Within sight of almost half of all Alaskans lies a little known tidal estuary. Perched along Turnagain Arm on the northwestern Kenai Peninsula, the 27,000-acre Chickaloon Flats is the only part of the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge that touches marine waters. It represents 7% of the total estuarine area in Cook Inlet and Prince William Sound, the two water bodies that form the peninsula. As such, it’s a small but important part of the Pacific Flyway for migratory shorebirds and waterfowl.
Read on for a full summary of the good, the bad, and the ugly of this year’s wildlife regulation changes in the Interior and the Western Arctic.
Comment by May 6th to secure enhanced protections for wildlife!
Catch our latest podcast interview on critically endangered Cook Inlet beluga whales!
Our Kenai Peninsula Coordinator, Teresa Becher, was just awarded a 2023 'Partners in the Spotlight Award' from NOAA fisheries! These national awards recognize partners who have expanded and enhanced recovery of the country's most imperiled marine species.
This January, the Alaska Board of Game (BOG) will deliberate on nearly 200 proposals impacting wildlife, including Proposal 75, which was submitted by the Alaska Department of Fish and Game (ADFG). ADFG has proposed sweeping aerial gunning on wolves and bears on the west side of Cook Inlet, between Denali National Park and Lake Clark National Park.
“In the past three decades, the Mulchatna caribou herd of southwestern Alaska has gone from nearly 200,000 to 12,000. Last year, the state wildlife agency’s Board of Game started to explore ways to help the struggling population. It landed on a controversial solution called "intensive management," also called predator control, which directs wildlife officials to indiscriminately kill predators. It was the first time the state included bears in the hunt, a decision that had no public process and was conducted without bear population estimates.”
‘The surprisingly high number of bears killed in the Mulchatna program is “especially egregious” given those findings, said Carol Damberg, board president of the Alaska Wildlife Alliance. "They’re ignoring their own biology ... they’re not following the science,” Damberg said Thursday. “If they were, they wouldn’t be doing this.”’
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