'Amazing but Also Concerning': Weird Wildlife Ventures to Northern Alaska

By Oliver Milman, Guardian UK

23 April 18

Arctic Dispatches, part 2: As the Arctic heats up, residents of Utqia?vik are experiencing first contact with unusual species that are making their way polewards

ast July, Nagruk Harcharek was savouring a bucolic visit to a cabin that sits on the lip of the Chipp river, deep in the Alaskan Arctic, when something caught his eye. Shimmering on a rack where he hangs his caught whitefish to dry was, astonishingly, a dragonfly.

“I’d been going to camp there for 30 years and I’d never seen one, I couldn’t freaking believe it,” said Harcharek. “I was amazed. I just thought, ‘Wow’.”

Dragonflies aren’t completely alien to Alaska, but the sight seemed as jarring as watching a hippopotamus stroll the Champs-Élysées. As the Arctic heats up, at around twice the rate of the global average, its remote but hardy communities are experiencing first contact with species that are flying, scurrying and swimming northwards.

The task of documenting anecdotal sightings of these newcomers falls to Craig George, a wildlife biologist with a snowy beard, spectacles and well-worn hiking boots. George, originally from New York, has spent four decades observing Alaskan wildlife but in recent years has generated sheaves of records on unusual arrivals.

Last summer, a child was stung by a wasp, the first time anyone could remember this happening in Utqia?vik, a coastal town formerly known as Barrow that is the most northerly settlement in the US.

A sphinx moth, a species with a wingspan as much as 5in across, was reported by a baffled resident as being some sort of bird. An actual bird, a kestrel, which has gone from rare to almost commonplace in just a few years, was tended to by George after it sought refuge in his workplace, the North Slope Borough. Arctic squirrels, previously little seen, have also taken up residence around town.

“People here often don’t know what these sub-Arctic species are and to be honest, sometimes I don’t either,” said George as he looked through his records, muttering about the the odd creature (“Hmm, rusty blackbird”) as he went.

“One reason I’ve stayed here so long is because every year there’s something new,” he said. “It’s amazing but also a bit concerning. The change is happening so, so fast.”

In 2009, Maasak Brower, a Utqia?vik security guard, caught a northern wolffish just half a dozen miles from town. The species, normally found in the north Atlantic, was previously unknown to the Arctic. Brower, a cigarette dangling from his mouth, posed triumphantly with the oddity, which is an unlovely, grimacing creature.

In the near decade since, various scientists have been amassing evidence of wider patterns. Beavers have moved into the Arctic Circle, damming more than 50 streams. As shrubs have started to blossom in tundra regions, snowshoe hares and moose have also pushed north.

Polar bears that spend more time on land as their sea ice habitat shrinks are coming into contact with grizzly bears that have wandered further north – resulting in “grolar” or “pizzly” bear hybrids.

Separating freak incursions from long-term shifts is a delicate process. Birds can be disorientated or knocked off course while migrating, a pulse of favorable weather may spur an adventurous fish or mammal to meander beyond their acknowledged ranges.

But broadly speaking, as the Arctic’s temperature climbs, sea ice recedes and soil long in the grip of permafrost start to thaw, animals are shifting polewards from the south. Some existing inhabitants, like ringed seals, walruses and polar bears, that rely heavily upon snow cover or sturdy sea ice platforms risk being pushed off the edge of the world.

Earlier this year, scientists at the University of California calculated that for every 10 degrees north from the 32nd parallel you move, spring now arrives four days earlier than it did a decade ago. For the Arctic, this daunting equation means that spring has hastened by more than two weeks in just the time it took for Barack Obama to run for the presidency and be replaced by Donald Trump.

This warping of timescales is causing the complex web of interactions between predator and prey, pollinator and plant, mate and mate to unravel. Another looming issue is the creeping advance of new and exotic diseases into the Arctic, with unknown ramifications.

A recent study of connected species around the world – such as sand eels that are devoured by guillemots, caribou and their favoured diet of vegetation – found that, on average, these interactions have shifted four days earlier per decade since 1981.

“Things are becoming out of sync,” said Heather Kharouba, the University of Ottawa biologist who led the research. The Arctic is, as is the case in many of the climate-driven changes under way in the world, the most extreme example of this.

“The whole Arctic ecosystem is changing,” said Kharouba. “We are seeing drastic changes and it’s going to affect human populations.”

Such unpredictability is playing out among whale populations, which are closely watched by the Iñupiat Eskimo subsistence hunter communities that dot the northern coast of Alaska. There were initial concerns that bowhead whales, the primary species targeted in spring and autumn whale hunts, could suffer as the sea ice retreats.

Instead, while increasing numbers of orcas and humpback whales have moved into the Arctic, the bowhead whales have remained relatively stable. As long as the sea ice is strong and plentiful, the native hunters in this treeless and unforgiving environment should be able to continue to pull in their prodigious food source from the sea, as they have done for several thousand years.

For now, though, life continues on the north slope of Alaska. There are whales to be caught as the ice breaks up, snowmobiles to tinker with, polar bears to be wary of. Not all change is bad, either.

“We caught red salmon up here in the past summer, which never used to happen before,” said Harcharek. “We normally got chum salmon, which is basically dog food. So everyone is pumped.”