Elma and Long Islands

An elma long time to be stuck on a beach

Monday, July 22nd 2024

Today’s adventure takes us to the Sanak Island group for a fox recheck. They were eradicated, with a recheck in 2007, and we’re following up on that. And of course, to see what the western spread of slugs might be. Are they here? Golly I hope they’re not here.

One group goes to Caton Island, and I head to a lil one called Elma with Ray and Brie. A fog has rolled in, pretty normal for this part of the world, and the only way we have to navigate is Brie’s ipad. Soon the Tiĝlax̂ vanishes. An arctic tern checks out our skiff before disappearing into the fog too. It’s eerie out there. 

We land on a shallow beach to the south side of the island and walk the skiff through eelgrass. Ray heads off north to check an inland lake while Brie and I go east along the beach looking for slugs and animal sign.

We find lots of speckly brown slugs and a few teeny tiny black ones, but after checking the ID chart they don’t seem to be the invasive Europeans. We collect samples to make sure, as well as picking up some scat we find for Mike and Katie (the USDA mammal experts) to check out. Brie is incredibly knowledgeable about seabirds but mammal stuff is new to her. It’s been fun watching the different biologists learn bits and pieces of each others’ areas of expertise. I’m picking up scraps of everything that I’m sure will make me incredibly annoying on hikes.

Elma is lovely - misty and covered in waist-high wildflowers with gulls nesting deep inside. We accidentally flush a big fluffy gull chick from the grass and it bumbles out into the surf, walking away into nowhere while the adult gulls caw at it to turn around.

We also find remains of a few different animals - an otter skeleton, a dead mink whale, and a cow skull (an ominous preview of this afternoon).

While we’re tromping around I ask Brie how she got into this work. She’s one of three unit biologists, each is responsible for part of the Refuge. Brie has the Alaska Peninsula and the Gulf of Alaska. She was an outdoor kid, like all these folks, growing up in Maine and studying Biology in college. There she took an ornithology class, which she found really interesting, and focused on seabirds after that. She spent several seasons as a biotech on Kasatochi camp so was very fond of it, but then the volcano exploded and wiped it all out. (More about Kasatochi later.)

Brie asks me why I’m here. I can’t imagine how anybody wouldn’t trade a firstborn to do this but she pointed out that not everyone likes putting on clammy waders 2-3 times a day and hiking through armpit-deep grass to look for slugs before decontaminating your boots in a tub of bleach. Fair. I think this is my precise type of fun though.

Lunch is chicken burgers, FOUR salads, and halibut soup. Aaron and John seem to pull a halibut out of the water every time the boat slows down so there is a lot of it on the menu. It’s one million dollars per pound back home so I am extremely happy about this.

Afterwards Ray, Brie, Lauren and I head out again into the dense fog, in a skiff with Ray’s lavender bandana as its noble flag. It’s going to be a four-mile ride to Long Island. Everyone is laughing as the second skiff slows down looking a little lost… til we realize that they’re having mechanical trouble. Ray turns around to help them out.

Soon Skiff 2 has joined us on Skiff 1 and we’re all going to Long Island together, pretty much at a walking pace. It’s so slow I get out my sketchbook and draw. Everyone is in a cheerful mood pretty much 100% of the time even when something goes wrong.

Long Island is a fitting name because it winds up being our home for a long time. It’s another cow island, and like Chirikof and Wosnesenski it’s extremely overgrazed. It’s also very much a toilet - we pick through cowpies along the rocky shore and wade through an unpleasantly glossy marsh dotted with cottongrass. Skulls are everywhere. At least these cows are a lot more skittish of humans than the other two islands, so we aren’t as worried about getting trampled. We are nervously mooed at from a distance, though.

The team splits up to look for mammals and slugs. The slug search feels a bit half-hearted - there’s no vegetation left, because the cows have eaten it all. It’s such a contrast from lush Elma this morning. 

There are a LOT of vole-hills though. It’s an entire vole-village, with ten-inch high hillocks dotting the landscape and their happy occupants waddling up and down their runs. Katie was absolutely gobsmacked at their size. “They’re the fattest voles I’ve ever seen. Like bratwurst with legs. Like dachshunds. They’re basically ermines.” As she tells of their legendary girth their size grows bigger and bigger til I’m pretty sure she’s describing the cows, but it’s in good spirits. This many voles means there aren’t any predators to keep their populations down, which means no foxes. Hooray!

We finish our search and return to the landing beach only to discover the skiff is going to be an hour late. So we park it on a driftwood log and I finally have some time to sketch. I go around the corner and find a non-cowed out place to draw some of the wild coastline. Balancing exploring, doing survey work, talking to everyone, and sitting still to draw is tricky, but I’m trying to carve out a little time when I can. I need to remember that as gifted as I am at finding slugs and poop, my job here is to draw.

Soon I hear on the radio that the skiffs are coming! Two of them appear out of the fog like avenging angels. Kim, who is in the running for Biggest Sweetheart on a ship of sweethearts, has sent a thermos of hot water and tea for us poor stranded urchins.

It’s a looooong cold bumpy skiff ride back to the Tiĝlax̂. I love skiff rides but I’m extremely happy to see the boat again. 

Kim has caught a massive halibut while we were gone and foraged lamb’s quarters for our salads. She also found a bottle of mysterious Chinese pills on a beachwalk, still freshness sealed. No one is brave enough, not even Captain John.

 Dinner is beef stir fry, tofu broccoli, lots of ice cream and a hot shower for dessert. I’m kind of horrified to see my legs at the end of the day. Getting in and out of the skiff is called “riding the elevator” - you wait til it rises up a little on a swell and step into the back of the boat while holding on to a line. I mistimed it a few days in and have a really nasty bruise growing. Combined with all the rocks and oars and metal posts and mystery objects I’ve smashed my body into I’ve got a pretty good collection going. I’m more than a little proud of it.