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I had three or four e-mails from the U.S. Forest Service recently about our wilderness permit for the incredible Tongass National Forest--truly a national treasure. There’s a limited number they give out. It’s for ten years and I’m on my third one. You have to specify how many guests [he can take eight, plus four crew] and how many days you’ll have on land, and you can only go over by five percent or under by five percent.

Why? Why so precise?

I don’t know. In one sense, it’s easy to do on a spreadsheet--in an office! But it isn’t easy when you have guests who want to go to places of maximum opportunity, to see where salmon are abundant, where bears are most likely to be on a river flat eating sedge, where we know there are eagles nesting or glaciers calving at a particular time.

Icebergs collapsing.

In Endicott Arm the Dawes Glacier has retreated two miles since 1984. In Glacier Bay--another of our favorite places to explore--the Muir Glacier is now grounded.

Alaska and the Delta. The contrast is pretty great.

The clear connection between Alaska and California is the salmon. Maybe peregrine falcons, too. We lost a lot of our locals and their niches were filled by migrants from the north who came down for the winter and ended up staying.

The Delta is the heart of California, it’s where the water is, where what I consider the very best wildlife habitat is.

How so? Why is it the very best? The Delta is full of plumbing, it’s crossed by power lines and pipes, it’s pumped and drained and farmed and developed.

The Delta has everything that wildlife needs--in abundance. It has water, food, shelter, and it’s all contiguous, all together. It is a mosaic of habitats: rivers and streams, marshes and seasonally flooded hardwood forests (or swamps), stream-side forests and shrubbery, and most importantly, intertidal freshwater sloughs.

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