Can Teshekpuk Lake, a Vital Arctic Refuge, Be Saved? Gerrit Vyn Hopes His Images Will Help
With fossil fuel development encroaching, the conservation photographer is devoting himself to protecting the remote bird-breeding ground, among the world’s most important.
Words by Andy McGlashen
Senior Editor, Audubon magazine
Photography by
Gerrit Vyn
Published September 23, 2026
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In recent years, conservation photographer Gerrit Vyn has ventured repeatedly to a place most people have never heard of, much less visited: Teshekpuk Lake.
Flat, buggy, and remote, this wetland complex in the Alaskan Arctic attracts few photographers. What keeps Vyn coming back? “It’s by far the most important, ecologically critical piece of real estate in the country for migratory shorebirds,” he says. Some 600,000 of them return each spring to breed there.
In June, Vyn returned for a seven-week stay to document what’s at stake for a vibrant, sensitive landscape that few people will ever see.
Teshekpuk Lake sits at the northeast corner of the 23-million-acre National Petroleum Reserve–Alaska (NPR-A), the nation’s largest tract of public land. The government created the reserve as an emergency oil supply in 1923 and later designated five sensitive “special areas” within it to protect the immense wildlife and subsistence values.
Among them was the immense network of wetlands surrounding Teshekpuk Lake, formed by meltwater pooling atop permafrost. The area provides breeding grounds for birds from every continent except Antarctica. Up to 100,000 geese molt there every summer, including Greater White-fronted Geese, Brant, Cackling Geese, and Snow Geese. “It is irreplaceable and just absolutely imperative to migratory birds the world over,” says David Krause, vice president of Audubon’s Alaska program.
The Teshekpuk Lake Special Area also provides denning habitat for polar bears, as well as calving and insect-relief grounds for the Teshekpuk Caribou Herd, which has sustained Indigenous people for generations.
“Here’s an incredibly important landscape, globally, for biodiversity—and nobody’s ever heard of it,” says Michael Wald, a wilderness guide whose company outfitted Vyn’s latest expedition. “It’s a place largely without a constituency.”
Now this unsung ecosystem faces unprecedented pressure from oil and gas development.
While crude began flowing from federal leases in the NPR-A in 2018, rules restricted development in the special areas. In 2013 Audubon and partners helped secure a twofold expansion of the Teshekpuk Lake Special Area to 3.65 million acres.
Last year, however, the Trump administration opened more than 80 percent of the reserve to fossil fuel development, and in March oil companies snapped up drilling rights on 1.3 million acres—much of it in the once-protected wetlands. Even before any drilling, seismic exploration with heavy machinery could leave lasting scars on the tundra landscape. “The Teshekpuk Lake Special Area,” Krause says, “has never been more endangered than it is now.”
This year’s record NPR-A lease sale was the first of five that Congress mandated in last year’s One Big Beautiful Bill Act. Opponents have challenged the sale with multiple lawsuits, including one brought by an Iñupiat nonprofit that led a federal judge to put some of the leases on hold.
With the future of Teshekpuk Lake on the line, Vyn says he’s more motivated than ever to inspire the public with scenes of the area’s wild magic. “At this point in my career,” he says, “that’s the place I want to invest my energy.”
A version of this story originally ran in the Fall 2026 issue as “Out of Sight.” To receive our print magazine, become a member by making a donation today.
