Federal migratory bird subsistence rules take effect across Alaska

For thousands of years, the people of northern Alaska have hunted migratory birds and gathered their eggs in spring — the first fresh food after a long winter. For most of the last century, federal law said they couldn't. This week, the rules that finally made that ancient harvest legal again were updated for the 2026 season.

The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service's revised regulations, effective June 23, set the species, seasons, and regional boundaries for this year's spring and summer subsistence harvest across Alaska's subsistence regions. On their face they're a technical update; underneath sits one of the quieter civil-rights corrections in Alaska history. The 1916 Migratory Bird Treaty with Canada, meant to stop market hunting, imposed a closed season from spring through late summer — the exact window when northern peoples had always harvested birds. The treaty's authors simply hadn't accounted for a subsistence tradition older than the country itself, and Alaska Native communities kept hunting through the closure because the food was essential. It took until 1997, after years of negotiation, for the U.S. to amend its treaties with Canada and Mexico and legalize the harvest that had never really stopped.

What makes the system distinctive is who writes the rules now. Rather than being handed down from Washington, the regulations are built by the Alaska Migratory Bird Co-Management Council, where Fish and Wildlife, the state, and Alaska Native representatives from ten tribal regions sit as equals — a genuine co-management body, not an advisory one. That structure is why the rules read the way they do: season dates and boundaries fine-tuned region by region, shaped by the people who actually hunt there.

It also means conservation and tradition get balanced at the same table. Recent seasons show the trade in action — the harvest of emperor geese has been closed statewide because the population dropped below the council's own threshold, while in the Kodiak roaded area the council scrapped a permit requirement it judged a barrier to Native participation and not part of customary practice.