We still have a limited quantity of our 2018 nature calendars available! These glossy 8 1/2″ x 11″ wall calendars are a welcome addition to any home or office, featuring full color wildlife and landscapes prints – and they’re only $15.00! Every month shows a different photograph accompanied by an inspirational quote. Holidays and significant dates in conservation history are noted. Click below to order your calendar today!
Copyright (c) 2018 G. Runco / Teklanika Nature Photography
Greetings & Best Wishes from Teklanika Photography!
We hope that our annual end-of-year newsletter finds you happy, healthy, and with those you love.
2016 has been another excellent year for nature photography! We feel fortunate to have the simple privilege of photographing Bohemian Waxwings in our very own downtown Anchorage neighborhood each winter. They love the berries of the Mountain Ash trees that line our streets and arrive in huge, chattering flocks for these delicate snacks. Not far down the Seward Highway southbound, the Dall Sheep gather in the cliffs, providing ample opportunities for viewing and photography. Of course, the beginning of the year is also great for capturing the Northern Lights. Like the year before, the 2016 Aurora Borealis did not disappoint.
On a more somber note, a major seabird mortality event in Alaska – affecting tens of thousands of Common Murres – occurred over the 2015-2016 winter season. While the specific cause remains unknown, the die-off likely resulted from warming sea temperatures. This event resulted in an opportunity to document the birds that Guy and his team at the Bird Treatment and Learning Center were able to rehabilitate and release back to sea.
In April, we took a family trip to Seward for an early-season Grey Whale-watching tour. In addition to one female Grey Whale and her calf, we enjoyed seeing myriad other sea mammals, including Steller Sea Lions, Harbor Seals, Mountain Goats, and Northern Sea Otters. We also watched a Kingfisher fish along the shore of Resurrection Bay on a beautiful evening at Lowell Point.
Also in April, we began taking pictures of the year’s newest arrivals – Moose calves! From a safe and respectful distance of course, observing and photographing the calves and their mothers is a profound annual experience.
In May, we took a trip to Colorado and enjoyed seeing the wildlife of our home state, including Red-Tailed Hawks, Black-Chinned Hummingbirds, American While Pelicans, Red-Winged Blackbirds, White-Tailed Deer, and Coyotes among others.
Back in Alaska, later in May and into June, finally the Black and Brown Bears are awake! Other young are appearing as well, like the downy Great Horned Owlets and the pink-beaked juvenile Ravens. And we’re off to our annual visit to the Kachemak Bay Shorebird Festival.
In July, we escorted a rehabilitated Bald Eagle north to Fairbanks for release at the 2016 Annual Midnight Sun Powwow. As in past years, this event and the eagle release is an awe-inspiring and goosebump-inducing experience.
Summer flew by in the blink of an eye.
In September, we returned to Denali National Park for the annual road lottery, an unforgettable four days in the park with numerous opportunities to observe and photograph Grizzly Bear, Moose, Caribou, Red Fox, Arctic Ground Squirrel, Willow Ptarmigan, and more. While in Denali, we also delighted in our first snow of the season at Eielson Visitor Center.
Along with snow and the change of the season comes the darkness, returning to reveal the Northern Lights once again! And the Fall Moose rut in Anchorage.
Winter has now settled in completely and the holiday season is upon us. We are anxiously awaiting some measurable snow accumulation.
In between our trips away from home, we spent hundreds of hours hiking and exploring our backyard in the greater Anchorage area, which offers excellent nature photography opportunities. We hope that you’ll visit the website and also scroll back through our 2016 posts in the Field Journal to see some of what we came across this year.
2017 Teklanika Nature Photography Calendar
Our 2017 nature calendars are now available! These glossy 8 1/2″ x 11″ calendars are a welcome addition to any home or office, featuring full color wildlife and landscapes prints – and they’re only $15.00! Every month shows a different photograph accompanied by an inspirational quote. Holidays and significant dates in conservation history are noted.
Visit the new Teklanika website!
We were finally able to make some much-needed updates to our website earlier this year, including faster loading photos and a streamlined shopping cart and check out experience. Take a look and let us know what you think!
New Prints Added to our Online Portfolio
As a reminder, if you find that Teklanika Photography photo that you just can’t live without, we have a variety of print options available to suit everyone’s needs. If you’re interested in a photo that you’ve seen while browsing our Field Journal but you don’t see it available for purchase on the Teklanika website, contact us and we’ll take care of you. Thanks!
Teklanika Field Journal
The field journal features our day-to-day wildlife and nature photos (many of which never make it into the teklanikphotography.com portfolio). You can sign up to receive Field Journal updates in regular installments (per post, weekly, etc.) right in your email inbox!
2016 Field Journal Video
Once again, we’re excited to share with you a video compilation of some of our moments this year in the field.
(For best results, be sure to watch the video in “1080p HD”.)
Copyright (c) 2016 G. Runco / Teklanika Nature Photography
Wow, seems like 2012 just flew by! It has been a great year – here are some of my photography highlights:
– 24,842 photos taken throughout 2012
– first great gray owl photos
– first snow bunting photos
– first northern hawk owl photos
– first decent photos of the Aurora Borealis, finally!
– 6 lynx sightings, and my first lynx photos
– incredible number of bear photo opportunities this year (thanks to Michael Bay for building the treestands along the creek)
– trusty Sony camera, lens and tripod slid into a raging river while photographing brown bears, lost forever
– special thanks to the incredible kindness of photographers Bill and Sharon Larson, Dick Williams and Dan Carline, I was able to salvage the busy summer photography season with borrowed gear
– first short-tailed weasel photos
– several trips to Denali National Park, including four days of the coveted “road lottery” (thank you Larson’s!!!)
– inducted into an excellent wildlife watcher / photography group, RLAC (Road Lottery Addicted Crew)
– first gyrfalcon photos
– first Alaskan pika photos
– new camera! switched from Sony to Canon (thanks again to photographer Dick Williams for his incredible continuing support, I owe you big time buddy!)
Thankful for an excellent 2012 and looking forward to a great 2013, happy new year!
The two primary breeding females from the best-known wolf pack at Denali National Park — a pack viewed by tens of thousands of visitors each year — are dead, one of them killed by a trapper operating just outside the boundary of Alaska’s premier national park.
The incident has raised an outcry among Alaska conservationists. They’re demanding an immediate halt to wolf trapping in what was formerly a buffer zone northeast of the park, an area made famous as the site of the abandoned school bus in Jon Krakauer’s “Into the Wild.”
The trapper apparently shot an aging horse and left it as a lure for the wolves, according to residents in the area. Park officials, who have unsuccessfully sought to maintain a no-hunting buffer alongside the park, said two wolves, at least one of them from the well known Grant Creek pack, were fatally snared near the carcass.
One of the dead wolves was equipped with a radio collar attached by scientists; it was the only female from the pack known to have raised pups last year. The pack’s only other known breeding female was found dead near the pack’s den, probably of natural causes. A third wolf, also snared near the horse carcass, was a male that may or may not have been part of the Grant Creek pack, said Tom Meier, wildlife biologist for Denali National Park.
Quite a year for me! I’ve gone from working with fish for the Division of Wildlife in Colorado to working with birds at the Bird Treatment & Learning Center, a wild bird rehab and education center in Alaska.
As for wildlife watching and photography, I’ve had many “firsts” this year, including…
– photographed Burrowing Owl
– photographed Dall Sheep
– photographed Bobcat (at quite a distance, but still a first for me)
– photographed Orca and Humpback Whale
– watched a Black Bear hunt Dall Sheep on steep cliffs (no photo of the chase, but really cool to see)
– photographed Arctic Tern and other birds of Alaska
– watched & photographed a Wolf feeding on a Caribou carcass (at quite a distance as well, but still a first for me)
– had a close encounter alone with a Grizzly Bear (again, no photo of the action, happened too fast)
courtesy of Alaska Dispatch
by Will Rose and Kajsa Sjölander
Beaufort Sea polar bears find themselves in the crosshairs of global warming, forced to adapt to less and less ice that’s critical to the way they hunt and survive.
As Arctic sea ice retreats up to 700 miles from the shoreline during summer months, bears must either head north or swim south to land as the ice breaks up. In 2011, U.S Fish and Wildlife Service scientists working in the area have counted 49 bears within 10 miles of Kaktovik, the largest concentration of the estimated 70-80 spread along the coastline.
Those bears represent up to 10 percent of the southern Beaufort population, estimated at 1,500 animals five years ago by U.S. Geological Survey.
The number of polar bears coming to land is increasing over the past decade but scientists are unsure why. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service says the primary threat to polar bears is the loss of sea ice habitat due to climate change. Whale remains left by local substance hunters may be another factor.
“A lot of bears showed up just after a big wind storm,” said polar bear guide Robert Thompson of Kaktovik. “Biologists said they saw eight dead polar bears floating in the water. We believe the thin ice broke up beneath them so they had to sink or swim.”
Wild ravens in the Austrian alps have been observed using their beaks and body language to direct another raven’s attention to a specific object, marking the first time such complex gesturing has been documented in an animal outside of humans and their primate cousins.
The findings suggest that Corvus corvax — those canny black birds that dominant both Alaska Native myth and Anchorage’s winter-time parking lots — may have communication abilities and intelligence that puts them on par with bonobos.
By repeatedly demonstrating a kind of “look at that” gesture thought to be at the foundation of human language — behavior seen in human infants beginning at about the age of 1 — the birds may even be smarter than some nonhuman primates, according to a study published today in the journal Nature Communications.
A young wolf from Oregon has become a media celebrity while looking for love, tracing a zigzag path that has carried him hundreds of miles nearly to California, while his alpha male sire and a sibling that stayed home near the Idaho border are under a death warrant for killing cattle.
Backcountry lodge owner Liz Parrish thinks she locked eyes with the wolf called OR-7 on the edge of the meadow in front of her Crystalwood Lodge, on the western shore of Upper Klamath Lake in Oregon, and hopes someday she will hear his howls coming out of the tall timber.
“I was stunned — it was such a huge animal,” said Parrish, who has seen her share of wolves while racing dog sleds in Alaska and Minnesota. “He just stopped and stared. I stopped and stared. We had a stare-down that seemed like a long time, but was probably just a few seconds.
“He just evaporated into the trees. I stayed there awhile, hoping he might come back. He didn’t.”
The much-touted Big Wild Life of Alaska’s largest city is proving a bit too wild for Anchorage cross-country skiers looking to embrace the plentiful early-winter snow.
It’s bad enough to worry about grizzly bears all summer while mountain biking and running Hillside Park trails in Alaska’s largest city, they say; having to worry about them in winter, when they should be sleeping, is a bit much.
“I can’t imagine carrying bear spray on the ski trails,” said long-time Anchorage resident Chip Treinen earlier this month, but after a running across way-too-fresh bear tracks on the Spencer Loop he was wishing he was packing some. “We were kind of spooked.”
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service on Tuesday lost a court battle in its bid to lift federal protections for grizzly bears in the Yellowstone National Park area.
The service had been arguing that a strong rebound by the local grizzly population, now estimated at around 600, warranted lifting the protections. But a federal appeals court upheld a lower court decision, ruling that the service hadn’t properly weighed the impact of a declining food source: the whitepark pine.
The 9th Circuit Court judges wrote that a study used by the service “to demonstrate long-term grizzly population growth included data only until 2002, before the ‘epidemic of mountain pine beetles’ began to kill the region’s whitebark pines.”
When we started the 2 o’clock tour at the Colorado Wolf & Wildlife Center in the mountains above Colorado Springs, the wolves were napping, just as wild wolves do in the middle of the day. A woman in jeans and cowboy boots served as guide for our group — eight random travelers, most of whom simply had seen the road sign, pulled in and paid the $10 fee. She led us from one enclosure to the next to see animals with names like Princess and Wakanda — tossing them treats from a Ziploc bag, so we could hear their jaws snap shut. Then she led us in a group howl, hoping that some of the wolves would join in. “Ready?” she said. “One, two, three. …”
Our first collective howl sounded more like the bawl of a dying cow, and a couple of the wolves flicked their ears as if irritated. “You guys are pathetic,” the guide said. “Let’s try it again.” Finally a wolf stood up, shook the dust from his coat and gave a half-hearted howl. As the guide directed us toward the gift shop, where a bottle of wolf fur cost four bucks, she tossed a biscuit over the fence. The next tour would be in an hour. The Wolf & Wildlife Center hosts thousands of visitors each year in its mission to “educate the public … about the importance of wolves, coyote and (foxes) to our ecosystem.” It even takes wolves as “ambassadors” into classrooms and other public settings ranging from Colorado’s ski towns to inner-city Denver.
Each captive wolf has its own story, as does every captive-wolf operation. It was almost feeding time when I arrived at Mission: Wolf, a remote 200-acre sanctuary nestled at the southern end of Colorado’s San Isabel National Forest. Wearing blue rubber gloves, two knife-wielding volunteers sawed through frozen meat. They’d cook the meat, which had been donated, in a giant pot mixed with vitamins and kibble, and then serve it to the 29 resident wolves, using white five-gallon buckets with each animal’s name printed on the side: Nyati, Ned, Merlin, Orion, Lily … and Soleil, a female rescued from an owner who wanted a fighting wolf and kept her chained to a tree for five months.
Near the end of the movie “Season of the Witch,” a small band of medieval adventurers is surrounded by howling wolves. The monk says, “Wolves.” Another character asks, “What’ll we do?” Nicolas Cage, playing a knight in tarnished armor, says, “Kill as many as you can.”
Welcome to wildlife management as it is currently practiced in Alaska. Not so different from the way it was practiced in the Middle Ages.
I am not opposed to reducing numbers of wolves to increase numbers of prey animals — wolf control — so long as wolves constitute a serious problem and the program is scientifically justified, temporary and cost effective. Wolf control for the sake of killing wolves is none of the above.
This week, in Barrow, the northernmost city in the United States, the Alaska Board of Game was scheduled to consider wolf control proposals for two game management units on the Kenai Peninsula: 15A and 15C.
Why was the board considering wolf control plans for the Kenai Peninsula at a meeting in Barrow?
When the board adopts a predator control plan, it takes 60 days before a program can be implemented. Ted Spraker, a board member from the Kenai Peninsula, was bound and determined to start shooting Kenai wolves this winter. But the board tabled both proposals until their Anchorage meeting, scheduled Jan. 13-18, 2012.
Board members, including Spraker, found serious flaws in the Alaska Department of Fish and Game’s documentation and expressed concern that a required feasibility plan wasn’t completed before the meeting.
Now most Alaskans wouldn’t get a chance until next year to examine the reasons why the department believes wolf control is justified on the Kenai Peninsula. The reasons are not persuasive.
A bear walks into a grocery store. While that may sound like the start of joke, it’s what really happened Saturday in Ketchikan.
The Ketchikan Daily News and KRBD radio reported a small black bear cub walked in the front door of Tatsuda’s IGA. The scared animal found its way to a produce cooler, where it made a mess.
Meat department manager Joe Stollar filmed the bear’s capture. He said the little bear was just trying to hide.
A customer captured the bear and let it loose from the store’s back door onto a trail leading to the woods. Authorities suspect it was an orphaned bear since its mother wasn’t seen nearby.
Several thousand dollars of ruined produce was donated to a livestock owner.
Soon comes the day when it will be safe to stumble out of the house like an average American. The new snow that rims the Chugach Mountains peaks these October days is viewed by some as “termination dust.” They sense the approaching winter with unease and dream as many an Alaskan miner did a hundred years ago of the warm comforts of Seattle or San Francisco or cities even farther south.
Those of us who’ve made a home here, those of us who cling to the land like country’s aboriginal, see the snow a little differently. It remains “termination dust,” but it has a different meaning.
Soon the bears will disappear from the scene for the winter.
Soon it will be fine to roam the neighborhood trails unprepared.
Soon we will feel comfortable bumbling out of the house at any hour without looking both ways for bruin.
Another bunch of Outsiders suffer a mauling in Alaska. I’m not just referring to the grizzly bear attacking seven teens in late July. I’m talking about the drubbing dished out by Alaskans who believe a gun is the best — some would say only — insurance against a bear attack.
A flurry of swats and biting comments were delivered in response to articles in the Anchorage Daily News. Within days the first article racked up 945 often acidic jabs. Several follow-up articles provoked another 569 shots. Most of the authors used pseudonyms, but many comments appeared to be written by Alaskans.
What provoked the electronic attack? Seven teens ranging from 16-18 years old were in their fourth week of a wilderness backpacking course sponsored by the National Outdoor Leadership School. NOLS is a highly respected organization that teaches leadership, teamwork, environmental ethics, first aid, and wilderness skills, including bear safety. The group was on the first day of a “student expedition,” which caps the month-long course by permitting the teens to demonstrate what they had learned, without adult supervision. Surprised by a brown bear in the western Talkeetna Mountains, four of the teens sustained injuries. Three members of the group carried a can of bear spray, which none had time to deploy. The teens were not allowed to carry firearms.
A few weeks ago Yellowstone National Park officials discovered the carcass of one of the park’s deadliest wolves, an aging male that scientists knew to be an aggressive bison hunter.
Wolf No. 495 died naturally, but his body bore bruises consistent with injuries inflicted in an encounter with large game, according to Dan MacNulty, an assistant professor of wildlife ecology at Utah State University.
The wounds found on No. 495 help explain MacNulty’s latest findings that wolves’ hunting success bears little correlation to the size of the hunting party beyond four wolves. Wolves hunt in groups because taking down large hoofed animals is not only challenging but dangerous.
But if the attack party exceeds four animals, the chance of success levels off, according to research MacNulty and colleagues published this week in the journal Behavioral Ecology.
The Juneau man who was accused of illegally feeding black bears pleaded guilty in Juneau District Court on Wednesday to one count of feeding game.
Arnold W. Hanger, 65, was fined $5,000 with $2,500 suspended, given 10 days in jail with all 10 suspended and ordered to pay $1,500 in restitution to the state.
In addition, Hanger was ordered to perform 80 hours of community work service with the Alaska Department of Fish & Game’s Wildlife Division. Hanger was also placed on probation for two years.
Somewhere in the rolling tundra east of Deadhorse, a lone wolf hunts. The 100-pound male will take anything it can catch, or find – a ptarmigan, a darting tundra rodent, a fish, the scraps of a carcass, or, if lucky, a moose calf or caribou. Hunger is a common companion, but the wolf somehow survived when his mate probably died of it last winter.
That event may have triggered the lone wolf’s incredible summer journey from south of the Yukon River to the crumbling shores of the Beaufort Sea. The wolf has traveled about 1,500 miles in four months, according to biologist John Burch, who works for the National Park Service.
Burch has studied wolves and the things wolves eat since the mid-1990s at Yukon-Charley Rivers National Preserve and Gates of the Arctic National Park and Preserve. Last November, he was part of a team that helicoptered to Copper Creek, a remote tributary of the clear-running Charley River. There, he tranquilized a healthy male wolf and fitted it with a satellite radio collar. The collar transmits GPS coordinates from the wolf every few days, which has allowed Burch to follow the wolf¹s trans-Alaska trek this summer.
Burch would have preferred that the wolf remain near Yukon-Charley, 2.5 million acres where the Yukon flows into Alaska. The wolf’s collar is expensive and would give useful information about one of a dozen wolf packs
that use the preserve as part of their home range. But the lone male is telling the biologists a different story about wolf behavior – what happens when a pack breaks up.
A moose hunter attacked by a grizzly bear north of the Denali Highway survived the severe mauling Monday after hiking to his camp, traveling by boat downriver to a wilderness lodge then getting an airlift via Alaska Air National Guard helicopter to an Anchorage hospital.
Donald “Skip” Sanford, 65, was hunting about five miles upriver from the Maclaren River Lodge when the bear attacked, according to Alaska State Troopers.
Sanford had been hunting with his son John, 12, his friend Monty Dyson, 47, and Dyson’s son Chad, 22, Dyson said.
Dyson relayed Sanford’s story Tuesday by radio phone from the lodge, which sits on the highway 42 miles east of Cantwell.
Sanford walked away from camp Monday about 2 or 3 p.m. to find a hand-held radio he lost earlier, Dyson said.
Sanford was on a game trail when he saw the bear stand up, Dyson said. Sanford backed up, but the bear seemed to circle around him, Dyson said.
Sanford told rescuers he first saw the grizzly about 75 yards away from him, said Joe Snyder, one of the many people at the lodge who helped treat Sanford and get him out of the wilderness. The bear quickly closed the gap between them, Snyder said.
“He turned around and the bear was about 20 yards away, and it was coming at him pretty fast with its head down,” Snyder said.
Four years ago the Alaska Legislature offered Gov. Sarah Palin and the Alaska Department of Fish and Game a special deal: $400,000 to “educate” voters on predator control. The money — spent mostly on a video, glossy brochures and public presentations — was meant to persuade and reassure Alaskans that predator control is essential and effective.
Firmly convinced he’s doing the right thing, the new director of the Division of Wildlife Conservation at Fish and Game, Corey Rossi, is taking predator control to new levels. For the first time since statehood, Alaska has targeted grizzly bears for large-scale population reductions, not by hunters but by agents of the state.
The publicity campaign, Rossi, Governor Sean Parnell and the Alaska Legislature would like you to believe that scientific experts on predator and prey populations — particularly the professional wildlife biologists and researchers with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game — unanimously support killing bears to increase numbers of moose and caribou.
But some of those experts have questioned the efficacy and advisability of reducing numbers of grizzly bears in a peer-reviewed article in the latest edition of the Journal of Wildlife Management.
A police officer in Soldotna has shot and killed a large brown bear in a busy residential area after the animal charged him.
Police Chief John Lucking says Officer Victor Dillon spotted the bear crossing into a yard Thursday afternoon. Dillon thought it was likely an injured one that had been reported scavenging in the area for several days. The officer went looking for the bear on foot, armed with a shotgun. The next time he saw the bear it charged him, veering slightly as it approached, and he fired and killed it.
The chief says the bear likely was attracted by a fresh caribou head within a few feet of where the bear was shot. Lucking says someone apparently had just butchered the caribou and the smell and head attracted the bear.
Wildlife agents were trying to capture a grizzly bear in Yellowstone National Park on Monday after it killed a Michigan hiker in the second fatal bear attack this summer at the famed park.
The body of John Wallace, 59, was discovered Friday in a backcountry area known for its high population of bears. An autopsy concluded he died from injuries sustained in a bear attack.
After a fatal mauling last month — the first inside the increasingly crowded park in 25 years — authorities let the responsible grizzly go because it was protecting its cubs.
This time, rangers have set traps with the intent to capture and kill the bruin that attacked Wallace. Its guilt would be established through DNA analysis connecting it to evidence found at the mauling scene, park officials said.
