Refuge Notebook Brings Natural Science to Life

Kenai National Wildlife Refuge, AK

Credit: Steve Hillebrand

Every week for 13 years, staff at the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Kenai National Wildlife Refuge in Alaska have been giving science writing a good name in a local newspaper column called Kenai Refuge Notebook.

Kenai Refuge Notebook offers observations on refuge life and work that refuge staff take turns writing for a local daily newspaper. Each installment appears on the refuge website.  

Subjects may be familiar (hunting or snow) or specialized (thermal imaging). But the perspectives are fresh, and the insights often surprising. Consider these accounts published over the last year:  

• Biologist John Morton’s account of three nunataks – exposed glacial ridges at risk of losing their uniqueness as wildlife oases as the climate warms.
• Entomologist Matt Bowser’s light piece about building a library of insect DNA codes to offer another measure of environmental change. (“The whole idea,” he jokes, “is to work myself out of a job.”)
• Graduate student Rebecca Zulueta’s observations of interactions between bears and humans. (One lesson from her survey of local attitudes on bears: “The fact that many Alaskans also have large, intimidating dogs definitely added unwanted excitement to my experience until I learned to bring along dog treats.”)
• And game warden Chris Johnson’s musings about wily scofflaws (like the fisherman who hid a fresh-caught rainbow trout in his pants) and the wilier officers who catch them.

The weekly newspaper column was conceived by ecologist Ed Berg in 1999, who thought it would be a good refuge outreach tool.   The informal tone ­that resulted has become a hallmark of the column. Column writers also tend to share a contagious enthusiasm for the Alaska landscape and a willingness to laugh at themselves. Take Morton’s aside about a recovered nunatak specimen: “We also collected one terrestrial mite (Erythraeus tonsus) which eventually made the front cover of the June 2010 issue of the International Journal of Acarology. I know that’s a lot of excitement to handle in one newspaper article, but you’ll be even more impressed to note that it was regarded as a ‘monstrosity,’ a genetic anomaly which resulted in a 10-legged (rather than 8) mite. OK, this is even nerdier than guys in Antarctica who name their band Nunatak.”

Will Morrow, the Clarion’s current editor, inherited the column from Evans in its first year, and he’s still a fan. “It’s generally very well written,” he says, of the Notebook. “It’s such a diverse thing. Sometimes it’s a biologist or ecologist writing, sometimes one of the law enforcement folks, sometimes one of backcountry rangers, so there’s always something different in there.”