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.    

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.