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(wind blowing)
So today we are
surveying Dall Sheep in the Park.
Yeah I see a couple ewes and lambs. Aw, they're frolicking, it's so cute.
We get out the scope, we get out the optics, try to count,
is that a ewe with kinda large-ish horns?
Or is that a young male? You know, trying to make those finer distinctions
to make our data as accurate as possible. You said you only see three? I thought I saw four in there.
Specifically trying to get, as best we can, a sense of
how many lambs there are per a hundred ewes
is the standard measurement. Yeah, I'd probably call that a yearling.
Which is basically looking at how's the reproductive success.
My name is Michael Raffaeli, I'm a jack of all trades
in the National Park Service. I'm Kaija Klauder and, today at least,
I'm a wildlife technician. I feel like, until I get the Masters, I don't know that I can
full out say I'm a wildlife biologist. (laughing)
I grew up in Palmer, Alaska. One thing I really discovered
when I was living in the lower 48, which is what we call the rest of the country,
was that everywhere felt just like a little bit claustrophobic to me.
And I've always identified as a Californian,
and you hear people that move here, and it's like, well how long do you have to be here to be an Alaskan?
And I'm... I say I live in Alaska You know I think that's the way to say it.
I live here now, and that transition has
been interesting. And I don't know
what it would be like to go back to California.
That's where, when I talk to people, they say oh, that's the harder transition.
Because all of a sudden you realize everything that's so important.
You know, for me it's the open space, that I can look out my window and see for miles.
And know that there's no roads, and that we have these wild areas.
Actually part of the reason that this park was initially formed was that
people were seeing the large numbers of
sheep here, that it was really good habitat. Charles Sheldon was a hunter.
That's what originally drew him up here to Alaska. Those sheep were being hunted
not only for a couple of specimens, but people were coming in and potentially decimating the population.
Especially with market hunting as the area was being developed,
the railroad, a lot of them were being killed to feed those camps. Him seeing that and saying
wait a second, we're not going to have these sheep in the future unless we do something about it now
It was ultimately the power of his passion. And he effected somebody else,
and that effected somebody else, and that effected somebody else. To ultimately create
a huge national park that hundreds of thousands of people come to visit every year.
I feel luck to have that opportunity to go out and
take the time to look at them, if they are just little white dots,
and remember what those little white dots represent.
His first trip, of course, where we were hiking,
is where he shot his first sheep, on Cathedral Mountain.
Obviously the park is much too large to effectively ground survey all of it.
I mean it's six million acres, it's just not going to happen. So basically,
what they want to do is say okay, we're going to look at a sub-sample,
and see what that number looks like. And groups divide up, hiking in groups of two or three people,
and walk around surveying the area that's likely sheep habitat.
You know these canyons are so steep and twisted that your one vantage point
might be all you ever get. But with the binoculars, just happened to see
on the ridge line looking, oh, couple of white dots that I probably wouldn't have noticed
otherwise, and sure enough, it ended up being anther nursery group.
We're on the south part of Cathedral Mountain right now, which is very sheepy
there's steep terrain which they like, but there's also enough vegetation
that they can be feeding on that.
Nothing has space anything like Alaska does.
And to me that's a really special feeling.
And it's a little bit of a paradoxical feeling, because I know that
me being here enjoying it is one person making that space just a little bit smaller.
But I hope that places like Denali
are able to facilitate people's interactions
with wild areas that way aren't very destructive.
The parks and the Park Service, they're that piece that we have to keep asking ourselves
is this important to us? And we have to continually
answer that, and it's important that every generation engages in those discussions.
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