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.
The Board of Game Proposals for the Central and Southwest Region have been released and AWA is carefully combing through them so that we can best represent the needs of Alaska’s wildlife at the Wasilla BOG meeting in January. The public comment period is open until December 27, and we could use your voice to help safeguard Alaskan wildlife.
“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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