There goes the neighborhood...
Seiner pulls up a penguin off Southeast
KETCHIKAN: Crewmen photograph 'odd-looking bird,' give it the heave-ho.
adn.com
By Joel Gay
Anchorage Daily News
(Published: August 1, 2002)
Guy Demmert and the crew of the seine boat Chirikof haven't had much of a pink salmon season this summer, but they can claim to be highliners in one category: rare and amazing catches.
On the morning of July 18 they pulled in a penguin. A few hours later a 3-foot sturgeon came up in the net.
"That's a history-making day," said state fisheries biologist Troy Thynes in Petersburg. "Sturgeon are rare, but penguins -- that's unheard of."
Demmert had taken his 58-foot salmon boat to the very edge of Southeast Alaska, the outer coast of Noyes Island west of Ketchikan where nothing lies farther west but Kodiak and the Aleutians, Hawaii and Japan. As they brought in the net that morning, "my nephew saw this odd-looking bird swimming around and asked what it was," Demmert said. "I didn't know. The first thing that came to mind was the unusual sea life we get coming in off the (ocean) currents, so I didn't pay that much attention to it."
After running his own boat for nearly a quarter century, the Edmonds, Wash., resident said he's seen some odd things: huge sunfish, tropical sharks and once even a sturgeon most likely headed to Oregon or Washington.
But nothing prepared him for the sight of a little black-and-white penguin standing among the salmon and jellyfish on deck after they emptied the net.
"He popped up and just stood there. We were kind of in shock," he said. Then it dawned: "It's a penguin!"
Wandering around the boat with its 30-inch-high rails, the 20-inch bird was trapped.
"He looked really scared at first," Demmert said. "He was literally shaking, quivering, maybe wondering what kind of predicament he was in."
After about 10 minutes, however, it calmed down. "We just kept our distance from it," in part because when they got near, the penguin snapped at them, he said. "We didn't want to test its grip or anything."
They followed it around, taking photographs.
"It looked real healthy," Demmert said, "nice and plump, kind of like a seal, like he was eating really good. He didn't look like he suffered any kind of damage from the net."
When it waddled up to the bow, Demmert said, the bird appeared to be resigned to its fate. "It didn't try to bite or anything. The penguin just stopped and stood there, like he gave up."
One of the crewmen sidled up, grabbed it and dropped it in the drink.
The photographs found their way to Dee Boersma, a zoology professor at the University of Washington who has spent the last 30 years studying penguins. She said it was a Humboldt penguin, "no doubt about it."
The birds, which typically weigh 6 to 10 pounds and stand 24 inches tall, live on the coast of Chile and Peru, where the water is much warmer than it is for the Antarctic species of penguin.
What was it doing in Alaska?
"It was fishing!" she said. "There's lots of herring up there, and penguins will eat anything smaller than their head."
It is highly unlikely the bird swam from Peru, Boersma said, because it would have had to pass through the zone of nonproductive water at the equator. It also didn't appear to have escaped from a zoo or other facility, because it wasn't banded or marked.
More likely, she said, the penguin was "adopted" by a fisherman, sailor or someone else who brought it north on a boat. Then the bird either escaped or was freed.
It wouldn't be the first time, Boersma said. In 1978 three were seen off Vancouver, British Columbia, and another was spotted in 1985 off the Washington coast. Humboldt penguins can live more than 30 years, she said, so it's entirely possible that Demmert's bird was among those sighted 15 to 25 years ago.
And its future looks promising, she said. "It'll last a long time" if it can find food, and the coast of Southeast Alaska and British Columbia has plenty, Boersma said.
The roving penguin could be better off than its cousins back in South America, where the population has fallen steadily over the last century. Nesting islands have been destroyed by humans harvesting the birds' droppings for fertilizer. More birds are killed for their meat, skin or eggs. Since the early 1970s, a precipitous decline in anchovies has caused a huge drop in penguins and other seabirds, Boersma said.
Demmert said that when the Chirikof's penguin hit the water it disappeared, surfacing about 50 yards away, then heading west, toward the open ocean.
But a few hours later the seiner pulled in another rare sight, a green sturgeon. In nearly a quarter century of fishing, it was only the second he'd seen.
Thynes, who grew up fishing in Petersburg and has worked for the Alaska Department of Fish and Game for three years, agreed it's an unusual beast in Southeast waters.
"I saw one years ago," he said. "We didn't know what it was at the time."
His boss has nearly 30 years of experience in the region and has never seen one, Thynes added.
It's been a slow season for the Chirikof, with pink and sockeye salmon catches well below what Demmert would consider good, but it will be hard to forget his big day off Noyes Island, he said.
"We didn't catch a lot of fish, but my fishing buddies said I was catching all the cool stuff that day."
Reporter Joel Gay can be reached at 257-4310 or jgay@adn.com. |
