MIKE, INTRO I'm Mike Delue from the University of Alaska Fairbanks, and this is Alaska Voices, a place for community members, friends and scientists to share stories and place based knowledge in order to build a better tomorrow for Alaskans and the world. Originally, I grew up in Kona, Alaska, Tail neck, Egypt, Idaho, vampire, Lawrence Island State Park, and I'm here with my student, my science buddy, my teacher, my homie. [Intro that lists Alaska place names and relationships in a variety of diverse voices] NILS My name is Nils Pedersen. I'm 38 years old. We're at the Akasofu building here at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. My relationship to Dick Shideler is he's a long term mentor of mine. He's, curly and bear dog handler within our programs. And he's also a friend. My name is Dick Seidler. I'm 78 and Nils is, long time friend and, fellow Karelian bear dog handler and a colleague. DICK My name is Dick Shideler. I’m 78. Today’s date is November 17, 2023. Can get my age from that. We’re at UAF, Akasofu building, and Nils is longtime friend and fellow Karelian bear dog handler and a colleague. NILS Traditionally, the way Karelian bear dogs would be used for hunting is working on leash. When you cut the track of a moose or something, the dog gets on that track, released the dog, and they're going to follow along sniffing. And then when they find the moose, for example, they're going to bark at it. So we're taking that innate drive that the dog's have and applying it for conservation purposes. You know how I first really became aware of Dick Shideler and his work was through polar bear den detection, because he was using his dogs to find polar bear dens in the North Slope oil field. You know, you could find the dens reliably and then set up a mile buffer zone around a known polar bear den, so that if the oil company was looking to do off road oil exploration or put an ice road in through this area, that they could avoid that den, reroute or wait until after those bears had emerged in order to continue that activity. So bears are happy. The management is happy. The oil companies are happy, maybe not thrilled that they can't do their activity there at this time, but they'd rather know rather than have something bad happen. Whether that means disturbing a polar bear or could even create a safety hazard for folks working up there. And that kind of just got started really. DICK And that kind of just got stared incidentally, I had the dogs up there, and often our field season lasted until bears went into their dens and some of our collared grizzly bears den very close to the road system, or sometimes even right in the oil field. And so just to sort of see what the reaction would be, I'd walk or ski out to those locations with the dogs and see what they would do. And inevitably, you know, they would tell me the bear was there, even though I knew it was in the area because of the radio signal, you know, they would dig and bark, and then I call them off because we didn't want to disturb the bears anymore. And it just turned out that another friend of ours named Craig Peram, who was a Fish and Wildlife Service polar bear biologist at the time, had sort of heard about this, and we sort of combined forces on this and made the grizzly bear part of it, not just incidental, but an actual den detection project and then also the Polar Bear Den project. NILS In 2014 started a graduate program here at the university. And Dick Sadler was on my committee. He was a co-pi on the research that we were doing. Part of that was working with a data set that Dec had of grizzly bear human interactions there on the North Slope oil field, sightings of grizzly bears reported from security officers. In particular, we were looking at using artificial dens, little dens we'd built with heaters inside of them, and then forward looking infrared cameras that would detect the heat coming up out of that den, and then using drones to get a perspective above the den. DICK The industry had been using forward looking infrared based off of a large aircraft platform for several years. And one of the things that had happened is that sometimes these infrared surveys didn't show a bear, and then the bear would pop out later on and industry maybe had a project nearby within that buffer, and they'd either have to shut down or really modify their activities until the bears left. And so we just decided, let's test this. So we set up a bunch of nearshore barrier islands as a test zone. And we started taking the dogs out there. And what we found out was that the dogs were not only more effective than the FLIR. The FLIR would miss. Bear dens, but it would also show objects under the snow. And this is surprising, like buried barrels, things like that that you wouldn't expect. So one of the things we found is a the dogs would actually ground truth the FLIR. They would get a few bears that the FLIR didn't pick up. They'd find those dens. And then in addition to that, they would not give you a false positive. Was a lot of fun. It didn't seem like fun always at the time because we were out there 40 below with the wind howling and can't see much. But our physical comfort wasn't that hot because we were on snow machines. The dogs were fine with it. They loved it. It's got some drawbacks that you can't take the dogs for the big long projects that involve, say, miles and miles of seismic lines or ice roads. Actually, you could do it, but it would just require a lot more thinking about how you use the dogs, because dogs are animals. So after a while they're going to get tired, and maybe they aren't going to be sniffing to their full capability. And one of the ways, as an intermediate where Nils came in with the drone project is we were looking for another system for the infrared that didn't involve having to get a lot of aircraft. And, you know, you had to plan and advance and the day you were going to fly FLIR, which doesn't do well in blowing snow and fog. We hired a helicopter and and a test project as part of that. We spent a week up there sitting on the ground with this helicopter, costing us thousands of dollars and a FLIR unit costing thousands of dollars, and couldn't turn a rotor because of the weather. And ultimately, we didn't get the job done because of that. Whereas with something as nimble as a drone, once you figure out the techniques, you can wait on the weather and then you can follow up with the dogs if you find hotspots or not. NILS Soledad, my 13.5 year old female, she went into the field for the first time when she was nine months old. American grizzly bears in Alberta. And once we had an idea of what we're looking for with our artificial dens and our infrared drone, we wanted to ground truth it and ended up looking for some grizzly bear dens out there and using Soledad to find them. And my, my perspective on that, of course, is that the dog was much more effective and much easier to use than the drone, which had a lot of technological complications. But I think a combination of the two is a really nice way of doing things. You know, one thing the dog doesn't give you is a nice picture of a bank of snow with a thermal heat signature coming off of it there. DICK That's a really nice thing to have is that photo with the coordinates and everything. So I think that we learned a lot about that project, and those lessons haven't necessarily been applied industries, pretty much just operating with the forward looking infrared still. And part of that was I had the only two dogs that were doing that. I'm retired from that stuff and probably can't ride a snow machine that long anymore, but now Nils has got dogs that'll do it. So I mean, I'd like to see more of that done. I think it's really valuable. NILS Folks up in the oil fields there, you know, by and large, those folks are up there to work. They're away from their family and their dogs. It's really nice for them to have some time to visit with a dog that's up there. Even better, it's a working dog that's here to help keep you safe. And no one wants to pet your drone, you know? But they might want to pet your dog. MIKE, OUTRO Alaska Voices is a place for communities to connect through conversation. This podcast was the brainchild of Jesse Young Robertson and Bob Bolton, with support from the Alaska Climate Adaptation Science Center, who also funded today's episode. The Alaska Climate Adaptation Science Center is committed to providing regionally relevant science for Alaska's changing climate. Alaska Voices would not be possible without the efforts of an amazing group of people. 00;08;52;28 - 00;09;16;16 Unknown Our producer and audio engineer is Kelsey Schanberg of Mossy Stone media. The Alaska Voices team also includes Mike horn at the University of Alaska Anchorage, Leah Ferguson, Mike DeLuca, Monica Ford and Diego Urena at the University of Alaska Fairbanks. If you're interested in more conversations and information, please visit our website at Alaska voices.org.