Alaska
‘The birds are a global citizen’: Indigenous groups in Australia and Alaska team up to track a feathered adventurer’s epic journey
Short-tailed shearwaters used to blacken the skies on the south-west coast of Australia, so abundant were they in their coastal homes each Djilba season – the time in the calendar of the Noongar peoples between August and September, when days shift from blustery cold and wet winds to warmer weather.
In Wudjari Noongar, the language of the traditional owners of this place they call Kepa Kurl, but which since colonisation has been called Esperance, the birds are called yowli. To other cultures they are muttonbirds.
At the other end of the year, on the other side of the globe, flocks of shearwaters would darken the skies in Alaska, ready to feast on the teeming fish and squid from melting ice and snow in the Arctic summer. Like the Wudjari, the Yup’ik would mark their arrival.
But First Nations peoples on both coasts have noticed that something is wrong. They began to see sick and dying shearwaters washing up on beaches: emaciated, their bellies filled with microplastics instead of food. Birds were turning up in places they hadn’t been seen before, veering far away from their fixed migration routes as they searched farther afield for food.
Jennell Reynolds, healthy country program coordinator and senior ranger with Esperance Tjaltjraak Native Title Aboriginal Corporation, grew up hearing stories of the yowli. More than 30 million return each year to breeding colonies off Australia’s southern coastline, mostly concentrating in the eastern states – but large numbers also return to burrows in the craggy archipelagos off Western Australia’s southern coast as well as the sand hills near Esperance, an area known for its pristine waters and white sandy beaches.
“It’s so graceful seeing them skip across the water when they’re feeding and diving,” Reynolds says. “They are such inquisitive birds when they come into the land.”
In April they return north to make the 15,000km journey back to Alaska, with newly fledged chicks in tow.
In an attempt to understand the birds’ perilous journey, Tjaltjraak rangers are working with Yup’ik and other Alaskan traditional owners. The global research project combinesecological, scientific and ancestral knowledge.
“It was one of those things where you know that you’ve got this connection through this one bird,” Reynolds tells Guardian Australia. “It’s a special moment because we are all on the same page in relation to taking care of country. We both have a kinship with the animals and wildlife and we’re making sure that we have that same responsibility for looking after them.”
The collaboration began by building on pre-existing relationships between the Tjaltjraak rangers and their Eyak, Iñupiaq, Yup’ik and Alutiiq community counterparts. Early conversations revealed shared concerns about declining numbers.
David Guilfoyle, a coordinator with the Tjaltjraak rangers, spent many years living and working in Alaska. He says those longstanding community ties helped fast‑track what is now a formal cross‑cultural partnership.
The project aims to form a clearer picture of how the birds live: their migration patterns; how deep they plunge the ocean in their quest for food; and ultimately the risks they are facing in a changing environment.
“It’s very holistic,” Guilfoyle says. “It’s not just looking at the species so much as looking at the whole ecosystem and what role these birds play, and what we can do to protect and manage them. But we can’t do that until we get a lot of data.”
The rangers knew the birds returned each year to colonies off Esperance; Alaskan communities knew when they arrived in their waters. But the exact route, the staging areas and what was happening in between remained largely invisible.
To answer those questions, Tjaltjaak rangers had to catch and tag the yowli. That meant working quietly and quickly in cold, dark and potentially snake-infested sand dunes on an island in the middle of the Southern Ocean, with only red torchlight to see by, says one ranger, Hayleigh Graham.
The team placed tiny, almost weightless sensors and tags on them – which required a little finessing to ensure the technology would adhere to delicate legs and tails.
“We had to sort of sand it back, so we made a bit of glue but the glue didn’t really work as well, so then we tried double-sided tape but, nope, that wasn’t so good,” Graham says.
“We ended up having to get some smaller zip ties to try and trim it off and make sure the ethics of the way we put it on wasn’t hurting or damaging the birds, and then as the sun started to go down, within a few minutes, we got our first yowli.”
By the end of the night, they had tagged 21 birds.
“It’s still really early days,” Guilfoyle says. “We’re really nervous. I can’t sleep since we’ve tagged these birds – every hour I’m checking the map about where they’re going. It’s like being an expectant parent.
“We watch them every day, so now it seems like they’re starting to slowly track towards Tassie, and then eventually they’ll just start missioning north to Alaska.”
Tjaltjraak rangers say the birds are not only culturally significant but vital to the area’s delicate ecosystem. The shearwater’s fixed habits make it a warning sign for the health of their breeding and feeding grounds.
“It’s like an alarm bell,” Guilfoyle says. “If we don’t see them as much now, what have we lost? At the very basic level, that observational data is a call to action: we need to make sure that we’re not just falling for the trap of shifting baselines.”
Climate threats
Estelle Thomson is a Yup’ik leader and president of the Native Village of Paimiut Traditional Council. She lives in Anchorage and works closely with Indigenous rangers and wildlife ecologists as a bird migration advocate and vice-chair for the Yukon River Inter-Tribal Commission, which represents 43 tribes from the Bering Sea to territories bordering Canada.
She says the shearwater were not originally one of the hundreds of birds that flew to the vast Yup’ik lands but were usually found on a cluster of islands in the Bering Sea. But they have been recorded as far south-west as the Kuskokwim River, far from their traditional migration path.
“They typically go to the Aleutian Islands … but because of climate change and because of a whole bunch of extenuating circumstances, they’ve actually been starting to come into my region,” Thomson says.
“We can tell when things are starting to go a little bit awry with the birds. We can tell when they’re not getting enough food, if they’re not coming in at the times that they normally do. We can tell when they’re late. We can tell if their food sources are having difficulty.”
The permafrost tundra is melting, leaving the region vulnerable to typhoons and other extreme weather events. The climate emergency is displacing Indigenous peoples from their lands. Once-abundant traditional food sources are becoming scarcer.
Many of those food sources are migratory birds – some 220 species of which spent part of the year in Alaska. Thomson has partnered with Indigenous peoples around the globe through a collective calledChildren of the Sky, which brings First Nations people together to gain a deeper shared understanding of migratory birds and their place in our ecosystem.
“Our peoples have specific, traditional ecological and Indigenous knowledge about our non-human relatives,” she says. “The people on the other side of flyway that we’re on also carry knowledge. So when we get together, we’re able to share what we know from each of our perspectives …
“The birds are a global citizen. This bird has no allegiance to any specific country. It doesn’t look at the boundaries of borders.”
Reynolds says she hopes the project will open the way to other cross-cultural endeavours.
First, though, rangers will have to catch the birds again next November to remove their tags.
“We’re all custodians now,” Reynolds says. “It’s not just us. It’s everyone’s responsibility to be able to care for country.”
Alaska
Former Alaska corrections officer sentenced to 150 years in prison for killing wife and teen daughter
A former Alaska corrections officer who pleaded guilty to the 2022 killings of his wife and daughter earlier this year was sentenced this week to 150 years in prison.
Anchorage Superior Court Judge Josie Garton on Tuesday sentenced Jalonni Blackshear to consecutive 75-year sentences for first- and second-degree murder in the 2022 killings of his wife, Raechyl Blackshear, and their 14-year-old daughter, Jayla, according to filings in the case.
The sentence came after Blackshear pleaded guilty to the charges in late January. Blackshear, in a plea agreement affidavit, said that he shot and killed his wife and daughter in their Scenic Foothills neighborhood home on April 4, 2022, amid a police investigation into suspicions that Blackshear had sexually abused his daughter.
The plea agreement called for a 150-year sentence, according to a May 11 sentencing memorandum signed by Assistant District Attorney Rachel Gernat.
Nearly a dozen other charges, including murder, sexual abuse of a minor and incest, were dismissed as part of the plea agreement with prosecutors, according to the memorandum.
Blackshear had a history of abusing and terrorizing his family, Gernat said in the memo. He shot his family members in the head to avoid prosecution on sexual abuse charges after he failed to coerce his daughter to recant statements given to Anchorage police about being sexually assaulted in late March of that year, she wrote.
In his plea agreement affidavit, Blackshear admitted that the murders were unprovoked and that he was likely to face charges for sexually abusing his daughter.
The mother and daughter were last seen on April 3, 2022, after Blackshear convinced his wife to take their daughter to Anchorage police to try to get her to retract her sexual assault allegations, prosecutors said.
Blackshear quit his job and fled Alaska several days later after he was charged with sexually abusing his daughter. Prosecutors said he used the mother and daughter’s phones to impersonate them in an effort to convince others they were alive.
Raechyl and Jayla Blackshear were found dead in the family home days later after Raechyl Blackshear missed a medical appointment, according to police. Tracking data from their phones led to Blackshear’s arrest in New York weeks later, according to prosecutors.
Blackshear was jailed at the Mat-Su Pretrial facility as of Thursday afternoon.
Alaska
Tomorrow Alaska Burns $190 Million Of Taxpayer Money To Drag Oil Companies Into The Arctic Refuge
There’s a place in the far northeast corner of Alaska that almost no American has ever seen and almost every American would tell you to protect. In June the sun never sets. The light is low and golden for twenty hours and soft and golden for the other four. The tundra goes electric green with cottongrass and dwarf willow and Arctic poppy. The Porcupine River runs cold and clear off the Brooks Range. And 143,000 caribou fan out across the coastal plain to give birth to their calves. They’ve been doing this for thousands of years. The herd walks 1,500 miles from interior Alaska and the Canadian Yukon to the same patch of tundra, every spring, to deliver the next generation onto the same ground their grandmothers were born on.
Right now, this week, the herd is on the plain. The calves are being born. Polar bear mothers, the sea ice failing them, have moved their dens onshore. Snow geese feed in the wetlands. Musk oxen, brought back from extinction in the 1930s, move in slow shaggy ranks across the high ground. More than two hundred bird species nest here every summer. Some flew in from Argentina. Some flew in from New Zealand. Some flew in from the edge of Antarctica. The Gwich’in people, who’ve shared this country with the Porcupine herd for thousands of years, call this place Iizhik Gwats’an Gwandaii Goodlit. The Sacred Place Where Life Begins.
Tomorrow morning at 10 a.m. Alaska time, in an office building in downtown Anchorage, the Bureau of Land Management will open sealed bids on the right to drill it. The only confirmed bidder is the State of Alaska itself, putting up $190 million in taxpayer money to drag oil companies into a refuge they’ve already refused to drill twice.
The only entity that has confirmed it will bid tomorrow is the Alaska Industrial Development and Export Authority. AIDEA is a state-owned Alaska corporation. Its money is Alaska taxpayer money. Three weeks ago, AIDEA’s board voted 6-1 to authorize $190 million for tomorrow’s bidding and the seismic exploration that would follow if it wins anything. That’s on top of the roughly $12 million in Alaska public money AIDEA already spent in 2021 buying refuge leases that have, five years later, produced zero barrels of oil, zero dollars in revenue, and a pile of pending litigation. AIDEA’s existing leases were canceled by the Biden administration, reinstated by a federal judge, and tied up in court ever since.
Let me explain what’s happening here, because the official press releases will not.
AIDEA wants the drilling. The Alaska political establishment has wanted the drilling for fifty years. Two prior federal lease sales on this same land asked whether private industry actually wanted to drill it, and private industry said no. The 2021 sale drew almost no major oil company bids. The 2025 sale drew zero bids of any kind. None. Exxon sat out. So did Chevron. So did Shell and ConocoPhillips. Every one of the six largest American banks refuses to finance Arctic Refuge drilling. Every major oil company has, on the record, in repeated lease sales, walked away.
So the Alaska political class is using state public money to bring the drillers in. AIDEA director Randy Ruaro told the Anchorage Daily News in May, “We’re absolutely interested.” His board voted to spend $190 million the next week. The lone no vote came from Andrew Guy, president of the Indigenous-owned Calista Corp., who said the agency hadn’t explained what the $190 million was actually for. The board went ahead anyway.
AIDEA’s bid serves a single purpose. The state’s development bank locks up acreage tomorrow so that an oil major can take a sublease later, when political weather changes or new federal infrastructure makes the project feasible. Call it what it is. A $190 million Alaska taxpayer downpayment on the destruction of the most pristine wildlife refuge in the country. Alaska is paying nearly a quarter of a billion dollars to make sure the drilling pipeline stays alive when the actual market has rejected it twice.
The Trump administration will call the result a successful sale tomorrow afternoon. The Alaska delegation will call it industry vindication. Alaska taxpayers will eat the $190 million. The federal government will pocket the bid money. The polar bears and the caribou will be one auction closer to gone.
When Congress opened the refuge to drilling in the 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act, the Congressional Budget Office estimated the two mandated lease sales would generate $1.82 billion over ten years. Pro-drilling members of Congress sold the program as a $1 billion offset against the bill’s $1.9 trillion price tag. The actual federal take from the 2021 sale was $8.2 million. The take from the 2025 sale was zero.
When Congress passed the One Big Beautiful Bill Act last summer and mandated four more sales, CBO revised the revenue estimate down to $452 million across the entire ten-year window. Taxpayers for Common Sense, the nonpartisan watchdog that’s tracked this program for a decade, calls even that estimate wildly inflated. Their projection based on twenty years of actual North Slope bidding data is $3 to $30 million in total federal revenue across all four sales combined.
To translate that, 2017 voters were told the program would pay for itself. The actual pace at which the program is paying for itself is roughly the cost of an elevator retrofit on a single Senate office building. We’ve written before about the lie behind ‘unused’ public land and the math that doesn’t add up on public lands logging. This is the same con, run on the same talking points, for the same beneficiaries. The pattern repeats. The federal government promises billions in extractive revenue. Actual revenue arrives in the low millions. The land is ruined regardless.
The reason the math doesn’t work is structural. There are no roads on the coastal plain. The Trans-Alaska Pipeline stops a hundred and twenty miles to the west at Prudhoe Bay. The airstrips, the housing, the processing capacity that any commercial operation would require, all of it would have to be built from scratch, in a place where winter lasts nine months and the working window for surface infrastructure is measured in weeks. A new field in the Refuge would take seven to ten years to develop before the first barrel reached a refinery. Whatever crisis the Trump administration cites tomorrow to justify the sale will be eight years in the rearview by the time any oil moves.
Goldman Sachs ran these numbers in 2017 and called Arctic exploration economically unjustifiable. The market agreed twice. Tomorrow, Alaska public money will try to override the market.
The man running tomorrow’s sale is Doug Burgum, the former North Dakota governor that Trump confirmed as Interior Secretary in January 2025 with a mandate to maximize fossil fuel extraction from federal lands. Burgum’s previous job was running the third-largest oil-producing state in the country. The Associated Press, citing state records, reported that his administration coordinated with oil industry lobbyists on regulatory strategy while his own family was leasing land to oil companies.
In October 2025, Burgum reopened the entire 1.56-million-acre coastal plain to leasing. In December 2025, Trump signed six Congressional Review Act resolutions overturning BLM management plans that had protected the coastal plain along with five other major federal land units. The CRA carries a permanent bar against the agency issuing comparable protections without new congressional action. The same Interior Department also opened the entire Gulf of Mexico oil and gas program by convening the God Squad for the first time in thirty years to exempt the program from the Endangered Species Act. Over the heads of fifty-one Rice’s whales. Tomorrow’s auction is one move in a campaign.
The Gwich’in Steering Committee was unequivocal. “Secretary Burgum’s intentions to pilfer sacred land in the Arctic Refuge to the highest bidder flies in the face of the rights of the Gwich’in as Indigenous people and, quite frankly, in the face of common sense.” On April 28, Steering Committee Executive Director Kristen Moreland sent letters to eight major oil company executives formally requesting they decline to bid tomorrow. The day after, 13 conservation organizations sent a parallel letter to 11 oil executives reminding them of the reputational risk of bidding. As of this writing, none of those companies has publicly confirmed they will. None has publicly confirmed they won’t.
Look at the numbers, then think about what they mean.
The Porcupine caribou herd has dropped from 218,000 animals in 2017 to 143,000 in the most recent 2026 survey. A thirty-five percent decline in nine years. The coastal plain is their calving ground. The geographic reason there’s still a Porcupine herd at all.
The Southern Beaufort Sea polar bear population, the bears that den on the coastal plain, has dropped to a draft 2025 estimate of 819 bears. The 1980s estimate was upwards of 1,500. They’ve been listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act since 2008, the law Doug Burgum’s Interior Department is currently dismantling through regulation. Three-quarters of the coastal plain is now their primary denning habitat, because sea ice denning is no longer viable. The mothers dig their dens in snowdrifts behind the dunes. They give birth in those dens in winter. The cubs are smaller than a softball when they’re born and weigh roughly a pound. They cannot be moved.
Seismic exploration uses 90,000-pound thumper trucks that pound the tundra in winter to map subsurface geology. The forward-looking infrared technology the oil industry uses to locate polar bear dens before driving over them has been documented missing more than half of known dens in field-tested conditions. When the technology misses a den, the truck drives over it. When the mother bear flees her den early, the cubs die.
Read that again. The technology misses more than half the time. When it misses, the cubs die. Tomorrow morning, Alaska is committing $190 million of public money to bring that equipment into the highest-density polar bear denning habitat in the United States. The hunters and anglers who love the Refuge know this as well as the scientists do. The same audience who saw the 1.4 million acres of the Dalton Corridor transferred to Alaska last month, severing the wildlife corridor between Gates of the Arctic, the Arctic Refuge, and two adjacent refuges. The same audience who watched 58 million acres of national forest get opened to industrial logging in March. The pattern is the pattern. The country we hand to our kids will have less of this in it every year we tolerate this.
Two full ANWR lease sales under the original 2017 Tax Cuts and Jobs Act mandate happened. Both flopped. CBO cut its revenue forecast in half. The banks won’t finance. The majors won’t bid. The Indigenous nation whose existence depends on the caribou opposes it. The polar bears are at a fraction of their historical numbers. The hunters and anglers who rely on those public lands are watching the access disappear. And the State of Alaska is throwing a quarter of a billion dollars in public money at the problem tomorrow to keep the political show alive.
Ninety-nine percent of one million public comments on the original program opposed drilling. Two-thirds of registered voters consistently oppose drilling in polling. The United Nations Committee on the Elimination of Racial Discrimination has sounded alarms three times about the human rights violations entailed in opening the calving grounds without Gwich’in consent. Multiple federal lawsuits are pending against the 2025 Record of Decision under the APA, the Wilderness Act, ANILCA, the Refuge Act, NEPA, the ESA, and the underlying statutory authorities. The Center for Biological Diversity and Defenders of Wildlife have served notice of intent to sue under the Endangered Species Act over polar bear impacts. The administration is conducting the sale anyway.
It’s a familiar pattern from this Interior Department. Move fast. Transfer the asset. Generate facts on the ground. Let the courts try to unwind them later. Once a lease sells, it encumbers the land for years. Active leases generate environmental reviews and seismic permits and road petitions and infrastructure proposals and an institutional momentum the courts struggle to undo even after they rule the underlying decisions unlawful. That’s the point of holding the sale anyway.
We Will Never Forgive or Forget Those Who Sell Our Public Lands is the name of a piece we ran last summer. It feels more applicable every week. Tomorrow morning, the State of Alaska is adding a $190 million line item to that ledger.
The U.S. House and Senate hold the keys here. The OBBBA mandate that compels tomorrow’s sale was written by Congress and signed by the president, and only Congress can rescind it. Find out how your senators and representative voted on every public lands measure of 2025 and 2026 in the Congressional Public Lands Scorecard. Call them. Tell them you want HR 3067, the Arctic Refuge Protection Act, advanced. Tell them you want the OBBBA Arctic Refuge mandate repealed. Tell them you noticed.
Tell them you noticed that the only confirmed bidder is using public money to bring oil companies to a place those companies don’t want to be.
Tell them you noticed the math has never worked.
Tell them you noticed what they’re selling, and you know we don’t get this one back.
Raise some hell,
Will
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