Alaska Fish & Wildlife News
January 2015

Black Bears and the Impact of Access
Heavy Hunting in Prince William Sound

By Riley Woodford

Build it and they will come. Sometimes that's wishful thinking, sometimes it's true.

In the case of the Whittier Tunnel on the Portage Glacier Highway, it's true in spades. The access led to a dramatic increase in the number of hunters from Anchorage pursuing black bears in Prince William Sound. That was good for the economy, and many of those hunters were successful. Thousands of bears have been harvested over the past decade-and-a-half, and wildlife managers, guides and transporters, ...   PWS Bears Article Continued

Guns and Canada
Crossing the Border

By Riley Woodford

Hundreds of hunters are failing to declare their firearms when they enter Canada. They are getting arrested and fined, and the U.S. Department of State wants to help.

Geoff Martineau works at the Department of State, Bureau of Consular Affairs, Office of American Citizen Services. “We help U.S. citizens traveling abroad avoid problems,” he said. “In Canada, we're looking at an estimated 200 to 300 U.S. citizens each year who run into trouble for failing to declare their firearms. Vancouver ...   Guns and Canada Article Continued

An AUV Journey on Kodiak Island

By Heather Finkle

A long, slender, yellow shape silently slices through the chilly waters of Karluk Lake on Kodiak Island. Is it a torpedo? Some type of missile? No! It is a YSI Ecomapper autonomous underwater vehicle, affectionately known as the AUV. She is a revolutionary tool for efficiently collecting geo-referenced limnological and depth data with the capability to also capture high-resolution images via side-scanning sonar.

The AUV was acquired by Westward Region Commercial Fisheries Finfish Research ...   Underwater vehicle Article Continued