The Stuart Creek wildfire plume as seen from Scott Rupp’s yard on a midsummer day.

Photo by Scott Rupp.

While pounding nails on a roof extension for his shed this summer, Scott Rupp heard a roar that almost scared him off the roof. Three planes with bellies full of fire retardant swooped low, then banked over the mountain behind his home.

“I looked up and saw this big smoke cloud,” said the part-time farmer and leader of an organization devoted to studying climate change. “That was my first sense that this was something that was going to personally affect me.”

With Tricia Blake of the Alaska Songbird Institute looking on, a first-grade student in Fairbanks watches the flight of a dark-eyed junco recently captured and its leg banded at the Creamer’s Field Migratory Waterfowl Refuge in Fairbanks.

Photo by Ned Rozell.

CREAMER’S FIELD, FAIRBANKS — “As this bird takes off, think about how they have to fly thousands and thousands of miles,” Tricia Blake said to 21 first-graders sitting on wooden benches surrounded by birch and balsam poplar trees.

The biologist and educator then placed a ruby-crowned kinglet in the flat palm of a six-year old boy. The thumb-size songbird was probably born in northern Alaska this spring. During the past hour of its brief life (which will last about 4 years), it had a tiny metal band clamped around its ankle.

For 50 years, scientists at UAF’s Institute of Arctic Biology have been studying creatures great and small, including the wood frog.

Photo by Ned Rozell.

While waiting for the talking to begin in darkened auditoriums, I sometimes scan the room, counting heads. “I’ve interviewed him, and her, and him. And her.”

At last week’s dedication of the Institute of Arctic Biology’s lovely new building on the University of Alaska Fairbanks campus, I saw more than a dozen people who have appeared in this space since fall 1994 (when I took over this column from Carla Helfferich).

A whale-watching platform made of and sitting on sea ice north of Barrow.

Photo by Ned Rozell.

Despite taking up as much space as Australia, the blue-white puzzle of ice floating on the Arctic Ocean is an abstraction to the billions who have never seen it. But continued shrinkage of sea ice is changing life for many living things. A few Alaska scientists added their observations to a recent journal article on the subject.

A caribou killed by wolves on a gravel bar of the Fortymile River in the Yukon Territory, just east of the Alaska border.

Photo by Ned Rozell.

At the approach of a canoe, the wolverine tears into the woods, its claws spitting mud. Seconds later, ravens explode from what resembles two branches reaching from a driftwood log.

After the animals flee the Fortymile River gravel bar, the driftwood turns into chewed velvet antlers the size of a folding chair. A fleshy backbone ropes from a skull, extending to rib fragments and a blade of hipbone, its sockets empty. A few tufts of hide lay amid rocks, but the rest of the caribou — so fresh it barely smells — has vanished.

American hunter Jim Martell, left, is seen with a hybrid bear he shot while on a hunting expedition on Banks Island, Northwest Territory, Canada, in April 2006. Genetic tests showed the bear had a polar bear for a mother and a grizzly bear for a father. Roger Kuptana, center, right, was the guide on the expedition. The other men are unidentified.

AP Photo/Canadian Wildlife Service.

When he heard the news of a grizzly-polar bear hybrid shot in Canada’s Arctic last month, Tom Seaton thought back to an unusual polar bear hide he’d once seen at Nelson Walker’s home in Kotzebue.

“He had two polar bear rugs in his house — one was a huge one, and the other was special; it had lots of brown in it,” Seaton said. “It looked like a regular polar bear, but for every square inch of hide, 5 to 20 percent of the hairs were brown instead of white.”

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.

Lightning strikes the hills northwest of the Yukon River.

Photo by Ned Rozell.

Forty years ago, an Army helicopter pilot flying over a tundra plateau saw a group of caribou. Thinking something looked weird, he circled for a closer look. The animals, dozens of them, were dead.

The pilot reported what he saw to the Alaska Department of Fish and Game. The caribou, 48 adults and five calves, were lying in a group. The way their carcasses rested showed no signs that the animals had been running from a predator.

Dan Mann holds the skull of a steppe bison that died on Alaska’s North Slope more than 40,000 years ago. Mann and Pam Groves found the nearly complete skeleton of the bison while floating down a northern river last summer.

Photo by Pam Groves.

As she scraped cold dirt from the remains of an extinct bison, Pam Groves wrinkled her nose at a rotten-egg smell wafting from gristle that still clung to the animal’s bones. She lifted her head to scan the horizon, wary of bears that might be attracted to the flesh of a creature that gasped its last breath 40,000 years ago.
 

Craig George at work watching for bowhead whales on a sea-ice platform north of Barrow.

Photo by Ned Rozell.

From my notebook, here’s more northern news presented at the Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union, a five-day gathering of more than 20,000 scientists held in early December 2012 at the Moscone Center in San Francisco: