With willows now tall enough to poke through
snow, snowshoe hares can find winter food and
hiding spots all the way to the Arctic Ocean.
Typically forest dwellers, they’ve now colo-
nized Alaska’s North Slope, hundreds of miles
from any real forest. Lynx, which prey on hares,
appear to have followed. Both are probably trav-
eling a trail blazed by moose, which also eat wil-
lows and now number roughly 1,600 along the
Colville River, where they were absent before.
Those discoveries led Tape to search photo-
graphs for other tundra newcomers. “As soon as
I thought about beavers, I seized on it,” he said.
“Very few species leave a mark so visible that
you can see it from space.”
In images from 1999 to 2014, covering just
three watersheds, he spotted 56 new beaver pond
complexes that hadn’t been there in the 1980s.
The animals are colonizing northern Alaska in
earnest, moving at about five miles per year.
Tape believes there are now up to 800 beaver
pond complexes in Arctic Alaska, including the
one with the massive lodge on the Alatna. Tape
dubbed it Lodge Mahal.
It was quite a sight: a mound of branches
and saplings, about eight feet high by 35 feetTHE THREAT BELOW 95