![]() “I’d been to Africa, and I’d seen a million wildebeests from the air,” Schoen says, “but nothing, nothing like this.” Tundra polygons are a prominent feature of Alaska’s Arctic coastal plain, formed over many years of freezing and thawing. As a young man, Schoen worked as a bear biologist and pilot for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game in the 1970s, flying transects in a De Havilland Beaver floatplane with a big camera to survey the Porcupine Caribou Herd. Retired wildlife biologist and former Audubon Alaska senior scientist John Schoen has seen that dichotomy firsthand. Indeed the entire Alaska North Slope is abundant with wildlife-and oil. ![]() Females generally nest within 500 yards of the site of their previous year’s nest. Greater White-fronted Geese are long-lived birds that maintain permanent bonds with their mates-and with where they are born. “Waterbirds, which include ducks and geese, loons, all of the shorebirds, gulls, terns, jaegers, they’re coming in the hundreds of thousands, and millions.… They’re at densities and diversities that are not found anywhere else in the Alaskan Arctic, and very high relative to the entire global Arctic.” The National Petroleum Reserve–Alaska supports more waterbirds than any other place in the Arctic, including the only significant U.S. “The reserve has big numbers of birds coming from seven different continents to nest,” says Senner. Stan Senner, Audubon’s former vice president for bird conservation and the former director of Audubon Alaska, says it is undeniably spectacular. While the NPR-A, or National Petroleum Reserve–Alaska, does have oil beneath it, the 23-million-acre expanse is also arguably the most important wetland habitat complex in the Circumpolar Arctic for birds-the breeding, nesting, molting, and premigratory staging grounds for several million birds every year. The largest single tract of wild public land in America, a landscape so vast and diverse it defies superlatives, is known by a bland and somewhat misleading four-letter acronym: NPR-A. From the Spring 2024 issue of Living Bird magazine.
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