Chamisso Wilderness is a

wilderness area Wilderness or wildlands (usually in the plural), are natural environments on Earth that have not been significantly modified by human activity or any nonurbanized land not under extensive agricultural cultivation. The term has traditionally re ...

in the

U.S. state In the United States, a state is a constituent political entity, of which there are 50. Bound together in a political union, each state holds governmental jurisdiction over a separate and defined geographic territory where it shares its sover ...

Alaska Alaska ( ; russian: Аляска, Alyaska; ale, Alax̂sxax̂; ; ems, Alas'kaaq; Yup'ik: ''Alaskaq''; tli, Anáaski) is a state located in the Western United States on the northwest extremity of North America. A semi-exclave of the U.S., ...

. It was designated by the

United States Congress The United States Congress is the legislature of the federal government of the United States. It is bicameral, composed of a lower body, the House of Representatives, and an upper body, the Senate. It meets in the U.S. Capitol in Washing ...

in 1975. A small subunit of the Chukchi Sea Unit of the

Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge The Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge (often shortened to Alaska Maritime or AMNWR) is a United States National Wildlife Refuge comprising 2,400 islands, headlands, rocks, islets, spires and reefs in Alaska, with a total area of , of whic ...

Chamisso Island Chamisso Island is a small island in Kotzebue Sound, Alaska. It is located off Spafarief Bay at the mouth of Eschscholtz Bay, just south of the Choris Peninsula. The island is roughly triangular. It is long and an wide. The highest point on Ch ...

and nearby Puffin Island were combined as a wildlife refuge in 1912, designated Wilderness in 1975, and added to the AMNWR in 1980.Chamisso Wilderness
- Wilderness.net Chamisso Island, named after the naturalist

Adelbert von Chamisso Adelbert von Chamisso (; 30 January 178121 August 1838) was a German poet and botanist, author of ''Peter Schlemihl'', a famous story about a man who sold his shadow. He was commonly known in French as Adelbert de Chamisso (or Chamissot) de Bonc ...

, comprises one large

sand spit A spit or sandspit is a deposition bar or beach landform off coasts or lake shores. It develops in places where re-entrance occurs, such as at a cove's headlands, by the process of longshore drift by longshore currents. The drift occurs due t ...

and a low beach zone surrounding a covering of

tundra In physical geography, tundra () is a type of biome where tree growth is hindered by frigid temperatures and short growing seasons. The term ''tundra'' comes through Russian (') from the Kildin Sámi word (') meaning "uplands", "treeless moun ...

with a few marshy

bogs A bog or bogland is a wetland that accumulates peat as a deposit of dead plant materials often mosses, typically sphagnum moss. It is one of the four main Wetland#Types, types of wetlands. Other names for bogs include mire, mosses, quagmire, ...

. Although Chamisso Island is much larger, Puffin Island houses many more nesting birds, especially

horned puffin The horned puffin (''Fratercula corniculata'') is an auk found in the North Pacific Ocean, including the coasts of Alaska, Siberia and British Columbia. It is a pelagic seabird that feeds primarily by diving for fish. It nests in colonies, often ...

black-legged kittiwake The black-legged kittiwake (''Rissa tridactyla'') is a seabird species in the gull family Laridae. This species was first described by Carl Linnaeus in his landmark 1758 10th edition of ''Systema Naturae'' as ''Larus tridactylus''. The English ...

s, and

thick-billed murre The thick-billed murre or Brünnich's guillemot (''Uria lomvia'') is a bird in the auk family (Alcidae). This bird is named after the Danish zoologist Morten Thrane Brünnich. The very deeply black North Pacific subspecies ''Uria lomvia arra'' i ...

s which build their nests on the steep-walled cliffs that fall into Spafarief Bay.

Iñupiat The Iñupiat (or Inupiat, Iñupiaq or Inupiaq;) are a group of Alaska Natives, whose traditional territory roughly spans northeast from Norton Sound on the Bering Sea to the northernmost part of the Canada–United States border. Their current ...

cross from the mainland to gather eggs, primarily from

kittiwake The kittiwakes (genus ''Rissa'') are two closely related seabird species in the gull family Laridae, the black-legged kittiwake (''Rissa tridactyla'') and the red-legged kittiwake (''Rissa brevirostris''). The epithets "black-legged" and "red-le ...

s and

murre ''Uria'' is a genus of seabirds in the auk family known in Britain as guillemots, in most of North America as murres, and in Newfoundland and Labrador as turr. These are medium-sized birds with mainly brown or black plumage in the breeding sea ...

s. With the exception of birds and the occasional

fox Foxes are small to medium-sized, omnivorous mammals belonging to several genera of the family Canidae. They have a flattened skull, upright, triangular ears, a pointed, slightly upturned snout, and a long bushy tail (or ''brush''). Twelve sp ...

that crosses frozen sea in winter, nothing lives on the islands that make up Chamisso Wilderness.

Walruses The walrus (''Odobenus rosmarus'') is a large flippered marine mammal with a discontinuous distribution about the North Pole in the Arctic Ocean and subarctic seas of the Northern Hemisphere. The walrus is the only living species in the fami ...

seals Seals may refer to: * Pinniped, a diverse group of semi-aquatic marine mammals, many of which are commonly called seals, particularly: ** Earless seal, or "true seal" ** Fur seal * Seal (emblem), a device to impress an emblem, used as a means of a ...

, and

whales Whales are a widely distributed and diverse group of fully aquatic placental marine mammals. As an informal and colloquial grouping, they correspond to large members of the infraorder Cetacea, i.e. all cetaceans apart from dolphins and ...

can often be seen in Spafarief Bay.

References

External links

Chamisso Wilderness
- Wilderness.net
U.S. Geological Survey Map
at the U.S. Geological Survey Map Website. Retrieved March 30, 2023. Wilderness areas of Alaska Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge Protected areas of Northwest Arctic Borough, Alaska Chukchi Sea Adelbert von Chamisso Protected areas established in 1975 1975 establishments in Alaska {{NorthwestArcticAK-geo-stub