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By Root 3128 0

the biologist of the Aleutians. He was one of the rare breed who enjoy calamitous weather. Generous homesteading provisions were offered to veterans like Jones by the U.S. government. Adding to the appeal of Alaska were enhanced communication systems, highways, and a road connection to the Lower Forty-Eight. As a first step Jones moved to Kodiak Island, bought a skiff so that he could go shopping, and started studying sea otters on his own. Working on the salmon boats for day wages—a truly hard way to earn a dollar—Jones decided that he preferred roadless areas to roads. It was a hand-to-mouth existence, but his experiences studying otters continued. If Jones could have promoted himself as well as Crisler, Hollywood might have made a movie about his life.

No single person did more than Jones to help sea otters become a protected species on the remote Aleutian island communities between the North Pacific and the Bering Sea. The Aleutian fishermen despised otters because they raided oyster beds, but Jones educated the geographically scattered people on Akutan, on Unalaska, and at the port of Dutch Harbor to leave the sea otters alone. His own headquarters and home were at Cold Bay, a main commercial center on the Alaska Peninsula. His combined base of operations there was a tiny structure in which he kept his few belongings: binoculars, framed pictures, a shaving mug, and shotguns. On his iron bed was a quilt from South Dakota. And on his record player, often at odd hours, there was typically something by Mozart or Bach.

In 1948 the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hired Jones to oversee the entire Aleutian chain for the Department of the Interior. Paid meager wages, Jones at least was his own boss for about 340 days a year; his immediate supervisors didn’t like flying much farther south than Homer. Although Theodore Roosevelt had started protecting Aleutian mammals in 1908, Jones was the first college-trained warden-manager appointed.* The gateway town to the Aleutians’ East Borough, Cold Bay, was only a block long. The deprivations there were considerable. Fewer than 100 people lived in the town. Every week, it seemed, the land trembled with an earthquake.

During World War II, Fort Randall was created as a base camp for the 11th Air Force at Cold Bay. Quonset huts housing nearly 20,000 U.S. troops were built near the shore. Japanese bombs fell on the nearby village of Unalaska in 1942, but Cold Bay was unscathed. After the war the soldiers left the aptly named Cold Bay. But Jones stayed, living with a couple of weather-service specialists, a few fishermen, and occasionally some stopover wildlife tourists—Audubon Society types—who lodged at the wind-chafed World Famous Weathered Inn. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service hoped Jones could help create the 300,000-acre Izembek NWR, a rocky outcropping for 130,000 Pacific black brant (Branta bernicla nigricans), 62,000 emperor geese (Chen canagica), 50,000 Taverner’s Canada geese (Branta canadensis taverni), 300,000 ducks, and 80,000 shorebirds. During the windy months, the Steller’s eider (Polysticta stelleri)—one of the most beautiful birds in the world—wintered along the thirty-mile Izembek Lagoon, which had the world’s largest eel grass beds. No wetlands in all of America held an abundance of wildlife that could rival the Izembek. Its panorama of a U-shaped valley, ancient glaciers, and hot springs made it the best-kept secret in America. “In my opinion, it was the finest assignment the [U.S. Fish and Wildlife] Service had,” Jones said of Cold Bay. “I wanted to be where there were animals and not many people, and it fulfilled both categories.”7

In 1953 Jones married Dorothy, a native of California. What made Dorothy unique as a bride was that she tolerated Bob’s pet sea otter, Harriet. Dorothy quickly learned that the future of sea otters was bleak, and that conservation biologists had to come to their rescue—fast. What most worried her husband was the scarcity of sea otters in the Aleutians. The Aleutians, in fact, were long the home of the greatest concentration of sea