Three dead gray whales washed up on two different Kodiak Island beaches recently. The strandings happened within the span of a week.

A rare winter robin has been spotted in Bethel and it has folks wondering what exactly it means. Locals and a biologist say they think it has to do with climate change.

I was home with my kids. They were on Christmas break. And I went to turn on the faucet in the morning to get things ready for breakfast and air came out of the faucet Glottfelty said. The water started flowing normally again after a few days. But after asking around the neighborhood, Glottfelty found out that many of her neighbors, connected to the same aquifer as a nearby church well had similar problems that day – in all, six wells were drained, she says, and one went permanently dry.

It’s one of only four mammals in Alaska to contract the virus, and the first brown bear to be found with the disease.

ABL Space Systems is still investigating the crash, but says the rocket rose more than 700 feet before its engines shut down 11 seconds after launch.

“We really don’t know when the problem started and whether it was a long-term situation this winter, but the bottom line is that it appears that salmonberry and blueberry were affected by the amount of cold and the depth of cold that we had that killed the winter buds and killed the above-ground stems of those plants,” Pyle said.

After a very slow beginning to their season, fishermen in Ugashik Bay saw millions of sockeye salmon return in a little over a week in mid-July.

Safeway on Mill Bay Road is the only large grocery store on the island. And store management expected the barge to bypass Kodiak after its last visit, with a resupply stop scheduled ahead of this past weekend. But snowstorms and gusty weather, including hurricane-force winds, scuttled those plans. “In my entire career, I’ve never seen two successive bypasses,” said Mike Murray, the store director of Kodiak’s Safeway.

Russian River flooded last week in Kodiak leaving some residents scrambling to address the damage.

Kodiak Island residents have been reporting a large number of common murres washing up dead on local beaches.

The magnitude 7.2 earthquake initially triggered sirens and evacuations in communities including Sand Point and Kodiak.

In recent months, bears have shredded a car’s interior, wandered into a liquor store, even woken residents in their own bedrooms.

A disaster declaration could make the fishery eligible for federal relief funds, although who specifically would receive money would be figured out later. 

Alex Hughes is a Fish and Game technician who volunteers with KSWCD. He said based on their studies at the Buskin river, crayfish are successfully breeding. Crayfish are originally from the Pacific Northwest and as with many invasive species, it’s anyone’s guess how they got to Kodiak.