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.