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 […]
The original Americans came from Siberia in a single wave no more than 23,000 years ago, at the height of the last Ice Age, and apparently hung out in the north – perhaps for thousands of years – before spreading in two distinct populations throughout North and South America, according to a new genomic analysis. […]