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:

George Divoky, left, talks with Geoff Haines-Stiles at the 2012 Fall Meeting of the American Geophysical Union in San Francisco.

Photo by Ned Rozell.

SAN FRANCISCO — From a lecture hall within a land of warm breezes and flowering December plants comes a story of a creature 2,600 miles north, where the sun will not rise for another 50 days.

Hall Island in the Bering Sea.

Photo by Ned Rozell.

HALL ISLAND — On this windy, misty August day, there are perhaps one million birds clinging to the cliffs that buttress this Bering Sea island. These seabirds, crazy-eyed and with bodies both sleek and clumsy, need solid ground for just a few months to hold their eggs. When their summer mission is complete, the birds scatter to the vastness of the sea.

An American dipper on the Sanctuary River in Denali National Park.

Photo by Ned Rozell.

On the upper Chena River in the heart of a cold winter, a songbird appeared on a gravel bar next to gurgling water that somehow remained unfrozen in 20-below zero air. Then the bird jumped in, disappeared underwater, and popped up a few feet upstream.

The bird continued snorkeling and diving against the current of the stream, which is so far north that in December direct sunlight never touches it, instead bathing only the tops of spruce trees with a ruby light.

Pleistocene wolf skulls from Rancho La Brea (in present day L.A.), California (above) and Fairbanks (middle). Though the skulls are the same length, their shape is different—the wolf skull from Alaska is wider, suggesting those wolves had greater biting power. 



Photo Credit: Blaire Van Valkenburgh, University of California, Los Angeles

An Alaska wolf that disappeared about 12,000 years ago just made another appearance.
   
No one will ever see this wolf, but scientists have found that it was different from Alaska’s wolves of today, and it was not like its Ice-Age contemporaries that lived in, among other places, Los Angeles.
   

Six-thousand reindeer lived here on St. Matthew Island in the Bering Sea in 1963. By the 1980s, zero reindeer remained.

Dave Klein photo.

During World War II, while trying to stock a remote island in the Bering Sea with an emergency food source, the U.S. Coast Guard set in motion a classic experiment in the boom and bust of a wildlife population.

The island was St. Matthew, an unoccupied 32-mile long, four-mile wide sliver of tundra and cliffs in the Bering Sea, more than 200 miles from the nearest Alaska village.