Vernon Byrd is one guy who doesn't mind going on wild goose chases; he knows that they sometimes pay off - even if it takes a very long time.

Byrd, who works for the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge, is one of several wildlife biologists whose efforts to save the rare Aleutian goose spanned nearly 30 years. Last spring, the scientists finally hit pay dirt as flocks of the geese flew north from California to Alaska to raise their young - and flew off the federal government's list of endangered and threatened wildlife to become one of only a handful of species brought back from the brink of extinction.

A subspecies of the Canada geese that populate parks and golf courses, Aleutian geese were once abundant. But in the 18th century, according to the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service, a scheme was launched to meet the then-growing demand for fox fur - with disastrous results for geese. Foxes released onto most of the Aleutian geese's home islands quickly developed a taste for the birds.

"Because adult geese temporarily lose their ability to fly when they molt in late July," Byrd explains, "they had no chance against the foxes."

By World War II, the Aleutian geese were believed to be extinct. But in 1962 researchers discovered a few hundred birds clinging to survival on Alaska's Buldir Island, a rugged speck of land only 300 miles or so off the coast of Siberia. The race to save the species was on.

To protect the small existing gene pool, the first biologists began by them to a rearing facility in Maryland.

By 1971, with several hundred geese thriving in captivity, a group of Maryland-born goslings were released, with some success, on a fox-free Aleutian island called Amchitka. But the Arctic seasons are much different than Maryland's, and the birds needed to acclimate to the area before they could be released. In February 1974, more Maryland geese were flown to the Aleutian isle of Attu, where they were met by John Trapp, a young biologist working for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service. (Attu was relatively accessible and was the site of an old Coast Guard loran station.) After acclimating for a month, the birds, accompanied by Trapp, would be loaded onto a support ship and taken to Aggattu, which was accessible only by sea.

On Attu, Trapp lived in almost complete isolation. "I had to hike three miles just to make a phone call," he recalls. "It got pretty lonely."

Weeks passed, and bad weather delayed the arrival of the support ship and its supplies. At one point, the crew received a radio message from Trapp: "Running low on food," he said. "Geese looking tastier every day."

The supply ship made it in time, and Trapp and Vernon Byrd liberated the geese just before summer. The population grew but not very quickly, and by 1976, says Bryd, "It was clear we needed a rearing facility in the Aleutians, so one was built on Amchitka." Once the facility was ready, the scientists began supplying it with eggs from Buldir.

For several years the facility at Amchitka produced geese for release on fox-free islands. But that process, too, involved heroic efforts of people like John Martin. He once found himself tending a box of goose eggs while crammed into the engine room of a boat. For nearly 200 miles - as the boat careened between 25-foot swells - he huddled near the roaring engine, choking on diesel fumes and struggling to keep the delicate eggs from getting too hot or too cold.

Another part of the project began in 1978: It involved capturing entire families of wild geese to be relocated on other islands. But catching the birds wasn't easy.

"Rounding up the geese was hazardous," says Trapp, who was also tapped for that assignment. "There were large boulders scattered every-where on the island, and by late sum-mer, when we'd capture the geese, the grasses were waist high, completely hiding most of the boulders."

Eight to ten people, many carrying long-handled fishing nets, would charge after the birds, not knowing if a big rock or other obstacle lay in their path. After badly injuring a knee in a collision with just such a rock, Byrd had to be evacuated off the island.

By the early 1980s, says Byrd, "The world population of geese had grown to the point that we felt good about taking a number of birds from Buldir for release on other islands, and closing the rearing facility on Amchitka." By 1990, more than 6,000 Aleutian geese were thriving on nine different islands. Eleven years later, the number had jumped to 37,000. On March 19, 2001, the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Service officially declared the birds completely out of danger.

"It was a great day," says Byrd, who still runs the goose program. The other biologists have moved on: John Martin retired after advancing from chief egg-sitter to manager of the Alaska Maritime National Wildlife Refuge. John Trapp now works for the U.S. Fish & Wildlife Division of Migratory Bird Management. But Vernon Byrd still spends his summers out on the windswept Aleutians, watching geese fly high.

Power Center The Aleutian Islands are among the most seismically active places not only in the United States but on the entire planet. A magnitude-7.8 earthquake rattled the region in 1946, causing a 115-foot tsunami that devastated the island of Unimak; 11 years later an 8.8 quake - the world's third largest in the 20th century - shook the area for minutes. The quakes are the result of the subduction process in which the Pacific tectonic plate steadily slides beneath the North American plate. The rock liquifies as it is pushed down into molten areas of the Earth's crust. Over millions of years, the magma has resurfaced, forming the volcanic peaks - some more than 10,000 feet high - that make up the Aleutians. There's no shortage of man-made power here, either: In 1971, the U.S. military set off its largest H-bomb test ever, detonating a 5-megaton device (385 times stronger than the one dropped on Hiroshima) under Amchitka. The test spurred the first protests by a fledgling environmental group known as Greenpeace, now among the most powerful organizations of its kind in the world. David Downs