Alaska
Beaver expansion into Alaska’s Arctic tundra presents problems for people – and opportunities • Arkansas Advocate
When Cyrus Harris first saw a beaver during a camping trip in the tundra territory in the far northwest of Alaska in 1988, the discovery created a stir in his hometown of Kotzebue.
“That made big news then,” he said. He and his companions removed the beaver, which was near Cape Krusenstern just north of the Bering Strait, above the Arctic Circle and, until recently, far north of the Alaska tree line. When they heard about the beaver, Harris said, local Inupiat elders issued a warning that more would appear: “They’re coming, and that’s what’s going to be happening.”
The presence of beavers in the Arctic landscape around Kotzebue is no longer news. The beaver population, previously not an Arctic feature, has exploded in that region – and quickly transformed the landscape.
That transformation was summarized at a workshop in late February at the University of Alaska Fairbanks, where scientists and community residents shared research findings and observations.
In a 100-square-kilometer area near Kotzebue — just under 40 square miles — the number of beaver dams jumped from two in 2002 to 98 in 2019, according to UAF research presented at the beginning of the three-day workshop. The workshop was part of a National Science Foundation-funded program called the Arctic Beaver Observation Network, or A-BON. On a wider area of the Baldwin Peninsula, the number went from 94 in 2010 to 409 in 2019. Across a wider area of Arctic Northwest Alaska, their presence went from nothing in the 1950s, as shown in aerial photos, to more than 11,300 beaver ponds identified through satellite imagery by 2019, according to the UAF scientists. The presence of beaver ponds in that region more than doubled between 2004 and 2017, the scientists found.
Satellite images that have tracked beaver expansion over time clearly show not just the number of dams but their drastic impacts, said Ken Tape, the UAF ecology professor who is leading the A-BON program. He pointed to one site as an example. “It basically changes from a little stream into a sprawling wetlands,” he said.
The proliferation of beavers is attributed to the northward spread of woody plants that they eat and use for their dams and lodges.
While climate change has enabled beavers to live farther north, the animals are exacerbating the effects of Arctic climate change. Through their dam and lodge engineering, they are inundating some areas with water, speeding up permafrost thaw. Elsewhere, they are drying out areas.
Effects of climate change were already underway on the tundra landscape, with permafrost warming and lakes expanding or draining and woody shrubs growing bigger and farther north, but those were relatively gradual – until the new arrivals began engineering the landscape, Tape said.
“All of a sudden, the beaver shows up. It’s like, wham, just night and day, completely different,” he said.
‘Tundra Be Dammed’
Tape, who got into beaver studies when he and UAF permafrost expert Ben Jones were tracking climate change effects on the tundra, has now become a leading authority on the animals’ northward expansion. A famous study that he led, published in 2018, described the phenomenon in Northwest Alaska and bore a catchy title: Tundra Be Dammed.
Beavers can be as disruptive to the tundra ecosystem as wildfires are, Tape and his colleagues have concluded.
Beaver presence in Arctic Alaska largely stops at the Continental Divide in the Brooks Range, leaving the North Slope largely beaver-free – for now. There are some exceptions discovered recently: a beaver pond complex that was found on the Kongakut River, which flows through the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge near the Canadian border, and some chew marks and tracks left by beavers on the Killik River, which flows from a point in Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve into the bigger Colville River.
But that North Slope situation is expected to change, Tape said. Projections are that if the climate continues its current warming trend and shrubs continue spreading north, beavers will follow, moving down the northern side of the divide to establish themselves across the entire North Slope by century’s end, he said. “They’re poised to swim downstream,” he said.
For many residents, their animals’ new presence is a serious problem.
“We’re surrounded by beaver lodges,” said Ralph Ramoth of Selawik, an Inupiat village about 90 miles east of Kotzebue.
Beaver structures have blocked access to traditional areas for duck hunting and berry-picking, and they’ve created barriers on creeks where fish used to spawn, Ramoth said. They have affected water quality as well, he said.
“When I was young, you used to be able to drink the water out of the river. Nowadays you don’t,” he said. Those who try, he said, get stomach distress. “People call it ‘beaver fever,’” he said, referring to the unpleasant intestinal infection caused by the parasite giardia.
Beaver sins
There is a long litany of observed or suspected beaver sins in their new Arctic territory that were discussed at the workshop.
Their dams can be insurmountable barriers to fish, particularly to the whitefish that are important subsistence foods but not particularly strong swimmers. That affects people who depend on those fish for their diets – and reverberates through the food web in ways that might seem surprising. Belugas in Arctic waters, for example, depend on whitefish populations that might be harmed by new beaver presence.
As articulated by Ramoth and by residents of Canada’s Northwest Territories who attended the workshop, beaver structures can impede travel, blocking boat routes long used in the summer and turning once-dependable winter ice-travel routes into danger zones.
Deteriorated water quality is a widespread concern; Harris noted that beaver complexes are plentiful just upstream of the reservoir that is the drinking-water source for Kotzebue.
There are potentially longer-term and wider-ranging effects as well.
By speeding permafrost thaw, they are hastening the release of carbon into the atmosphere, scientists said. That is because permafrost holds organic material accumulated over thousands of years that, through freeze, is resistant to decomposition, said Michael Loranty, an associate professor of geography at Colgate University in New York.
“But when you start thawing that out, it starts decomposing,” he said at the workshop. “And if, you know, you’re kind of putting all that permafrost carbon in the bank slowly over tens of thousands of years and then you thaw it out very quickly, it’s kind of a big pulse, potentially, into the atmosphere.”
There is evidence that such pulses are already underway. Work led by UAF researcher Jason Clark detected hotspots of methane emissions from Northwest Alaska beaver ponds. Methane is a particularly potent greenhouse gas and is known to be produced from permafrost thaw. The discovery of “is an example of a new disturbance regime, wrought by an ecosystem engineer, accelerating the effects of climate change in the Arctic,” said the 2023 study, which was coauthored by Tape, Jones and others at UAF, along with scientists from the National Park Service and the California Institute of Technology.
There are related effects. Though studies are preliminary, there is evidence that beavers are contributing to higher mercury levels in the water systems – and thus in fish populations. Permafrost thaw releases natural elemental mercury that is stored in frozen peat, and beavers stimulate that thaw.. Additionally, the beavers may be inadvertently helping to convert that elemental mercury into methylmercury, the form that is most dangerous to people and animals.
“Beavers bring a lot of wood to streams,” Matthew Mervyn, a graduate student who is studying the question in Canada’s Northwest Territories, said at the workshop. “Since the water slows down, it introduces more bacteria to methyl-ize the mercury.”
Mervyn, with Canada’s Wilfrid Laurier University, is part of a Canadian-British program called Beavers and Socio-ecological Resilience in Inuit Nunangat, or BARIN. It focuses on the Arctic region of the Northwest Territories. There, Indigenous hunters were the first to document colonization of the Beaufort Sea coast by beavers, with the animals spotted in 2008 and 2009.
The benefits of beavers
But there is another side of beavers in the Arctic.
“If I had a T-shirt, it would say, ‘I love beavers.’ I love them. They’re the best things in the world,” Lance Kramer, one of only about three Kotzebue residents who regularly trap beavers, said at the workshop.
He acknowledged that many of his Kotzebue neighbors greeted the news of beaver presence with the expression “Aiee,” a somewhat untranslatable Inupiaq expression of alarm and annoyance.
Kramer, in contrast, has taken advantage of the new arrivals. When he traps a fat beaver, he can use it for meat. The meat from skinny beavers goes to his dog, he said. He is making money selling the pelts. He has created his own detailed map of beaver lodges in the area, with names like “Faceplant Place Lodge” “About Time Lodge” and “Mad Snowman Lake Lodge,” the latter so named because his son became so annoyed about waiting for him to show up there that he built a snowman with an angry face.
He has even taken his love of beavers to show business, albeit subtly. He was an actor in the Alaska-based HBO series True Detective: The Night Country, and in a tense scene where his character brandishes a gun at law enforcement officers, he is wearing a beaver hat made by his mother-in-law.
Kramer brought up other beaver benefits. Aside from supplying meat, fur and income, beavers make it easier for him to hunt or trap other animals that gather at the structures, like wolverines and minks. “You can get everything at a beaver lodge. It’s a one-stop shop,” he said.
Evidence, mostly from outside of Alaska, shows that beaver lodges and dams can create habitat for other species, from insects to birds to predators. Research into that is continuing through the A-BON program; one project, explained by UAF graduate student Sebastian Zavoico, is using sound recorders to track bird diversity at recently established Alaska beaver sites.
While many Arctic residents are leery about the impacts of beaver dams and lodges to fish, evidence gathered to date paints a mixed picture.
In the Lower 48, where many riparian systems have been damaged by development, beavers are often considered restorers. Numerous studies there have found that beaver colonization is good for fish.
In Alaska, where study of the beaver-fish relationship is just starting, the evidence is that the animals have been positive influences in some spots and negative in others, according to information presented at the conference by UAF graduate student William Samuel. He has been tracking the relationship between beavers and Arctic grayling – and the relationship between beavers, grayling and wildfire. Within Interior Alaska, he found strong evidence that beaver densities increased in burned areas and that the combination of beavers and fires could be bad for grayling.
But the presence of beavers can make forested areas resistant to fires, too. Dammed areas can serve as fire breaks and help speed ecosystem recovery after wildfires, research in the Lower 48 has found.
The “beaver fever” name notwithstanding, beavers may not be as responsible as people think for giardia infections, said Glynnis Hood, an environmental science professor at the University of Alberta. “Beavers always get the rap, but humans carry giardia, too, and they don’t always clean up after themselves,” she said at the workshop.
Entrenched in the tundra landscape?
Future action on beavers might address both negative and positive aspects, suggested Andy Bassich of Eagle, an Interior community near the Canadian border.
“I don’t want, really, to use the word ‘infestation,’ but in some people’s minds that’s the appropriate word,” he said. In his region, where beavers have long been established, the animals have become a good source of food that substitutes for traditional food sources like salmon that are in short supply, he said.
If people want to get rid of “nuisance beavers” that might be blocking fish passage or creating other problems, perhaps there should be some kind of combined economic and cultural program that trains young people to hunt and trap them, process them, tan the hides, providing both meat and income, Bassich said.
Whatever Alaskans and Arctic residents decide to do about them, beavers may be in the far north for good.
That was a lesson imparted by Lennie Emaghok, an elder from Tuktoyaktuk, a Northwest Territories Inupiat community on the Beaufort Sea coast.
He recounted how in 2020, along a relatively short stretch of creek, he and others found 10 beaver structures and quickly removed most of them, including one that was particularly towering.
“When we returned three days later, the dam was built back, as if we had never touched it,” he said.
Hood summarized the power of the wood-chomping rodent. “Never underestimate a beaver,” she said.
Alaska Beacon is part of States Newsroom, a nonprofit news network supported by grants and a coalition of donors as a 501c(3) public charity. Alaska Beacon maintains editorial independence. Contact Editor Andrew Kitchenman for questions: [email protected]. Follow Alaska Beacon on Facebook and Twitter.
Alaska
Umpqua singers travel to Alaska to represent school spirit – The Mainstream
To celebrate UCC’s upcoming 60-year anniversary, President Pokrant reached out to Jason Heald, director of music, to write a fight song for the school.
Fight songs have been around since the 20th century mostly stemming from sports teams as a way to boost morale, encouraging the team to reach victory.
Heald did extensive research on previously successful fight songs before creating “Riverhawk Squawk” highlighting the inclusive spirit and “call-and-response” from the crowd. A Call and response is a musical technique where the singer will call out a phrase and the audience will respond with a phrase back.
Heald directed the Umpqua Singers in performing the fight song first on the center stage and then invited the crowd to join in at parts during a second round of singing.
Besides working on writing new music, Heald has also been busy on field trip duty, taking the Umpqua Singers group he advises to Alaska over the spring break to perform in several shows across the state. The group sang songs from jazz, acapella, and pop genres, as well as classic Alaskan songs including the state song. Alaska was chosen since it was close enough for the short spring break and Heald is from Alaska, so the trip was easy to put together based on his previous experiences. This small functional group also travels together to perform at many local and state venues throughout the year and they have previously traveled overseas in the past years to places such as Hong Kong, Spain, and Ireland.
Heald, who came to UCC in 1998, directs the Umpqua Singers group of eight to 12 students typically in an amplified style, which includes each member having a microphone due to the constantly changing environments in which they perform.
Before working at UCC, Heald was a musician living and working in Portland.
Joining the Umpqua Singers is a year-long commitment and requires students to have a flexible schedule as the Singers perform 45 to 50 times per year. Merit awards are available for students helping them get some relief from tuition costs.
Students can also enroll in the Music Studies program that prepares students for transfer to four-year universities, offering comprehensive training in music theory, history, technology, and performance. The Music Studies program has two pathways: an Associate of Arts Oregon Transfer degree and an Associate of Applied Science degree.
According to UCC’s website, this program is approved for “liberal arts and education programs at most four-year colleges and universities.” The program includes award-winning performance groups in choir, band, and orchestra, with specialized classes in jazz and classical music.
Contact me at:
UCCMainstream@yahoo.com
For more articles by Jace Boyd, please click here.
Alaska
REPORT Two Alaska Airlines Boeing 737 tail strike incidents were caused by a software glitch
A software glitch caused a temporary shutdown of Alaska’s flight activity nationwide.
On the morning of Jan. 26, as two Alaska Airlines flights from Seattle to Hawaii departing six minutes apart experienced a tail strike.
The pilots of each flight felt a slight bump and the flight attendants at the back of the cabin heard a scraping noise. As the noses of both Boeing 737s lifted skyward on takeoff, their tails had scraped the runway.
Both planes circled back immediately and landed again at Seattle-Tacoma International Airport. The incident grounded both flights and forced a temporary shutdown of Alaska’s flight activity nationwide.
Horrifyingly, investigators have now discovered that a software glitch was responsible for the incident. According to the Seattle Times, the tailstrikes occurred largely as the result of a bug in a program sold by a Swedish firm called DynamicSource.
The program is supposed to deliver “crucial weight and balance data” that pilots enter into their flight computers to help determine stuff like “how much thrust the engines will provide and at what speed the jet will be ready to lift off.”
The data [delivered] was on the order of 20,000 to 30,000 pounds light. With the total weight of those jets at 150,000 to 170,000 pounds, the error was enough to skew the engine thrust and speed settings.
Both planes headed down the runway with less power and at lower speed than they should have. And with the jets judged lighter than they actually were, the pilots rotated too early.
Alaska
New York trans advocate, park ranger falls to her death while ice climbing Alaska mountain path ‘the Escalator’
A longtime New York forest ranger and trans advocate was killed Thursday night after falling more than 1,000 feet while attempting to climb a steep cliff in Alaska, officials said.
Robbi Mecus, 52, of Keene Valley and her climbing partner both fell while ice climbing an especially treacherous part of Mount Johnson in Denali National Park known as “the Escalator,” according to the National Park Service.
Mecus, a transgender woman, died in the fall. Her climbing partner, a 30-year-old woman from California, survived with “serious traumatic injuries.”
Another climbing party witnessed the tragic drop and called for help around 10:45 p.m., but it took until 7 a.m. the following morning for the survivor to be airlifted to a hospital.
Mecus’s body wasn’t recovered until Saturday morning following deteriorating weather conditions the evening prior.
The outdoors enthusiast had been a forest ranger for the Department of Environmental Conservation’s Adirondack region for 25 years after joining in 1999 at the age of 27, the agency said.
“I join the Department of Environmental Conservation family in mourning the sudden and tragic passing of Forest Ranger Robbi Mecus,” interim DEC Commissioner Sean Mahar said in a statement Saturday.
Mahar said Mecus “exemplified the Forest Rangers’ high standard of professional excellence,” emphasizing her rescue efforts, her work on complex searches and her deployments to out-of-state wildfire response missions.
The interim commissioner also commended Mecus’s work in “advancing diversity, inclusion, and LGBTQ belonging throughout the agency.”
Mecus was also a leader in the queer community in the Adirondacks, NCPR reported.
She told the outlet in 2021 that she struggled through her teenage years to come to terms with her gender identity. She ultimately waited until she was in her 40s to transition: “I was scared and afraid and I didn’t know how I was going to live my life.”
That hard time is when she discovered her love of rock and ice climbing, and opened her up to a community that didn’t include many queer people, allowing her the opportunity to become a leader.
“There are many reasons I didn’t come out until I was 44, but one of them was because I didn’t see anybody else doing the things that I still wanted to do and I didn’t think I could do them,” said Mecus in 2021. “I didn’t see any queer rangers. I didn’t see any trans climbers.”
According to her social media channels, Mecus had visited Alaska several times for expeditions over the years.
She even successfully made it up “the Escalator” last year.
It’s not clear what went wrong with her final climb, but park officials warn the path to Mt. Johnson’s 8,400-foot peak is among the most dangerous.
“The approximately 5,000-foot route involves navigating a mix of steep rock, ice, and snow,” the National Park Service said.
Mecus is survived by her daughter and former wife, who live in the Keene Valley community.
Denali National Park and Preserve is about 240 miles north of Anchorage.
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