of Lisa’s presentation:







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Arctic to Attu: A Photographer’s Tour of Six Alaska Wildlife Refuges

Please join us on Tuesday, February 18, 5-6pm (AKDT), for our Friends February membership meeting with featured guest speaker and photographer, Lisa Hupp. 

Lisa will be speaking to us at the Anchorage meeting: our other gatherings will join via Zoom Meetings or you can join from home (see below). 

  • Anchorage: Fish & Wildlife Service Regional Office, 1011 E. Tudor
  • Fairbanks: Watershed School 4975 Decathlon  
  • Homer: Islands and Ocean Visitor Center, 95 Sterling Highway
  • Soldotna: Kenai National Wildlife Refuge Visitor Center, Ski Hill Road

  

Lisa Hupp  will share her experiences behind the lens photographing Alaska’s refuges.  “I love how photography can demand close attention and devotion to place,” Hupp says. “It’s a way to see and share the world, whether you take photos on a phone or with a backpack full of equipment. Alaska’s national wildlife refuges are places of endless possibility for photographers, from dramatic and vast landscapes to charismatic wildlife. These refuges are big, wild and remote; photography can help us to tell their stories.” 

Hupp is the Communications Coordinator for National Wildlife Refuges in Alaska.  You can see some of her images and read how she gets those amazing shots here. 

Download Lisa’s presentation: Arctic to Attu (PowerPoint .pptx file)

Missed the meeting?  Watch a recording of the meeting below:

 



Meetings

Join us and learn more about refuges and wildlife at our meetings held from 5-6 pm AKT, the 3rd Tuesday of the month. from fall to spring. Every meeting can be attended live if you are in the same town as the speaker, at watch parties in Anchorage, Kenai and Homer or on zoom wherever you are. All meetings are also recorded and posted on this page. You do not need to be a member to attend.

Upcoming Schedule:

November 18 – working title:  Kuskokwim Salmon Crisis and CoManagement by the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge and the Kuskokwim River Inter-tribal Fish Commission

No December Meeting

January 20 – Robin West, retired refuge manager and author;  details coming; in person at the Kenai Refuge

February 17 – TBD

March 17 – TBD

April 21 – TBD

Every meeting will feature an engaging speaker from one of Alaska’s 16 Refuges or a partner who is closely involved with our Refuges.



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Adventures with a unique Alaska shorebird: the Bristle-thighed Curlew

Please join us on Tuesday, January 21, 2020, 5-6 pm (AKDT), for our Friends January membership meeting with featured guest speaker, Kristine Sowl.  

Wildlife Biologist Kristine Sowl worked on a Bristle-thighed Curlew nesting ecology study in the Andreafsky Wilderness of the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge in the summers of 2010 to 2012. The curlew proved to be an elusive, difficult, and fascinating species to study.  Her presentation will talk about her experiences during that project.    Kristine Sowl has spent over 25 years working as a field biologist on public lands in Alaska, including Yukon Delta, Izembek, and Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuges, and summer seasonal jobs at the Alaska Peninsula National Wildlife Refuge, Aniakchak and Cape Krusenstern National Monuments, and Bering Land Bridge National Preserve. She moved from Bethel to Homer a year ago and now spends her time helping Alaska’s wildlife refuges plan their biological programs. 

Kristine will be at the Homer meeting; our other gatherings will join via Zoom Meetings. 



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