In late January, the city of Lower Kalskag got a call about a dead animal in the woods.
“They just found it while they were getting wood,” said Lower Kalskag mayor, Henry Aloysius. “On the wood trail about a half mile north of Lower Kalskag.”
It was a muskox. And while the herd has grown here in recent years, it’s illegal to hunt them. So the death was unexpected. The city contacted the Alaska State Troopers to launch an investigation.
According to a report from Alaska State Troopers, the animal had been shot and none of its meat had been salvaged.
“After that, they told us we could harvest it,” Aloysius said. “But we sent some people over there with our loader and try to get it. But when they cut the stomach open, it was so really bad and spoiled the meat.”
Troopers arrested 42-year old Joseph Kameroff, a resident of Lower Kalskag.
On March 10, Kameroff pleaded guilty to one count of taking muskox in a closed season, and one count of wanton waste of big game.
He was sentenced to 180 days in prison with 173 days suspended, placed on two years of probation and had his hunting privileges revoked for two years. Kameroff was also fined $3,000 for killing the muskox and $10,000 with $7,500 suspended for failing to harvest the meat.
Under a plea agreement, charges surrounding using artificial light and a motorized vehicle to hunt big game were dropped.
It’s illegal to hunt muskox in most parts of the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta. Permit zones exist only on Nunivak and Nelson islands, where the animals were reintroduced in the ’60s. Congress purchased the animals from Greenland after muskox had become extinct in Alaska due to overhunting.
In the years since, some of the animals migrated to the mainland by walking across the frozen sea ice. Now, two populations live on the mainland. One of them resides near the hills of Upper and Lower Kalskag.
“So far to date, we have not had a hunt on the mainland,” said Patrick Jones, a Bethel-based wildlife biologist with the state Department of Fish and Game. “These are the populations just getting big enough that we could hunt it. So that's why we're putting this extra effort into understanding it better, so that we can start hunting it in the near future.”
He said last year the state received funding to collar and begin monitoring the Kalskag area muskox populations. Understanding their population and how it’s increasing could help Fish and Game confidently open a hunt there in the future.
According to Jones, the Kalskag population is doing pretty well. Right now, there are around 70 muskox known to reside there. Another 485 live on the Y-K Delta flats between the Yukon and Kuskokwim rivers. Overall, the decades since the animal’s re-introduction to the Delta have been a success story.
But Jones said poaching has been actively slowing their population increase. To start, muskox typically only produce one calf per breeding season, unlike moose which are prone to twins. It’s also common for muskox to take a year or two off from breeding.
“We could have had a hunt, a huntable population a long time ago, if people would have left them alone,” Jones said. “But we're getting there now.”
Jones said they’ve seen illegal harvesting actively bring population numbers down in certain areas, leading to ripple effects in breeding. There have been years where the number of illegal harvests were equal or greater than new muskox in the populations. He says if no more illegal poaching were to happen, he could see a mainland hunt opening in as soon as three years.
But right now, it’s important to let the population grow. It’s something Henry Aloysius says the community takes seriously.
“They shouldn't be hunting those muskox, they know about it,” Aloysius said.
He said in recent years, the village has seen more of the animals in the hills and on the tundra, but says they’re not abundant.
Legal muskox hunting on the mainland could be years away. But it is something residents of Upper and Lower Kalskag will likely see in their lifetimes. And for locals that rely on subsistence, the historic hunt remains an exciting prospect.
