Life on the Outer Coast

July 7


Left Reid Glacier at 8am bound for Elfin Cove vis South Marble Island. On the way out of the bay, passed several Arctic Terns on smallish ice bergs, Kittiwakes, Kittlitz and Marbled murrelets, and Tufted puffins near the mouth of Reid inlet.
South Marble island is a sea lion haul-out (Buster Hoffmaster shared his photo) and a sea bird breeding site. There are other similar sites in the park, but this is the only one that boats can approach as close as 50 yards.
Nesting birds reported from South Marble include: Glaucous-winged gulls (1999 minimum of 570 pairs), Pigeon Guillemots, Black-legged kittiwakes, Black Oystercatchers, Common and Thick-billed murres, Tufted and Horned Puffins, and Pelagic Cormorants. We managed to find all of the reported birds, plus Bald eagles and alot of mew gulls. We saw the one Horned puffin as it flew by the boat.
Found a few documents on the nesting birds of Marble island including this kind of entertaining report on Pigeon Guillemots.
http://www.absc.usgs.gov/research/seabird_foragefish/products/reports/pigugu~1.pdf

I was kind of curious if there was any allowed harvest of Glaucous-winged gulls eggs from this island. Couldn't find anything in the park literature that addressed the question, but did finally find an answer in the posted regulations.
May 15 to June 30th Glaucous winged gull egg harvest is allowed by the Community of Hoonah (Harvest area: National Forest lands in Icy Strait and Cross Sound, including Middle Pass Rock near the Inian Islands, Table Rock in Cross Sound, and other traditional locations on the coast of Yakobi Island. The land and waters of Glacier Bay National Park remain closed to all subsistence harvesting [50 CFR Part 100.3]. (i)

Searching for the regs turned up this article in Current Anthropology on traditional environmental knowledge of the Huna Tlingit regarding sustainable Glaucous-winged gull egg harvest.
http://www.journals.uchicago.edu/doi/abs/10.1086/377666

Huna Tlingit Traditional Environmental Knowledge, Conservation, and the Management of a “Wilderness” Park1 by Eugene S. Hunn, Darryll R. Johnson, Priscilla N. Russell, and Thomas F. Thornton


"A study of Huna Tlingit traditional gull-egg harvests in Glacier Bay National Park and Preserve, Alaska, indicates that local traditional environmental knowledge includes a sophisticated appreciation of glaucous-winged gull (Larus glaucescens) nesting biology and behavior—in particular, an understanding of this gull as an indeterminate layer with a modal clutch size of three. The community has applied knowledge to the design of sustainable egg-harvesting strategies. The dominant strategy is to take eggs from nests with one or two eggs but leave nests with three or more; an alternative strategy advocates partial harvests from three-egg clutches. "


http://www.nps.gov/glba/naturescience/upload/Hunn_etal2007_GullEggHarvests.pdf

Found another related article (probably the same one, but with a different purpose) by the same people.
Huna Tlingit Gull Egg Harvests in Glacier Bay National Park
Eugene S. Hunn1, Darryll R. Johnson, Priscilla N. Russell, Thomas F. Thornton
http://www.nps.gov/glba/naturescience/upload/Hunn_etal2007_GullEggHarvests.pdf

The last section of the article was on management implications of the harvest

"Evidence to assess the impact of a given harvest practice over the long haul is rarely available. Thus, if subsistence egg harvests by Huna in Glacier Bay were to be legalized, there would remain considerable uncertainty with respect to the sustainability and appropriate scale of such harvests. The Glacier Bay National Park administration is in a difficult position; on the one hand charged to protect for all Americans Glacier Bay as a premier “wilderness” park, while on the other hand, recognizing that Huna Tlingit people have a legitimate interest in managing resources that constitute the material and symbolic foundation of their community. Park staff has worked with the Huna community since the completion of our study to help arrange the harvest of gull eggs at a small colony outside of the Park at Middle Pass Rock in Icy Straits, which has allowed elders and young people from the community to experience this traditional subsistence practice without fear of arrest for the first time in decades. However, the Middle Pass Rock colony is subject to stronger currents and wave action than is the case at the Marble Islands and thus is not safe for younger children. If the legal obstacles to the resumption of Huna Tlingit harvests in Glacier Bay can be resolved, the administrative details of a truly cooperative
management effort will still need to be hammered out, in the face of stiff opposition by those committed to the notion of parks as “wilderness,” on the one hand, and by indigenous
activists on the other who reject as illegitimate any federal presence in their traditional homeland."

Have to admit that I probably would have been in the camp of keep the park as a wilderness without any harvest of much of anything at one time in my life, but feel rather differently these days. It seems reasonable that a small, sustainable harvest could be allowed, but can see the difficulty of working out the details of that one.

We saw a multitude of humpbacks between Gustavus point and Lemesurier island.
Proceeded out of the park and west through the passes to Elfin cove. At the east side of Lemesurier Island the fleet passed by two sea otters eating an octopus. They let us pass very close by, perhaps reluctant to risk losing their large meal. We couldn't tell exactly how large the octopus had been, but it didn't look particularly small. The otters were about 4-5 ft apart in the water. This pair were chewing on the legs and less often on the membranes of the head. Apparently octopus eating isn't unusual, in fact some otters prefer a diet of big molluscs if they can get it.

Between Lemesurier and Inian islands found a small group of Ancient murrelets mixed in with the Marbled ones. The white neck area stands out pretty clearly.

Arrived at Elfin Cove around 6pm.