Ronald Martin, 73, is charged with five counts, including wildlife trafficking, false statements concerning wildlife and violating the federal Lacey Act, which outlaws transporting or selling illegally taken game.

At least a dozen state and federal agents went to Haines in October 2011 and seized records, hides, hunting equipment, as well as boats and a plane associated with Martin and assistant guides who worked for him. Since then, the U.S. Attorney’s Office and U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service have been building a case.

According to documents filed in U.S. District Court, Martin is alleged to have violated federal law on several guided hunts between 2002 and May of 2011. Martin was a guide for black and brown bear and mountain goat for at least a dozen clients during that time, mostly from Alberta and Utah. An undercover federal agent also took part in a hunt in the course of the investigation.

In several of the hunts, Martin is accused of falsifying the sealing certificates and hunt records, claiming brown bears were taken in a different places than where they had actually been shot. Federal authorities allege many of the brown bears were taken at unregistered black bear bait stations. Martin is also accused of leaving clients to hunt alone, failing to salvage meat from goats or bears and other record falsifications.

The charges carry up to 5 years in prison, a maximum quarter million dollar fine and three years’ probation.

But Martin signed a plea agreement on May 1st. In exchange for Martin’s guilty plea, the federal prosecutor agrees to recommend probation and a $40,000 fine and a suspension of hunting rights for three years. Martin also agrees to plead guilty to two less serious hunting violations in state court.

Martin’s guiding license expired at the end of 2011. He was charged with other hunting violations in state court in the 1990s, while his license was on probation.

Charges have not been filed against the assistant guide mentioned in Martin’s court documents.

Martin is expected to appear in U.S. District Court in Juneau on May 31st to formally enter his guilty plea. The prosecutor in the case, Assistant U.S. Attorney Jack Schmidt, said he would not comment on the lengthy investigation or case until then. Neither Martin nor his attorney could be reached for comment.

Instead, the raptor center operates out of garages, though in 2003 — with broad community support and federal funds — it purchased ten and a half acres of land for an Alaska Coastal Wildlife Center.

The land lies fallow and the raptor center struggles to get members to volunteer.

Blueberry the raven is calling his handler, Sandy Harbanuk, by singing out her son’s name: “Lev.”

Blueberry has lived with Harbanuk for 17 years. He missed what she calls “baby bird” school when he was young and can’t live on his own. Now he is a full time education bird. Harbanuk says education birds like Blueberry teach Alaskans about wildlife rehabilitation:

“There is a certain empathy, people really want to help a bird that’s in trouble and we want to take care of animals that are harmed. I mean many of them are harmed because of either windows we’ve put up and they’ve crashed into or cars that they crash into or pesticides we’ve put on our lawns or whatever. We create bird patients.”

Home rehabilitation can be rough for people taking care of wild birds. Handling a bird often takes two people, so some volunteers who house birds reach out to other raptor center members for help.

When a Juneau bird needs special care, it goes to the Alaska Raptor Center in Sitka. Even with a full staff, an avian veterinarian and a flight training area, Sitka is still 93 miles away as the crow flies.

Alaska Raptor Center Director Debbie Reeder says going to the bird hospital is like any emergency room visit for humans – getting the right care, quickly, is paramount. She says raptor care centers in Sitka, Anchorage and Juneau get in touch when a sick or injured bird lands in their hands and they need a second opinion.

“We call each other if we need the resource that they can offer and other than that we just kind of all work independently,” Reeder says.

The Juneau Raptor Center has tried for years to find a central location to care for birds that need extra help. In about a month, the raptor center will open a clinic on Jordan Avenue in the Mendenhall Valley, where Northern Hot Spots used to be. All that’s left to do is some electrical work and collecting medical supplies and equipment.

Treasurer Scot Tiernan says the move will consolidate the rehabilitation volunteers into one place.

“If we have a public place, the clinic, I think we’ll have a little bit better time getting some of the volunteers to hang around with the group a little bit longer,” Tiernan says.

Organization president David Wetzel says a clinic will also make it easier for fewer volunteers to tend to more ailing birds.

The clinic will house but a portion of the raptor center’s work. Wetzel says education birds that go into classrooms and offices won’t have a place at the new clinic, but will stay at their current homes.

The raptor center’s plans extend far beyond the Jordan Avenue facility.

Harbanuk and I walk the Brotherhood Bridge Trail. In summer, the riparian meadows have chocolate lilies and tall grasses. At an intersection of trails, she looks out at the meadow and points to what would have been the entrance to an Alaska Coastal Wildlife Center proposed for this spot ten years ago.

“It would be great for kids or visitors to come and have, say, like a guided walk along through this little bit of forest and then come to the entrance of the center here for people who are cycling,” Harbanuk says.

The Juneau Raptor Center once had a home, but moved out of the small facility at the Gold Creek Salmon Bake in 1999 to begin the search for new quarters.

In 2003, the Juneau Raptor Center collaborated with national conservation nonprofit Trust for Public Land to set aside 10 acres in the Mendenhall Valley to preserve scenery, rehabilitate birds and promote scientific collaboration.

The land needed to be publicly owned, so the trust handed the check to the City and Borough of Juneau. The city gave the Raptor Center 35 years to use the land, which is adjacent to Wildmeadow Lane, a low-density residential area with little traffic.

In the last decade nothing has happened to the land. The focus is on bird care and opening the clinic.

Wetzel says the organization doesn’t know what a coastal wildlife center would look like, but members want a place for education birds and science outreach, which the clinic won’t provide. Without building plans, there are no definitive costs but estimates have ranged from the hundreds of thousands to millions of dollars.

“I think that the educational aspect is really important, that we connect with the community with what we do, the importance of our work, and then that’s going to foster volunteers that are coming into the organization,” Wetzel says.

And more volunteers would bring new life to the organization.

Wetzel says he’s researching what the raptor center can do with the land.

“I don’t have any other details really at this time other than that’s something we’re revisiting and that’s something that has sat in our organization for a while that we clearly want to look at again,” Wetzel says.

Meanwhile, American Bald Eagle Foundation founder Dave Olerud believes the region needs a center like this.

“I made the name ‘Science Center of Alaska,” Olerud says.

Although Olerud is in Haines, he says Juneau would be an ideal location. But he says to draw people to the region, the science center would need to look beyond birds.

“Just having raptor repair and a few birds is not going to generate the money necessary to sustain that facility. If you have a good educational program, and we here in Haines have been experimenting with that for years,” Olerud says. “But we have one ship a week, would you believe, where you have five ships a day. So you can see the difference from an economic perspective.”

Juneau Raptor Center’s Wetzel says the organization has a committee working on building plans, and members of the public are welcome to join. The organization has a certificate of deposit for the building that grows only through donations and grants.

 Kathy Maas works with the Juneau Raptor Center to care for four birds on her property. Here’s her story:

Circle First Chief Jessica Boyle says the ice started breaking up around 3 a.m. Sunday, jammed downstream and sent water over a 25 foot seawall along the Yukon River.

“Came over the seawall, came up onto the roads,” Boyle said. “It just totally engulfed the whole downtown area of Circle.”

Boyle says about 15 homes were flooded, some getting as much as 3 feet of water.

“Most of the houses in the downtown area did get water in it and then a couple came off the foundations and floated into the woods behind where their house originally was,” she said.

Boyle says a community hall on higher ground, is providing housing for some while others have taken refuge with friends whose homes were not flooded. She says the community of about 80 people is a mess.

“There’s ice chunks on the roads, it’s pretty muddy, pretty messy, there’s a strong smell of diesel and gas in the downtown area,” Boyle said. “Our church got flooded, our clinic got flooded. It looks pretty rough.”

Circle’s electric generator is working and Boyle says the community has a 5,000 gallon holding tank that’s providing fresh water, but there’s concern the city well may be contaminated. She says community leaders are communicating with agencies, including the Tanana Chiefs Conference, the Red Cross for recovery assistance.

A flood warning has also been issued downstream on at Fort Yukon.

National Weather service hydrologist Ed Plumb says aerial surveillance indicates the village will likely experience high water.

“We’re expecting the break up front to push past Fort Yukon sometime later today and with all this water coming down the river,” Plumb said. “Low lying areas of Fort Yukon will likely see water go over the bank.”

Plumb says the big concern is that strong ice below Ft. Yukon will result in a jam.

The Alaska Volcano Observatory reports a plume of steam, gas and ash reached up to 22,000 feet Sunday and was visible on satellite images drifting southeast over the north Pacific.

Trace amounts of ash were reported in Sand Point, a city of nearly 1,000 on Popof Island about 55 miles east of the volcano.

The volcano observatory says seismic activity remains elevated at the 8,262-foot volcano that began its latest eruption May 13.

The volcano last erupted in 2007 for 29 days.

The dedication of the new facility near the edge of Auke Lake featured the raising of house posts carved by Haines carver Wayne Price.

Forest Service employees assigned to the lab helped raise the posts at the entrance of the building.

The $10 million facility built on federal land is the new, permanent home for the lab’s roughly thirty employees who have worked in at least three other different facilities on a temporary basis over the last 60 years.

Updated story on Saturday’s ceremony:

• Juneau Forestry Sciences Laboratory dedicationKTOO NewsDownload

Two groups of Forest Service employees approached the new Juneau Forestry Sciences Laboratory from opposite directions. Each group, about a dozen people each, carried a thousand-pound yellow cedar log carved into a house post. In front of the lab, each of the ten-foot posts were set down, pivoted on the bottom end, lifted up on a mounting pedestal, and pushed upright into place (see slideshow above).

The dedication of the new lab on Saturday was a mix of the traditional and the modern with more of an emphasis on tradition as participants danced, and paid their respects and honored the Aak’W Kwaan who have traditionally owned and occupied the land around Auke Bay. It included the Carver’s Dance which marks relinquishment of title and ownership of the totems.

The modern part of the dedication came at the very end with a ribbon stretched across the entrance and a half-a-dozen pair of scissors.

“We’re delighted to be here on the ancestral grounds of the Aak’W Kwaan,” said Robert Mangold who is acting director of the Pacific Northwest Research Station that is essentially a group of eleven labs in the region. “They’ve been very helpful and instrumental in design of the building and supporting us.”

Mangold says the 12,000 square foot Juneau lab on the edge of Auke Lake and adjacent to the University of Alaska Southeast campus is about medium in size for their facilities.

Construction on the $10 million building started only three years ago. But it’s has been as much as 60-years in making with the lab’s twenty to thirty employees recently working in at least three different facilities on a temporary basis.

“It’s a tremendous building. It really offers the kind of lab facilities that we never had before,” said Paul Hennon, a forest pathologist with the Station.

Contractors used stone and yellow cedar siding obtained in Southeast Alaska while the interior features hickory trim. Upstairs include the offices while the downstairs is devoted to the lab spaces where the botanists, hydrologists, entomologists, and other scientists can work.

Hennon and his colleagues in other disciplines will work together to tackle everything from forest health to human use of the forest, watershed and young-growth management, and climate change issues.

“So, it’s very common at least in our experience that we team up, kind of mix our disclipines together and are able to take on some broader problems that way,” said Hennon.

The new building will also house the Alaska Coastal Rainforest Center and its location next to UAS should foster more collaboration with faculty and students on research.

Other building construction details include triple-glazed windows, radiant heating, and a ground source heating and cooling system for energy efficiency.

But the house posts will be the first thing that any visitor sees. Master carver Wayne Price of Haines says both posts are carved from the same log of yellow cedar found on Chichagof Island. He says he started on them full-time after the New Year, and finished just hours before getting on the ferry for Juneau. Price says the Eagle post features a mudshark of the Wooshkeetaan and the Raven post includes a dog salmon picked by Aak’W elders.

“I’m just very glad to see the house posts in place. They look a lot better where they belong,” said Price.

“And I’m glad to see all the people that turned out today for this big event and thank the Forest Service for supporting the Native culture and the art. Now that we have these here, all the young people have a constant reminder of the people that were here from the get-go. That ties it all together.”

Bill Hanson is the Field Supervisor of the Juneau Field Office for the Fish and Wildlife Service in Southeast Alaska. His office is responsible for recovery efforts and restoration programs in Southeast Alaska.

“Sometimes we look at species and we think ‘well does it make a difference if one disappears or another one disappears’ and the main thing to remember this is that each of those species represents some portion of that ecological network. So if you look at one species disappearing it’s not just one species disappearing it’s actually all the interactions that relate to it.”

U.S. Fish and Wildlife manages some marine mammals including the polar bear, walrus and sea otters. They also manage almost all of the endangered terrestrial species of animals and plants as well as freshwater fish. They work in conjunction with the National Marine Fisheries Service which also has a field office in Juneau. (Here’s a full list of endangered, threatened and candidate species in Alaska)

Marine Fisheries manages all of the other endangered marine mammals including whales, sea lions, seals, saltwater fish, and turtles.

Hanson says that Southeast Alaska doesn’t have very many endangered species compared to other parts of the country or Alaska, but a there are number of species including the Short-tailed Albatross, sea otters and a variety of whales that are monitored.

“A species doesn’t become listed unless it’s in real trouble. Once it’s listed, we go into the next phase which is recovery. Recovery doesn’t just mean getting it above the line which would be it’s either threatened or not threatened. It’s getting it back to healthy populations. That can take a long time and in some cases maybe it’s not possible. We don’t ever know the full answer to that. Success can be measured in a lot of different ways. Ideally, complete recovery is the measure of success and in other cases it maybe that we simply prevent it from becoming extinct.”

The specific reasons that a species becomes endangered can vary widely but most fall into one of two categories: either the species has lost its habitat for some reason or something has caused the species to not be able to function normally such as pesticides or pollution.

There have been success stories. In the Lower 48, the Bald Eagle was once on the edge of extinction due to pesticides, but after it was added to the Endangered Species List and pesticides were more carefully cleaned up and regulated, the birds bounced back.

In Alaska, the Arctic Peregrine Falcon and the Aleutian Canada goose were both successfully recovered.

Hanson says the most important thing to remember is that it’s never just one species that’s in danger because everything in an ecosystem in connected. When one species is endangered, they often represent a broader range of species than just themselves.

Mendenhall Visitor Center (Photo by Reywas92/Wikimedia Commons)

The busiest time of the year for the Mendenhall Glacier Visitor’s Center is getting underway with a new director.

John Neary is taking over from retiring director Ron Martin.

Neary has spent decades working in Alaska’s outdoors and the job at Mendenhall is a position he says he is very happy to have. His work as a wilderness manager with the Juneau ranger district and Admiralty Island prepared him for this position he says. He plans to bring all of that experience and community connections to his new work.

Neary is already busy with lining up his goals for the center. He sees a need for a number of improvements that he says will improve the viewing experience. Problems such as the long wait for restrooms, congested traffic, and unsafe areas are not suitable for the “world-class” Mendenhall, Neary says.

“A few days ago I was watching an older gentleman—and I was some distance from him—but he walked down on the beach right past a sign that said dangerous rocks ahead and he walked up on to the rocks and with his first step he slipped and slammed down onto his shoulder. And I thought ‘oh no, the poor guy is going to have some major injury,’ but he stood up and held his elbow and hobbled back towards us and he was okay. But you can see that’s an accident waiting to happen and it just begs for a really good design solution to have a nice kind of loop trail that goes through this area that people really want to go through, out to Photo Point.”

Neary emphasizes the importance of access to locals as well as tourists.

“We are the drive-up glacier–there’s, as you know, lots of glaciers in Alaska—but what makes the Mendenhall unique is the fact that we have this great highway that comes right up to it and you get a wonderful view, nice trails, very accessible and that’s our niche really. What we want to be able to develop is the partnerships with the tour operators, with local residents, with everybody else who enjoys that easy access to ensure the flow works well here.”

Neary calls Mendenhall our backyard glacier and says that Juneau values it highly. He says his goal is to preserve opportunities at the glacier for both residents and visitors.

The summer season is just getting underway, but Neary says people are quickly discovering what makes Mendenhall so special.

“Right now we have bears feeding on grass and cottonwood trees and that makes for a wonderful drive up bear-viewing experience which is also unique in Alaska. There are very few of them. Most of them entail expeditions to get out to some remote area.”

The Hawaii Tribune-Herald reports that the adventurous family so far has navigated more than 60,000 nautical miles and climbed the highest peaks on five continents. After the Mauna Kea volcano, they will sail for Alaska where they will climb Mt. McKinley, North America’s biggest mountain at 20,320 feet.

Dario Schwoerer and his wife, Sabine, began their odyssey in Switzerland in 2000. The family travels aboard a solar-powered, 50-foot sloop. They plan to spend the winter in Alaska and then sail the Northwest Passage to the Atlantic Ocean. They expect that their journey will end in 2017 after 18 years of ocean adventures.

Berkowitz’s attorney says the musher plans to fight to the keep the dog, Wizard, who is under quarantine at the borough animal shelter.

Attorney Myron Angstman says there was no reason for the child to be in the kennel last Friday.

Mike Patterson, an attorney for the family of Elin Shuck, says the girl had been at the dog yard before.

The Anchorage Daily News says the girl was unresponsive when medics arrived. The child was flown by helicopter from Berkowitz’s Apex Kennels to an Anchorage hospital.

During a summer survey, NOAA Fisheries scientist, Dave Withrow, took this aerial photo of harbor seals basking on a sandbar on Iliamna Lake, Alaska. Photo: NOAA Fisheries

A federal agency says it will consider a petition seeking to list a population of harbor seals living in a freshwater Alaska lake as a threatened or endangered species.

The National Marine Fisheries Service says it has accepted a Center for Biological Diversity petition to list seals that live in Iliamna Lake 200 miles southwest of Anchorage.

The agency has a Nov. 19 deadline to perform a status review of the seals, estimated to number estimated 250 to 350 adults, and can propose a listing or reject it.

A listing would present a potential environmental hurdle to the Pebble Mine.

The proposed open-pit copper and gold mine would require a 140-mile road to Cook Inlet. About 50 miles would pass along the lake shore, where seals hunt for salmon.