Every year, gray whales migrate from their summer feeding grounds in the Arctic to their wintering grounds off Baja California in Mexico. And roughly every other year, scientists with binoculars count them as they funnel past a point on the California coast a bit south of Monterey Bay. Scientists conduct this survey to keep track […]
As a river eats its way into Newtok, Alaska, residents are planning their moves to a new village site 12 miles away. One family will move into a house on skis with the ability to migrate as needed with self-contained water and electrical systems. In his dozen visits to Newtok, a village of about 354 […]
Even fish look forward to retirement. After making an exhausting migration from river to ocean and back to river — often multiple years in a row — one species of Alaskan trout decides to call it quits and retire from migrating once they are big enough to survive off their fat reserves. This is the […]
As piles of wet snow fell, an unexpected guest rapped at the window. My wife, Kristen, heard it bump into the glass. She was soon cupping in her hands a delicate bird she saw perched on the windowsill. “It’s a golden-crowned kinglet!” she said. Kristen is a bird biologist, but I was surprised at her […]