Author disputes mayor’s comments

To the editor:

In the recent Mayor’s Corner, Talis Colberg makes many errors of fact regarding the endangered Cook Inlet belugas. He does this in part by completely misrepresenting my book, “Beluga Days.”

I never wrote that there were 1,150 belugas in 1995. On page 46 I said this number was given to me by Ron Morris of the National Marine Fisheries Service and was inaccurate; the best estimates for that period, based on aerial surveys, were 653 in 1994 and 491 in 1995. More critically, I did not suggest that the belugas were leaving the Inlet. I wrote that in the past, because the belugas were seldom seem in winter, people assumed they left the Inlet. In chapter three (see p. 86), I discussed the “satellite tagging” that showed the belugas remained in the Upper Inlet throughout the winter. Genetic work has also clearly established that the Cook Inlet whales have not interbred with other populations for thousands of years; this is why they are called “geographically isolated and genetically distinct.”

And while I did point out that the people of Tyonek had revived a cultural tradition of beluga hunting, I very clearly stated throughout the book that the beluga hunting that depressed the population was not conducted by Tyonek, which never took more than one or two whales per year in recent decades, but by hunters from Anchorage. It is wrong and irresponsible to blame the people of Tyonek for the population decline. It is also not useful to blame the Anchorage hunters, who were acting legally as subsistence hunters, but did not know their combined take was at unsustainable levels and who voluntarily stopped hunting in 1999.

There’s a great deal more to take issue with in Mayor Colberg’s opinion piece. I do not support, and my book does not support, his criticisms of the Endangered Species Act or his irrational fear that protecting belugas means we will “stop development and civilization.”

It is time to focus on what the endangered Cook Inlet belugas need for recovery. One big part of that is the designation, after much delay, of critical habitat.

Nancy Lord

Homer