Least auklets on St. Matthew Island, 1984.

U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service photo.

Fifty-five summers ago, when Dave Klein first stepped on St. Matthew
Island, driftwood on the beaches held no plastic bottles and hundreds of
reindeer roamed the tundra hills.
   
When the 85-year-old naturalist returns next week for his sixth trip to
one of the most remote islands of the world, he knows he’ll see lots of
plastic and no reindeer, along with some changes he can’t yet imagine.

“It’s such a fabulous place,” he said.
   
Klein, along with a group of scientists and one non-scientist (me!), are

A wolf caught serendipitously on one of Ken Tape’s cameras he set up in northern Alaska to record caribou and ptarmigan migrations this spring.

Image courtesy Ken Tape.

Ken Tape feels that way, after a time-lapse camera he set up in northern Alaska captured a full-frame portrait of a wolf. He shared the image with me, and, now, with you.

A black-billed magpie in the Kodiak National Wildlife Refuge.

Photo by Dave Menke.

A while back, Ron Koczaja was walking a riverbank in Kasigluk with a village elder when a large, striking bird perched on a powerline.
   
"What is that bird?" the woman asked.

"A magpie," said Koczaja, a teacher in the village. "What's it called in Yupik?"

"I don't know,” she said. “Them birds never used to be here. There is no word."

Seth McMillan of the National Park Service recovers the body of a male wolf that roamed more than 2,000 miles in seven months. The wolf died of starvation; McMillan is pictured where he and John Burch found it beneath a spruce tree near the upper Kanuti River.

Photo courtesy John Burch.

Thanks to information from a collar that communicated with satellites, a biologist has closed the book on the long journey of a male wolf that left its pack last one year ago and wandered thousands of miles through northern Alaska. 

A flock of bar tailed godwits departs Alaska in September from Nelson Lagoon on the Alaska Peninsula.

Photo by Bob Gill

After flying northward from Chile, a whimbrel landed in late March in an alfalfa field near Mexicali, Mexico. The handsome shorebird with a long curved beak left its wintering ground in South America one week earlier and flew more than 5,000 miles. Nonstop.

Biologist Julie Hagelin holds a murre while surrounded by children in the village of Savoonga on St. Lawrence Island. Photo by Aaron Strong.

Photo by Aaron Strong.

Julie Hagelin remembers the day she hugged a rare New Zealand kakapo parrot to her chest. The soft, green bird emitted the scent of lavender, like dust and honey; it lingered upon Hagelin’s t-shirt for hours. That powerful essence inspired her question to the revered biologist for whom she was working. Was the bird’s pleasant odor attractive to other birds?

Jessy Coltrane and the subject of her doctoral research, the porcupine.

Photo courtesy of Jessy Coltrane.

While running through Bicentennial Park in Anchorage, biologist Jessy Coltrane spotted a porcupine in a birch tree. On her runs on days following, she saw it again and again, in good weather and bad. Over time, she knew which Alaska creature she
wanted to study.

Vic Van Ballenberghe, who has studied moose for three decades, drives the Denali Park road in late September, 2011.

Photo by Ned Rozell.

DENALI NATIONAL
PARK AND PRESERVE— On a late autumn day, as naked stems of dwarf birch nod away
from a warm breeze, a distant flash of antler reveals the object of our search.

“The hunters
would love to see him,” Vic Van Ballenberghe says as he pulls his pickup to the
side of the park road and grabs his binoculars. “He’s a trophy bull.”

An Alaska wolf on the Kenai National Wildlife Refuge.

Photo courtesy U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Somewhere
in the rolling tundra east of Deadhorse, a lone wolf hunts. The
100-pound male will take anything it can catch, or find — a ptarmigan, a
darting tundra rodent, a fish, the scraps of a carcass, or, if lucky, a
moose calf or caribou. Hunger is a common companion, but the wolf
somehow survived when his mate probably died of it last winter.