In this Far North village of Kotzebue, no animal provides more protein to fill freezers than the bearded seal. A single seal can supply hundreds of pounds of meat, enough to feed a large, extended family for a winter.
For generations, every late June and early July, native hunters like Ross Schaeffer and his niece Karmen Schaeffer Monigold have motored through the broken sea ice of Kotzebue Sound in northwestern Alaska, looking for seals basking on frosty rafts. But this year, temperatures were close to 70 degrees, there was no ice in sight, and the seals had already migrated north.
This seal-hunting season was the shortest in memory, lasting less than a week, compared with the usual three weeks.
Schaeffer and Monigold did manage to get a few animals, but the conditions were nothing like Schaeffer, 68, had seen before. By the third week in June, when Monigold would usually be dressed for cold, she drove out to check on her drying seal hide wearing flip-flops and shorts.
“Every year we’ve gone out, it’s getting harder and harder because the ice is so rotten by the time it’s time to go hunting that the seals are hard to find,” Monigold says.
The amount of ice near Kotzebue, Alaska, changed dramatically between May, 2015, (on the left) and June (on the right.) This May was the warmest on record in Kotzebue.
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