Buldir Island
[2] Buldir is the most westerly of the Aleutian Islands, which formed as a result of volcanic activity in the late Quaternary or recent times.
Archeological evidence of human occupation on Shemya and Kiska, on either side of Buldir, dates back to at least 2000 BCE.
The water-soaked clay on the island has preserved wooden and other organic artifacts unusually well, allowing scientists to carbon date the periods of occupation.
[8] Among the bones found was a rib of a Steller's sea cow, a relative of modern-day manatees, which became extinct in 1768 due to overhunting by Russian fur traders.
Archeologists speculate that resource scarcity or other turmoil in the larger island groups may have forced people to Buldir as a matter of survival.
[7] Both the size of this construction and others, and the many artifacts recovered from archeological excavations suggest that occupation of Buldir, while sporadic over the centuries, was by people who were living there rather than passing through on their way from one island group to the next.
Bering's ship, St. Peter, left Petropavlosk, Kamchatka in June 1741 and reached what is now known as Kayak Island near the mouth of Prince William Sound on July 20.
The log recounts that Bering named it "St. Stephen Island", but at least as early as 1787, it appeared on Russian maps as Buldir (Булдырь).
Several other reconnaissance missions were attempted in late 1942 and early 1943, both to see if the Japanese had occupied the island and to obtain weather information from the area.
Puzzlement at the Japanese disappearance led to widely reported speculation by officers of the 11th Air Force that they had sailed off on a fleet of barges to rendezvous with ocean-going transports in the lee of Buldir.
The detachment's job was to report hourly weather observations and also to provide local air-traffic control as an Army Airway Communication System site.
[19] On February 2, 1945, 1st Lt. Arthur W. Kidder, Jr., a member of the 54th fighter squadron based on Attu, was test-flying a P-38 Lightning when his radio antenna broke.
After a four-hour search, he spotted Buldir as he was running low on fuel and executed a wheels-up forced landing.
[22] In October 1956, the tanker Dulcinea, carrying 285,000 US gal (1,080 m3) of aviation fuel to the Northwest Airlines base on Shemya, went aground on Buldir.
[27] Buldir's remoteness and the extreme difficulty of landing a boat safely on the island gave it a unique ecological history.
Neither Russian nor American fur traders thought it was worth the effort to stock Buldir with Arctic or red foxes, as was done on 190 other Aleutian islands.
In consequence, the ground-nesting birds of Buldir continued their lives undisturbed by mammalian predators, while on other Aleutian Islands entire species were extirpated.
[26] Freedom from introduced predators allowed Buldir to become one of the largest and most diverse seabird breeding colonies in the Northern Hemisphere.
[31] Due to its proximity to Asia, over 35 species of birds have been recorded on Buldir Island, which are rare in North America.
The birds had suffered complete breeding failure due to predation by introduced rats and foxes, which ate both eggs and goslings.
The birds produced by this program were reintroduced to Aleutian Islands that had been cleared of foxes by teams of trappers and hunters working for the National Wildlife Refuge.
