When they captured her off Cohen Island in the summer of 2007, she weighed 58 pounds and was the size of a collie. The growth rings in a tooth they pulled revealed her age — eight years, a mature female sea otter.
They anesthetized her and placed tags on her flippers. They assigned her a number: LCI013, or 13 for short. They installed a transmitter in her belly and gave her a VHF radio frequency: 165.155 megahertz. Then they released her. The otter was now, in effect, her own small-wattage Alaska radio station. If you had the right kind of antenna and a receiver, you could launch a skiff into Kachemak Bay, lift the antenna and hunt the air for the music of her existence: an occasional ping in high C that was both solitary and reassuring amid the static of the wide world.
Otter 13, they soon learned, preferred the sheltered waters on the south side of Kachemak Bay. In Kasitsna Bay and Jakolof Bay, she whelped pups and clutched clams in her strong paws. She chewed off her tags. Some days, if you stood on the sand in Homer, you could glimpse her just beyond Bishop's Beach, her head as slick as a greaser's ducktail, wrapped in the bull kelp with other females and their pups.
"They're so cute, aren't they?" said the woman in the gold-rimmed eyeglasses. She was leaning over 13 as she said this, measuring a right forepaw with a small ruler. The otter's paw was raised to her head as if in greeting, or perhaps surrender.
"They're one of the few animals that are cute even when they're dead."
Two weeks earlier, salmon setnetters had found the otter on the beach on the far side of Barbara Point. The dying creature was too weak to remove a stone lodged in her jaws. Local officials gathered her up, and a quick look inside revealed the transmitter: 13 was a wild animal with a history.
This made her rare. She was placed on a fast ferry and then put in cold storage to await the attention of veterinary pathologist Kathy Burek, who now paused over her with a sympathetic voice and a scalpel of the size usually seen in human morgues.
Burek worked with short, sure draws of the knife. The otter opened.
"Wow, that's pretty interesting," Burek said. "Very marked edema over the right tarsus. But I don't see any fractures."
The room filled with the smell of low tide on a hot day, of past-expiration sirloin.
A visiting observer wobbled in his rubber clamming boots.
"The only shame is if you pass out where we can't find you," said Burek without looking up. She continued her exploration. "This animal has such dense fur. You can really miss something."
She made several confident strokes until the pelt came away in her hands, as if she were a host gently helping a dinner guest out of her coat. The only fur left on 13 was a small pair of mittens and the cap on her head, resembling a Russian trooper's flap-eared ushanka. (...)
Important work in Alaska
Burek often spends her days cutting up the wildest, largest, smallest, most charismatic and most ferocious creatures in Alaska, looking for what killed them. She's been on the job for more than 20 years, self-employed and working with just about every organization that oversees wildlife in Alaska. Until recently, she was the only board-certified anatomic pathologist in a state that's more than twice the size of Texas. (There's now one other, at the University of Alaska.)
She's still the only one who regularly heads into the field with her flensing knives and vials, harvesting samples that she'll later squint at under a microscope.
Nowhere in North America is this work more important than in the wilds of Alaska. Scientists say 2016 was the planet's hottest year on record, beating out 2015.
As human-generated greenhouse gases continue to trap heat in the world's oceans, air and ice, and carbon dioxide reaches its greatest atmospheric concentration in 800,000 years, the highest latitudes are warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe.
Alaska was so warm last winter that organizers of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race hauled in snow from Fairbanks for the traditional start in Anchorage (though the snow was never used). The waters of the high Arctic may be nearly free of summertime ice in little more than two decades, something human eyes have never seen.
If Americans think about the defrosting northern icebox, they picture dog-paddling polar bears. This obscures much bigger changes at work. A great unraveling is underway as nature gropes for a new equilibrium.
Some species are finding that their traditional homes are disappearing, even while the north becomes more hospitable to new arrivals. On both sides of the Brooks Range — the spine of peaks that run 600 miles east to west across northern Alaska — the land is greening but also browning as tundra becomes shrub-land and trees die off. With these shifts in climate and vegetation, birds, rodents and other animals are on the march. Parasites and pathogens are hitching rides with these newcomers.
"The old saying was that our cold kept away the riffraff," one scientist told me. "That's not so true anymore."
During this epic reshuffle, strange events are the new normal. In Alaska's Arctic in summertime, tens of thousands of walruses haul out on shore, their usual ice floes gone. North of Canada, where the fabled Northwest Passage now melts out, satellite-tagged bowhead whales from the Atlantic and Pacific recently met for the first time since the start of the Holocene era.
These changes are openings for contagion. "Anytime you get an introduction of a new species to a new area, we always think of disease," Burek told me. "Is there going to be new disease that comes because there's new species there?"
A lot of research worldwide has focused on how climate change will increase disease transmission in tropical and even temperate climates, as with dengue fever in the American South. Far less attention has been paid to what will happen — indeed, is already happening — in the world's highest latitudes, and to the people who live there.
Put another way: The north isn't just warming. It has a fever.
She'll see epidemics first
This matters to you and me even if we live thousands of miles away, because what happens in the north won't stay there. Birds migrate. Disease spreads. The changes in Alaska are harbingers for what humans and animals may see elsewhere. It's the front line in climate change's transformation of the planet.
This is where Burek comes in. Fundamentally, a veterinary pathologist is a detective. Burek's city streets are the tissues of wild animals, her crime scenes the discolored and distended organs of tide-washed seals and emaciated wood bison.
"She's the one who's going to see changes," says Kathi Lefebvre, a lead research biologist at Seattle's Northwest Fisheries Science Center, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. "She's the one who's going to see epidemics come along. And she's the one with the skills to diagnose things."
As the planet enters new waters, Burek's work has made her one of the lonely few at the bow, calling out the oddness she sees in the hope that we can dodge some of the melting icebergs in our path.
It's a career that long ago ceased to strike Burek as unusual, and she moves without flinching through a world tinged with blood and irony. The first time we spoke on the phone, Burek offhandedly said of herself and a colleague, "We've probably cut up more sea otters than anybody else on the planet."
"Congratulations," I said.
"We all got to brag about something," she replied. (...)
Surprisingly little is known about the diseases of wildlife. As a result, many veterinary pathologists end up focusing on a few species. Thanks to Burek's curiosity and her gifts, and to a necessary embrace of the Alaska virtue of do-it-yourself, her expertise is broad. "Anyone who gets into this kind of thing, you like a puzzle," she told me. "You have to pull together all kinds of little pieces of information to try to figure it out, and it's very, very challenging."
Over the years, Burek has peered inside just about every mammal that shows up in Alaska field guides. One morning, as we drank coffee at her kitchen table, she rattled off a few dozen examples. Coyotes. Polar bears. Dall sheep. Five species of seals. Many whales, including rare Stejneger's beaked whales.
As we talked, I wandered into the living room. On a wall not far from the wedding photos hung feathery baleen from the mouths of bowhead whales and the white scimitars of walrus tusks. Upstairs in a loft lay an oosik — the baculum, or penis bone, of another walrus. It was as long as a basketball player's tibia. Atop the fireplace mantel, where other families might display pictures of wattled grandparents, grinned a row of skulls: brown bear, lynx, wood bison. Burek tapped one of the skulls in a spot that looked honeycombed. "Abscessed tooth," she said. "Wolf. One of my cases."
Working on wild animals, often in situ, routinely presents her with job hazards that simply aren't found in the Lower 48.
Anchorage sits at the confluence of two long inlets. When Burek performs necropsies on whales on Turnagain Arm, she has to keep a sentry's eye on the horizon for its infamous bore tide, when tidal flow comes in as a standing wave, fast enough that it has outrun a galloping moose. Knik Arm is underlain in places by a fine glacial silt that, when wet, liquefies into a lethal quicksand. Burek's rule of thumb in the field is never to sink below her ankles. Not long ago, while taking samples from a deceased beluga, she kept slipping deeper. Exasperated, she finally climbed inside the whale and resumed cutting.
Then there's the problem of the whales themselves. "Whales are just like Crock-Pots," Burek said. "They're kind of encased in this thick layer of blubber that's designed to keep them warm. They might look OK on the outside, but inside everything is mush."
Decay is the nemesis of the pathologist. Decay erodes evidence. "Fresher is always better," Burek said, sounding like a discerning sushi chef. It isn't possible every time.
Colleagues told me about a trip with Burek to a remote beach outside Yakutat, to do a postmortem on a humpback. There were several in the group, including a government man with a shotgun to keep away the brown bears that sometimes try to dine on Burek's specimens. It was raining and cold, and the whale had been dead for a while. Inside, the organs were soup. The pilot who retrieved them had to wear a respirator.
"My wife," Henry told me, "has a high threshold for discomfort."
by Christopher Solomon, Alaska Dispatch | Read more:
Image: Joshua Corbett
[ed. One of my first jobs as a wildlife technician with the Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game involved retrieving, skinning, dismembering and incinerating a 700lb muskox that had died giving birth and been laying in the sun for a few days. It took me a week. Every day - all day - I was covered in blood, fat, hair and flies (talk about a motivation killer for the daily commute). Working alone in the autopsy lab (a large open air garage), it felt like I'd been transported into a horror movie (and won't even try to describe the smell). Kudos to folks like Kathy who get so little recognition but do the hard work that everyone needs to get done.]
They anesthetized her and placed tags on her flippers. They assigned her a number: LCI013, or 13 for short. They installed a transmitter in her belly and gave her a VHF radio frequency: 165.155 megahertz. Then they released her. The otter was now, in effect, her own small-wattage Alaska radio station. If you had the right kind of antenna and a receiver, you could launch a skiff into Kachemak Bay, lift the antenna and hunt the air for the music of her existence: an occasional ping in high C that was both solitary and reassuring amid the static of the wide world.
Otter 13, they soon learned, preferred the sheltered waters on the south side of Kachemak Bay. In Kasitsna Bay and Jakolof Bay, she whelped pups and clutched clams in her strong paws. She chewed off her tags. Some days, if you stood on the sand in Homer, you could glimpse her just beyond Bishop's Beach, her head as slick as a greaser's ducktail, wrapped in the bull kelp with other females and their pups."They're so cute, aren't they?" said the woman in the gold-rimmed eyeglasses. She was leaning over 13 as she said this, measuring a right forepaw with a small ruler. The otter's paw was raised to her head as if in greeting, or perhaps surrender.
"They're one of the few animals that are cute even when they're dead."
Two weeks earlier, salmon setnetters had found the otter on the beach on the far side of Barbara Point. The dying creature was too weak to remove a stone lodged in her jaws. Local officials gathered her up, and a quick look inside revealed the transmitter: 13 was a wild animal with a history.
This made her rare. She was placed on a fast ferry and then put in cold storage to await the attention of veterinary pathologist Kathy Burek, who now paused over her with a sympathetic voice and a scalpel of the size usually seen in human morgues.
Burek worked with short, sure draws of the knife. The otter opened.
"Wow, that's pretty interesting," Burek said. "Very marked edema over the right tarsus. But I don't see any fractures."
The room filled with the smell of low tide on a hot day, of past-expiration sirloin.
A visiting observer wobbled in his rubber clamming boots.
"The only shame is if you pass out where we can't find you," said Burek without looking up. She continued her exploration. "This animal has such dense fur. You can really miss something."
She made several confident strokes until the pelt came away in her hands, as if she were a host gently helping a dinner guest out of her coat. The only fur left on 13 was a small pair of mittens and the cap on her head, resembling a Russian trooper's flap-eared ushanka. (...)
Important work in Alaska
Burek often spends her days cutting up the wildest, largest, smallest, most charismatic and most ferocious creatures in Alaska, looking for what killed them. She's been on the job for more than 20 years, self-employed and working with just about every organization that oversees wildlife in Alaska. Until recently, she was the only board-certified anatomic pathologist in a state that's more than twice the size of Texas. (There's now one other, at the University of Alaska.)
She's still the only one who regularly heads into the field with her flensing knives and vials, harvesting samples that she'll later squint at under a microscope.
Nowhere in North America is this work more important than in the wilds of Alaska. Scientists say 2016 was the planet's hottest year on record, beating out 2015.
As human-generated greenhouse gases continue to trap heat in the world's oceans, air and ice, and carbon dioxide reaches its greatest atmospheric concentration in 800,000 years, the highest latitudes are warming twice as fast as the rest of the globe.
Alaska was so warm last winter that organizers of the Iditarod Trail Sled Dog Race hauled in snow from Fairbanks for the traditional start in Anchorage (though the snow was never used). The waters of the high Arctic may be nearly free of summertime ice in little more than two decades, something human eyes have never seen.
If Americans think about the defrosting northern icebox, they picture dog-paddling polar bears. This obscures much bigger changes at work. A great unraveling is underway as nature gropes for a new equilibrium.
Some species are finding that their traditional homes are disappearing, even while the north becomes more hospitable to new arrivals. On both sides of the Brooks Range — the spine of peaks that run 600 miles east to west across northern Alaska — the land is greening but also browning as tundra becomes shrub-land and trees die off. With these shifts in climate and vegetation, birds, rodents and other animals are on the march. Parasites and pathogens are hitching rides with these newcomers.
"The old saying was that our cold kept away the riffraff," one scientist told me. "That's not so true anymore."
During this epic reshuffle, strange events are the new normal. In Alaska's Arctic in summertime, tens of thousands of walruses haul out on shore, their usual ice floes gone. North of Canada, where the fabled Northwest Passage now melts out, satellite-tagged bowhead whales from the Atlantic and Pacific recently met for the first time since the start of the Holocene era.
These changes are openings for contagion. "Anytime you get an introduction of a new species to a new area, we always think of disease," Burek told me. "Is there going to be new disease that comes because there's new species there?"
A lot of research worldwide has focused on how climate change will increase disease transmission in tropical and even temperate climates, as with dengue fever in the American South. Far less attention has been paid to what will happen — indeed, is already happening — in the world's highest latitudes, and to the people who live there.
Put another way: The north isn't just warming. It has a fever.
She'll see epidemics first
This matters to you and me even if we live thousands of miles away, because what happens in the north won't stay there. Birds migrate. Disease spreads. The changes in Alaska are harbingers for what humans and animals may see elsewhere. It's the front line in climate change's transformation of the planet.
This is where Burek comes in. Fundamentally, a veterinary pathologist is a detective. Burek's city streets are the tissues of wild animals, her crime scenes the discolored and distended organs of tide-washed seals and emaciated wood bison.
"She's the one who's going to see changes," says Kathi Lefebvre, a lead research biologist at Seattle's Northwest Fisheries Science Center, a division of the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. "She's the one who's going to see epidemics come along. And she's the one with the skills to diagnose things."
As the planet enters new waters, Burek's work has made her one of the lonely few at the bow, calling out the oddness she sees in the hope that we can dodge some of the melting icebergs in our path.
It's a career that long ago ceased to strike Burek as unusual, and she moves without flinching through a world tinged with blood and irony. The first time we spoke on the phone, Burek offhandedly said of herself and a colleague, "We've probably cut up more sea otters than anybody else on the planet."
"Congratulations," I said.
"We all got to brag about something," she replied. (...)
Surprisingly little is known about the diseases of wildlife. As a result, many veterinary pathologists end up focusing on a few species. Thanks to Burek's curiosity and her gifts, and to a necessary embrace of the Alaska virtue of do-it-yourself, her expertise is broad. "Anyone who gets into this kind of thing, you like a puzzle," she told me. "You have to pull together all kinds of little pieces of information to try to figure it out, and it's very, very challenging."
Over the years, Burek has peered inside just about every mammal that shows up in Alaska field guides. One morning, as we drank coffee at her kitchen table, she rattled off a few dozen examples. Coyotes. Polar bears. Dall sheep. Five species of seals. Many whales, including rare Stejneger's beaked whales.
As we talked, I wandered into the living room. On a wall not far from the wedding photos hung feathery baleen from the mouths of bowhead whales and the white scimitars of walrus tusks. Upstairs in a loft lay an oosik — the baculum, or penis bone, of another walrus. It was as long as a basketball player's tibia. Atop the fireplace mantel, where other families might display pictures of wattled grandparents, grinned a row of skulls: brown bear, lynx, wood bison. Burek tapped one of the skulls in a spot that looked honeycombed. "Abscessed tooth," she said. "Wolf. One of my cases."
Working on wild animals, often in situ, routinely presents her with job hazards that simply aren't found in the Lower 48.
Anchorage sits at the confluence of two long inlets. When Burek performs necropsies on whales on Turnagain Arm, she has to keep a sentry's eye on the horizon for its infamous bore tide, when tidal flow comes in as a standing wave, fast enough that it has outrun a galloping moose. Knik Arm is underlain in places by a fine glacial silt that, when wet, liquefies into a lethal quicksand. Burek's rule of thumb in the field is never to sink below her ankles. Not long ago, while taking samples from a deceased beluga, she kept slipping deeper. Exasperated, she finally climbed inside the whale and resumed cutting.
Then there's the problem of the whales themselves. "Whales are just like Crock-Pots," Burek said. "They're kind of encased in this thick layer of blubber that's designed to keep them warm. They might look OK on the outside, but inside everything is mush."
Decay is the nemesis of the pathologist. Decay erodes evidence. "Fresher is always better," Burek said, sounding like a discerning sushi chef. It isn't possible every time.
Colleagues told me about a trip with Burek to a remote beach outside Yakutat, to do a postmortem on a humpback. There were several in the group, including a government man with a shotgun to keep away the brown bears that sometimes try to dine on Burek's specimens. It was raining and cold, and the whale had been dead for a while. Inside, the organs were soup. The pilot who retrieved them had to wear a respirator.
"My wife," Henry told me, "has a high threshold for discomfort."
by Christopher Solomon, Alaska Dispatch | Read more:
Image: Joshua Corbett
[ed. One of my first jobs as a wildlife technician with the Alaska Dept. of Fish and Game involved retrieving, skinning, dismembering and incinerating a 700lb muskox that had died giving birth and been laying in the sun for a few days. It took me a week. Every day - all day - I was covered in blood, fat, hair and flies (talk about a motivation killer for the daily commute). Working alone in the autopsy lab (a large open air garage), it felt like I'd been transported into a horror movie (and won't even try to describe the smell). Kudos to folks like Kathy who get so little recognition but do the hard work that everyone needs to get done.]
