Headline        A NATURAL BALANCE OLD FASHIONED FIELDWORK, STILL INVALUABLE IN THE HIGH TECH WORLD OF SCIENCE  
Run Date        8/28/1994      Day     Sunday 
Page    M1     Section         Lifestyles     
Dateline        DENALI NATIONAL PARK   
Story Byline    By SANDI McDANIEL Daily News reporter  

      Some summer days, Jeff Keay pushes back the heavy wooden shutters of the East Fork research cabin and lets in the wilderness. A table just inside the window makes a fine spot to look out over the vast, willow-covered hills while he writes, always with a permanent-ink pen and pure, acid-free cotton paper. So his words will last 100 years. Keay, a bear biologist for the National Biological Survey, has an office at park headquarters full of computer doodads. But to his mind, no invention beats a plain, ring-bound notebook when it comes to observing nature. It isn't the same if you wait until you're back in the office where people are talking and phones are ringing, he says. Write it while it's fresh, while you can still hear the quiet of the tundra and feel the rain soaking your socks. TX: In an age when biologists routinely monitor bears by satellite, Keay finds no substitute for the low-tech staple of scientific research the field journal. It's one of the first rules he made upon arriving here in 1990 following a 12-year stint as wildlife manager for Yosemite National Park in California keep a journal. To make sure his staff knew how, he wrote and distributed a guidebook. "One might initially believe that the naturalist creates the field journal," he solemnly wrote, "but I firmly believe that it's the field journal that creates the naturalist." With all our techno-gadgetry computers, remote sensing and radio telemetry, we forget that "we still don't have accurate species lists for many areas, nor do we accurately know the local distribution of plants and animals. Incidental observations, recorded in field journals, can provide much of the information." Keay's approach is gaining validity in scientific circles as biologists search for ways to manage wildlife in the 21st century. They're giving more credence to the methods of early naturalists, whose work heretofore has been known as "anecdotal," as having little scientific value. This holistic approach has been missing for decades as young biologists specialized marching into the field not in ranks, but to individual drumbeats. Last year, Interior Secretary Bruce Babbitt began assembling a National Biological Survey, a resurrection of the Bureau of Biological Survey, established by the Department of Agriculture in 1885. The BBS was a predecessor to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and in its first 15 years, quadrupled the number of known mammal species in America. Babbitt's NBS, signed into law by President Clinton, has nearly 2,000 employees and a budget of $167.2 million. Its intent is to consolidate research of federal and state agencies to get an overview of how wildlife interacts and how to manage it. Alaska plays a key role, with four field stations and 120 employees working at the Alaska Science Center in Anchorage. Call it preventive medicine, with a prescription for biologists to think beyond their specialties and in terms of the whole picture. For them to compile and compare. To take the puzzle pieces and connect them. Aug. 29, 1949 "I startled two bears in the woods along the Teklanika River. One ran into the woods above the road and the other ran below the road. One started to utter chuckling, baby-like sounds that were answered by the other bear . . . This is the only time I have heard cubs call to each other." Adolph Murie Wildlife in Denali National Park ebbs and flows, adapts, evolves. When Jeff Keay, 45, wants to know what was going on in the park a couple of years ago, he consults his field journal. When he wants to know what was going on a half-century ago, he consults Adolph Murie's field journal. One of McKinley's earliest and most respected naturalists, Ade, as friends called him, worked 25 summers in the park between 1922 and 1970. His research cabin still stands at East Fork just up the road from where Keay now works. During long stints in the back country, Murie made literature of his field notation, some of which has been published posthumously and is considered classic Alaska nature writing: "A Naturalist in Alaska" (1961); "The Grizzlies of Mount McKinley" (1981); "The Wolves of Mount McKinley" (1944); "Mammals of Mount McKinley" (1962). Ade learned to love nature as a boy in Minnesota, where he grew up camping and fishing on the Red River. He was lured to Alaska by his older brother, Olaus, who in the 1920s was working for the old BBS, making a natural history study of the Interior. During this assignment, Olaus lived unleashed, mushing and hiking his way across the wilderness, living on ptarmigan and blueberries. At night, he took notes and made drawings of the wildlife and countryside he had seen. Ade was envious, and when he got a chance, joined his brother to aid in a study of caribou. Later, upon receiving his doctorate from the University of Michigan, Ade worked for the Fish and Wildlife Service and the National Park Service in Wyoming, Arizona and in Yellowstone National Park. But Alaska was his favorite laboratory, and he looked for ways to return throughout his career and even after he retired. Through years of devotion to the park, the Muries became Alaska's first family of naturalists. Olaus's wife, Margaret, the first woman to graduate the University of Alaska Fairbanks, distinguished herself with such writings as "Two in the Far North" and "Wapiti Wilderness." Ade was 21 when he met Margaret's sister, Louise, then just 11. They married when Louise was in college and had two children, Jan and Gail. Ade died in an epileptic seizure 20 years ago last month. Sometime later, while sifting through his father's papers, Jan Murie, a zoology professor at the University of Alberta in Canada, found something interesting. Notes. On science, yes. But also on life and philosophy. Quotes from people his father admired, like Henry David Thoreau and Ralph Waldo Emerson. After all this time, Louise, now in her 80s and living near Jackson Hole, Wyo., is still perfectly clear about what possessed her husband to return to the hardships of the park year after year. "He had a love affair with Alaska which he never got over." May 25, 1955 "I watched a female and two 2-year-old bears climb a slope near Savage Canyon. When they neared a band of 33 rams, the other made a short run toward them. The rams fled upward about 100 yards, then walked slowly a little farther, and stood watching the family pass over the ridge a short distance from them. In rough country the sheep are aware of their security." Adolph Murie When Olaus Murie wrote the forward to Ade's 1961 book "A Naturalist in Alaska," he already had identified a trouble spot in modern science poor fieldwork. "Such intimate, on-the-ground contact with animals, for as long as it takes to get the desired information, leads to an understanding of nature which is desperately lacking in this age of human exploitation of the planet." Ade had the authority of having lived in the park, closely following the activities of its inhabitants. In the 1950s, he concentrated his observations on wolves. Later, he studied grizzlies. He examined the interrelationships of bear families, following them for days at a time. He saw these large predators as entwined with their fellow creatures in a dependent universe. He wrote about them that way, taking notes on how each affected the others. He gathered more information on a wider variety of species than most biologists today, Keay says of his predecessor. It's true his work is highly respected, yet Ade would have a hard time publishing a paper today, Keay says. He wouldn't have the tools. Keay, currently charged with investigating a disturbing rate of bear cub mortality in Denali, monitors 30 park bears by radio collar, tracking their movements by airplane in spring and fall. He and his staff study plant phenology with the help of weather satellites. What are the bears eating? How do they eat? Where do they eat? If they are eating berries, what time of year is the harvest at its peak? Are they eating blueberries, cranberries, crowberries or soapberries? Keay's heart may be out in that cabin on the East Fork, but he's also only half joking when he says he's working on a masters' degree in statistics. He's got the computer- generated models to prove it. He would have little validity otherwise. Ade worked primarily alone, but Keay relies on the research of five other biologists in the park, plus the opinions of far-flung colleagues and an acre of books and periodicals weighing down the shelves of his office. But guess what he's got stuffed in among all those drab volumes of statistical data? "The Grizzlies of Mount McKinley," by A. Murie. "We've got to have a balance," he says. We need to take the best of Ade Murie and apply it to the benefits of the technology we have today, he says. Why? So we can figure out a better strategy for how to run things. Why? To put it in Babbitt's words, so we can avoid "train wrecks" like the spotted owl, the snail darter and other environmental mistakes of the late 20th century. "I think the oil spill is a good example," says Leslie Holland-Bartels, chief of marine ecology at the Alaska Science Center. Biologists weren't prepared to study the damage from the 1989 Exxon Valdez spill, she says. There was no long-term data on populations. If scientists had known more about how the ecosystem of Prince William Sound worked, they could have better judged the degree to which its various species were affected. At the time, they could only estimate the percentage of loss. "Because we didn't know how many we had, we didn't know how many we lost," she says. While Babbitt has been criticized for creating an "eco-police," Keay thinks it takes a broad mind to envision how the NBS could build an extensive body of knowledge about such ecosystems, and scientists of all stripes could work together. "I'm impressed," he says. Aug. 7, 1961 ". . .mother and yearling were seen about 8:30 p.m., feeding on berries on a slope of Igloo Mountain. I watched them as they fed slowly up the slope until 10 p.m., when it was too dark to see them. I had hoped to observe them retiring for the night but they continued feeding on blueberries in the dark." Adolph Murie Ever heard of Aldo Leopold? You have if you've been listening to the Clinton administration, which often quotes him for his views on ecosystems. Leopold, ("Sand County Almanac," 1949) and other early naturalists may be more appreciated today than in their own time. "There have always been people that have a strong, philosophical bent for wilderness," says Calvin Lensink, retired after 30 years with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service in Alaska. But now many lay people are thinking about the environment, he says. People in big cities are thinking about ecosystems for Pete's sakes. "They call it the Bambi syndrome. They sort of love wildlife in an esoteric way without understanding too much about it." An interesting turnabout, adds Lensink, who began his work in Alaska three decades ago, studying marten in the Interior. He was lucky if he could get population counts by cornering and interviewing trappers, on the chance they had caught some of his tagged animals. Now he would rely on radio marking capturing and tracking them electronically. There is a connection between these advances and public awareness, Lensink says. When biologists know more, they can pinpoint problems. And when there are problems, the public gets interested. All this talk about ecosystems began with the environmental movement in the 1960s, but it took a long time for momentum to build, says David Klein, a senior scientist and wildlife biologist at UAF. Nuclear accidents, the toxic backlash of Love Canal, oil spills, endangered species and other environmental catastrophes spurred public concern and debate. And environmental organizations have worked to change the focus of the government, he says. But, "You don't just go out overnight and do studies understanding how ecosystems function . . . We're just starting to do that kind of research." In the UAF Department of Biology and Wildlife, there are about 200 wildlife majors, 200 biology majors and 100 graduate students. The majority of graduates stay in Alaska, according to Klein. They find jobs at the National Park Service, the Bureau of Land Management, the state and with private consulting firms for corporations. Some are happier working with computers, modeling data and statistical work. Others bolt for the field. Either way, there is work for them. "There's a vast gap in our knowledge," Klein says. "If we're going to have increasing human populations here in Alaska, we should have basic knowledge, so we can plan for those increases." Perhaps the broadest biological survey ever made in Alaska was undertaken in 1899 when a rich New Yorker named Edward Harriman led 126 scientists, naturalists, writers and artists here, just to have a look around. The Harriman Expedition logged 9,000 miles in two months, examining and taking notes on plant an animal species. Their work and that of the early naturalists is known as "the baseline," the starting point to what we have now. June 1, 1965 "I spent the first day of June 1965 in the Polychrome Pass area. A bear was first seen at the head of one of the branches of East Fork River. For about 10 minutes he fed in one spot, apparently on part of a carcass, then wandered southward. Twice he stopped to roll. There were no caribou ahead of him, so I moved on." Adolph Murie When Fred Dean, 67, drives down to Denali from his home in Fairbanks, he and Jeff Keay like to chat about bears. Dean, a retired UAF biology professor, has studied them in the park since 1957. To Keay, a relative newcomer, Dean is a valuable resource. He gives him the perspective of years. "To me, Fred is a link to the past," Keay says. Dean's link to the past is Ade Murie. The two shared a research cabin for one month in the summer of 1959. Ade had an inexhaustible knowledge of the park, yet remarkably, he made most of his observations along the narrow corridor of the park road. He was a patient observer, once watching a wolf den on the Toklat River for 33 straight hours, according to John Murray in his anthology "A Republic of Rivers." So many fresh, young professionals jump in and do research without any understanding of their surroundings, Dean complains. They don't give themselves time to know the area. They don't see the seasons change, see it from year to year. A pressure to publish also keeps biologists myopic, he says. "This is what I hope NBS gets going," Dean says. "Keep the ecosystem approach in mind. Do a general survey, then pick out the meaningful questions . . . There's been, I guess, a lot of politically correct talk about taking an ecosystem approach. I hope it turns out to be more than just a lot of politically correct noise." Ade didn't have all the answers, Dean says. But he cared deeply about the park and understood the consequences of "managing" the animals that lived there. He was a shy person, he adds, but well able to express his opinions with park officials, the public, his colleagues and the U.S. Congress, to which he wrote many thoughtful letters. Olaus Murie may have best expressed the two brothers' thoughts on the park and their work in his 1961 forward to "A Naturalist in Alaska." "Our civilization is now going through a severe strain," he wrote. "We are trying to find our way, those of us who are concerned with it. And to do so, it behooves us to get serenity in order to think and get back to fundamentals for a clearer view into the future. "I believe such writing as this gives a view of truth combined with avenues of natural beauty, as a help toward a richer life." May 12, 1994 "Today I drove to Polychrome Pass to look at some potential vegetation phenology plots my crew will be monitoring this year. Our goal is to correlate plant phenology with some advanced satellite imagery and see if we can predict berry production and availability for bears. Along the way, I saw four Harlequine (sic) ducks in Caribou Creek . . ." Jeff A. Keay