Welcome. My name is Kevin Winker. I live in Fairbanks, Alaska, with my wife Dr. Rose Meier. I am a faculty member at the University of Alaska Fairbanks—a professor in the Department of Biology and Wildlife and Curator of Birds in the University of Alaska Museum. This blog continues in a more public forum an ongoing series of emails to family and friends. They’re just stories and musings about what we do and what life is like here in Alaska and, occasionally, in other places we visit.

Why Notes from Beringia? It’s where we live and work. Beringia is a vast expanse stretching to the west and east of the Bering Sea, which was an important part of the Bering Land Bridge during the last glacial maximum. Beringia includes much of Alaska and the Russian Far East. The region is often called the Crossroads of the Continents because humans and many other interesting mammals walked across from Asia to North America when the land bridge was last exposed by lower sea levels, thousands of years ago. Today, large numbers of migratory birds make the intercontinental crossings twice a year. Many people equate the term Beringia with its dynamic history—the Bering land bridge has been exposed and inundated many times during the glacial-interglacial cycles of the 2.6 million years of the Pleistocene. But it is no less exciting today. I hope you, too, find something of interest here.

Partially following instructions on the sign, near Calgary, British Columbia.