The Quiet World_ Saving Alaska's Wilderness Kingdom, 1879-1960 - Douglas Brinkley [249]
As Jones worked for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, dividing his residency between Anchorage and Cold Bay, he was intrigued by the thickness of the sea otters’ fur—the thickest mammal fur in the world. Pushing a finger through the dense fur was futile; you couldn’t get to the skin. Children, in particular, adored the sea otter because it seemed so frisky and joyful, showing off in the kelp, lying on its back eating oysters and clams. Most otters slept on their backs in the water, usually amid the tangled kelp and seaweed. At the Cold Bay station Jones had another pet otter, named Hortiser. Nothing seemed to exhaust this pet. What Jones learned about sea otters (as a species) from the ones he befriended on the Aleutians was their apparent joie de vivre. As in a scene from Gavin Maxwell’s Ring of Bright Water, these otters would dive 300 feet down, then would surface, seemingly full of glee and laughing among themselves about their underwater antics.
Frolicking with the sea otters around Cold Bay and counting the birds that congregated around the Izembek Lagoon constituted the entertaining part of Jones’s U.S. government job. Far more menacing was taking his dory out in rough Bering Sea weather to patrol the other islands in the chain. The giant surf on Buldir Island was particularly rough for landing a small boat with a small outboard motor. Rain . . . hail . . . sleet . . . snow . . . storm . . . surf. No matter what the weather was like, Jones would make the rounds along the rugged islands of today’s Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge. Over the years he had a lot of colorful names for his boats: Water Ouzel, Phalarope, Dipper, and Wandering Tattler. Daily he took field notes about seabirds, invertebrates, transplant geese, and foxes in need of removal. “On bright clear days the approach of the dory by a cascade of cormorants and puffins from the cliffs and then we traveled under a veritable canopy of wings,” Jones jotted in a notebook in 1959. “When a sea fog lay close and we ran on compass courses, quite out of sight on land though we knew it to be near, the smell of whitewashed cliffs was a beacon guiding us and a sudden avalanche of birds, bursting out of the murk, pinpointed our location.”10
Safeguarding the Aleutians brought Jones a lot of satisfaction. The biologist Olaus Murie, always circulating around Alaska, shared with Jones much of his research pertaining to birdlife in the Aleutians. Murie was overseeing a project to rid the islands of the foxes introduced in the 1920s, 1930s, and 1940s: these foxes were leading to the demise of the Aleutian Canada goose. Wanting to experience the underwater life of sea otters, Jones got a wet suit and started scuba diving in the kelp beds, nearly living with the otters (an unheard-of practice before Jones). Conditioning allowed his body to become almost immune to the powerful numbing effect of the water. “It became apparent that if we were to get information about what happened below the water surface,” he said, “we’d better go down to take a look.”11
Jones was perplexed about why the sea otters were dying off in record numbers during the winter months. His scuba dives off fogbound Amchitka and Adak produced an answer: the otters’ food source was depleted. Rock oysters weren’t alive on the bottom; the shells were without much muscle. Every time the otters seemed to be feasting, cracking open shells, they weren’t getting much meat. “The otters kept on eating sea urchins, but they weren’t getting any nutritional value,” Jones recorded, “and downhill they went.”
Owing to the sea otter rehabilitation project undertaken by U.S. Fish and Wildlife in the Aleutians,