Our WINGS guides, and half of the birders were stranded
on Saint Lawrence Island on Saturday, due to the weather, and so didn’t make
the Sunday flight out to the Pribilofs.
Luckily, WINGS had made arrangements for the ‘local’ guides to lead us
on this amazing tour.
Monday the 9th was a day just for the 5 of us ‘tourists’
to be birding with Sulli Gibson and Alex Harper from Saint Paul Island Tour,
which is fully owned by TDX Corporation, the Alaska Native Corporation.
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| Antone Lake on St. Paul Island |
The Pribilofs are the remainders of what was once part of
the Bering Land Bridge before the melting of the glaciers. The current wind-swept tundra was once home
to woolly mammoths.
Research indicates
that these Holocene elephants likely overgrazed their habitat when rising sea
levels reduced the size of the island around 5,600 years ago, or about the time
that the Minoan Culture was developing.
Looking across the putchki, it is not hard to imagine a
herd feeding its way across the tundra landscape. Among all of the Bering Sea islands, St. Paul
Island is unique in having lava tube caves from which animal bones might be
collected. One such lava tube on Bogoslof
Hill yielded mammoth teeth, as well as polar bear remains. In 1999, researchers found even more
“fossils” of woolly mammoth, polar bear, caribou, and Arctic fox in Qagnax̂ cave on Saint Paul.
Smithsonian paleobiologist Clayton Ray, in a 1971 article, noted that one of the local managers for the Alaska Commercial
Company, a Mr. J.C. Redpath, had faked finding some mammoth tusks on Saint Paul,
ostensibly as a practical joke. This
same Mr. Redpath also salted the black sands of Lunakin Beach with smelted
droplets of bronze to mimic gold! Quite
the prankster . . . and likely hoping for a profit in it all. However, the other
mammoth bones found on the Pribilofs were apparently authentic.
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| Mammoth steppe |
Besides mammoths, the only land mammals originally on the
islands in pre-history were arctic foxes, shrews, and polar bears. In the late 1800s and early 1900s, polar bear arrived
in conjunction with the ice pack. They were last recorded on St. George Island in 1915: “The men report seeing bear tracks near the Company House at Zapadni… They
lead from the sea line to a place where the animal had apparently laid
down and again to where it again took to the water.”
There are still ungulates on Saint Paul now,
however. In the fall of 1911, the U.S.
government imported 25 Siberian Reindeer to the islands to provide the resident
Aleut (Unangan) with a source of fresh meat.
By 1921, the population had grown to 250 animals, and by 1938, there
were about 2,000 reindeer on St. Paul Island.
Poaching, harsh winter weather and starvation resulting from overgrazing
severely depleted the St. Paul herd in the 1940s.
In 1950, only eight reindeer remained on St. Paul Island,
so in 1951, 31 reindeer were brought to the island from Nunivak Island. Currently, several hundred reindeer roam St.
Paul Island. Interestingly, when the
reindeer population exploded in the 1930s, they depleted the lichens, and
changed the vegetative make-up of the island.
The Saint Paul reindeer are now thriving by grazing the grass and
putchki, rather than lichens, and currently number around 400 animals, which
the Native Corporation manages.
At one point, we saw a herd of these animals milling in a
tight circle near the road. We pulled up
behind a pickup where a local was viewing the reindeer through a spotting
scope.
We waited a bit, not wishing to spook the deer. Then, seeing that the reindeer were not
paying much attention to us, got out for better looks and photographs. At that point, there was the roar of a .30-06
from the pickup ahead of us. A few of
the birders were horrified; “Oh, My God!
Is he killing those beautiful animals?!!!” But some folks assured them that the Aleut
was “just trying to scare the deer away from the road”… A second shot was made, so we herded the
birders into the van and drove away. I
am always surprised to meet people who don’t know where food comes from.
Off and on, we’d turn over a board or stray plank of
plywood, hoping to get a view of the endemic and Endangered Pribilof Island
Shrew Sorex pribilofensis, but to no avail.
Arctic Foxes were seen pretty regularly, mostly near the
village.
Normally the species is a beautiful snowy white in winter,
and on account of its abundance and wide range it does not command a
high price on the fur market.
But on these and a few other islands, the
melanistic strain predominates and the slate colored pelts are called
“blue” in the fur markets. Because of their relative scarcity they
commanded a higher price than the white.
We were told that we shouldn’t
feed the foxes, as the Native Corporation had forbidden that activity. However, we often watched a native Elder come
out to feed these charming little animals.
The mammals that are most obvious on Saint Paul - besides
the humans - are the Fur Seals.
The reason that there are people on Saint Paul in the
first place is because Russian sealers imported Aleuts to do the heavy labor of
harvesting pelts.
The Pribilofs were
uninhabited, and were discovered in 1786 by Russian fur traders.
They landed first on St. George, and named the larger island to the
north St. Peter and St. Paul Island.
In
1788, the Russian American Company enslaved and relocated Aleuts from Siberia,
Atka and Unalaska to the Pribilofs to hunt fur seals; their descendants live on
the two islands today.
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| 1983 Book by Barbara Boyle Torrey |
The Pribilof Fur Seal Monument commemorates the 100th
anniversary of the signing of the North Pacific Fur Seal Treaty of 1911. This treaty was an international treaty
designed to manage the harvest of the fur seals, and prohibit the killing of
fur seals in International waters.
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| The monument shows an Aleut man observing several
seals |
Northern fur seals are "eared seals", who spend
most of the year in the ocean. Weaned
pups typically spend nearly 2 years away before returning to their breeding
colonies. Fur seals use the open ocean
for foraging and return to the rocky beaches for resting, molting, and
reproduction.
After the U.S. acquired the islands during the Alaska
Purchase in 1867, the Federal government licensed the Alaska Commercial Company
for 20 years, then the North American Company for another 20 years to harvest
the seals on Saint Paul, with an exclusive control over the harvest and the residents.
Life for the Unangan was little better under the American monopoly than it was under the Russians. Then, the
government assumed sole management of the commercial harvest until 1984.
In that year, the fur seals were designated as a
“depleted stock” under the Marine Mammal Protection Act, because the stock had
declined by more than 50 percent from its estimated population of 2.1 million
seals in the 1950s.
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| Fur Seals at the Reef Rookery on July 15, 1948 |
It was not until 1966 that the Aleuts were freed from their servitude to
the U.S. Government by the passage of the Fur Seal Act. This law
forbade the killing of fur seals in the Pribilofs, with the exception of
subsistence hunting by Alaska Natives. The termination of the fur seal
trade meant the end of Aleut slavery.
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| This seal picked up some plastic trash - the scourge of the seas |
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| Saint Paul has a population of about 500 souls, mostly Unangan |
The subsistence
harvest is currently managed under a cooperative management agreement between
the Pribilofs Unangan Government and the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
According to NOAA, the 2017 abundance estimate for the eastern Pacific
stock was 620,660 northern fur seals.
The Saints Peter and Paul Church was founded in 1830, and
the current church was built in 1905.
The bell tower from the “old church” was removed, and apparently not
reinstalled until after 1989. Their website tells us that most of the worship services are done in English, although
they use Church Slavonic and Aleut at times.
The vegetation on the island is predominantly the putchki
or wild celery (Angelica lucida), beach rye (Elymus arenarius), Nootka lupine
(Lupinus nootkatensis) and Pacific hemlock-parsley (Conioselinum chinense).
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| Alex Harper searching for birds in the putchki |
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| Hoping for a 'rarity', we usually found Lapland Longspurs in the putchki . . . |
It being September, most of the wildflowers were done blooming, but there were a few.
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| Arctic Poppy Papaver macounii |
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| Nootka Lupine Lupinus nootkatensis |
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| Seaside sunflower Senecio pseudoarnica |
There are no trees native to the islands; the nearest
things being the dwarfed willows.
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| The Willow Forest . . . |
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| . . . isn't all that tall. That's my foot! |
The
guides showed us the “Pribilof National Forest”, which consists of a planting
of Sitka Spruce near the old Coast Guard Loran Station. Loran was the hyperbolic radio navigation
system developed in the United States during World War II, and the guidance
system that mariners and aviators relied on for years - until President Obama declared the
system obsolete in 2009, at which time it had been replaced by the current GPS
system. These trees are about 3 or 4
feet high and are likely 30 years old.
With this exotic and amazing landscape before me, I can’t
wait to go birding!
