Dashell Neibaur News Today

By Ned Rozell Helpers with the Alaska Songbird Institute's Swallow Ecology Project prepare to capture a black-capped chickadee that is nesting in a swallow box

Red-necked stints winter in New Zealand, Australia and Asia and migrate to Alaska, but it is quite unusual for them to travel as far inland as Fairbanks.

Hazel Sutton was eating lunch on an island at Tanana Lakes Recreation Area in Fairbanks with her family recently when a bird caught her eye. At first, she figured it was a semipalmated sandpiper, an ocean bird that migrates to Interior Alaska each spring to create more sandpipers.