FAIRBANKS, Alaska — A Montana native who dreamed of Alaska since childhood has spent his career working to restore one of the state's lost species — the wood bison.
Tom Seaton, a bison biologist with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game, grew up hunting, fishing and trapping west of Choteau, Mont. The son of a cattle hand, he green broke horses before graduating from Joliet High School south of Billings.
"From when I was 4 years old, you could say, what are you going to do when you grow up? I'm going to Alaska, man. Because like, every story was always the best in Alaska," Seaton said.
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Seaton moved to Alaska just weeks after graduating from high school and has been there ever since.
"I just picked up odd jobs, operating heavy equipment and shoveling and whatever," Seaton said. "And then I ended up going to school here (at the University of Alaska Fairbanks) and became a wildlife biologist."
He has worked with the Alaska Department of Fish and Game since 1995 and has led a project to reintroduce wood bison to the Alaskan ecosystem since 2011.
"The wood bison were native to here and they were native to all Alaska and northwestern Canada all the way up to the Arctic Ocean," Seaton said.
"Really, they're a wetland animal in the north, which is kind of an odd way to think about bison. A lot of people think of bison in the Great Plains and dry, and the reality is that bison are super adaptable to all kinds of habitats."
Reintroducing the native species has not come without challenges. Wood bison disappeared from Alaska more than a century ago.
"We're trying to restore wood bison to portions of their former range in Alaska, and that's a difficult job because they're completely gone from Alaska," Seaton said. "The last ones were shot about 1918 in Yukon Flats, which is about 100 miles north of Fairbanks."
About 100 miles south of Fairbanks, in the heart of interior Alaska, a plains bison herd with a lineage tracing back to Montana is thriving. In 1928, 23 animals were shipped from the National Bison Range in Moiese to Alaska.
"In 1928, in Montana and the National Bison Range, there was extra bison available there," Seaton said. "Alaska wasn't even a state at the time, but the federal government decided that they would ship bison from Montana all the way up here and start a population and to try to help establish a renewable resource."
Now, 98 years later, that herd has grown into four different populations totaling about 1,000 bison.
"They're wild, free-ranging bison with no fences. They're subject to natural selection and predation from all predators, and it's a pretty unique environment," Seaton said. "You don't get much chance to hunt bison in a non-fence situation anymore anywhere in the world, but you can here."
Seaton hopes to replicate that success with the wood bison project. With retirement about three years away, he said the work has given him a deep sense of purpose.
"I dedicated my life to hunters and the hunted species," he said. "And I feel happy and satisfied that I was able to do what I did."
