Alaska pioneers oral history transcript

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Transcripts of

(Unedited nor corrected)

Alaska Pioneers

1. Jim King 1

2. Cal Lensink 42

3. Hank Hansen 62

4. Jerry Lawhorn 86

5. Tom Wardleigh 93

6. Brina Kessel 99

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Jim King

I worked for the US Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska for 33 years, starting out

as a game management agent in territorial days when the Fish and Wildlife

Service operated as a Game Department in Alaska and we did all the wildlife

work that was done in Alaska then. So, it was a job that included things like duck

banding and game surveys and then a big part of it was law enforcement and --

Well, there was some early game laws that applied to Alaska and some that were

designed for Alaska, but they were kind of political and local oriented and it

wasn't until 1925 that a real game law was passed and there was a set up

designed for monitoring what was going on with the Game Commission, the

Alaska Game Commission, it was called.

They hired local guys and even when I was hired I didn't go through the normal

government process of being on a register or what not. I just filled out some

employment papers and you know, never did take a civil service test, I guess.

So, it was a system that worked pretty good but what had been going on was that

you had all this hoard of people that showed up with the gold rush and no rules

so, they were doing what ever was handy with wildlife.

Judge Wickersham, an honorable and well respected important person in Alaska,

he described going up the Cantishna River. He was going to climb Mount

McKinley and he had a big group of people and they shot a moose every two

days because they couldn't keep the meat and they'd have fresh meat for a

couple of days and they'd have to get another one. He did comment on that, that

it was a shame they were wasting all this meat.

Well, that sort of thing was going on, foxes were worth a lot of money and some

trappers would go out and shoot a moose or a caribou and fill it, you know scatter

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strychnine, strychnine all around and foxes would come. And they'd, they'd pick

up the foxes but also an array of birds and ravens and raptors of one sort or

another and bears and wolverines and those things would become a really

unattractive mess for if somebody had been using strychnine. So, those early

game laws ended the use of poisons for one thing and, and there was a lot of

support for that.

Yes, that's right. The, let's see there was a, Alfred Brooks, who the Brooks

Range is named after, wrote a book about Alaska resources. He was one of the

first people to talk about the oil seeps on the north slope, which the natives of

course, knew about. That they could burn this stuff that came squirting out here

and there or bubbling out.

But, he had said in this book, that he wrote somewhere in the early part of the

20th century, that it was too bad that the beaver and the martin and the sea otter

were on the road to extinction and would soon be gone and, but that was the

price of progress. And so then in 1925 for the first time there was real interest in,

in curbing that form of progress to a certain degree and so, they did a good job.

They stopped the, those early guys, they stopped the use of poisons, market

hunting and this business of wasting meat, because you couldn't keep it. And all

the really wasteful practices and the people that lived in the bush by in large

supported that. And the game wardens were kind of part of the country and were

not considered oh, invaders or government bureaucracy that was being abusive

of the people. They could see immediately that this was helping.

Well, there was a guy named Sam White that lived in Fairbanks in the late 20's.

And when they were just starting to develop airplanes and he had a big dog team

and he described as a group of or a pack of free thinking dogs that he would tie

up to his sled and go off looking for violators with the dogs hooping and howling.

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and spend all his time tending his dogs. And he was the one that recognized the

possibility of airplanes.

And I think it was 1929 that he learned to fly and bought a little airplane and flew

out and caught somebody doing something wrong, shooting cow moose or

something. And he proceeded to use this airplane some and he got a lot of

criticism from it. And there were memos in the files when I went to work in

Fairbanks scolding Sam White for being out in his airplane on working time.

He went and did a moose count with his airplane and there was a memo telling

him to take annual leave for the time he was in his airplane and get out with his

dog team and do a proper moose count.

So, there was a lot of that and, it got rough and he quit over that but by the time

he quit he had pretty well set the pattern of using airplanes. As far as I know he

may have been the first person in the world that tried to use airplanes for any

kind of conservation work.

And I think the thing that really got it going was he and Clarence Rhode made a

joint patrol along the border with the Canadian Mounties. And there was a lot of

illegal traffic and fur back and forth across the border and they were able to

gather up a number of these people that were doing that.

One of the things was that Alaska had a bounty on wolves so every Canadian

was trying to send his wolves to Alaska to get the fifty-dollar bounty and things

like that were going on.

Well, the biological survey went back, what to the late 1800's but in 1940 I think it

was that the Biological Survey and the Bureau of commercial fish or the Bureau

of Fisheries or something were combined into the Fish and Wildlife Service so

that was, that was eleven or twelve years before my time started.

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Well, this border patrol with the Canadians well, that kind of caught the public

fancy. And there was stories in the newspapers about it and got the attention I

guess, of people higher up in the Fish and Wildlife Service or Biological Survey

then. And they begin to recognize the potential and then World War II came

along and of course, everybody got drafted or into you know.

World War II hit Alaska pretty hard and Alaska was invaded and that had a

dramatic effect on everybody that was there. So, the Fish and Wildlife Service

kind of almost vanished during that period and there was a big influx of military.

And perhaps another abusive period on the wildlife. There was a lot of

controversy over that and books have been written about conflicts with the

military. and but, After the war then this rebuilding process went into effect.

Clarence Road had, had been on this border patrol and he became first in, he

learned to fly as a result of that and then spent some time setting up an aircraft

division in Anchorage. And as a result of, of that work, he kind of caught the

attention as a good manager and organizer. And he went on to be the regional

director of the Alaska region. And he wanted everybody in the organization that

wanted to fly, and he encouraged young people, like me to get a license. And,

and you know it was easier to learn to fly then to, to not in a way.

I was stationed in Fairbanks and we had three airplanes there then and I think

there was only four agents.

Starting, I went to work in 1951, in Fairbanks, so.

I went through the normal you know, flight school kind of thing in Fairbanks.And

then they had a rule then that you had to have a license and a hundred hours of

experience before you could then go through a check ride with the aircraft

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division people. And then initially you would be authorized to fly under

somebody's direction. And there was a very experienced pilot in Fairbanks and

in charge of the station. And I flew with him a lot and, and you know for the next

two or three years, after I got authorized to fly, I was supposed to not make any

trips that I didn't check out with him and --

Well, I was, the beginning of waterfowl surveys was occurring then. You know

this was the same period that they were developing in the prairies. And we were

a little behind so initially in the early 50's some of the game management agents

were doing waterfowl surveys in their own districts. And it produced a product

that was hard to deal with.

There were some biologists then who in Juneau and other places that were trying

to put a forecast to the fall flight. And as soon as he could manage it Roads

wanted to get a full time waterfowl biologist assigned to this.

And so about 1956 he brought on Hank Hanson who had been a World War II

fighter pilot and an instructor in waterfowl at Washington State. And had worked

for Washington State Wildlife Department doing waterfowl, duck work.

And so, Hank kind of reorganized these, initial efforts that the game agents had

been working on. And the other key figure was Dave Spencer, who had been

involved with starting transect surveys in the prairies, and he did the first

waterfowl surveys on the Yukon delta in 1949.

And well that was when descriptions of the waterfowl, before that people just

talked about clouds of waterfowl, or that kind of thing but no numbers. And

Spencer identified the big goose nesting areas on the Yukon delta for brant and

emperor geese. And he wrote a paper called Alaska's or American's greatest

goose brant nesting area. And it was the first real description of that except oh,

there'd been people on the ground before that had come before like E.W. Nelson

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who toured with a dog team on the Yukon delta and Olaus Maurie and some

other people had come by dog team to Hooper bay on the Yukon delta and then

stayed till mid summer and they described the birds there in some detail.

And there was two or three books written about that but it wasn't till these

airplane surveys that you could really describe what was going on, on the Yukon

delta and that was sort of true of all the big valleys in Alaska and the big coastal

plains.

Well, that started in '49 with Spencer extending the systems that he'd helped

develop on the, on the prairies.

Well, they set up a 16 mile strip usually marked with a pencil on a map and then

the pilot and a person on the right would fly along this strip at about a hundred

feet and counted all the birds within an eighth of mile. And there were various

ways to learn how to judge the eighth of a mile strip. And so, if you flew a 16 mile

transact and counted all the birds for an eighth of a mile on each side, you had a

four mile square sample, that would be a quarter of a 16 miles.

And so then you could take the data from that and apply random sampling

statistics to, if you did enough of these things to determine you know, some

sampling error and come up with a pretty good figure. You learn pretty quick

whether you need to do more or you'd done enough and that sort of thing.

Well, then after Spencer started do that on the Yukon delta, it wasn’t known how

to set these things and that '49 survey he, he did a variety of patterns with these

things and then other people set them up in the other valleys. It became evident

that the really thickest, densest duck populations weren't on the Yukon delta they

were on the Yukon flats. Right in the northern part of the Yukon river valley which

just touches the Arctic circle.

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And people hadn't paid much attention to that area before the airplane because

in the summer time it was just a big boggy place. It was hard to get around. The

natives there moved to the river in the summer and then the country was pretty

empty.

In the wintertime, people were running around with dog teams and hunting

moose and trapping but in the summer it was just, people weren't out there until

airplanes came along. Well, there was a little bit of people out first thing in the

spring shooting muskrats but after the muskrats were gone, all the nesting

season, the area just wasn't, wasn't useful.

Well, it came here to Patuxent and was used in, in the forecasts and the

regulation setting process and, you know, it evolved over time. One of the things

that of course was immediately obvious was that you didn't see everything when

you were flying a, you know going at 90 miles an hour across the tundra and

things are going by pretty fast.

And so they started working on a correction factor for the things you didn't see

and there was a lot of work on that done in the prairies where they could send a,

a ground crew along a road at the same time they were sending an airplane

overhead. And you know, they actually could do it simultaneously and the guys

on the ground would come up with a figure for what was on the lake and then

compare with, with what the pilots saw, lake by lake actually.

And that continues and they do change the correction factor every year in the

prairies but that doesn't work in Alaska cause there wasn't any roads to, to run

down. So, they had some sort of standard correction factor for a number of

years. I don't know how they came out with it but, it was very, way below so for a

number of years it showed Alaska didn't produce very many birds because we

didn't have a proper correction factor. And actually Bruce got into that with a

helicopter a few years ago and, and now there are pretty good correction factors

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for Alaska that show that Alaska actually produces a lot more birds then were

originally thought. This is always kind of a discovery process.

Well, yeah, it started with the district agents you know, and then statehood came

along and, and law enforcement authority went to the state for wildlife. And so

the game management agents, such as myself, were either transferred outside

or, or went into another job. And I became a refuge manager then and then I was

the refuge manager on the Yukon delta for a few years and then switched. to

Hank Hanson transferred to, actually to, to this area, to Washington and so I

then had the survey job which I did for 20 years. But it was kind of a, initially it

was a discovery process.

There were more oh, little river deltas that we looked at and we looked at

distribution of swans and separated the trumpeter swan from the, the tundra

swan nesting areas. We got more into banding birds and determined where the,

see a lot of the white fronted geese from Alaska. They're all over Alaska, half of

them go down the Pacific flyway to California and the other half go east of the

mountains to Texas.

And you know, these were kind of exciting things to learn. And then in this period

the new states first senator, one of the first senators, Ernest Greening decided he

needed to bring home a big chunk of money to improve the economy in Alaska.

And the, the way he was going to do it was to dam up the Yukon and create the,

the Lake Erie size impoundment and the biggest hydro project in the United

States, bigger then any other hydra project in Russia. This sort of flooded the

entire Yukon flats. And it, the dam was to be at a little village called Rampart so

the project became the Rampart Dam Project.

And there was enough concern at that time there was oh, legislation requiring

wildlife studies for hydra projects before they were, were done. And so there was

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so many to, to study the fish in the Yukon, which were important. King salmon

and dog salmon both came that far up in big numbers and native populations

were dependent on these fish.

And then these early transact counts had shown large numbers of ducks on the

Yukon Flats so we had two years to do a duck study there. Cal Lensing set up

plots and did production studies and I spent two summers there banding ducks.

And we banded about , I think 18,000 ducks that were a variety of species. That

video you had, showed people at Canvasback Lake. We named that, We caught

some Canvasbacks there.

But the interesting thing about these ducks that we banded, there was they

distributed. I don't know, to 40 other states and all the provinces to Ontario. And

the canvas backs that we caught there, lots of them wound up in Chesapeake

Bay and they were hunted in places like Fingerlakes in New York. We got a lot

of our bands and the, oh, the lesser scaup were hunted heavily in, in Minnesota

and all the way down the Mississippi flyway to Louisiana in, in big numbers. And

that's a, you know, our survey showed that scaup were a big producer on the

flats, so this was kind of exciting and suddenly wildlife people began to think

more about hey, this place is producing something for us. and the International

Association of Fish and Wildlife Commissioners, that's an organization that

changes it's name every few years so I probably haven't got it right.

(Tape change)

Well, Clarence Road who was the regional director in the 50's was a pilot and --

Well, there were extensive ground studies which is necessary to you know, count

ducklings and that sort of thing and Cal Lensing did these plot counts to get a

feel for the productivity of the area and then I did this banding and these birds

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just went swish all over the country and some of them got as far as the

Caribbean and some of them got as far as Panama.

And it showed that here this valley in Alaska was producing something for people

all over North America and Central America and it is a unique place. I don't see

people talking about what a unique thing this Yukon Flats is but it’s, we used to

talk about it as a sun bowl because it's on the arctic circle and it's protected from

the coast by mountains in all directions and so protected from storms.

And the arctic sun just goes round and round in the spring you get a type of

heating that's not normal in the arctic because of the protection the hills give it.

And these lakes we were banding ducks on, we actually measured 70 degree

water temperatures, which I don't know if there's anyplace in Canada you can

find that on the arctic circle. And, and we used to laugh about these, they had a

program about Hawaii calling and they'd give the water temperature and the air

temperature and they'd both be close to 70 and we would get that on the Yukon

flats in the summer.

So, what you have is a, is a type of productivity that is similar to the best water

productivity of the Canadian prairies and Minnesota and the Dakotas. And the,

the duck fauna and densities are equal to the best anywhere in the country. So

there's about 20,000 square miles, something like that on the Yukon flats that

would have been flooded and this is this 70 degree.

I think your, your other video said something like 30,000 lakes or something like

that, but there's ducks everywhere and other birds too. It’s the highest density of

ducks in Alaska. The warmest summer temperatures and the greatest variety of

ducks and other birds. And of course at that time passerines didn't have a high

visibility in service activities and we didn't even look at all the passerines which

they are looking at now.

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But you know, some of us were kind of bird watchers and we did note the

different varieties there that you wouldn't see anywhere else in Alaska. So,

anyway I had an interesting personal aspect to that.

I got married the spring before we got into this banding, so I rented a cabin in

Fort Yukon and that was sort of, we laugh about it now, that was our honeymoon

home, Fort Yukon. But anyway, these ducks went so far and wide that it caught

the attention of, particularly the International Association of Fish and Wildlife

Agencies and they talked to the big conservation organizations and a lot of the

state game department directors, all registered strong objection to Rampart dam.

And Ernest Greening, who is a really eloquent speaker, I think he was one of the

great speakers in the Congress at that time, was preaching, ‘we've got to have

this electricity. And it got to be quite a, you know there was a lot stuff in the

newspapers and the reports and booklets came out. And people all over the

country were aware of that and this was the first, I guess ,I wouldn't say that but it

was one of the wildlife issues that caught the fancy of, of the country.

So then it was, about a few years late, when the statehood act had granted a

million some acres to the state of Federal land and it took a long time to, to sort

that out and decide which million acres they were going to get.

And then the native people came in and said well, this is our land and they filed

claims and Congress was working on that. And then it was Morris Udall and

Congressman Sailor, I think a few others in Congress decided well, if, if we're

going to decide what the state gets and what the natives get we ought to decide

what we want for parks and refuges. And let's see, I think it was Stuart Udall

that, that put a hold on what they called a land freeze, which was holding up

things like oil development or, exploration, Then he just established this freeze

until all of this land stuff was settled and I don't know, what did we get, 50 million

acres of waterfowl refuges?

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Well, I was doing these waterfowl surveys then in all the valleys and I actually

came back here and Cal Lensing (inaudible) and worked on the, we worked on

the Yukon flats together. We came back here and analyzed all that banding. Cal

did that and then I re-evaluated all the, the survey data and we drew boundaries

and then they were submitted as proposals for refuges and that was the, what

became the Tetlan refuge, the Yukon Flats, the Kuyukuk refuge, the Kanuit,

Novitana, Selewick and Inonoko and Yukon Delta. And those were the ones I

was involved in and the boundaries of those were, were really set on the survey

boundaries that we had been using for waterfowl.

Well, if you look at a relief map of Alaska, it's quickly apparent that the biggest

mountains in North America are sort of sprinkled across Alaska and in between

these big mountains are extremely low valleys. And like Fairbanks which looks

like it's in the middle of Alaska and in view of Mount McKinley is only 450 feet

above sea level I think and so you have this combination of very high terrain and,

and very low terrain--

Well, you have the highest mountains of North America scattered around in

Alaska with these really low elevation valleys in the interior there and they're

broad flood plains of big rivers. And in the interior, they're under laid by

permafrost even though the summer temperatures are similar to say Minnesota.

The annual temperature is way lower and you have this frozen substrate, which

prevents percolation of water.

So, you have all of this surface water that, and then another nice climatic

characteristic that makes Alaska important in this regard is that most of the

rainfall in the interior occurs in August and September.

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So you have a nice dry period in the spring for the baby ducklings to get their

start then before freeze up. It starts to rain and saturates the soil and then it

freezes in a saturated condition and the following spring it doesn't rain. But you

have the frost going down and water coming up in the, in the capillaries so you

have a nice rich vegetation even without any rainfall.

And kind of, well one of these neat systems that's developed there and so areas

like the Yukon flats are just covered with these really rich shallow lakes. And

because the water isn't percolating out and these were the areas that we were

looking at for initially assessing the waterfowl that were going to be hunted in

California primarily. But also in all of these other states down the Mississippi

flyway and, and to a certain extent further east, Chesapeake Bay.

So, Patuxent was developing this system of evaluating annual waterfowl

numbers. The spring surveys tell you, tell them what has survived the winter and

made it, made a successful spring migration. And then some ground studies

show how they, what kind of production they've had and this results in a forecast

of how many ducks are going to be available to, to hunt.

And if the numbers have gone down seasons can be shortened and bag limits

can be restricted or numbers are booming then regulations can be liberalized and

so that was the purpose of all these aerial surveys. But then when the Congress

decided they wanted to set up some refuges in Alaska, this fit right it.

We had the, we had the figures to, to sell these areas as valuable for refuges to

the director of the Fish and Wildlife Service. When Cal Lensing and I came back

here was Spencer Smith and I remember when we first talked with him he said,

you know this was in the time that they were trying to oh, buy some refuge land

in the Dakotas with duck stamp money and spending a lot of money to get a little

production areas and he told us we want every acre of productive waterfowl

habitat in Alaska that we can get and our instructions were to draw the

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boundaries of these areas as big as we could justify and we did and we had fun

doing it. That was a nice invitation really.

Well, there's no roads and there are trails all over the Yukon Flats and some of

these other areas. But for getting out to the lakes where we were banding ducks

and for doing the production surveys which were based on plots, the only

practical way was to go by airplane. And so we had planes there at Fort Yukon

for that and the same is true of the Yukon Delta.

The Yukon delta is more of an Arctic climate even though it's south of the Yukon

flats, it's treeless tundra and but there's no roads and the only way to, there are

rivers and sloughes that you can get around in a boat. But really, if you're going

to go where the action is for the birds, you got to go the way they go and fly

there.

Well, one of the things we worked on then was developing boats we could carry

in the airplanes. And there was a guy in Juneau that worked with a manufacturer

-and this was prior to good quality inflatable boats - those things didn't exist

when we were doing these studies in the 60's. And he took a 16 foot fiberglass

boat and cut it in five pieces and put bulkheads in the thing and came up with a

deal you could stack up like a set of camp dishes. And then they had a pretty

good little boat we could put a motor on. We, for a while we were carrying

canoes on the airplanes outside, and even though we never had an accident with

the carry boats outside it was illegal for non-government people to do that. And it

wasn't a comfortable thing to be carrying a big bulky think outside of your

airplane. Airplanes aren't designed for that except for the beaver and so getting

the boats inside was, everybody was interested in that. Now, they have really

good inflatable boats so, that's the way to go but, this camp dish arrangement

was kind of fun for a while.

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Yeah, well it was a dream of Clarence Road that he would have all of his people

or as many as possible flying. And he used to say that the light airplane to his

people is as the pickup is to wildlife people in other places. He encouraged

everybody that wanted to, to fly. You know, some people don't want to fly and

they weren't stigmatized for that. But it became a pretty routine thing and

actually worked really well. The biologist--

Well, they started off getting some surplus military planes after World War II and

they weren't entirely satisfactory. And then oh, about 19, late 50's they started

getting Piper Pacers and Piper Pacer was a post war airplane, extremely well

built. ut it, there again speed was something that would appeal to people so it

was designed to, they shortened the wings I guess to make it fly faster so it's

performance on skies and floats was, was not all that great.

But we used Pacers for a number of years and they were really good airplanes. I

don't know, there must have been 10 or 15 of those purchased and then, what in

the beginning around 1960, the Cessna 180 showed up and that was better yet

although it wasn't, the 180, the Cessna's are not as good a cold weather

airplane.

The Pacer was neat, we used to heat those with a plumbers fire pot. I don't think

anybody nowadays knows what a plumber's fire pot is. There was a, you know,

back then plumbing sewer pipe was joined with a lead seal and plumbers had

this little stove that they'd melt lead on for sealing up these pipe joints. And going

back to the thirties the pilots in Fairbanks had determined that you could put a

little engine cover, a tent arrangement over your engine and put a fire pot under

it.

If you didn't burn the plane up in due course it would get warm and you could

start the engine. And then there was some tricks developed to prevent the thing

from burning up. We would at night instead of just switching off the engine you

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would switch off the fuel switch and then run the engine until it cleared the

gasoline pretty much out of the carburetor. And the, you know the parts and the

engine and then we'd always drain the oil out of it. And they designed quick

drains so that you could put an oil can under there and get the warm oil out and

then we'd take that to bed with you, take it in the house or where ever you were --

Well, actually the arctic wildlife range is not big waterfowl habitat so we never

had any survey areas there. And there are waterfowl along the coast there but as

a, it's not a waterfowl area so I never did do much work there. But going back to

when I was a game agent we did go up there and look for caribou and things but

in recent years the waterfowl people have been much more interested in the

national petroleum reserve further west which is just now beginning to be

developed for oil. So, I can't say a whole lot about the arctic wildlife refuge; it's a

splendid area.

Well, of course there's sort of a, a lot of macho folk tales that seem to emerge

from Alaska. And you hear people interviewing pilots and the first thing they want

to know about is the accidents and maybe want to know if there were any babies

born in your airplane. Things like that entered the image of Alaska pilots but as

far as we were concerned that wasn't the part of it, the.

We had good airplanes and this aircraft division that they set up in Anchorage,

Roads, it was Road's dream, but it was a guy named Theron Smith’s ability that

put together an operation that the airplanes were in really good shape. We had

some mechanical problems but we didn't have the sort of things that come from

careless maintenance like instantaneous engine failures and that sort of thing,

engines flying apart. We'd have engines that would have troubles but usually

they would start running rough and you'd get somewhere where you'd could get

something done about it and so we really quite worrying about engine failures in

that sense and--

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Yeah, by the time I came along there were what were called world aeronautical

charts, wac charts. And they're 16 miles to the inch and they got pretty good

contours. And you know, because of the way Alaska's laid out, you've got all

these big mountain areas and then river valleys between and even going back to

the 30's, when the pilots were learning to fly around without any maps, there is

kind of a pattern to the country that you could follow and get around.

And then there are passes in the, in the big mountains that are rivers. We spent

a lot of time following rivers if the weather would be bad you know, if you could

get on the Yukon or the Tannana or the Cyacook you can follow the river and it

was, it was you know sort of a, I don't know, it was a little bit of a sort of, I used to

say I fly like a lark in the woods. You learn a little bit about the country and the

weather and you use those to your advantage. Now, everything is instrumental

and you don't need to learn the country as long as all of your instruments are

working.

Well, you know in the wintertime we always carried equipment to warm the

airplane up but also tents and sleeping bags so that we could, and food, so that

we could stop if we got in bad weather. And after the, after I got into the full time

waterfowl work, I wasn't flying in the winter much anymore. But these amphib

float planes that we wound up using for waterfowl work, we'd always carry, and

Bruce does today, tents and sleeping bags and a box of food as well as oh, some

emergency rations if you smash the airplane all up.

But nobody ever has smashed an airplane all up and that's one of the intriguing

things that's never really been analyzed, but for some reason now and in over 50

years, of this low level transect flying for ducks, there's never been a fatality

connected with that.

And you know, you're breaking some of the conventional theories about flying

where speed and altitude are supposed to provide safety and here the waterfowl

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biologists cruising around low and slow and that's not supposed to be right but

the safety record for the both here but in Canada and in the prairie states where

they run these things. There's been a few oh, wheels up landings and minor

fender bender type accidents, but I don't know of anybody that has ever been

hurt of that group of pilot biologists and that applied to oh, the refuge people in

Alaska as well.

Well, we've talked about it some you know, the Fish and Wildlife pilots talk about

it some--

The safety record is good but it doesn't apply clear across the board in the Fish

and Wildlife Service because there are some professional pilots and Clarence

Road was one who have had fatal accidents in larger airplanes. Roads flew for

airlines during World War II and well he was top of the line for professional pilots

at that time. And there was another Grumman goose lost in Southeast with a

bunch of fishery biologists, cracked up in the woods. And then after OAS came

along there were some serious accidents with OAS pilots.

And then there was one refuge fatality with a guy that had, he was a military pilot,

ex-military pilot that had been working for just a month or so and he cracked up

in the Brooks terrain and killed himself and a state biologist. So and

When OAS came along, this was, you know the Fish and Wildlife, has it's own

aircraft division and then it was transferred to this interior department thing and

they worked out a, you know their own bookkeeping. And OAS doesn't have any

accidents. If there's an accident then it's attributed to the agency that was paying

for the trip so some of their pilots have banged up planes and killed Fish and

Wildlife people. And it's a Fish and Wildlife accident you know, that's the way the

record is. And so this business of the pilot biologist not killing themselves or their

passengers is sort of buried in the record book but it's a true thing and I think

maybe actually flying around low the way we do, you learn to get a feel of the

20

country better and you're watching the weather in a different way then people

flying higher. One of the things that happens to the ones that stay way up in the

air is suddenly they get a low ceiling and have to come down lower and every

thing looks different and we're always low so if we get a low ceiling we don't even

notice.

Well, I started initially flying in a Pacer, Piper Pacer which is a four place engine.

And I think it was hoped that it would be a business airplane because they

shortened the wings and made it go a little faster. The Service was the refuge

people, particularly were using Super Cubs as well and the predator control

people but we were using the Pacer and it had a range of four hours and forty

minutes.

And we flew those all over but on floats for things like long trips. Course you had

to land in the water where ever it was and at that time in all the villages in Alaska

you could buy gasoline in ten gallon, five gallon cans. Two five gallon cans came

in a wooden box and so, and those boxes and the cans where valuable material

but we spent an awful lot of time carrying boxes and cans down to river banks.

And a lot of time in the evening looking for places to tie the plane to in case the

wind came up. And that was a big aspect of operating on floats, in some places

they had barreled gas and we'd roll these barrels for half a mile to get them down

the river bank and that was a good part of your day when I first started doing

surveys

And actually another problem with the floats was the duck surveys come

immediately after breakup in the spring, so not all the ice is gone and places are

short of gas. They haven't had their first supply boat of the spring yet. So, we

had to contend with all of that.

You know, Hank Hanson and I landed at Anvick one time with about a half hours

gas in the tank. We thought we were nearly out and the guy at the store said

21

well, it would be about 10 days before we could fill up. This when he was

expecting his first supply. And we were standing around in the store debating

this deal and what to do and couldn't think we had enough gas to get anywhere.

And people came in, Anvick's not a very big community, and here were a couple

of strangers in town so everybody had to come look and finally some old guy said

well, he had found this barrel of gas floating down the river and he didn't know

whether he ought to put it in his boat because it was, said aviation on it.

And so Hank assured him that it would be terrible for his boat but, that he could

help him out and give him enough money for his barrel to, to replace the, so he

bought that for a good deal more then the replacement cost but things like that

would happen.

Then, we used to go into the inlet cleat and they'd always be out of gas so Hank

set up the deal when he'd come in in the spring he's buy enough gas and pay for

it for the next spring and they'd keep his gas there all for him and the whole

town'd be out and that worked. It was interesting that they never let him down on

that.

I described how operating on straight floats was awkward and then this was

another one of the Dave Spencer innovations. The Eddo float company came

out with the first set of amphibious floats with retractable wheels. And the floats

and he ordered one of those for the refuge, the Kenai refuge and nobody liked to

fly it. It took a long run to get it in the air and it, it wouldn't climb and I learned

much later that this was a function of the center of gravity being too low. You

know, pilots worry about fore and aft center of gravity but engineers know about

vertical center of gravity and if it's too low you can't pull the nose up and climb,

you just pull the nose up and it mushes.

So, that was what this plane did but it, as long as it was in level flight it was fine

and I tried that out and I was making all these stops for my survey route and hey,

22

that was just the deal, no more looking for tie downs on the river bank or packing

boxes of gas around. I could pull up to the gas pump and tie up at the, on the

ramp there and it would, it would save one or two hours a day out of a survey

day.

And so it was kind of neat because then suddenly I had exclusive use of one

airplane and I could leave my stuff in it. You know, that aircraft division operated

like a motor pool and the planes people thought were good were in demand and

so you always had to take your stuff out and what not. I can, I could keep this

amphib and it was, oh, there were some other peculiar things with it. The, there

was electrical switches in these floats that didn't always work and sometimes I

couldn't get them down to land on the airport and I'd have to find some water and

go down and shake the switches. And one time I got them, one side up and the

other side down and I finally had to land it that way at the airport at Bethel.

But by in large it was a good airplane for me because I didn't want to climb. I was

staying low and I didn't need to go into short lakes, I could land in rivers and I

used to.

They were using these World War II bombers to carry loads of water out for

forest fires in those days and they'd put too much load in them and they'd take off

there in Fairbanks and be about a hundred feet in the air at the end a three

thousand foot runway and I used to say the only plane that cross the far end of

the runway lower then I do is those Boray bombers called them because I

couldn't get the 180 up with that. so I used that for a while and I liked that

airplane and then they started getting 185's and one 185 was just enough bigger

of an airplane that it could carry these floats better and you had good rate of

climb and a little better speed and good take off performance and I used a 185

for a while. They were kind of the standard and then the Service got Beavers

with amphibious floats. And they're a bigger airplane and a good deal more

rugged so you didn't break little things on them.

23

I don't think I ever took a Cessna in for a hundred hour inspection that the door

latches were damaged and little things like that that didn't really effect the

operation of the airplane. But they would, things would happen to those Cessnas

and there were springs on the rudder pedals, I broke one of those springs in

Bethel one year and so I flew it for a week or so and I had to keep about 10

pound pressure on one side of the rudder petals to fly straight but that sort of

thing didn't happen much with the Beavers, they were just, just better built.

They're built in Canada.

So, they were great airplanes and then this Theron Smith who, he spent a lot of

time flying in Grummans. The Grumman goose was a really great airplane that

was designed during or used a lot in World War II by the Navy, twin engine

amphibious airplane. And they used them, the Coast Guard used them for

rescues and, so they were good for sea mammal surveys and fisheries patrols

and that sort of thing but they had some limitations too.

And this Tharen Smith was a bit of a dreamer and he wanted an amphibious

airplane that would fly about 12 hours and carry biologists and in order to

accommodate the biologists, the Grummans were usually a two pilot airplane and

they would fly them on instruments. And so that meant the two front seats were

occupied by the pilots and the biologist that might be paying for the trip had to sit

behind and some of the.

Carl Kennyon used to do sea otter surveys in the Aleutians and he's always be

needling Smith about having to sit in the back and then he used a DC-3 for that

survey so Kennyon would be perched on a bar stool in an isle looking out the

front window. So, there was a lot of good natured banter on that but Smith was

storing this all away and he designed this modified Grumman that he actually

described this to a Senator who he was taking for a ride, a female Senator her,

Congressman she was Interior or Committee Chair Julia Butler Hanson.

24

I think her name is still around but Smitty in some way charmed her and she

came up with money enough for him to modify his Grumman. So, he stretched it

out a little and put a couple of seats behind the pilot and co-pilot so he could

have a couple of biologists in there with pilot quality visibility and added another

six or eight hours of fuel capacity. And put these Garrett turbine engines in the

thing and just designed the best airplane for these Aleutian Island sea mammal

surveys and that sort of thing and it was a very successful airplane.

OAS didn't like it because it didn't fit their pattern and they finally sold it but at this

point they were developing the Garrett air research engine and decided to put

one in a beaver. And so they took an Army surplus Beaver and stretched it a little

bit, added tanks. These turbine engines use more fuel per hour then a piston

engine so they made a seven hour airplane out of the turbine engine mounted

Beaver.

And that became, they tried it with some of the other projects but it turned out

that it was more useful for waterfowl work then anything else. And Beavers are

heavy if you're using them, no, if you're not using them for rather heavy work or

long distance stuff they're more airplane then you need.

The Cessnas are better. If you're batting around in small areas where you don't

need a lot range but for these waterfowl surveys the seven hour range was neat.

The ability to, you know you can't really sit in an airplane and count ducks for

seven hours but with the amphibious floats you could stop and we'd always have

a picnic on the tundra somewhere on these long survey days.

And then have a full set of gear so if the weather gets bad you can land and

camp comfortably and we usually had a good time when we'd get stuck some

lake that we hadn't landed on before and camp. And you know, walk around and

learn a little bit about a new area and the same was true for lunch stops. You

25

know, you always learn something when you stop at a strange lake that you've

never landed at before. And the birds around and animals around and it was part

of understanding the country I think was, was just. You look at the bottom you

know, sometimes you get stuck on it and you had to turn the airplane around so

you've got to feel for the bank and find a parking place and just having a little

experience in the country that taught you something about it that you wouldn't

have thought of if you were just looking out the window or well.

Then this turbine had another nice characteristics with this regard in that it has a

reversible prop so instead of getting out and fiddling around with your airplane

when you pull up to the bank, you just put it in reverse and back off.. If you

anticipate your landing you can turn around and back in and so you're ready to

go.

So, that was another kind of a break through for waterfowl surveys. It flies a little

faster, a little farther, you get a little more done in a given day with less

expenditure of time and effort. And, and though we couldn't do the kind of

surveys that are being done today with a Pacer on floats to just, you get two or

three times the productivity out of a day that you would with using a little plane

like we started out with.

So, now that, that turbine Beaver that was kind of an experimental thing to start

with has been modified some since and rebuilt and Bruce Connet takes it to

Mexico every winter for winter surveys and then it made something like four trips

to Siberia.

It was the first float plane they'd ever seen in that part of the world because most

float planes burn gasoline and in Russia they use these big turbine helicopters to

get around the country and they burn jet fuel so here was a float plane that burns

jet fuel so it could operate in Siberia where none of the other American float

planes can do that. And so, and now they've got it loaded with modern

26

electronics GPS for navigation and moving map thing that you don't have to carry

a paper chart anymore, you've got a little video screen and you can, the map

keeps moving and little dot, where it shows you where you're at and you don't

have to look out the window anymore.

Well, the turbine Beaver is is really good and it's been extensively modified really

from a standard Beaver. Another aspect of that you know, the turbine Beaver

was that they, they stretched the fuselage and added much better windows. The

turbine engine is smaller then the big radial engine. And instead of building a big

photogenic cowling on the front they put it in a narrow cowling which means that

you can look out and see the toe of the floats ahead.

And and just has way better visibility and one of the things I always did, we were

all the time out, I was doing these surveys we'd use, put our data on a tape

recorder, a voice recorder and I'd bring these things back and transcribe the data

off them. And oh, we'd do that at night and for a number of years I was just a one

man project ,so I'd, I'd have to find somebody to be my observer every year.

And had a long series of different people but I saved all these tapes and then

after Bruce Connet took over the project some years later, he and his assistant

Jack Hodges got some money and they took all these tapes going back to the

50's and had a guy sit down and re-transcribe them and the way we did it in the

past .And the way most of the other survey data is done, both sides record on the

same data sheet and so individual differences are lost.

And what Bruce and Jack Hodges did they re-transcribed all these tapes and

separated them and then did computerized it and did some comparisons

between myself and all the different observers I'd had. And then between the

later crews and what they learned out of all of this was that there hadn't been

much. It didn't seem to hurt to change observers, that there'd be a rough day or

two to start and then after a few days of duck survey both sides would be up to

27

speed and that would go on in good shape but the one thing that really did

change was there was a sudden jump in the numbers of ducks in Alaska when

this turbine Beaver with bigger windows came on the job.

Well, the aspect that I mentioned about the improvement in the number of ducks

that a person can record out of an airplane depending on the size of the

windows. So any airplane that was designed for particularly waterfowl where it

should feature big windows on both sides.

You know, we’ve used that turbine Beaver for eagle surveys too, well that’s an

entirely different ball game. We’re, instead of flying straight lines here following

shore lines and the observer on the right is making observations and recording

locations and that puts the pilot on the opposite side from the shoreline he’s

following and in this case you need good visibility from the left seat on the right

side and the turbine beaver is pretty good. Lots of airplanes you can’t really do

that because you can’t, you don’t have the visibility to the right.

So, it might be that the windows could be even improved some if they were

designed you know, starting from scratch to build an airplane to give an even

better visibility and less you know blind spots. Every post and every contour of

the panel are blind spots when you’re looking out. So, developing that kind of

visibility is important to wildlife flying but evidently is not important to most pilots,

all they want to see is sufficient runway to land and enough visibility to see if

there’s other airplanes that are, might be a conflict with.

Well, you know, as I was talking earlier, for the waterfowl surveys you really don’t

need to go into little lakes, if you’re hunting sheep or things like that, going into

high elevation lakes to pack out loads of meat that’s a whole different scheme of

things. But using pretty good sized lakes, when we used those airplanes a lot for

banding ducks as well and hauling banding equipment but there again we’re

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always using lakes with plenty of space. There was no need to go into little

places.

So, that’s not so critical ,if you could, a more efficient engine would be a help so

that you were burning less fuel. And I think that turbine engine that the beaver

has now that’s got more power then you use. The Beaver airframe is restricted

to 121 miles per hour and you know, that engine would probably pull it at 300

miles an hour but you’re not allowed to do that it might, the engine might go off

by itself at such speeds, leave you hanging there. So, a smaller engine using

less fuel.

Using a lot of fuel is, you know it takes time to put it in for one thing and here, up

there on the wing, fiddling around when one of the things. I asked the aircraft

division for one time was some handles up on top of the wing. Cause you, you

know a lot of times it’s a nice day and you climb up there to fill your tanks and it’s

fine.

But I remember one time I was filling up at a dock in Katchacan and there was a

filler way out on the end of the wing on a standard Beaver and I was out there

eight feet above the water filling the tank and a sand boat came by making a

three foot wake and that wing started to go up and down about I don’t know, it

must have been about 10 feet and all I had was a, was a gas filler hole to stick a

couple of fingers in. I felt fairly vulnerable out there.

So, Jerry Lawhorn, he did put a couple of posts, called them goat ears or

something on top of the wing that I could hang onto and we used those for a

while and then they decided it was, I thought they were great but they did more

study of it and determined that this was causing a little flutter on the tail. I hadn’t

noticed that but so, they had to take those off.

29

But, anything you can do to the airplane to make it easier to service you know,

like airline pilots or even most fix based charter operators, we were always

fueling our own planes and adding oil and that sort of thing. So if that can be

simplified, it just saves you time.

Another aspect of this is you know, a big airplane is, is a pretty complex machine

and there’s a whole lot going on inside of those engines with the controls and

everything and the simpler you can get those controls the easier it is for the pilot

to spend his time looking out the window instead of manipulating things. And that

was one of the things we didn’t like about the standard Beaver with the radial

engine that if you’re going to change your power setting you had to move the

throttle lever and then you had to adjust the mixer control, the carburetor

temperature and you had about three or four things to do.

So, you are doing that and you’re not looking out the window. Well, the turbine

Beaver is better, a lot better. You just had one lever and so you could be looking

out the window and add a little power without studying the panel.

Well I would say basically waterfowl management in North America in the 50

years, I’ve been associated with it is pretty successful. The, you know, coming

out of the dust bowl era, there was a lot of discouragement about waterfowl and

you can see it in their reports and literature and even things like I talked about

earlier where Spencer Smith said we’ve got to get every acre we can.

And if you look at the total figures now the duck numbers are in total continent

wide about the same as they were in the 50’s. There’s been some ups and

downs and some periods of worry. So, basically the things the Service is doing

and the things you know other contributors like Ducks Unlimited are working and

seem to be. But there are some places that are causes for concern.

30

In Alaska, the geese on the Yukon delta took a big dive and there are some

provisions that the Service has made. It’s a difficult thing because it’s all

wrapped up in cultural aspects of the native community there but bit by bit they’re

getting the Upic Eskimos to recognize that they need to contribute too or we’re

going to lose some of these stocks. But there is a lot of vacant habitat for geese

in western Alaska that was a lot more areas that were occupied by the first bird

reporters.

So, that was one thing that’s down and I think the Service has done a good job

but I don’t see an objective to return to the level of abundance that the early

people found. They’ve set some numbers objectives and I suppose when those

become accomplished maybe they can be raised and eventually geese

reestablished in some of these areas that are now vacant.

So, that’s one area of concern and I guess the other one would be the well

another goose area that’s a matter of concern is the Copper River delta and the

dusky Canada geese which that area was up lifted six feet by the earthquake in

1964 and it changed the whole hydrology of the area and changed the way

predators had access to the goose nesting areas so there’s that problem but also

they go to a very limited wintering area in the Walamet valley so that’s an area

that is a matter of concern.

And then with the ducks, the ducks seem to being doing well in Alaska, the

dabbling ducks, some of the diving duck species are going down, some of it may

be just normal fluctuations. The oldsquaw duck, which has recently been re-christened

the long tail, duck numbers are going down and nobody’s quite sure.

There because they’re not a big species in the hunting bag and they don’t occupy

habitat that seems to be damaged much. But the Service is starting to do some

research on the diving ducks and that’s good and ascrotis is another species

that’s getting some attention for the first time you know,

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It used to be the hunters weren’t returning the bands there was no need to pay

any attention to them and then we got two species of eiders that are on our

threatened list but are fairly abundant in Siberia, the stellar eider and the

spectacle eider. And it seems to be turning out that one of the serious things that

happened to those species, they used to be quite abundant.

When I was refuge manager on the Yukon delta, I didn’t have any trouble finding

both those species. to take pictures of the females on their nests and I got

pictures of, the females aren’t very spectacular but the males are. And I could,

you know that was one of the things I was trying to take pictures of and then a

period came along where people going out there just didn’t find them and so they

were put on the threatened list and actually as a result of my petition.

That’s the kind of thing you can do after you retire and that resulted in more

money for eider studies, there was nobody looking at them and one of the things

they found was that the eiders are picking up a lot of lead out there in those

ponds where they nest and were suffering from lead poisoning and I don’t think

the natives have paid much attention to the lead shot, steel shot thing until that

came up but they’re learning about that and some of them are responding and

you know those are things that take time and I think the, a lot of the natives out

there are well, working on these things too, now to try and get the lead out and

it’s a problem. For some reason you know, there is always this theory that well, if

you shot lead into the mud or into ponds with a mud bottom the, it would

eventually go out of reach for the birds, I think there’s more questioning now then

there used to be on that score but these ponds on the Yukon delta freeze solid,

the whole works, the water and the mud and everything and I guess there’s some

evidence that you know, like the fields in New England, the frost keeps bringing

things up instead of letting them settle down and so they’re not seeing it

disappear so the eiders are a matter of concern and it’s going to take some time

to resolve the hunting problems out there on the coast where there’s a strong

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tradition for summer and spring waterfowl hunting. It’s not a matter of nutrition

anymore which may have been but I always think it would be like telling the rest

of us that we couldn’t have Christmas trees anymore you know, and we’d figure

out ways to, it would take a long time to, for us to get used to not having

Christmas trees. Some people would go on with it right away and others would

try and sneak a tree in. So that’s what’s going on out there now and it’s just

taking time.

Oh, I think it’s enormously important and –

The aerial survey thing, before you know, the flyway biologist concept went back

to the dust bowl days when ducks were really disappearing and you read these

stories from John Lynch and some of those other people that were trying to figure

out what was going on and, and they had permission to ride in military aircraft

and they had a terrible time trying to talk military pilots into flying low and slow

and that didn’t work, it just wasn’t (cough) and they tried to do surveys in the

prairies from railroad trains, they couldn’t do them from roads because in the

spring when they needed to be in there looking at duck production the roads

were all muddy and they’d just get stuck and wouldn’t get any surveys done but

they could go down the railroad tracks and they’d try riding the passenger trains

and somebody finally decided they could do better if they could get permission to

ride in the caboose of the freight trains which went slower and had better visibility

and all these things were tried but it wasn’t until they started using airplanes after

World War II in some cases ex-military pilots but some of the other guys got a

few hours flying in a supercub or Cub then and like, John Lynch and started

flying there you know, and before the airplane thing came by you know the

regulations were set on the basis of, of winter inventories and a lot of that was

pretty superficial without aircraft and when the airplanes came they then began to

do a winter inventory which continues to this day but was really needed was, if

you look at them in the winter they got tough weather to deal with and a spring

migration so if you really want to put some precision in this thing you ought to

33

know how many birds survived to get back on their nesting grounds and then

take a look and see what their productivity rate is, like how many ducklings they

produce because some years even if they get back the weather’s bad or the

habitat is too dry (cough) or something’s the matter and you get poor production.

So, if you can figure out the production and the, a factor for the number that

came back then you really can’t do it. It’s not a census in that sense. What

you’d learn is whether numbers are better then last year or worse and you know,

these surveys are so consistent now with airplanes that predictions that you get

10% more are valid. It comes at the time you need it and then the regulatory

process is kind of a mad scramble to analyze data and set regulations that will

give you the level of kill that you think you can stand and you then get them

printed and out to hunters before the duck season starts so, really it’s a grand

production and it seems to work.

Yeah, well, it was recognized first the need to have good information in the spring

and different methods were tried to achieve that and it wasn’t till enough people,

enough biologists got flying and they discovered that they could generate the

broad scale, you know contin, continent wide level of information that became

effective in, in you know, predicting what birds were going to be on the hunting

grounds and how many of them you should take and then the other thing that

happens is all this information is recorded and of course it was recorded in files

initially but it’s now all well computerized. Every year you know, it’s an art

predicting these things even with the information but now with 50 years of

experience behind that all adds to the picture as well and the people at the ducks

can say oh, well this is the year it looked like 1965 and that year we did thus and

so and we killed a little more then we should so you know, you get that kind of

experience or maybe we could have killed more that year so, it’s still sort of an

art but it’s improving with experience and will continue to improve I’m sure but the

basic system since the airplanes came in really hasn’t changed much, a few

adjustments here and there and one of the interesting aspects of the sampling

procedure is that it violates some rules randomness that bothers statisticians and

34

it, it has to be sort of a trade off between randomness and the practical aspects

of flying the airplane and how you can get out there and do things effectively and

efficiently at a reasonable cost and then there’s the human aspect of just

recording visual information as, you know, it’s not as good as, as what having a

photograph or some permanent record so those things have bothered people

and they talk about bias and this thing and there have been a number of, or

several detailed studies that have determined that even though there are biases

of this nature, it works and various professionals have criticized the thing and

probably will continue to, in the mean time it’s working. I guess that’s what I

wanted to say and the critics are looking at pieces to the whole picture, the whole

thing works and it works because of the combination of, of aerial you know,

aircraft equipment and the experience of the people doing the flying. There isn’t,

you can’t talk air survey in collage and get a degree in it. It’s something that’s,

and you really can’t, there isn’t a cookbook for it. It’s something that’s passed

from experienced pilots to new pilots and it’s working.

Well, I don’t see any substitute for the –

Well, the, the aviation, the airplanes are essential to, to getting the kind of

information that’s necessary for managing waterfowl and another aspect of it is

you know, you’re using the medium the birds do, that’s important in

understanding what they’re faced with and how their year is going and so I don’t

see any substitute for using airplanes. About airplanes in the future, well, the

basic single engine high wing, there is a lot of low wing airplanes on the market

and they’re of course useless for this sort of thing. You have to have the wing

above so you can look down and most of those planes were designed in the

1930’s, the basic aeronautics and some of them like the Beaver was in the

1940’s I guess, like the turbine Beaver that we’ve been talking about has a

plaque in it with a manufacturer date of 1952 and you know, what, what I often

think of people get quite excited when they see a nice 1952 model automobile on

the street, think oh, that’s a real antique. They don’t think that with airplanes but

35

there’s been tremendous oh, innovation with regard to materials and engines and

power plants and at some point I think they’ll be a lot of improvements that we

don’t necessarily envision now like you know airplanes that are riveted together

with pieces of aluminum to a major degree. There are going to be lighter

materials that are maybe stronger and if you get a –

Well of course, I think the flyway biologists have always had cameras and –

Flyway biologists have always had cameras and taken pictures and been

interested in photography and in a few cases it’s been useful, like particularly

with snow geese because you’ve got good contrast between the background.

We tried endlessly to take pictures of blank brant at Eisenbeck lagoon though

and you don’t have the contrast there so even if you had some kind of a

computer sensor you probably wouldn’t, wouldn’t get it. The infrared doesn’t

work on brant because they’re so efficiently feathered that they don’t loose heat

and you know, snow can fall on their backs and it won’t melt and they’re just not

registering on infrared so, and then people have tried to oh, use movies and

other gadgetry but to a certain extent you wind up with a pile of film that takes

more time to analyze then, then you know, just a bunch of stuff. So, for the time

being anyway I don’t see a, a photograph substituting for visual. You know, they

say that the computer that thinks better then the man will be here one of these

days but it’s not yet. I guess they do have computers that will count little blips if

you can get the proper contrast or whatever but, it’s not here. It’s not on the

horizon I don’t think.

Well, David Spencer you know, was one of the pioneers in the prairies, he didn’t

stay there very long but he, he was a key in developing the transect survey

techniques that we use today almost un-modified even though he did it with a

pencil and a pad of lined paper and now it’s done with voice recorders and

computers but the technique has lent itself to you know, being dealt with by a

modern technology and the basic observations are the same. So, Spencer was

36

extremely important and he was in Alaska, he, there was a couple of things about

Spencer. He had this background prior to World War II he was in the refuge

system I think in Florida somewhere but he spent a year in Wisconsin studying

under Aldo Leopald and he worked on some projects with Olis Murie in Wyoming

and when he came to Alaska people were still thinking in terms of how to get a

sustained yield out of reindeer and out of fur bearers and you know, controlling

wolves was one of the techniques that was used for conservation work and, and

there was still a major effort to get rid of the keen-eye moose range and the

kodiak, the keen-eye was in demand for home steaders and the kodiak refuge

was in demand for cattle ranchers and the he was the first wave of biologists that

weren’t, the game agents were, were really thinking about preventing you know,

law violations and developing regulations, hunting regulations and trapping

regulations and, and I didn’t realize this at the time but Spencer was the first one

that had the sense of wilderness that you know, he was there when it was

emerging amongst Leopold and his students and his associates and so he

brought that to Alaska and I think a lot of the refuges were administrative order

refuges which can be reversed by another administrator and in fact that was what

had happened to the first I think they called it a sanctuary on the Yukon delta set

up by Teddy Roosevelt that was abolished by Warren Harding in his wisdom.

We don’t know much about that. It would be fun to dig up the records on that.

But, anyway Spencer was important in the, you know, we brag about our

wilderness in Alaska that’s going to be there in putuety and I think he deserves

the credit for getting the agency as well as the other people in Alaska thinking in

terms of the value of wilderness and that we need to, needed to do it now rather

then think you know, there was quite a strong feeling oh, Alaska’s safe we need

to put our money in our effort down south where all the people are tearing things

up and he did these first pioneering waterfowl survey then the next, well,

Clarence Road was important with his attitude towards flying and that we should

all learn to fly government airplanes if we wanted to and he really encouraged

that and he got the money, he got it from Albert Day who was the Director that

really, he had very good rapport with Day and we hear stories about how the

37

other regional directors were pretty irritated with Roads cause he got everything

he wanted and they all had to struggle for what they needed but I don’t know

whether that’s true or not but in any event Roads was important in encouraging

the flying and then bringing Hank Hanson who sort of built on some of the early

work Dave Spencer had done and he set up a program for not only doing the

duck surveys, Hank Hanson started the studies on trumpeter swans. He tried to

get a little banding project in each one of these valleys that in most cases are

now national wildlife refuges and find out where those birds, you know who was

using them and he set this thing in motion and then I followed Hank Hanson and

pretty well, I built some on what he’d been doing but I didn’t go in like so often

happens when project leaders change and make a new start. I liked the work

he’d done and I worked with Hanson quite a bit before he left doing banding and

doing surveys and then Bruce Colnut came to work for me. He worked for me for

about five years before I retired. I did the waterfowl project for 20 years and then

Bruce has now been there for over 20 years and he’s built on the Hank Hanson

program and there’s more money in the, most of the time until Bruce came along,

I was a one man project and then I had Bruce for five years. Now there are three

of them in the waterfowl project and Jack Hodges was the second one and he’s a

guy with a wildlife degree and a biometrics advanced degree and a good grasp of

computer programming and when I left the project in 1983 the Service was using

main frame computers in Alaska and had some in Anchorage but that stuff was

still kind of on the horizon and I worked pretty hard with computer programmers

in Anchorage trying to get oh, things like the swan data computerized and it was

really hard working with a computer programmer that didn’t know anything about

wildlife. The thing that bothered me was they always wanted to change the data

so that it would fit into their computer better. I’d have to think, well what are we

doing this for anyway and I didn’t, I didn’t get very far with that. Well then Jack

Hodges came along working for Bruce Connie and he was able to, he’s a pilot

too, he flies the turbine Beaver and knew how to write the programs to handle the

data that was useful to the, that was easy for the pilots to manage as well as

being, meet the standards of the migratory bird station here and he just came up

38

with all sorts of good innovative stuff and the desktop computers were coming

out then so that all has happened since you know, I was still essentially with a

pencil when I retired and now they’ve got really good computer capability and

one of the things that’s exciting to me I guess I mentioned this before is that so

much of the data that I’d stored away in the files but never had a, a chance to

completely work up Bruce Conin and Jack Hodges and they have a young lady

there Dever Groves and they’ve been able to archive this old data and it’s

comparable with newer stuff and have turned out a lot of really good publications

and papers and taken what was sub-grade literature and added it to the literature

of, you know, of the peer reviewed literature of waterfowl science. So, what

you’ve got is in Alaska a waterfowl program starting in 1956 to 2001 with very

strong continuity and that's actually pretty rare in the government I think and kind

of exciting and it was exciting to be part of that and Bruce is not to far from

retiring now so whether it will keep going or not well, who knows but so far so

good it's almost 50 years and it's set a good record.

Bob may have some other comments on that. This might be worth. Alaska's a

long way from Washington DC and the Patuxant and because of the you know ,

Juneau's a long way from Anchorage and I think we had a level of freedom that,

it's disappearing now but we could attack things that --

In Alaska we had the freedom to innovate I think, partly it was an aspect of a

small number of people a long ways from kind of the establishment. Oh, I think

the way Jack Hodges has developed his own computer programs is an aspect of

that. He just did it and oh, we got into other areas. We got into things I got

involved with eagle surveys. I don't think anybody down here is doing, you know,

the waterfowl biologists--

(I had to turn the tape over so I missed some)

39

--- where there's an eagle nest every half mile on an average for hundreds of

miles of coast and the game agent that I worked with in Juneau was watching

this and nobody had any concept of how many eagles or where they were until

we got out with the airplane and started plotting them and went to the forest

service and said how can you allow these loggers to cut all these eagle trees

when, showed them the bald eagle act and you know, allowing a law violations

here and that resulted in a good program to protect eagle trees in the Tongas

forest and we got involved with the, you know, I did some of the first sea bird

surveys with an airplane because here was a oil industry talking about drilling for

oil and they did in Cook inlet and at that time you know they were in the wild and

woollies of Alaska and everything they didn't need went over the side and the

Fish and Wildlife guys brought them up short on that and there were the tankers

that were coming in to Cook inlet were pumping oily bilge and killing birds and so

we all got kind of fiddling around with the sea birds and then when the oil

development became more serious suddenly there was money to, to do some,

some sea bird studies in Alaska and what they call the Auxcet program

(inaudible) continental shelf, something or other and we had a good idea then of

what we needed to do and how we could use airplanes to do it and but I did

some air surveys in Bristol bay which was on the hot list for, for oil drilling that

hasn't happened there because it's so important for fish but there were lots of

sea birds in the water but also ducks as well so I said well, I can go out there and

look at them, get some figures and I had a system of, I called it a saw tooth

survey where I'd go out eight miles and back eight miles and go down the coast

that way because most of the birds are close to shore. So, we had to freedom to

do that sort of thing so we were ready when suddenly some guy from

Washington shows up and he's got three days to write a program for doing

studies for oil development in Bristol Bay and hey, we've been there and I can't

remember that guys name. He was an interesting guy. He gathered a bunch of

people together in the regional office in Anchorage like on Wednesday and he

said I'm going back to Washington on Friday and I need to have a report on bird

studies that are needed and he talked to the Fish and Game biologists and he

40

says I need, you know what you want for, for sea mammals and one of these

guys you know, they don't want the Federal government putting any time

restraints like that on them and he said well, we can do that, it would take us

about a month and this guy says I'm going to turn in a report on the need for sea,

for sea mammals studies in that area on Monday morning and if you don't have it

to me on Friday, I'm going to write it on the airplane and but, he didn't have to

say that to the bird people because we'd kind of been sniffing around and we

knew something about where the birds were and that kind of, you know that went

back. Are you familiar with Ira Gabrilson?

He was director for 10 years, Fish and Wildlife Director and but he was a real

birder, birds was his passion and every summer that he was Director he spent a

month or two birding in Alaska and of course being Director he could command

ships and planes and cars and whatever he wanted and then he and Frederick

Lincoln who was the guy who set up the banding lab produced a monumental

book on the birds of Alaska and it was Gabrilson's observations and Lincoln's

research really you know, there's a 50 page bibliography in that book and it's

wonderful. But Gabrilson had paid attention to the, to the sea bird rookeries.

He's got on these, they had some pretty good vessels at the time for fisheries

work and, and he'd take these big boats out for bird watching, had a grand time.

So, there were good descriptions of some of the bird colonies from Gabrilson of

course, they looked up all the literature preceding and so, it was a little of

following up on you know, we did know, knew something about birds and now the

Service has a very good sea bird program as you described in your video of

monitoring sea bird colonies but none of that was going on in the, in the 60's and

70's.

Well, having the Migratory bird office for waterfowl surveys in Juneau has been a

sore spot with the people in Anchorage for a number of years. Juneau of course

in the capital of Alaska and that's where the regional headquarters was in

territorial days and then after statehood the regional office was abolished and

41

most of the people transferred and the, when I, when I came on as, as the

waterfowl position then it was called supervisor of waterfowl investigations and

what I supervised was myself mostly because people were disappearing in all

directions but it was based in Juneau and I tried to move it to Fairbanks where I

was familiar with but I was told it had to be in Juneau and I got settled there and I

just barely got settled when they started trying to move me other places but

Juneau's, my wife liked it there and it's a nice community to raise a family and I

looked at the possibilities, let's see they wanted to move me to Portland first and I

didn't want to do surveys in Alaska from a base in Portland so I managed to get

out of that and then they, several times they wanted me to come back here and

then when the regional office was established in Anchorage it's always bugged

the regional staff in anchorage that that project's in Juneau but it's a good place

for a project like that because it, there was a time when they took all the flyway

biologists out of the regional offices cause the regional directors wouldn't leave

them alone and they'd be called on to attend meetings endlessly and never

would get their surveys written up and that's another interesting aspect of the

duck survey business. The flyway biologists go out and do a survey and they

have it available, written up, analyzed and available for distribution within a week

or two and so often, in fact the norm for biologists is to go out and get a bunch of

data and work on it all winter and maybe two or three winters and there's an

awful lag between the field work and the finished paper and the flyway biologists

well, they got things in order so zap it comes right out and I don’t know of any

other project that operates under that kind of a time straint. Do you Bob?

We were free of being called on the hall for every ceremonial event in the

regional office and we had a nice office that had big windows facing down

Gastanol channel, I could see the swans going by when they were migrating and

occasionally there'd be hump back whales I could see from my office window and

any ships coming into Juneau harbor and it was a pleasant place to work. So, I

had a good office. I had a place my family liked. I had a, actually had you know,

the kind of beach property you've got to be a CEO or a agency director to be able

42

to afford around here and I got five acres on the waterfront in Juneau and so it

was a good place for my family and I just could see how I could take my family a

suburban home in Anchorage or back here somewhere and Hank Hanson came

back here before me and I remember talking to his daughter one time about, they

had lived right in downtown Juneau and she felt like she'd, she was a teenager,

she'd lost all of her freedom. She came back where she was dependent on her

parents to take her anywhere she wanted to go and in Juneau she'd been able to

walk or bike to all the things she was interested in so staying in Juneau appealed

to me and I think the same thing with Bruce and it still irritates the regional office

that we're there but I think they recognize that there's a good flow of information

comes out of that Juneau office that maybe it isn't a good idea to interrupt that.

43

Cal Lensink

5/10/01

Q Your name, and then talk about your education and your career.

Actually I started out at the McAllister college and an English Professor there

assigned us a theme on what we were going to be and directed us to the

vocational files and at that time I was in Pre-med and it was in the vocational files

that I found that there was such a thing as wildlife management and so I had to

transfer schools right away and I’ve been pretty much on one track every since. I

graduated from the University of Minnesota in 1950 and then took a year of post

grad work there and then went to the University of Alaska for my masters degree

and then from there if you don’t have a permanent job, you continue on in school

and I got a PHD from Purdue.

Q What is your employment history?

The, my earliest work was with the Minnesota Department of Conservation, one

year one summer as a, working on a fisheries research crew and the second

year on duck lakes surveys and then I worked part time in the winter and then

went, went to Alaska after that and I worked on several temporary jobs as, when

I was a student in Alaska and then in 1957 I went to work for the state of Alaska

and worked for them three years when I began working for the Fish and Wildlife

Service on the Rampart project on the Yukon flats.

Q Describe the Rampart project, what was that all about?

The Rampart project was a proposal pushed very strongly by an Alaska senator

Greening, to put a dam across the Yukon river rampart and that would have

created a, a power dam and a lake behind it of about ten thousand square miles

which would have completely inundated the Yukon flats which is the premier

44

waterfowl production area in interior Alaska and fortunately the, the, the dam did

not go in and actually a lot of the information that we collected at the time of the

rampart project was used for establishing the Yukon flats as a national wildlife

refuge. So, it—

Q What did you do as far as, were you surveying?

It was, as we were talking about earlier most of our work is surveys and

censuses and that’s what it was. We were trying to establish how big the

populations were and how productive they were and we set up a series of 20

sampling plots each of four square miles which we had a census by foot and

canoe three times during the summer, once for breeding population and then

twice for broods and in total, and then we had some larger study areas in

addition to our sampling plots but in total we hit between eight and nine hundred

lakes every summer at least three times.

Q Describe what life was like there, the support systems you had and how

self sufficient you had to be, sort of just get a feel of what Alaska was like.

The, well even yet my headquarters, the summer headquarters would be in Fort

Yukon but we didn’t see much of Fort Yukon because we were camped out most

of the time. But our supply base was in Fort Yukon and this is a small Indian

village maybe at that time, three or four hundred people and most of them were

still living off the land, they trap, they hunted a few of them had summer jobs in

construction but in Fairbanks or something like that but, but really they depended

very much on subsistence living, catching fish in the Yukon river in fish wheels

and hunting and trapping and some of them were very good at trapping. Now,

much of that is gone. There are very little trapping anymore compared to what

there was then.

45

Q What was the thing that made the Rampart project not go and was the

information you gathered convincing or did it just die of it’s own self or –

I think there were two major things, first the major environmental damage that it

would cause, caused a lot of the environmental organizations to strongly oppose

it but they really beat it on shear economics rather then wildlife values. It, it the

evidence said that the environmental groups put forward on the economics of it

was pretty convincing and so the project then died and I think projects like that

don’t tend to die and stay dead but I think every year puts a further nail in it’s

coffin though now with the energy crunch that we’ve got now they want to open

the Artic wildlife range for oil exploration. I can envision them wanting to develop

electrical power out of the Yukon, a renewed Rampart project with the problems

they’ve got in California now and so it, you never quite feel those projects have

gone away for good.

Q Bob Scott hiring for waterfowl?

Yeah, they, actually the, I got the fellowship to go to the University of Alaska for

my masters but that didn’t start until fall, but I came up in, in Spring, in May and

then flew out, I first worked for a couple of weeks on the University campus to

make ends meet and then in, in June I flew surveys over much of Alaska and into

Canada with Bob Scott and then he dropped me off at Holy Cross and told me to

pick up a boat and motors and so on there that they had stored there and I was

on my own, hire an Eskimo to work for me and he said the people, it was a

missionary town at Holy Cross and he told me that the, the missionaries there

would tell me who would be good to work for me and when I talked to them there

was one person left in town that needed a job and the missionary didn’t think

very much of him and I was stuck. It turned out that I probably got the best

person in town. He was very aggressive for an Eskimo or Indian, that probably

didn’t go over big in town where there was, might have been liquor or something

like that being in the field with me if I caught six ducks he had to catch seven and

46

so we had bang up summer. He was a first rate helper all the way and in those

years we didn’t have good maps so you really depended and I always enjoyed

working with a local Indian or Eskimo that knew more about living in the wild then

I did and could get along pretty well but the map I had then was cut out from an

air navigation chart in which only the main stem river of Anoco was shown,

Anoco and Ididerod and most of the map was printed in yellow labeled tarra

incognita. They didn’t know what the country was like even at that time and in, in

the early 1950’s they started the aerial mapping of Alaska, the Air Force started

that in the early 50’s and since then the maps have improved rapidly and

continue to improve.

Q What were you doing that summer? What was the mission at hand?

It was pretty much a natural history project on waterfowl on the Anoco. How

many were there but it focused more on banding and knowing where they went

to then, then anything else. We were a little too late in the season to do much

nest8ing work and not knowing the geography well enough anyway we couldn’t

set up any sampling system and I probably wasn’t able to do it then anyway with

the education I had at that time and, and so we banded birds with basically our

only equipment was a dip net which we had to run down every bird individually

and I think we banded a little over a thousand ducks and geese that summer.

Q Were there a lot of ducks there?

There were a lot of ducks there and a lot of geese using the edge of the river and

the, the boat I had was so slow that if you were following the geese along the

shore of the river, the geese could run faster then the boat could move but we

had a very small skiff and we could take the motor off the bigger boat which was

a 16 horse Johnson, an old fashion on, put it on the little boat which was fairly

dangerous I would say and then we could catch up. It was a fun summer but it’s

47

one of the two places I found more mosquitoes then any place I’ve been in

Alaska.

Q What did you do after that summer?

Then I, of course after the summer I started work at the University of Alaska and

my Master’s thesis was on Pine Martin, a fur bearing animal and I, I always really

wanted to work on mammals and ended up working on birds most of my career

and then after I was of the longest temporary employees the Service had had, I

think I got my, my ten year pin in career status the same year and it took two

years to get career status, I had eight years of temporary time one way or

another. But jumping from one project to another just where I was needed and

while it was always a, you were always sort of low man on the totem pole as far

as the pay was going, it was really the best part of my career and able to go and

do everything all over the state on different projects and whether it was

censusing moose or then my, I, one of the projects I was on was helping on the

Allusion Island refuge on a study on sea otters and there were some professors

from Purdue on the same project and that Christmas we became friendly and

that Christmas I sent one of the Profs a Christmas card and on the card jotted

that I was thinking of going back to school and that I was going to apply to

Berkley and the University of British Columbia to see whether I could get into one

of those. I knew the Profs from both those and I got an air mail letter back saying

come to Purdue and we’ll give you a scholarship so, I went to Purdue and I think

I was probably lucky. I’m not sure I would have made the grade at Berkley or –

Q What did you study at Purdue?

I was still in wildlife management and my major project was on sea otters. I sort

of topped my bet, I, when he told me that he’d give me a scholarship I said I’d

come to Purdue if I could work on a project in Alaska and suggested sea otters

48

since the Prof there knew a little bit about sea otters at least and that worked out

just fine.

Q Was there a problem with sea otters at the time?

Well, the sea otter population had, had become almost extinct about the turn of

the century and we knew that there had been some recovery in some areas and

during World War II a Navy pilot had censused just flown around Amchitka and

identified a lot of sea otters there and, and so then the refuge became interested

in and were contemplating transplant studies and so on to try to move them to

other areas of population. Alaska wide was still very, very small then and, but so

that was basically the way I got involved with that.

Q What was your work entailing locating colonies?

It was, I, I censused sea otters pretty well all through the laska where they were

and then it was just general life history, reproduction and behavior and, and but I

focused probably as much on anything as the, the history of the population. How

they had been exploited by the Russians and subsequently by, by the Americans

after the sale of Alaska and, and tried to make some estimate of how few there

had become and I thought that in Alaska the population might have dipped as

low as a couple of hundred animals and then when I was working on them, I

worked on them for several years of course and my thesis I had data up to oh,

’68 or ‘9 and I thought that by that time they had recovered to about 30,000 and,

but they, they didn’t cross between islands very rapidly. They’d build up the

population and the bigger the population would get the deeper they’d have to

forage to get food and eventually get to another, another island. The, once the

population got that big though it expanded very, very rapidly. An interesting thing

now, it’s in the Allusions Island it’s going down hill again and it’s not all together

certain what it is but it looks like it may be predation by, by Orca, killer whales

that is, is having a major impact on them right now. There’s been a very sharp

49

decline in the numbers of seal lions and seals in the north pacific so, so much so

that sea lions are threatened or endangered and, and they were the primary food

of the killer whale and the killer whale has had to substitute anything it could get

and apparently it’s getting sea otters. At any rate the population of sea otters is

going down quite sharply in the western Allusions.

Q So, where did the sea otter study lead you? What was your next focus?

That lead, lead me to actually the, I was, before I even got my PHD, I went to

work for the state as head of the predator investigation and control and then I

worked for about three years for the state when I started the Rampart project

and, and on that I had, that was a split assignment. I spent winters in Patuxent

research center in Maryland and summers on the Yukon flats working for Hank

Hanson at the time and so that, that was pretty good experience. Being at

Patuxent for three years was very good and I’ve had breaks all the way through

my career. Let’s face it, interesting projects to work on and being the right

person, the right place at the right time, like the Rampart project. I was only one

that had done really much work on waterfowl on the ground in Alaska and so I

was the natural one to go in on that.

Q Get him to tell Garvon stories.

He was a biologist working as a temporary for me on the, on the flats and –

Just Garvon would be enough. It was things happen to him and we were in a

canoe one time and the water had been very high and the grass on the end of

the lake was flooded and we were in two Indian made canoes, real narrow

canoes and the, it, it was quite deep just a little ways off shore but he didn’t

realize that because there was grass in the water and so I, he was following me

and I, I got the bow of my canoe on shore, stepped out into ankle deep water and

he saw that I was in ankle deep water in the grass and so he was still in the

50

grass so he calmly put a leg over the canoe and tipped it over and he was in five

feet of water and then one other time he, we had a plot that was sort of tough to

do and so I sent him to do just about a third of the plot in the easy part and I

didn’t expect to be back until nine o’clock but I thought he’d be done by about

four or five in the afternoon and I got back about nine o’clock at night and no

Garven and it was obvious he hadn’t been in camp and so I started out looking

for him and finally it got too dark and I had to go back to camp and then I was up

about three in the morning to track him down and I could track him to see where

his canoe went in and out of water and I actually found him, he was on his way

home, he had figured out where he was but he’d spent all night out and but he

had lost his watch and had no idea of what time it was or anything else and on

the last portage on to the home lake I was way ahead of him, being out all night

he was tired and but I was crossing the portage and there was a patch of

blueberries there and so I scooped a couple of handfuls and went on down the

lake shore and he saw that and he came by them and he said these would be

real good in pancakes. So, he wanted to stop and pick blueberries and I thought

anybody that’s been out all night wants to pick blueberries, I’ll pick blueberries

with him and so we had pancakes with blueberries that morning. But, then to

cork it off, the next year I had a kid form Canada working for me, a wildlife

student from Canada and he was on the same plot and if you couldn’t find the

lake you were heading for, you had them run compass courses through all these

ponds and you’d start climbing trees when you got anywhere near but Larry was

climbing a tree and coming down he found a watch in the tree and it was still

running and so it was Garven’s watch from the year before. I knew just who—but

here’s a tree 20 or 30 miles from the nearest village, way out in the wilderness

someplace and it was really funny.

Q Was he a native?

Garven?

51

Q Yes.

No a white man. He had a degree in wildlife management. It was, he seemed to

get in trouble all the time.

Q Were you working for the Service then?

I was working for the Fish and Wildlife Service, that was part of the Rampart

project then, but that was sort of funny.

Q Did you work with Jim King?

I've worked with him but never for him. I've know him, he was a student at the

University of Alaska when I was there and then when I was at, on the split

assignment, Rampart and, and in Maryland he started as first manager of the

Yukon delta refuge which was then Clarach Road refuge and then he was there

just a year or two, a couple of years when he was offered Hank Hanson's job as

flyway biologist for Alaska and then the Rampart project was winding down and

Dave Spenser called me in Maryland and, and asked whether I wanted the

Yukon delta job and I sure did because I was either going to have to, it would get

me back to Alaska otherwise I was going to have to go full time in Maryland and

that didn't really interest me that much.

Q You went to become manager?

And then I was at Bethel for eleven years.

Q As manager?

Yeah.

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Q Describe what that was like, relationships with the native populations, how

much support you had, was it just a caretaker kind of job?

The, it's when you think of refuges now and, and even what's on the Yukon Delta

now, we had a staff of four, a maintenance man, a secretary, an assistant

manager and myself and the refuge at that time was about six and a half acres

and so we had our hands full but, and our budget was so small it was in the

seventy thousand range that the first day of the fiscal year we could have a fixed

cost for our airplane, for fuel, electricity, light and salaries and we were in the

hole, on the first day of the fiscal year and yet we ran a pretty good project out

there because I wrote Profs all around the country and, and told them that we

had, we couldn't afford temporary helper for the most part but that if they had

students to come out there that we would, we would furnish them the logistics

since our airplane was paid for and we had boats and, and that worked out really

superbly a Prof from Purdue sent some students out and Dennis Ravling from

University of California sent students out and we had a student from Canada and

so there were several masters and PHD projects that went on when I was there

and so we ended up with a really good program, really I had no wish to leave

Bethel really but the last three years I was there I was on constant detail doing

other things, other then the refuge so that the refuge program was sort of going

to pot from my point of view because a fourth of the staff was gone, that was me

and I was the one, the only one interested really in research but I had been the

detailed on the Alaska natural interest lands legislation and I was pretty much

involved in that for, for three years and I, I averaged about two hundred and

ninety days away from home, so trying to live in Bethel and, and doing the other

things is just almost impossible so in the, that was finished I,

(Tape change)

Q What politics were involved? How the refuges and the lands were divided

up. What the process, a little bit of history of how that all came about.

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The, the national interest lands in Elka I think probably had a longer history then

most people think, from my point of view at any rate but a lot of the

environmental organizations long before Elka got interested in the artic wildlife

range and, and as sort cause celebra, and, and so they had, had a large coalition

of environmental organizations that fought for that and then at the time that the

Native claim the settlement act sometime later the artic range was originally

established by Ydal who had, had blocked oil development up there until the

range was established, she set everything up as a monument and, and they

couldn't really move forward with the oil development until some of the

environmental issues were settled and in this group of organizations was still

together and so they were interested in preserving more land as refuges and

parks in Alaska. At the same time we had John Dingle who is very interested in

refuges as a whole and was interested in, in lands in Alaska as a refuge and he

requested the Service identify lands in Alaska that, that would be good as

refuges and that's the point I really came in directly. Jim Keagan and I were

mostly because we were the only ones free and could go probably and we also

had, he had flown more over Alaska and seen waterfowl and I had worked on the

ground in several locations. We're sent to Washington, DC to identify refuge

lands, land suitable for refuge in Alaska but we had absolutely no idea how, what

we were going to ask for, whether it was ten thousand acre, a hundred thousand

acres, a million acres. We had no framework, nobody in Fish and Wildlife

Service who could tell us what we were supposed to be doing but we started on

a series of briefings on what we were going to do, it was, everything in the cart

was before the horse and it was sort of funny and then John Dingle learned we

were in town to respond to his question and asked us up to come up and brief

him and during the briefing, Jim King asked Dingle, pointed out to Dingle, we had

no frame of reference. We didn't know what we were supposed to be identifying,

whether ten thousand or a million acres and, and Dingle came right back, he said

I want you to identify everything in Alaska that you'd think would be good for a

refuge and we both pointed out that was very easy to do if, if you had ten

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thousand acres to select, you'd probably take a seabird island but if you could

grab everything and we were on the floor with a map of Alaska with John Dingle

and, and we're on the floor drawing, lines around all the places in Alaska that we

thought would make good wildlife refuges and then that went into the native

claims act but not just as refuges, it was parks, refuges and everything else and

the native claims act director the secretary to select up to 80 million acres of, of

lands in Alaska that would be suitable for national parks or monuments or, and

split it up among the four systems BLM, Butmars preservation recreational areas

and I was involved in selecting then of lands and, and preparing impact

statements, environmental statements for, for the lands we selected and initially

the legislation went in dividing the land fairly evenly between BLM Parks Service,

Forest Service and Fish and Wild life Service and I 've often thought that Don

Young should get a metal for his conservation effort, he was very much opposed

to the refuge in this legislation and so when, when the Secretary of the Interior

went in for 83 million acres instead of 80 million acres he was most upset and he

put in another bill for 16 and said it be comprised someplace in between and then

the environmental organizations, much the same ones that had pushed for the

Artic wildlife range said, no it will be a compromise between anything we might

want in your 16 million and they got everything they wanted. They got about 130

million acres into the refuge and parks systems and BLM was pretty well cut out

and the forest was pretty well cut out. The original legislation I think, asked 23

million acres of refuges and we ended up with 52 million acres and it was just a

fantastic thing to be --

Q Talk about women and biology and field work.

The, there were very few in the early days. People went into wildlife

management because they like hunting or fishing and, and there were just almost

no women involved and if they were involved it was usually through a University

system like the University of Alaska had a first rate ornithologist Brina Kessel that

was employed but in must have been 1967 or 1968 one of the Profs wanted to

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send up a girl onto the refuge and, highly recommended her so I and another

Prof also wanted to bring up a girl a, a student that they'd started in wildlife and I

was perfectly happy with that and, and so they came out on the Yukon Delta and

then our regional office, we were under Portland at the time rather then the

Alaska Regional office, were so fascinated by it that they wanted a news release

of these girls working in a remote areas of Alaska, on a refuge and I sent them

the information and some pictures and it hit AP and it was all over the country. It

was just an unheard of thing as late as the late 1960's that you'd have a women

working in a remote area in a field camp. It seems strange now but it was sort of

funny because that fall I was on my way to a meeting in Florida on a plane and I

was sitting with a nice looking lady and she, we started talking and I told her I

was from Alaska and she asked whether I had heard about this women working

in the boonies of Alaska for Fish and Wildlife Service and I said yes, they work

for me. I wouldn't have dared tell her that but in my brief case I had two sheets of

slides I could haul out to show them to her and, but then shortly after that there

was really strong government involvement in equal opportunity which extended

to women as well as racial groups and when, then when I started the, the marine

bird shop in Anchorage there were, almost nobody with any experience and so I,

I hired a lot of women in that job and some of them are still working. In fact, all of

them are, that I hired are, are in the field yet and some of them in Alaska, yet but,

the we had a really nice person as a EEO officer at the time but she heard me

make some derogatory comment about EEO, that I didn't, didn't like the program

and, and of course she hadn't heard, over heard the whole conversation, she just

heard that much and so as a project leader that she didn't think was supporting

her Eeo program, she, she complained to the Regional Director and the Regional

Director told her to talk to the Assistant Regional Director who is, and, and then

called me and said sooner or later she'd be down there to see me but the

Assistant Regional Director then directed her to my boss and my boss finally sent

her to me and then she walked in the room and I had this trophy on the wall that I

got from my contribution award that I got from my contribution to EEO for hiring

so many women and minorities and, and she told me what she'd overheard and I

56

said yes, I don't like the program I said all you do is hire the best people you can

get and let the chips fall where they may and they might be minorities or women

and that's what I had done basically and about half, better then half my staff at

that time was women and all of them working in the field and --

Q Talk about Hank Hansen? Saving the Spring Water puddle survey with

Hank Hansen.

Not quite sure the, Hank Hansen was continuing surveys after, after Bob Scott

had started them actually Dave Spenser had flown the earliest one and he was

followed by Bob Scott but because Spenser was actually part of the refuge

supervisor at the time and wasn't, but he had been a flyway biologist before he

came up here so he at least started some surveys in Alaska and then Bob Scott

set up surveys over most of the important waterfowl areas in the state and then

he left and, and Hank Hansen took over and he was initially flying the same

survey lines as, as Scott had set up and, and, and I was working for Hank mostly

on the ground and doing some air ground work and so on and but, we realized

that the surveys weren't a very statistically sound sampling system that, that a

small area might have as many transect lines and be sampled as heavily as a big

area and it didn't all make sense so in 1956 I think it was or before, before the

surveys were flown in 1956, Hank and I laid out all the transect lines that they're

using now and then Hank flew those for years and years and at that time he was

flying a piper pacer and on floats and which meant that you had to have gas on

lakes in any place you went and it had limited range compared to what they've

got now. It was a huge, huge job to--

Q Was the Piper an under wing plane?

No it was, the Piper they had then, the Piper Pacer was a high wing. It's, it's I

was going to say something like it's got a bigger fuselage, it's actually a four

placed plane but it's smaller wing spread and so on then a cubby did so it's sort

57

of a hot little airplane but it didn't perform to well on water and, and it didn't have

range or so on. It just wasn't a very good airplane. The first really good airplane

for survey work we had was a 180 and that was, that was a fine airplane and

then from that we went to 185 and now to 206 now the turbo beaver which is

probably the best thing that ever happened to the surveys up here.

Q There's only one though.

There's only one. It's too bad we don't have a dozen of them.

Q We just did a video on trying to get a new era of, a new airplane

specifically designed for survey work.

They aught to start out with a beaver and go from there. The, the 206 is, is on

amphibious floats, the 206 from my point of view is a dog, When I talked to them

in place they land and so on I would, they just can't begin to get in and out of the

places we did with straight floats and yet nowadays to get fuel and so on you

almost have to be able to land on land and so there, there in a sense good

survey airplanes, the best available now but there is nothing really great.

Q His work for research under Dirk Durkson. Only smoking office they

tolerated because of Cal's pipe.

I had an office of my own though with windows but I smoked for years and years

and years I guess and I got the message all of the sudden, better quit. I had a

stroke in 1993, I think, that was after I retired though. I kept--

Q Dirk Durkson?

Durkson replace me, I was head of research and then I, have you ever read the

Peter Prince book and you know what percussive sublimation is? So, I was

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bounced up to where I couldn't do any damage and Dirk took over my job, so I

ended up working for Dirk, that worked out fine but it but I continued to smoke my

pipe. I, I it was almost part of me. I'd wake up in the middle of the night and

reach for my pipe.

It's still funny even yet I, I'm usually wearing a dog whistle and once in a while

you know, when you're nervous or something like that I'll have the whistle in my

mouth and reach into my pocket for a cigarette lighter.

Q How long was your career? When did you retire?

I retired in 1988 actually and but then kept my office in the Fish and Wildlife

Service for several years longer. I think in 1989 I put in a full years time working

for Fish and Wildlife service as a volunteer because for the Exxon Valdez spill I

ran all the morgues and then did a lot of right up on the, on the dead sea otters

and birds and then --

(end of side one)

--In a profession that you really like, you just, you might retire but that means you

quit getting paid and but--

Q Looking at the future of maybe, let's keep it to waterfowl, how do you,

where do you see the Service pretty much expanding in some areas, do you see

them expanding in some areas? What do you see in the evolution of the Fish

and Wildlife Service?

There's been a lot of evolution of the Fish and Wildlife Service even in the time I

worked and that's mostly due to legislation like when I started you had a office of

river base and surveys but you didn't have too much authority but you did good

work, now that's evolved into environmental statements and, and commenting on

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those and, and any Corp or Engineer project has to take Fish and Wildlife, there

are just lots of involvement, different involvement, on different kinds of

environmental matters. The endangered species for instance none of which was

there when I first started working.

Q Let's go back to endangered species and the changes you saw in that

and, and how the mission of the Fish and Wildlife Service has been changed in

certain aspects because of (inaudible).

So, so the mission of the Fish and Wildlife Service has spread out so much

since, since the early days because of new add ons and so on that has created I

think, a certain problem because the, the refuge division for instance is probably

always been under funded as compared to the Park Service it, it's played second

fiddle, we have more land, we do more with it then the Park Service does, you

can hunt and fish on our land or I can't help but saying our when I mean Fish and

Wildlife, our, I'll always work for Fish and Wildlife Service I guess but at any rate,

refuges have been under funded and been a problem, that's been a problem but

we've got refuges in every state now and, and so there's some resentment in the

refuge division against that lack of funding and feeling the Fish and Wildlife

Service the whole is draining funds from the refuges. I really don't accept that

thing, I think on early days at least it was partly the Systems fault and it's going to

take time to change but 20 years ago or 30 years ago refuge managers really

wanted a refuge to sort of lock it up and throw away the key and not let anybody

on them and it's only in the last couple of decades that they've realized that

visitor centers and public education and involvement of the public is important

and, and so that we're getting more and more public support but, but it'll take

time and I, I, it will probably never approach the monetary status of the parks so

we can't do as much and I think that's probably not all bad. I don't think we

should have as much money as the Parks Service have because that would

mean we were getting too many visitors.

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Q Did you have, was that a conflict, how was all that resolved between

traditional native uses and, and the Migratory Bird Act and those things?

Legally the natives have never been able to take waterfowl, they did, so basically

if an, a native shot a duck in spring, he was violating the law and when, when

you've lived off dry fish all winter and, and haven't had much else a goose in

spring tastes pretty good so there was pretty good justification for, for amending

the Migratory Bird Treaty to permit hunting in spring but the, it came out you

know you can't let a particular ethnic group hunt so it's done more on the basis of

the size of your community for and so on, and, and I think it's going to, could

create problems down the line but where do you, where do you saw it off and

how, how firm a regulation you can have. If they regulate the take in spring very

carefully it's fine but as a population in some of the remote areas increases it

could cause a problem so I'd like to, to, to see regulations pretty well enforced for

my own point of view. On the other hand this is a, a problem for the Fish and

Wildlife Service because when you've got very, very powerful Senators such as

Senator Stevens you don't want, and he's completely in support of the native

positions, that's where a lot of votes come from and it is for other Senators and

Representatives too, you're not going to do too much to bucky them and so there

probably hasn't been as much enforcement of laws against natives as might be

other wise possible. Looking back clear at the history of that--

Q When you were a refuge manager would you look the other way or were

you looking for violations or was your territory--

Basically, I, I told the natives I wasn't going to go out enforcing laws or try to find

them but if they shot a duck in front of me they better watch out and I never paid,

and basically they didn't, they, they they knew I sympathized with them to a very

large extent but when I was out there, their equipment was much inferior to now.

Now, they've got a fast boat with a 65 or 115 horsepower motor and they, they

can hunt three watersheds over from where they were and even when I was

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there you could see the rivers they lived in and the next river there would be any

geese on the river any more and then the further you got from a village there're

more geese and, and so that clearly subsistence hunting in spring had an impact

on waterfowl and then I think the Fish and Wildlife Service missed a bet, they

didn't recognize the amount of waterfowl that the natives were taking and so

seasons in California were set sort ignoring the native take and that, and then we

had some years of severe predation on the Delta, nesting predation and a

combination of those various things sent the goose population on the Yukon

Delta into a tailspin and the populations ended up less then a fourth of what they

were. I think Capplers we were concerned that it might have to be put on the

endangered list though, it fell short of that but,--

Q List some of your career, what your sense of feeling and accomplishment,

what are the highlights?

It was all sort of a highlight from my point of view. It was just, every job I had I

enjoyed. I think probably the least fun but the most important in that, that sense

of highlight was the National Interest Lands Act, the work I did for that but both

for, for just pure enjoyment and, and also accomplishing something the waterfowl

studies on Rampart and, and the initial studies on the Yukon Delta, the large

number of students that were able to pursue their careers when I was out there

were, were very good and then starting the marine bird program and, and a really

good program. All of those things are, I, I sort of walked from one highlight to

another. So, I had a much better career I think then most people ever get an

opportunity to have.

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Hank Hansen

Well, my real name is Henry Hansen but I don’t answer to that I answer only to

Hank and I have for many years.

Q What was your education?

I grew up in Des Moines, Iowa and I left right after I graduated from high school I

went to college in Nebraska, a little college in York, Nebraska that went to

defunct at the beginning or shortly after the beginning of World War II, just

weren’t enough students to keep the thing operating I guess. I got my Bachelor’s

Degree there and immediately went into the Service in fact, I was inducted before

I graduated and they, they deferred me until I got my degree because I was pre-med

and in those early days just before the war pre-meds and engineering

majors were all, they were—they, they let us, they let us finish our degree before,

but we understood that as soon as we got our degree no matter what we were

majoring in we were going to be inducted which I was. As a matter of fact, I take

some measure of pride in you may or may not remember, how that first, that first

induction was made. Franklin Roosevelt was President and his Chief Of the

Military, whatever it was called then, General Hershey and the first draftees,

General Hershey reached into a big fish bowl and brought out a handful of slips

of paper with names on, my name was in the first, the first handful of –

(airplane noise)

Well, he reached into that fishbowl and pulled out a handful of names and mine

was in that first handful. I was among the very first inductees but I was, as I say,

they let me alone until I graduated but as soon as I graduated I, I went in and I

was inducted into, into the ground troops into the field artillery and I could, I

couldn’t see my life flashing before my eyes out there pounding the turf so I

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enlisted in the Air Corp in the Army Air Corp and was accepted and that’s where

I, well I still had to go through basic training in the ground troops but after 14

weeks of that they released me and I went into the Air Corp before Pearl Harbor,

that was, this was early, early on and I went through flight school in Arkansas

and then I knocked around in many, many training units in the state side before I

eventually ended up in a fighter reconnaissance outfit in Europe and did all of my

oversees time flying P51’s in England and France and Germany and when I

came home I still had, I still had my intent to go back to med school, I had a

scholarship to the University of Nebraska, school of medicine and but I found out

in the meanwhile that there’d been a new science developed and it was called

wildlife management and that’s what I really wanted. The only, the only real

reason I found out that I wanted to go to med school was to make enough money

that I could hunt and fish all I wanted and when I found out here was a science

that had been developed that I could get into and it revolved around fish and

wildlife, game of all kind I immediately transferred to one of the very first wildlife

schools and that was Iowa State University and I got my Master’s Degree at Iowa

State and came out to Washington State at Pullman to get my PHD and then

took a job with the Washington State Game Department and I worked for them

seven, eight years before I had an opportunity to go to Alaska 19, well, I had a

chance to go to Alaska early but I had accepted a, a teaching job with

Washington State and Clarence Road came through and was taking an airplane

up to, to Alaska and he contacted me or vise versa and he wanted me to go up to

Alaska, he offered me a job and that was in 1947 and he offered me a job on the

spot to fly up with him. Well, I had just accepted a one semester teaching job at

Washington State and I didn't feel it was right to accept the job and then

immediately walk away and leave them with nobody to teach their wildlife

courses. So, I, I regretfully turned Clarence down at that time and then I went to

work for the state of Alaska, Department of Game--

Q State of Washington.

64

Or state of Washington, Department of Game and I worked for them until, until

the spring of 1947, early '47 and a job became available in Alaska, a flying job,

flyway biologist job and it was the first one up there and I decided I just couldn't

pass it up again so, I left, I left the state of Washington and I went, I went to

Alaska and started flying that spring.

Q How was it in Alaska and the knowledge of waterfowl and management

and had there been any work done before or what was the science at that point?

Well, there had been a few cursory waterfowl surveys. Dave Spenser had done

a little surveying out on the Yukon Delta and Bob Scott had flown a survey for a

spring or two but they were, they were not very coherent, they were just kind of

exploratory and they and there was no attempt to really put things together and

make a, a program and, and determine what was up there, where it was, how to

go about making a good coherent survey comparable of what they were all ready

doing in the Canadian prairies and that was, that was my first shore was to locate

the waterfowl habitat, map the waterfowl habitat, determine how to go about

setting up the surveys so that I could do, I could replicate them year after year

and make sense out of what was there and we found out from the outset that

there was not way that we could compare the Alaska habitat and waterfowl with

what they were doing down in the Canadian prairies. It was, it was not adding

apples and oranges, it was even more diverse then that. So, I went ahead and

set up some surveys that were unique to Alaska, completely differen