Author Topic: What your federal government does in Alaska  (Read 369 times)

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Offline thxmrgarand

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What your federal government does in Alaska
« on: March 30, 2009, 09:25:03 AM »
Here's a story running in Alaska newspapers.  Because of federal regulation, over 60,000 Alaskans hunt and fish with virtually no limit or regulation.  Spouses of those people also can hunt and fish with no practical oversight, even as aircraft, snowmobiles and boats allow travelling further from residences.  As you might expect, federal and state bureaucrats lock horns often over harvest limits, harvest seasons, methods, etc.  Hunting waterfowl during the nesting season and especially during molting when birds cannot fly has been especially controversial, and some Alaska hunters/conservationists have been disappointed that DU has chosen to stay out of the issue.  I have had duck hunters ask me why the heck I use nontoxic shot (when they do not), and I tell them that not all Americans are created equal.



Federal eider rules may limit Alaska subsistence hunting
Dan Joling/The Associated Press

Originally published Sunday, March 29, 2009 at 11:04 a.m.
Updated Sunday, March 29, 2009 at 2:12 p.m.

 
The Associated Press
 
The Associated Press
ANCHORAGE, Alaska - A diminutive sea duck with a white head and a blue wing could bring restrictions to one of the last virtually unregulated hunts in America.

Inupiat Eskimos on Alaska's northern coast for centuries of springs have welcomed the return of waterfowl as a source of fresh meat after eight months of winter. They have been free to take almost whatever they want, whenever they want, without bag limits.

That could change this year. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services has proposed rules for subsistence hunting to protect Steller's eiders, a threatened species whose breeding numbers in the United States have dropped to an estimated 500 birds.

Steller's eiders are not sought by Inupiat hunters for meat, but they flock with the white-fronted geese, black brant and king and common eiders prized by hunters. Despite years of trying to educate hunters, federal officials found 27 dead Steller's eiders last year, including 20 that biologists confirmed had been shot. In one particularly disturbing discovery, a dead female Steller's eider was piled with carcasses of six juveniles outside a hunting blind.

Proposed rules would shorten hunting hours, ban shooting near roads, increase law enforcement presence, and set up a potential draconian measure: The agency's Alaska regional director could close all subsistence hunting to protect Steller's eiders.

The proposals are not sitting well with people who fought in court and Congress to retain rights to their land and the animals that live on it.

"Part of subsistence is not just going out and killing your food. It's the freedom of going and getting the food from your land," said Barrett Ristroph, an attorney for the North Slope Borough. "Once someone comes in and says, 'You have to do this, you have to do that,' it kind of takes away what subsistence is all about."

The dispute pits people trying to preserve a unique species against people equally passionate about preserving a way of life.

There are four species of eiders on the North Slope. Steller's are the smallest, averaging 17-18 inches long.

Both sexes have a blue patch with a white border on their upper wings, but while females and juveniles are a mottled dark brown all year, the males' breeding plumage is magnificent. They have a white head with a greenish tuft and small black eye patches, a black back, white shoulders, and a chestnut breast and belly.

The sea ducks were once common on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta but breeding pairs for decades have not been seen anywhere except the Arctic Coastal Plain, with a concentration near Barrow, America's northernmost community. After breeding, Alaska birds and eastern Russia birds migrate to southwest Alaska.

Besides their plumage, Steller's eiders stand out for their breeding habits: They don't breed every year and appear to assess environmental conditions before deciding whether to lay eggs.

"What we think they're looking for, when they're looking for a good year, is if brown lemmings are abundant," said USFWS biologist Ted Swem, the endangered species branch chief for northern Alaska.

Arctic foxes prey on birds that nest on the ground but mostly eat brown lemmings. So do snowy owls and pomarine jaegers.

The owls and jaegers are fierce defenders of their nesting habitat and appear to offer a measure of protection to Steller's eiders from foxes. That's despite owls and jaegers themselves preying on eider nests to a lesser degree.

When there are few brown lemmings around, snowy owls - think Hedwig from Harry Potter - move elsewhere to find alternate prey and Steller's eiders choose not to nest. Between 1992 and 2008, they nested in roughly half those years, Swem said.

The new rules would set hunting hours to a half-hour before sunset until sundown - a seemingly silly requirement in the land of midnight sun, except that some Steller's eiders killed last year were shot in August, a month when the sun finally dips below the horizon. Sticking to daylight hours, federal officials hope, will allow hunters to distinguish between a Steller's eider and other birds.

The rules create a no-hunting buffer zone along roads outside Barrow. The buffer would have protected 91 percent of Steller's eiders nests documented in 2008.

The rules would allow federal law enforcement officers to inspect hunters' bags to monitor birds in their possession. The recommended fine for killing a Steller's eider is $400 plus $50 per bird.

Federal agents are sensitive to the resentment toward officers patrolling the hunting grounds. Both sides remember what happened nearly 50 years ago in a clash between western and indigenous interests.

A Washington D.C. official with the federal Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife decided to enforce provisions of a 1916 treaty with Canada that banned hunting from March through August and made no provision for subsistence hunting.

Federal game wardens in May 1961 arrested and confiscated the gun of a Barrow state representative, John Nusunginya, when he shot a couple of spring geese. A few days later, 138 hunters showed up with ducks in their hands at the warden's door and demanded to be arrested.

The Barrow "Duck-In" protest became a galvanizing moment for Alaska's indigenous people asserting their rights. They received national sympathy and federal officials eventually dropped charges and backed down from halting a hunt that had negligible effect on waterfowl populations.

Ristroph, the assistant North Slope Borough attorney, said the objections to the proposed rules start with the science behind them. Steller's eiders have always been a minor species on the North Slope and their numbers fluctuate up and down, she said.

"As far as the eiders go, traditional knowledge indicates that there were never very many Steller's eiders on the North Slope.

If numbers are declining, she said, it's not necessarily because of hunting.

"The traditional knowledge here indicates that predators are a huge problem, like foxes, seagulls, ravens. It seems like there's not enough attention to that," she said. Pollution and global warming could be factors.

She said 56 percent of the households in Barrow get at least half their food through subsistence. If the waterfowl hunt closes, hunters will have to travel farther or buy grocery store food.

"If people had to switch to the store-bought food to take the place of the subsistence food, it would really be damaging to the health. We think that's something the Fish and Wildlife Service should have considered when they proposed this regulation."

Stan Pruszenski, special agent in charge for the USFWS's Office of Law Enforcement, said the agency's attempts to phase in enforcement has been pushed forward by the circumstances of the Steller's eider.

"Oftentimes the regulations aren't viewed as necessary in that rural folks believe they have a history of self-regulation and they know how to conserve and protect wildlife," Pruszenski said. "In this particular instance, with eiders being threatened, the service is attempting to institute some additional conservation measures."

Swem said Steller's eiders in Russia are not considered threatened but losing the U.S. population would be significant.

"It's a fascinating bird with a unique and fascinating breeding ecology," he said. "To lose it as a breeding bird, to lose it as a member of the breeding avifauna of Alaska, to me would signal a loss. That would be a change for the worse."

Offline JimFromTN

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Re: What your federal government does in Alaska
« Reply #1 on: March 30, 2009, 10:37:22 AM »
Poor Eskimos.  They won't be aloud to just kill whatever they feel like regardless of whether they will actually eat it or not.  I believe there was some discussion on the Alaska hunting forum about the carribou slaughter where eskimos went out and slaughtered carribou and left the carcases to rot.  They are not exactly people of the earth.  There is no greater disgusting slob hunter than the eskimos in AK as far as I'm concerned.  They make people who spotlight deer seem like conservationists.

Offline mirage1988

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Re: What your federal government does in Alaska
« Reply #2 on: March 30, 2009, 10:46:17 AM »
From that one incident all eskimos are slob hunters? Kind of a wide paintbrush isn't it?

Offline JimFromTN

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Re: What your federal government does in Alaska
« Reply #3 on: March 30, 2009, 11:12:50 AM »
Why would anyone have an issue with the government banning the killing of endangered species when the only reason they are killed is for $hits and giggles or they are too stupid to take the time to learn the difference between an eider and a goose?  If I shoot a sparrow hawk on a dove field by accident, they game warden isn't going to care that I did not know the difference.  The game warden will give me a ticket for being stupid which I would deserve.  The eskimos feel they should have the right to kill whatever they want whenever they want for whatever reason they want.  They are the epitomy of the slob hunter.

Offline mirage1988

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Re: What your federal government does in Alaska
« Reply #4 on: March 30, 2009, 11:22:02 AM »
You know this how? A few posts and news articles? They were native long before the white man came. Just because a few punks went on a shooting spree doesn't mean all eskimo's are slobs! We have the same problem in minnesota with the indians and their "tribal rights" raping the lakes in the spring when the walleyes are spawning, but it would be a stretch to say "all indians are slob fisherman". It only takes one rotten apple to spoil the whole barrel.

Offline JimFromTN

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Re: What your federal government does in Alaska
« Reply #5 on: March 30, 2009, 11:38:40 AM »
It was not just a few.  It was the entire village.  The elders actually told them to just take good cuts of meat and leave the rest.

The fact that they would oppose this law proves that they are slob hunters.

Offline thxmrgarand

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Re: What your federal government does in Alaska
« Reply #6 on: March 30, 2009, 01:54:04 PM »
My view is in part that we are all Americans and no one should be more equal than any other, especially due to race.  The federal government disagrees, and they continue to screw up Alaska.  One reason the federal government has so radically mismanaged Alaska is that there are no Indian reservations here (one small exception on an island just north of British Columbia) so federal mandates about special race-based hunting and fishing rights for Indians apply to all Indians in all of Alaska.  Also, there is no DNA testing or any other blood quantum test, and people with names that phonetically sound like Alaska Indians can and do hunt polar bear, walrus, etc. while someone named Smith from the same town in the Lower 48 (or Alaska for that matter) cannot (and that is only a small part of it).  Moreover, it's the resource that suffers, and as anyone might guess, since the state cannot regulate so-called subsistence hunting they must bear down on the hunting and fishing they can regulate (ours).

This is not a partisan issue but one of Washington, DC owning almost all the land in Alaska and sending bureaucrats up here for stints of 2 to 4 years to tell us how to live.  I am a registered Republican but this cannot be blamed on Obama.  Also, our current governor is more likely to stand up to the federal government than any we have had since statehood.  Her husband is part Indian but she supports responsible management of the resource and equal access for everyone.