Mary Willson
Berners Bay

Every spring, millions of small, silver fish called hooligan swim into Berners Bay to spawn in the lower reaches of its rivers.  So rich and oily that, dried, they burn like candles, the fish are irresistible to legions of creatures who swarm into the bay to fatten up before continuing on to their summer breeding grounds.  Sea lions stack up like linebackers, then dive in unison to corral and capture the fish. Humpback whales and orcas join in the frenzy, and the silvery scales of millions of victims coat the surface of the water.

Within a few days, the final push for the spawning grounds begins and, lifted by the tide, the hooligan pulse into the Berners and Antler Rivers.  Tens of thousands of gulls rise in a screaming flurry over the shallow water.  Shorebirds, ducks, mergansers, and crows flock in droves.  A thousand bald eagles feed on the hooligan that die after spawning (not all do) and ravens cache carcasses in the trees so that when the wind blows, it rains desiccated hooligan.

When Juneau research ecologist Mary Willson first saw the clouds of birds at the hooligan run in Berners Bay, her initial reaction was, “How on earth am I going to count all these animals?”  Though many years as a scientist have honed Mary’s practical mind to a sharpness that always responds to hard numbers, they have also given her a depth of experience that magnified the awe and wonder that she felt on first witnessing the hooligan run.  

Mary came to Alaska after a long career at the University of Illinois.  When her husband died just short of her twenty-fifth year as a biology professor, Mary decided that she’d had enough of the classroom and moved to Juneau to take a job with the Forestry Sciences Lab.  Her new job was a refreshing change from teaching, as it allowed Mary to spend summers in the field doing everything from netting birds to collecting bear scat.  Winters she wrote.

As a field researcher in the little-studied environment of Southeast Alaska, Mary was able to follow her keen interest in ecosystem relationships.  Her initial studies on fruit-eating birds piqued her interest in the links between berries and bears—and bears naturally led her to salmon and other fish.  As a result, she came to Berners Bay with a detailed mental map of some of the many interactions between species that occur in Southeast.  But even that did not prepare her for the menagerie of creatures that she saw stream into Berners Bay for the biggest feast of the year.

The sea lions, whales, and, most of all, the birds that Mary watched that first spring convinced her to conduct a more extensive series of studies of the hooligan run.  Every April for several years, she and a team of research assistants headed to an island in the Antler River and set up camp on a carpet of moss overhung by a canopy of spruce boughs.  The studies that resulted from their observations of the wildlife only hint at the full ecological richness of Berners Bay, but they make a strong case for its preservation.  The U.S. Congress has recognized the bay’s value and protected parts of it from the threat of logging.  However, it continues to face threats from mining, road building, land privatization, and other development.  Mary’s studies suggest that any of these activities could disrupt the magnificent interplay between species that occurs during the hooligan run. 

The hooligan have also influenced the way that Mary views her work, inspiring her to take an increasingly active role as a watchdog of extraordinary places like Berners Bay.  In recent years, Mary has devoted more and more of her research to conservation goals, and has spent time educating journalists and the public about the critical importance of habitat to birds and other creatures, both in Alaska and abroad.  Having studied a “wildlife heaven” like Berners Bay and discovered the depths of the damage that could be done to it, she says, “I realized I couldn’t sit on the sidelines anymore.”