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U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service photo

Photo by Sam Harrel

When Nora Rojek heard the Alaska SeaLife Center in Seward successfully bred a pair of captive Steller’s eiders sea ducks last July, she felt a familial bond to the lone chick that was hatched.

A sea bird biologist for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service who studies Steller’s eiders on Alaska’s North Slope, Rojek helped find the egg biologists collected in 2005 that produced the chick, named Solo.

It marked the first time scientists have successfully bred Steller’s eiders in captivity.

For Rojek, it was evidence she really is making a difference in the recovery efforts of Steller’s eiders on the North Slope, one of two species in Alaska listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act.

“It was really exciting because I know I had a part in making that happen,” Rojek said of Solo’s hatching. “I kind of feel like an aunt.”

For her contributions to the historic event, Rojek was recently named one of 16 recipients nationally and two in Alaska to be given the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s 2007 National Recovery Champion award, which honors agency employees and their partners for their work with threatened and endangered species in the U.S.

The other Alaskan to receive the award was Dr. Tuula Hollmen, a veterinarian at the Alaska SeaLife Center in Seward, where Solo joined a captive flock of more than two dozen Steller’s eiders that were either hatched from eggs collected on the North Slope breeding grounds monitored by Rojek or were captured on their wintering grounds on the Alaska Peninsula and Kodiak Island.

Most of the world’s Steller’s eiders — a population estimated at around 150,000 — nest and breed in Arctic Russia and winter in waters adjacent to the Alaska Peninsula. But a small group of the birds nests on the Arctic slope of Alaska and occasionally on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta, providing biologists like Rojek the ability to study them. The birds don’t spend any time on land, except when they are breeding and nesting in the spring.

The breeding population of Steller’s eiders on the North Slope was listed as threatened under the Endangered Species Act in 1997, joining its cousin, the spectacled eider, as the only Alaska bird species on the endangered species list.

Alaska researchers have been studying nesting of Steller’s eiders on the North Slope near Barrow since 1991 and Rojek has been leading those efforts for the past five years for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service office in Fairbanks.

Needle in a haystack

When scientists began studying Steller’s eiders, very little was known about the small diving ducks other than their numbers on the North Slope were declining, Rojek said. Even today, biologists don’t know much about the birds, starting with how many there are.

“The estimate is from hundreds to thousands,” Rojek said. “It really varies from year to year.”

Some years biologists don’t find any nests around Barrow and other years they do. Part of Rojek’s job each spring is locating Steller’s eiders nests. Finding a Steller eider’s nest on the North Slope isn’t easy, she said. A nest is nothing more than a depression in the ground filled with grass and down feathers, she said.

“It’s like finding a needle in a haystack,” Rojek said. “You can walk right up to a Steller’s eider’s nest and not know it’s there. They really blend in well with the tundra.

“It’s very exciting when you find one,” she said.

Once a nest is located, Rojek monitors it to see how many eggs are in it — the average is six — and how many of the nests successfully fledge chicks.

In 2007, Rojek and her colleagues located 12 Steller’s eiders nests. In 2006, they found 16. They do most of their work hiking off the roughly 25-mile road system around Barrow, which basically consists of two or three roads leading in and out of the village.

“We cover everything we can get to within a couple kilometers of the road,” Rojek said.

Most of the time, Rojek locates nests by finding female birds — hens — sitting on them or flying away when she or another searcher gets close. Other times they spot birds flying back to a nest. Occasionally, they find birds sitting in ponds and stake them out, watching them for hours in hopes the female will fly off to return to the nest.

“If you’re lucky you’ll see the female leave and know there’s a possible nest in that area,” Rojek said. “Then you go look for them.”

Another way to locate a Steller’s eider nest is to look for nesting pomarine jaegers. Even though the gull-like sea birds sometimes prey on the eggs of Steller’s eiders — they prefer to eat lemmings if they are around — the two birds often nest near one another, Rojek said.

In fact, the nesting success of Steller’s eiders appears to be related to the number of lemmings, pomarine jaegers and snowy owls on the North Slope each year, Rojek said. When lemmings are abundant, pomarine jaegers and snowy owls focus their predatory efforts on lemmings, not the eggs in Steller’s eiders nests. When there aren’t many lemmings around, pomarine jaegers revert to stealing eggs from Steller’s eiders’ nests. In years when lemming numbers are low, Rojek said, there are fewer Steller’s eiders around the next year.

“Somehow they sense or know if it’s going to be a good (lemming) year,” she said. “Somehow they know if pomarine jaegers and snowy owls are nesting.”

Flying high

It was while working on her master’s degree in zoology at the University of Hawaii when Rojek became interested in endangered species.

Hawaii is considered the endangered species capital of the world. There are more endangered plant and animal species per square mile on the Hawaiian islands than any other place in the world, she said. Rojek did her master’s thesis on the Hawaiian goose, or Nene, which was driven to near extinction in the 1940s and has been the focus of recovery efforts for the past 50 years. The bird remains on the endangered species list.

After receiving her master’s, Rojek spent two years working as a sea bird biologist for the California Department of Fish and Game before taking the job in Fairbanks. Her fiancee, Dean Kildaw, is a sea bird biologist who works as a research associate at the University of Alaska Fairbanks.

As for the future of the Steller’s eider in Alaska, Rojek hopes recent management actions, such as banning lead shot on the North Slope, predator control focused on arctic foxes, the captive breeding program at the Alaska SeaLife Center and more public education, will help the recovery program.

The federal government has been conducting predator control on arctic foxes the past three years to prevent them from preying on eggs in nests in Rojek’s study area and it seems to be working.

“We actually do think it’s helped and nesting success has been higher the last few years,” Rojek said.

Global warming could be playing a role in the decline of Steller’s eiders, also, but Rojek said there is no direct evidence to prove it. She noted the species’ decline was first noticed in the early 1990s, when global warming wasn’t as hot a topic as it has been in the last few years.

“Obviously, it’s a concern because all arctic species could be impacted by global warming,” she said, adding that warmer temperatures could cause changes to the birds’ food supply or nesting habitats if water levels in ponds change.

With more studies focusing on Alaska’s breeding population of Steller’s eiders, as well as nesting research being conducted in Russia and on the wintering grounds in Alaska, Rojek is optimistic the birds will recover.

“We’re getting more information and that’s helping us understand the species better,” she said.