During a month of endless summer light, a mated pair of shorebirds teaches their four chicks how to catch insects. The babies grow fat and strong on the tundra high in northeastern Alaska. They are soon ready for their first migration.

On a random day, the male then jumps off the cushion of northern plants and, done with Alaska, flaps eastward. The female pivots and flies west.

The male whimbrel pauses for 25 days at Hudson Bay, continues over Nova Scotia and then follows the Atlantic coast on a nonstop journey to a wetland in Brazil.

The female cuts over the nose of the Seward Peninsula and stops for two weeks on the Yukon-Kuskokwim River Delta. The fattened bird then tracks the Pacific shoreline — resting a week in San Francisco Bay and then some at the mouth of the Colorado River — until it reaches Colombia.

The whimbrels winter apart on opposite coasts of South America.

The following summer, both birds reverse course, reaching northeastern Alaska in late May.

Hopping across a green bench above the Katakturuk River, they each recognize the other’s shape, perhaps a remembered scent.

Their love blossoms anew. The female soon lays four eggs in a shallow nest.

This Valentine’s Day story arrives via a biologist who is about to learn a lot more about the whimbrels of northeastern Alaska.

Dan Ruthrauff has studied the ptarmigan-size shorebirds with roundish bodies and long, curved beaks for years. He has held them in his hands within the Kanuti Wildlife Refuge in central Alaska’s boreal forest and the tundra off the Colville River in northern Alaska.

Ruthrauff, a longtime researcher with the U.S. Geological Survey Alaska Science Center in Anchorage, is taking over a study Shiloh Schulte initiated in Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge a few years ago.

Schulte, who died in a helicopter crash last summer, was in the second year of a newly funded three-year study that included monitoring a mated pair of whimbrels he had radio tagged. To the astonishment of other researchers, Schulte found that the two whimbrels — birds that probably mate for life — migrated in fall via different coasts of the Americas, and wintered in different countries.

In January 2025, Ruthrauff retired earlier than he had anticipated from the USGS Science Center in Anchorage. He was one of many scientists who left that organization of excellence due to pressure from the U.S. Department of Government Efficiency.

A couple of months after a June 2025 helicopter crash near the Deadhorse airport took the life of biologist Shiloh Schulte and the helicopter’s pilot, a supervisor with Manomet Conservation Services of Massachusetts contacted Ruthrauff. He asked if Ruthrauff would consider extending Schulte’s work on the northern whimbrels, which can live to be 20 years old.

“The idea grew for me to work with the organization to help carry Shiloh’s work forward,” Ruthrauff said. “It was kind of a nice lifeline for me.”

Ruthrauff recalled a track from one of the birds he studied with his USGS colleagues. The whimbrel left a site near Quinhagak, on the mouth of the Kuskokwim River, and flew nonstop to a site in western Mexico, overflying the Baja Peninsula.

“This was over water the whole way, skipping Canada, the Lower 48, and Baja,” Ruthrauff said. “This was 5,700 kilometers nonstop, over less than three and a half days.”

Before Schulte found the mated pair that migrated via different ends of the continent, biologists thought that whimbrels that went east in fall might have been a different subspecies than the birds that headed west.

“We thought those birds were probably unlikely to breed,” Ruthrauff said.

But the birds have produced healthy chicks. Schulte found that a surprising three out of nine mated pairs of birds were composed of males that migrated by one ocean, females another.

That means two birds responsible for the same tiny nest on the tundra face dangers from the Caribbean and South America, where they are hunted for sport and food, as well as on the Pacific coast. Whimbrel numbers worldwide have declined by at least 70% over the last few decades.

“It shows the importance of these interconnected sites across the whole (Western) Hemisphere,” Ruthrauff said.

This summer, Ruthrauff will follow the whimbrels north to their nesting site near the Katakturuk River in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge, which flows straight north from the Brooks Range into the Beaufort Sea. He wants to learn the birds’ life history and to find out where during their epic migration the birds face the most danger.

If he’s lucky, Ruthrauff may even witness the original long-distance couple that Schulte discovered, the plucky travelers once again reunited in northernmost Alaska.

House minority Republicans are decrying a procedural decision to temporarily zero out the Permanent Fund dividend size in next year’s draft budget while conversations are underway on its ultimate amount.

Majority members on the House Finance Committee have repeatedly underscored their intention to include a dividend in this year’s final budget.

In a 6-5 vote on Wednesday, majority members set the annual payout to Alaskans at zero, with the promise that the dividend size will ultimately be determined later in the session.

The move was opposed by all committee Republicans, who said that despite the fact the move was temporary, it masked the state’s fiscal challenges.

Lawmakers have not followed the existing state statute for determining the annual Permanent Fund dividend for a decade, as lower oil revenue forced them to turn to the fund’s earnings to pay for an increasing share of government services.

But Gov. Mike Dunleavy again included the statutory dividend in this year’s budget draft, asking lawmakers to draw roughly $1.5 billion from the state’s savings to cover its cost.

Republicans in the House have conceded that Dunleavy’s request for a payment of roughly $3,800 is unreasonable, but they have yet to land on a dividend size that would appease their minority caucus.

Leaders of the bipartisan majorities in the House and Senate, meanwhile, have said they will seek to adopt a balanced budget and avoid significant draws from state savings. Last year, that strategy led to a dividend of $1,000 per eligible recipient.

“Do I think that there’s going to be a full statutory PFD? Do I think there’s even a possibility of that? No, I don’t think so,” House Minority Leader DeLena Johnson, a Palmer Republican, said on Thursday. “Do I think that it could be higher and better? Absolutely. And do I think it’s the closest thing that we have to a spending cap in this universe that we live in right now? Absolutely.”

With the dividend set at zero, the budget draft that lawmakers will use as their template as they build next year’s spending plan is starting with a revenue surplus of more than $800 million, compared with Dunleavy’s starting point of a $1.5 billion deficit.

Republicans said that artificially large surplus, which also doesn’t take into account other significant funding items like disaster response expenses, could lead to misperceptions about the state’s fiscal constraints.

Rep. Will Stapp, a Fairbanks Republican who serves on the Finance Committee, said he is concerned that House majority members will use that budget surplus as the basis for adding more spending on state services to the budget.

“When I hear the co-chair of Finance talking about all the things that he’s going to spend money on, and he deposits the entirety of the PFD into the general fund, that makes me think that we’re not taking this deficit very seriously at the moment,” said Stapp. “I’m not super optimistic at the moment that they’re going to have downward pressure on the budget.”

House Finance Committee Co-Chair Andy Josephson, an Anchorage Democrat, said that the advantage of beginning the budget-making process with a dividend set at zero is that “now we can hear from all 11 members of the Finance Committee at the end of March, by amendment, and have a debate about what that number should be.”

“What constrains us is public perception and desire for a dividend,” Josephson said. “But the prospect of paying a statutory dividend is so obliterated in our fiscal position that it doesn’t constrain us anymore.”

Ultimately, Josephson said that the dividend this year is likely to be between $800 and $1,400 per eligible Alaskan, depending in part on whether lawmakers approve a draw from savings as part of the budget-making process or stick to available revenue.

Concrete discussions on the size of the dividend likely won’t begin in earnest until mid-March, when the Department of Revenue will issue an updated revenue forecast. The size of the dividend will be shaped by ongoing policy questions, Josephson said, like whether to increase education funding and whether to adopt a new public pension system.

“Once those policy calls are made, then we can better see what remains,” said Josephson.

Rep. Calvin Schrage, an Anchorage independent, and Rep. Neal Foster, a Nome Democrat, co-chair the House Finance Committee alongside Josephson. They voiced support for the budget draft on Wednesday.

“Everybody knows that the PFD is not in this. That’s the biggest elephant in the room, and I think we all need to talk about that, and it’s going to be an ongoing conversation,” said Foster.

As lawmakers continue discussions on next year’s spending plan, next week they are also set to debate a request from Dunleavy to draw more than $400 million from savings to cover a deficit in the current year’s budget.

They met as kids in the late 1980s — Lisa was 5 and Michelle 10 — and grew up as neighbors, family friends and schoolmates. In 2004, by chance, they graduated from subsequent Alaska flight attendant training classes and months later were assigned to the same flight. For years, whenever their schedules overlapped, they worked side by side, catching up in the galley and strengthening a bond that already felt lifelong.

In 2014, over dinner on a New York City layover, one simple question changed everything: “Why don’t we buddy bid?” That moment sparked a 12‑year tradition of bidding for and working on the same trips. Now, if you see Lisa on your Alaska flight, chances are Michelle is nearby.

“Working together feels effortless. We can read each other, anticipate what the other needs and assist each other in difficult situations,” Michelle said. Their chemistry shows in the cabin — fun, intuitive and always in sync. They carpool to the airport, plan their work meals and spend layovers exploring, shopping or catching up with fellow crew friends. They share a love of sports too, with memories of cheering on the Knicks in Manhattan and the Saints during a New Orleans layover.