Jenny Carlson of the University of California, Davis with a captured Swainson’s thrush in Coldfoot, summer 2012.

Image by Ravinder Sehgal.

Thousands of Alaska mosquitoes are now on sabbatical at the University of California, Davis. They are not pestering suntanned Californians. Researchers are analyzing their tiny corpses to see if the parasites that cause malaria are inside them.

Mike Taras of the Alaska Department of Fish and Game points out red squirrel tracks at Chena Hot Springs Resort.

Photo by Ned Rozell.

CHENA HOT SPRINGS — “This is your chance — maybe your only chance in a
lifetime — to see vole poop in a tunnel,” said Mike Taras, an expert
tracker and wildlife educator for the Alaska Department of Fish and
Game.

Seven people kneel and then squint into a blue-white opening in the snow. We see tiny cigars, evidence that a red-backed or meadow vole had indeed paused there. Taras was correct — this was the first time most of us had seen vole poop in a snow tunnel.

A “moose fly” on the upper Tanana River.

Photo by Ned Rozell.

While boating down the Yukon River during the hottest summer recorded in Alaska (1915, when Fort Yukon reached 100 degrees Fahrenheit), missionary Hudson Stuck wrote about the wildlife that most bothered his party.

“With the failure of a little breeze and the overcasting of the sky, the weather grows oppressively sultry and a swarm of horse-flies, or moose-flies as they are called in these parts, makes appearance — large venomous insects that bite a piece out of one’s flesh when they alight.”

A snow mosquito emerges in spring as an adult.

Photo by Ned Rozell.

First, I’ll wear light-colored clothing. Second, I’ll bathe more often in an attempt to be as odorless as possible. Third, I won't exhale while I'm in the woods.

The adult and larva versions of the red flat bark beetle, one of the hardiest organisms in Alaska.

Ned Rozell photo.

As we pull on our winter coats and wool hats to shield our tropical bodies from the cold, there is a creature in our midst that survives Alaska’s coldest temperatures bare-naked.

Derek Sikes, curator of insects at the University of Alaska Museum of the North, on a summer 2011 trip to the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge.

Photo by Matt Bowser.

As Alaska cools and hardens, many scientists are reacquainting themselves with their offices.
Such is the case for Derek Sikes, the curator of insects at the University of
Alaska Museum of the North. This summer, he traveled across Alaska, from Sagwon
Bluffs to Sitka and many places between, including a trip to the Aleutians for
good lateral coverage.