Commercial uses for other pinnipeds cut into their numbers during the Russian and American periods. Alaska Natives, especially Aleuts, had tradition-ally pursued Steller sea lions and hair seals for food, oil, and hides to make clothing and construct baidarkas for sea mammal hunting. A population of about 15,000 sea lions found at the Pribilofs underwent continuous assault during the fur-seeking era. Organized hunts at Northeast Point on St. Paul Island in the early 1870s proceeded as follows: Aleut hunters selected a moonlit night to approach the rookery. They crept onto the beach, frightened the animals Walrus herd at Walrus Islands haulout, Bristol Bay, ca. 1957. By William H. Sholes. Alaska Game Commission, 19th Annual Report, July 1, 1957 Thru June 30, 1958. The islands became one of the first state wildlife sanctuaries in Alaska.
inland, spent up to three weeks assembling them into a group of several hun-dred, and drove them to the village ten to twelve miles away. To avoid stress-ing the animals to the point to death, the final trip lasted a minimum of three days. After the slaughter, some of the skins went to the Aleutians for sale at 60 cents each.89 Pribilof Islanders kept some for making boats. Aleuts used dried intestines for waterproof jackets, flipper skins for shoe soles, whiskers for hat decoration, and fat for oil lamps and fire fuel.90
By the 1870s white commercial sealers looked for the Steller and California sea lions when other, more profitable seal hunting waned. Some obtained oil or skins to be turned into glue, but they made the easiest money in the “trimmings”
trade. Chinese bought the whiskers for toothpicks and opium pipe cleaners, the male genitalia as aphrodisiacs, and the gall bladders for medicinal purposes.
Hunters approached a haulout site by land, shot a few males before the herd plunged into the water, cut off what they wanted, and left the carcasses. The Steller population fell precipitously in California and did not recover.91
At the high point of exploitation, sea lions grew so scarce in the Aleutians that skins had to be imported from Baja California.92 Hunters allegedly killed sea lions to reduce the supply available to their competitors.93 Unregulated tak-ing of the creatures continued into the 20th Century. In 1913 a lack of fur seals induced the Aleuts to kill sea lions on St. George Island, mainly to feed foxes being raised for fur. The rookery ceased functioning in 1916. At North-east Point, a breeding colony that numbered 10,000 in 1872 dwindled to 120 adults in 1914. To preserve the Pribilof population the island manager banned harvest of pups and females.94 Tolerance of human activity around rookeries varied widely; in some cases the herds survived repeated incursions by hunters.
Relying on such precedents, Fish and Wildlife Service officials permitted Aleuts to take sea lion pups from a revived Northeast Point herd beginning in 1949. A decade later the site, the only Steller sea lion rookery in the world accessible to observers on foot, lay abandoned.95
Of the four or five known sea lion rookeries in the Pribilofs active in 1867, none showed breeding activity in 1960, although sea lions visited all of them as haulout sites. Walrus Island, formerly the breeding site of the walrus herd, then operated as the only sea lion rookery in the Pribilofs for its partially restored population of about 6,000. Researchers could not determine whether harass-ment by hunters and tourists might have driven the animals from Northeast Point to Walrus Island or why the population had not made greater recovery in several decades of restricted hunting.96
No longer needed for baidarkas to hunt sea otters and less relied upon for food and clothing by Natives, Steller sea lions recovered in the 20th Century.
They became best noted for raiding salmon nets. Fishermen shot many of them, and predator control agents (Chapter 13) killed some in the vicinity of fishing
operations. Fisheries officials investigated possible uses of the animals to take pressure off fish stocks. They found that leather manufacturers did not want the skins because of numerous cuts and scars. The meat, though palatable, would serve only a specialty market. Fox farmers rated it highly as feed, but the fox business evaporated in the 1950s. Pet and fish food would require removal of most of the fat. Processing, preservation, and transportation from distant sites might impose prohibitive costs.97 A revived fur market prompted the killing of 65,000 pups at rookeries between 1959 and 1972. Then the Marine Mammal Protection Act restricted sea lion killing to Native Americans for subsistence purposes and to fishing operations on a limited permit basis. Management passed from state to federal control.98
In the 1970s, populations of sea lions, hair seals, and fur seals started a downhill slide. By the mid-1980s they had shrunk by about half, and the trend continued. An ongoing debate and research program suggested that reduced food supply, possibly caused by commercial fishing or changes in ocean temperature, Sea lion breeding male, Northeast Point, St. Paul Island. By Victor B. Scheffer. FWS 428, Alaska Resources Library and Information Services. Heavily hunted for meat and skins, sea lions abandoned Northeast Point as a breeding colony site.
accounted for most of the losses. In 1990 the National Marine Fisheries Service declared the Steller sea lion a threatened species under the Endangered Species Act.99 By the end of the century the western population (Aleutians to central Gulf of Alaska) numbered a minimum of 39,000, compared with 140,000 in the late 1950s. Now listed as endangered, it continued to decline at more than 4 percent annually despite measures to restrict fisheries in its feeding zones. The Southeast Alaska population, by contrast, rose by an annual 6 percent through the 1980s to a total of more than 15,000.100
Hunters commercially exploited the smaller but widespread harbor seals beginning in 1889 and took large numbers for bounty payments between 1927 and 1967.101 Alaska Natives traditionally hunted them for subsistence purposes, employing a variety of capture methods. Hunters might sit on the rocks at haulout sites and attract seals by calls and sealskin decoys. When the seals ap-proached, the hunters clubbed or speared them or frightened them into a net stretched offshore. Hunters paddled up to seals sleeping in seaweed, attached hooks tied to sealskin floats, and killed the seals when they tired. Chugach Es-kimos stood in the water near haulout sites on stormy nights and speared seals by means of harpoons on long poles. In winter they loaded stones into a skin boat to lower it to the water line and positioned a large piece of ice on the bow.
Approaching the quarry, a hunter speared it through a hole cut in the ice. Pull-ing the dead seal aboard, the hunters threw out an equivalent weight of stones.
They repeated the process until they acquired a maximum load of ten or twelve seals.102
Tlingits approached swimming seals by canoe or lay waiting in their boats among the ice floes until seals surfaced nearby. They shot or speared the animals and, if the spear had no float attached, they hurried to recover the quarry be-fore it sank. At rookeries they killed pups by clubbing them. Women in camp removed the skin, separated the blubber, and heated it in a pot to render it into seal oil. They dried the skin and soft parts, the latter to be eaten. They sewed skins into footwear, some to be sold as tourist items. Seal oil would be consumed as food or sold for local consumption. A two dollar bounty in 1931, increased to three dollars in 1939, induced some hunters to kill seals for the bounties and discard the bodies. Tlingits used an undetermined percentage of the seals for meat, oil, and handicrafts.
Between 1931 and 1945, hunters, about 85 percent Alaska Natives, col-lected bounties on approximately 890 seals per year. From 1963 to 1965 a shift in the European fashion industry drove up the price of sealskins, resulting in large-scale killing. A downturn in the fur market and termination of the bounty in 1967 took the pressure off the harbor seals.103
A predator control program (Chapter 13) to protect commercial fisheries accounted for about 38,000 harbor seals in the 1950s. From 1927 to 1957
the territory and state paid bounties on more than 358,000 hair seals of all species.104 The decrease of hair seals may at times have inconvenienced coastal Natives, although no species approached extinction. The 1972 Marine Mam-mal Protection Act ended all commercial killing but, soon thereafter, harbor seals accompanied the sea lions and fur seals in a steep downward trend.105 In the late 1990s Alaska harbor seal estimates stood at (1) Bering Sea and Aleu-tians: a minimum of 13,000, possibly stabilized and increasing; (2) Prince Wil-liam Sound to Unimak Pass: 29,000 and possibly increasing; and (3) Southeast Alaska: 35,000 and increasing. In general the trend appeared to slow or reverse the declines of the 1970s and 1980s. Direct contact with fisheries accounted for little of the mortality, but possible effects of food supply removal by fisheries remained unknown. Subsistence harvest by Natives approximated 2,700 seals annually, about two-thirds in Southeast Alaska.106 As for sea lions, fur seals, and sea otters, the central causes of population loss likely included killer whale predation, commercial fishing, and climatic change.107