American Bald Eagle Foundation founder Dave Olerud says his organization has been gifted a significant attraction, but it may take closing a section of Second Avenue to put it on display.
The foundation recently inherited 62 full-body mounts of wildlife from Africa, Asia and North America that previously comprised the Southeast Alaska Museum of Natural History, a collection displayed for years in the Auke Bay home of Juneau resident Fred Koken.
The question is where to put it.
A brochure for Koken’s museum shows a display of about 20 sheep from around the world mounted on a three-story, stone wall inside his home, flanked by displays of a lion on a downed Cape Buffalo and leopard preying on an impala.
Koken is a 76-year-old retired financial consultant and stockbrocker. He hunted all over the world for four decades to create the menagerie valued at $750,000. He wants the collection to stay in the region, and as a whole. The eagle foundation, with a collection of its own of more than 200 wildlife specimens, was a natural choice to inherit it, he said.
“I can’t go on forever and keep the museum going on forever… My first choice was to donate them to an organization with a like mission,” Koken said in an interview this week.
Koken’s collection includes a few local specimens, like a Dall sheep and a coyote, but also species far removed from the Alaska moose and lynx on display at the eagle foundation, like a Siberian snow sheep and a Tanzanian zebra. For now, the collection occupies two, 55-foot shipping containers at the Alaska Marine Lines office in Haines. Olerud said the foundation’s seven lots at Second Avenue and Old Haines Highway are occupied, as is the foundation headquarters building, which opened in 1994 as a gallery of local wildlife specimens.
“If we’re going to have a continuous building, which is ideal, (the plan) is to go out into Second Avenue. All we have left is the road,” which he says sees little traffic. The remaining section of Second Avenue still could be accessed by Ed Shirley Drive, a street one block away named for a foundation donor.
Olerud’s desired section of Second Avenue is owned by the Haines Borough and sees considerable traffic one day a year – as the last quarter-mile of the course for the Kluane Chilkat International Bike Relay.
Olerud hasn’t formally approached the borough about the land, saying he was still in in the “political situation” of figuring out who to talk to, but he wants to get moving on a decision in the near future.
He said he also has been offered space on a five-acre lot in Skagway’s Liarsville, an area north of downtown used by shore excursion tour operators. He expressed confidence the specimens would be a successful attraction in Skagway, but said he’d rather keep them here.
“Economics tells me to go to Skagway, but if we could pull this off in Haines, it would be one-of-a-kind, not only in Alaska, but in most of the United States,” he said.
He describes the collection as “the accumulation of a lifetime” that may be priceless because some specimens such as a Marco Polo Argali sheep from Tajikistan, can no longer be acquired.
Olerud said the addition of the animals, with a sheep collection he describes as “one of the finest,” would take the foundation to a new level. “This could be one of the greatest institutions for the appreciation of nature in the whole Northwest, if we have that collection.”
The collection would be an educational tool, Olerud said, just as they were in Juneau, where local school students would come to see them on tours.
“There is no natural history museum or zoological garden in Southeast Alaska,” says the brochure for Koken’s collection. “The result is many young people in Juneau and Southeast Alaska grow up never having had the opportunity to view first-hand many of the wild animals of the world.”