CAL LENSINK, WILD MUSKOXEN AND AN AMAZING CONSERVATION SUCCESS STORY

by JOE LaROCCA

Cal Lensink, now deceased, is one of Alaska’s unsung heroes. He died several years ago in his native state of Minnesota after a long career as a wildlife biologist in Alaska for he U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

I first met Cal back in the 1970s when he was manager of the federal Yukon-Kuskokwin National Wildlife Refuge, which included Nunivak Island in the Bering Straits just off Alaska’s western coast near Bethel. He was one of the key figures in the management of the wild muskoxen herds on Nunivak Island in the Bering Strait and one of the nation‘s great conservation success stories.

After the last muskoxen had been extirpated from its mainland Alaska habitat by hunters in the mid-1800s, about 30 muskoxen had been transplanted onto Nunivak Island from Greenland in the 1930s, reproductively increasing to about 700 by the late 1960s.

At that time, the island herd was in danger of crashing from overpopulation by the early 1970s. Cal was one of the leaders, along with the late Ivan Thorall and Glen DeSpain of Fairbanks, who mounted a controversial campaign to remove the long-standing ban on muskox hunting on Nunivak Island.

They and others advocated sport hunting of surplus bulls, while at the same time proposing the transplant of small family groups at various locales on the mainland where it was hoped they would re-establish permanent herds on their historic habitat.

There are more than 3,000 of their descendants on mainland Alaska. Defying his political bosses in the U.S. Interior Dept., including former governor and interior secretary Wally Hickel who opposed the hunts, Cal helped provide the moral authority and biological expertise needed to overcome the wrongheaded political inertia and environmental opposition to the hunts, which were initiated on Nunivak Island in 1975 as the herd faced certain extinction from natural causes.

Today, the hunts, both subsistence and trophy, are a valuable management tool in the maintenance of both the island and mainland herds. I was the first newsman allowed to accompany the first legally permitted muskox hunter (an Anchorage refrigerator salesman) to Nunivak Island in 1975 to report on and photograph his successful hunt for a bull muskox.

After Cal retired from the US F&WS, he returned briefly to Alaska to supervise, pro bono, the cleaning and salvation of thousands of Alaska’s sea mammals and waterfowl in Prince William Sound which had been immersed in the Exxon Valdez’s disastrous oil slick.