Peltola to serve as Yukon Delta wildlife refuge manager

ALEX DeMARBAN

June 12, 2008 at 10:32AM AKST

A son of Bethel will return home to become the state’s only Alaska Native refuge manager.

On July 20, Gene Peltola Jr. will take the reins of the Yukon Delta National Wildlife Refuge, a 19-million-acre, lake-pocked landscape that supports millions of migrating ducks, geese and other birds.

Peltola, 42, has spent a quarter of a century preparing for the role, bouncing around the state in a variety of jobs for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, all in an effort to one day manage the animals that fill freezers and bind the culture on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta.

Over the years, he’s crashed a raft down a 15-foot waterfall on the Kisaralik River, come face to face with a musk ox on Nunivak Island, and, near the Tagagawik River, leapt to escape a tranquilized bull moose that lurched to its feet before the drug took hold.

It was all in an effort to track Alaska’s birds, fish and big game.

More important, it was part of a life plan Peltola fashioned in high school, when the part-Yup’ik teen spent his summers with wildlife biologists, voluntarily banding birds on the wetlands stretching from Bethel to the Bering Sea.

His dad, Gene Peltola, well known as the president of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Health Corp., made sure he spent fall hunting seasons on the tundra instead of the classroom, wanting to help future generations have enough wild food to hunt and eat.

“I knew that if I wanted to ensure that my children and their children had the same or better opportunities that I did growing up that not only did I have to work with the Fish and Wildlife Service, I had to be the manager of the refuge,” said Peltola, now a wildlife enforcement officer and pilot in Fairbanks.

He’ll run the second largest of the federal government’s 16 Alaska refuges, the state’s most important area for nesting geese. The post came up last fall, when longtime manager Mike Rearden, a friend and mentor, retired from the refuge.

Rearden, now helping the University of Alaska Anchorage educate Alaska Native biologists, said he began working with Peltola in Bethel in the early 1980s. Rearden, a pilot biologist for the refuge at the time, often flew the wide-eyed volunteer to nesting areas in the back of a Super Cub.

Rearden remembers Peltola, just 16, squawking through the plane’s headphones about his plans to one day manage the refuge.

Peltola’s breadth of experience, and his connection with the region’s unique subsistence lifestyle, will help him build community involvement to protect wildlife, Rearden said.

“I can’t think of a better person to be my successor,” Rearden said.

Peltola’s paid career with the agency started a few days after he got his high school diploma in the Western Alaska community of 5,800, when he tramped into the refuge’s Bethel headquarters in 1984 asking for a job. He spent the summer counting geese nests on a coastal expanse between the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers.

“It didn’t even seem like work,” he said. “I was getting paid to go camping.”

Later, he earned a wildlife management degree at the University of Alaska Fairbanks and got his pilot’s license.

He’s worked on and off in Bethel and at the Yukon Flats National Wildlife Refuge in the Interior. He spent much of his career at the Selawik National Wildlife Refuge out of Kotzebue. In 2002, he began a two-year stint as the refuge manager there, a first for an Alaska Native.

Since then, he’s worn a badge and flown north of the Alaska Range to enforce wildlife laws.

Peltola said he’s never declared his ethnicity on job applications, because he doesn’t want people to think he’s earned special privileges because of his race.

“I’m proud of my heritage but I guard against people saying I got where I am because of what I am,” he said.

Not many Natives hold management positions with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

There are six in Alaska, out of 132 total supervisors, said Bruce Woods, spokesman.

Overall, 52 of the agency’s 520 employees are Native, or 10 percent, he said. Alaska Natives comprise 15.4 percent of the state’s population, according to a 2006 U.S. Census estimate.

Fish and Wildlife officials hope that Rearden’s effort at UAA, which began last year as part of the Alaska Native Science and Engineering Program, will produce more biologists to fill management roles at the agency, Woods said.

People raised near refuges who later work there are more likely to stick around, and they bring decades of knowledge that help build partnerships with residents, Peltola said.

Rearden is a great example. A non-Native from Homer, Rearden first moved to Bethel in the 1970s. He developed bonds with the community that paid off five years ago, when hunters accepted a voluntary moose-hunting moratorium on the lower Kuskokwim River, Peltola said.

Native leaders, with help from state and federal wildlife officials, wanted the moose that trickle into the region every year to grow into a sustainable population that provided reliable numbers for hunting.

The effort worked in part because residents respected Rearden, Peltola said.

As refuge manager, Peltola said he would continue the work his friend started, with an eye on building additional protections, with the community’s help, for the clouds of birds that visit the delta from around the world.

“To be a refuge manager, you have to have passion for what you do. I have passion because this is my home and this always will be my home,” Peltola said.

Alex DeMarban can be reached at (907) 348-2444 or (800) 770-9830, ext. 444.