by Todd McLeish
Chapter 11: Translocation
OLYMPIC PENINSULA, WASHINGTON
AMCHITKA ISLAND doesn’t play a role in just the discovery of the sea otter population crash in the Aleutian Islands. The story of Amchitka’s sea otters is much bigger than that. Located just nine hundred miles across the icy Bering Sea from Russia’s Kamchatka Peninsula, this narrow forty-two-mile-long island has had no permanent human population since the 1830s. But its population of wildlife includes more than one hundred species of migratory birds, rare nesting seabirds, and thousands of marine mammals like walruses and Steller sea lions. Its natural wonders were so extraordinary that in 1913, President William Howard Taft designated the island the centerpiece of what is now the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge. But the island has been repurposed several times since then. During World War II, its fragile tundra landscape became an airfield for thousands of US soldiers fighting the Aleutian Islands campaign. When they departed, they left behind tons of debris and little surviving wildlife. The island was then turned back over to the US Fish and Wildlife Service, which undertook a different kind of campaign, one that restored to health the formerly abundant wildlife. Salmon returned to spawn in its streams, bald eagles and Aleutian cackling geese were plentiful, and sea otter numbers skyrocketed.
By the early 1960s, however, things were about to change again, dramatically. That’s when the Department of Defense and the Atomic Energy Commission went looking for a site to conduct underground tests of nuclear bombs. Despite strong objections, especially concerns that it would trigger an earthquake and tsunami, an eighty-kiloton bomb called Long Shot was exploded there belowground in 1965, followed by the one-megaton Milrow in 1969. Descriptions of the latter blast noted that it “forced geysers of mud and water from local streams and lakes fifty feet into the air” and “turned the surrounding sea to froth.” More objections were raised when the commission announced that an even larger nuclear device, the five-megaton Cannikin, would be detonated a mile below the surface of Amchitka in 1971, the largest underground nuclear test in US history and nearly four hundred times larger than the bomb that destroyed Hiroshima.
Among those objecting were US Fish and Wildlife Service biologists and others from the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. They argued that the recently restored wildlife populations would be wiped out—they were—and that the government should take steps to mitigate those effects. Noting the many C-130 cargo planes delivering supplies to the island and departing empty, the biologists proposed using the aircraft to deliver Amchitka sea otters to parts of their range where the animals had yet to become reestablished following the fur trade, such as Washington and Oregon. Seeking some positive publicity after years of negative coverage, the Atomic Energy Commission agreed to the idea and even agreed to fund most of it. But transporting the otters wasn’t easy.
Long before Jim Estes made his first appearance on Amchitka, biologist Karl Kenyon had been studying sea otters there, often experimenting with methods of capturing and holding the animals for the purpose of relocating them elsewhere, a process biologists call translocation. Experimental translocations had been conducted six times between 1951 and 1959. Kenyon tried keeping sea otters in dry bedding, in freshwater, and in various saltwater enclosures, but in all but the last scenario, the animals died because during the time between capture and release, their fur became matted and soiled, and the otters were unable to groom themselves effectively. It was not well understood at that time how important a well-groomed pelage was to the well-being of sea otters. When the captive otters were released back into the cold Pacific, they quickly became hypothermic and died.
By 1968, however, sea otters had been successfully reintroduced to Southeast Alaska and to the tiny island of Saint Paul in the Pribilof Islands, north of the Aleutian chain. Not all of them survived the process, but Kenyon and his colleagues considered it somewhat successful and worth continuing, especially since it was likely that most of the otters around Amchitka would die as a result of the detonation of Cannikin. So they decided that Washington and Oregon would be the next destination for translocated sea otters.
On Amchitka in 1969, the biologists captured twenty-nine sea otters destined for Point Grenville, Washington, on the wild coast of the Olympic Peninsula. They captured the animals using a fishermen’s gill net, loaded the otters into specially designed crates, and hauled them to the Amchitka airfield, where they were stowed aboard a C-130 and flown to a small airport near the release site. From the airport, the otters were trucked to the coast and, before a crowd of reporters and onlookers, unceremoniously released on the beach. Karl Schneider, a retired biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, was there, and in a 2014 story in Audubon magazine, he explained how cages of frantic, filthy sea otters were opened on the beach in a circus-like atmosphere. Some were even prodded with poles to leave their cages and enter the water. Two weeks later, sixteen of the animals had already washed ashore dead (two from gunshot wounds). None of the twenty-nine are believed to have survived.
Kenyon and his colleagues tried again a year later, this time releasing thirty sea otters at Cake Island, north of the community of La Push, which borders Olympic National Park, and those animals fared better. No immediate mortality was reported. By then the biologists had learned that the otters should not just be pushed into the water after their long trip from Amchitka. Instead, Kenyon and his colleagues designed and constructed large holding pens that could be anchored in the water offshore so the animals could acclimatize to their new environment for several days. The twenty-four-foot-square pens had a shelf around the edge where the otters could haul out to rest and groom, a fence around the perimeter, and a fine-mesh net at the bottom prohibiting them from escaping to the open ocean too soon.
That strategy was attempted in Oregon that same year. Again, Karl Kenyon captured twenty-nine sea otters on Amchitka and they were transported via C-130 aircraft, this time to an old military base near the release site of Port Orford, sixty miles north of the California border. The otters made it successfully into the holding pens, where they were held for two days, and the animals appeared to quickly acclimatize to their new environment. The pens were then towed by a fishing boat three miles south to Redfish Rocks—now a marine reserve—where it was believed the habitat would support the animals.
Ron Jameson was a senior at Oregon State University in 1970, when the first sea otters were translocated to the state, and he wrote a school paper about the project. He later spent thirty years studying otters in the Pacific Northwest for the US Fish and Wildlife Service. As a result, he knows more than anyone alive today about the circumstances of the Oregon otter translocations, and he said it wasn’t pretty.
“It was really nasty weather when they towed the pens, and the trip was quite harrowing for the otters,” Jameson said. “When they got there, some of them didn’t even want to leave the pens.” But the nets were cut anyway, the animals were released, and by the time the boat returned to Port Orford, most of the otters had already arrived back in port ahead of the boat. The animals apparently wanted no part of Redfish Rocks. No one bothered to keep track of the otters after that, so little is known of their ultimate fate.
A year later, in June 1971, another twenty-four sea otters were destined for release at Port Orford, and forty more were translocated fifty miles farther north to South Cove at Cape Arago, near the town of Coos Bay. And once again, the weather wreaked havoc on the biologists’ plans. A storm blew in rough seas and howling winds, making it nearly impossible to safely release the animals into the pens. Jameson doesn’t believe that any of the otters at either site made it as far as the pens but were instead just dumped overboard from their crates. No one made any effort to monitor the status of those animals, either.
After he graduated, Jameson returned to Oregon State University to earn a master’s degree studying the state’s otter population, but what he found was not promising. In 1973 he located a total of twenty-t
hree sea otters, eighteen of which were congregated at Blanco Reef, a group of rocks fourteen miles north of Port Orford that is now part of the Oregon Islands National Wildlife Refuge. One otter had wandered 160 miles north to Gull Rock, near the appropriately named village of Otter Rock; two more were found near Port Orford; and the last two were at Simpson Reef near Cape Arago. Three years later, just twelve sea otters were observed in the entire state of Oregon, all at Blanco Reef, and by 1981, when just one animal was left, the population was all but extirpated and the translocation effort deemed a failure. The only good news was that the Oregon otters successfully produced ten pups, but where they ended up is unknown.
Jameson thinks he knows what happened to many of the released animals. “My personal hypothesis is that ultimately they started trickling out and moving north,” he said. “I would almost bet money that some of the first otters that turned up at Destruction Island in Washington, which was nowhere near where the Washington otters were released, could very well have come from Oregon. After some period of time, I think they just started to disperse, and I suspect that a lot of them headed for home”—toward Alaska.
It’s a fair hypothesis, but there is no evidence to back it up. At the time, the tracking devices commonly used today by biologists to monitor hundreds of species around the globe, like GPS-based satellite tracking systems, had not yet been developed. The translocated sea otters weren’t even identified with flipper tags or any other device to indicate they were part of a special population released at a certain site. When young Jameson called a biologist in Washington to see what he knew about the otters that had been released there, he was told that no one knew anything about them, and if they disappeared, the biologists would just go get some more from Alaska. The passage of the Marine Mammal Protection Act, however, made that prospect much more difficult. With the exception of the experimental group brought to San Nicolas Island in California as part of the establishment of the state’s no-otter zone, wild sea otters would never again be translocated anywhere in North America.
Yet despite the absence of a resident population, sea otters have a strong fan base in Oregon. Quinn Read, the wildlife coordinator for the nonprofit advocacy group Oregon Wild, said “there is a public appetite for sea otter recovery” in the state, though she laments the fact that it does not appear to be on the radar of the state Department of Fish and Wildlife. “They’re listed as threatened in the state, and yet they do not appear on the wildlife agency’s website,” she told a gathering of sea otter biologists in Seattle in 2015. “So I think that speaks to where we’re at in Oregon.” Her organization is pushing for state officials to develop a sea otter recovery plan that identifies potential habitat, determines how to address human conflicts, and develops a plan for restoring the population.
Read has every reason to feel optimistic. Even if the state does nothing, most observers agree that sea otters will soon begin to naturally reestablish a population in the state. Since 2008, more than twenty-five individual sea otters have found their way to Oregon. Most have been seen along the northern part of the coastline near Newport, close to where the last known Oregon otter was killed in the fur trade in 1907. Jameson calls the visiting animals “stragglers and dispersers from the Washington population.” Some have been found dead on beaches, and all that have been identified have been males. “The thing that will really determine whether we’re going to reestablish a population is if we get a young female or two that decide to wander off down here,” Jameson said. “I think one of these days we’re going to get some females with pups in Washington that move quite a bit farther south, and eventually they’re going to wander into Oregon. It may take a while, and it’s possible that we may get some wandering up from California, too, but it’s going to happen.”
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UNLIKE IN OREGON, the translocated population of sea otters in Washington eventually flourished, but regular monitoring of the Washington animals didn’t begin until 1977, seven years after their release. By then, the population had declined to just nineteen individuals, four of which were pups. A year later there were just twelve, and no pups. But then their numbers began growing—to forty-five in 1981 and ninety-nine in 1988, before doubling a year later. Over the next twenty years, sea otter numbers in Washington grew at a rate nearing 10 percent per year. All of the animals were found along the outer coast of the Olympic Peninsula, well north of the original translocation sites.
So that’s where I headed. I arrived on the peninsula at Port Angeles on the Strait of Juan de Fuca and proceeded west toward the outer coast. But along the way I decided to conduct an informal survey of sea otters in the strait. Heading west on State Route 112, which hugged the coastline almost all the way, I pulled over every chance I could to scan the water with my binoculars. I wasn’t expecting much, because the official surveys had found few otters in the strait in recent years. But that didn’t stop me from trying. Back in the mid-1990s, more than 120 sea otters, almost all males, rounded the corner into the strait, where they hung out in some of the westernmost bays during the winter months and ate all the available red sea urchins in a span of five or six years before retreating back to the outer coast. Yet I figured there were bound to be a few lingering where I could see them.
But there weren’t. I found not one sea otter foraging in the abundant bull kelp near the tiny fishing village of Sekiu, none at beautiful Neah Bay, not even any at Cape Flattery, the northwesternmost point of the Lower 48, where seabirds, porpoises, and sea lions were abundant. And yet, apparently, the results of my highly unscientific assessment were wrong, though not by much. The week before my informal survey, officials with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, the US Fish and Wildlife Service, the Seattle Aquarium, and other agencies conducted their own sea otter survey of the state’s coastline using airplanes and land-based spotters, and they found a total of 1,394 sea otters in the state, including one in the Strait of Juan de Fuca. I don’t feel bad about missing that one animal in the vast strait.
According to Steve Jeffries, the biologist who coordinates sea otter surveys for the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife, the sea otter population in the state has been growing at a rate of about 5 to 7 percent in recent years. Strangely, the distribution pattern of the population has flip-flopped, with about 70 percent of the animals now in the southern portion of their range—roughly between the town of La Push and Willoughby Rock in the Copalis National Wildlife Refuge, a distance of about 60 miles—whereas the northern section of the range had previously been home to the majority of Washington sea otters prior to about 2000. It appears that the northern region may have reached its sea otter carrying capacity, while there is still abundant food and habitat for the animals to continue expanding to the south.
The greatest numbers of sea otters counted in the 2015 survey were found at Destruction Island, a thirty-acre island located more than three miles off the coast just north of the Quinault tribal reservation, which borders Olympic National Park. Part of the Quillayute Needles National Wildlife Refuge, Destruction Island looks, from an unmarked roadside overlook, like a low, flat mound of rock and earth covered in abundant green vegetation. It is topped by a prominent black-and-white lighthouse and at least two unidentifiable man-made structures. The island was too far away for me to see any sea otters, but I knew they were there. Hundreds of them. In fact, according to the survey, there were 386 sea otters living in the waters around the island about the time I was there, and a year later 687 otters were seen in one massive raft a short distance north.
Destruction is the largest island on Washington’s outer coast, and Jeffries says it is usually home to more than half of the state’s sea otters because it provides everything a healthy otter needs. “It has many fingers of protected areas where the otters can raft up; it has a lot of lee areas so when the wind is blowing they can hang out protected from the wind,” he said. “And it’s right in the middle of pretty good, if not the best, Dungeness crab
habitat on the Washington coast.” The otters radiate out from Destruction Island to forage, eating as many crabs as they can find. The crabs in the areas that are too deep for the otters to reach will continually repopulate the otter foraging area. From a sea otter’s perspective, it’s the ideal place to live, though the tribal crab fishermen who fish in the area would prefer that the otters moved elsewhere.
Although a few scattered individual sea otters occasionally wander south of Destruction Island, it seemed odd to me that there have been no mass movements of otters attempting to recolonize the southern two-thirds of the Washington coast. Jeffries thinks the reason has mostly to do with the distribution of the two species of kelp found in the area. Giant kelp is a perennial seaweed that can grow a foot or two each day and can easily reach more than one hundred feet tall. It has willowy, leaflike fronds and gas-filled bladders that hold it upright in the water. The closely related bull kelp, on the other hand, is an annual seaweed, which means it breaks off and dies back every year before growing back again. Jeffries said that Washington sea otters are primarily found where giant kelp grows year-round, and there is almost no giant kelp in the state south of Destruction Island, just bull kelp. In the winter, when the wind and water conditions are at their roughest, sea otters raft together in large groups in the protection of the kelp, where they can anchor themselves and stick together. Since the only patches of kelp available in winter are of the giant variety, that’s where the otters tend to spend most of their time, and this keeps them from expanding southward.
Because the entire Washington population of sea otters is confined to a one-hundred-mile stretch of coastline, Jeffries says the greatest threat to the state’s otters is an oil spill. Unlike in California and Alaska, diseases have not been a serious problem for the otter population in Washington. They aren’t facing significant predation from sharks or killer whales, either, thanks to an abundant population of harbor seals. “Why would a predator choose to eat a fur ball like an otter when it can eat a little cube of butter?” Jeffries asked. But an oil spill would be a major disaster for Washington’s otters. The last time an oil spill struck Washington’s coast was just three months before the massive Exxon Valdez spill in Alaska, when a fuel barge, the Nestucca, spilled 231,000 gallons of fuel oil at the entrance to Grays Harbor. The oil spread south to Newport, Oregon, and north to Vancouver Island. If that happened today, the Washington sea otter population may not be able to recover.