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ANCHORAGE - A diminutive sea duck with a white head and a blue wing could bring restrictions to one of the last virtually unregulated hunts in America.

Inupiat Eskimos on Alaska's northern coast for centuries of springs have welcomed the return of waterfowl as a source of fresh meat after eight months of winter. They have been free to take almost whatever they want, whenever they want, without bag limits.

That could change this year. The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Services has proposed rules for subsistence hunting to protect Steller's eiders, a threatened species whose breeding numbers in the United States have dropped to an estimated 500 birds.

Steller's eiders are not sought by Inupiat hunters for meat, but they flock with the white-fronted geese, black brant and king and common eiders prized by hunters. Despite years of trying to educate hunters, federal officials found 27 dead Steller's eiders last year, including 20 that biologists confirmed had been shot. In one particularly disturbing discovery, a dead female Steller's eider was piled with carcasses of six juveniles outside a hunting blind.

Proposed rules would shorten hunting hours, ban shooting near roads, increase law enforcement presence, and set up a potential draconian measure: The agency's Alaska regional director could close all subsistence hunting to protect Steller's eiders.

The proposals are not sitting well with people who fought in court and Congress to retain rights to their land and the animals that live on it.

"Part of subsistence is not just going out and killing your food. It's the freedom of going and getting the food from your land," said Barrett Ristroph, an attorney for the North Slope Borough. "Once someone comes in and says, 'You have to do this, you have to do that,' it kind of takes away what subsistence is all about."

The dispute pits people trying to preserve a unique species against people equally passionate about preserving a way of life.

There are four species of eiders on the North Slope. Steller's are the smallest, averaging 17-18 inches long.

Both sexes have a blue patch with a white border on their upper wings, but while females and juveniles are a mottled dark brown all year, the males' breeding plumage is magnificent. They have a white head with a greenish tuft and small black eye patches, a black back, white shoulders, and a chestnut breast and belly.

The sea ducks were once common on the Yukon-Kuskokwim Delta but breeding pairs for decades have not been seen anywhere except the Arctic Coastal Plain, with a concentration near Barrow, America's northernmost community. After breeding, Alaska birds and eastern Russia birds migrate to southwest Alaska.

Besides their plumage, Steller's eiders stand out for their breeding habits: They don't breed every year and appear to assess environmental conditions before deciding whether to lay eggs.

"What we think they're looking for, when they're looking for a good year, is if brown lemmings are abundant," said USFWS biologist Ted Swem, the endangered species branch chief for northern Alaska.

Arctic foxes prey on birds that nest on the ground but mostly eat brown lemmings. So do snowy owls and pomarine jaegers.

The owls and jaegers are fierce defenders of their nesting habitat and appear to offer a measure of protection to Steller's eiders from foxes. That's despite owls and jaegers themselves preying on eider nests to a lesser degree.

When there are few brown lemmings around, snowy owls - think Hedwig from Harry Potter - move elsewhere to find alternate prey and Steller's eiders choose not to nest. Between 1992 and 2008, they nested in roughly half those years, Swem said.

The new rules would set hunting hours to a half-hour before sunset until sundown - a seemingly silly requirement in the land of midnight sun, except that some Steller's eiders killed last year were shot in August, a month when the sun finally dips below the horizon. Sticking to daylight hours, federal officials hope, will allow hunters to distinguish between a Steller's eider and other birds.

The rules create a no-hunting buffer zone along roads outside Barrow. The buffer would have protected 91 percent of Steller's eiders nests documented in 2008.

The rules would allow federal law enforcement officers to inspect hunters' bags to monitor birds in their possession. The recommended fine for killing a Steller's eider is $400 plus $50 per bird.

Federal agents are sensitive to the resentment toward officers patrolling the hunting grounds. Both sides remember what happened nearly 50 years ago in a clash between western and indigenous interests.

A Washington D.C. official with the federal Bureau of Sport Fisheries and Wildlife decided to enforce provisions of a 1916 treaty with Canada that banned hunting from March through August and made no provision for subsistence hunting.

Federal game wardens in May 1961 arrested and confiscated the gun of a Barrow state representative, John Nusunginya, when he shot a couple of spring geese. A few days later, 138 hunters showed up with ducks in their hands at the warden's door and demanded to be arrested.

The Barrow "Duck-In" protest became a galvanizing moment for Alaska's indigenous people asserting their rights. They received national sympathy and federal officials eventually dropped charges and backed down from halting a hunt that had negligible effect on waterfowl populations.

Ristroph, the assistant North Slope Borough attorney, said the objections to the proposed rules start with the science behind them. Steller's eiders have always been a minor species on the North Slope and their numbers fluctuate up and down, she said.

"As far as the eiders go, traditional knowledge indicates that there were never very many Steller's eiders on the North Slope.

If numbers are declining, she said, it's not necessarily because of hunting.

"The traditional knowledge here indicates that predators are a huge problem, like foxes, seagulls, ravens. It seems like there's not enough attention to that," she said. Pollution and global warming could be factors.

She said 56 percent of the households in Barrow get at least half their food through subsistence. If the waterfowl hunt closes, hunters will have to travel farther or buy grocery store food.