On a windswept beach near Haines, Tim Ackerman walks down a hill with a pair of gloves, a knife, and a bottle of Dawn dish soap to kneel beside the carcass of a harbor seal. The flesh of its head is conspicuously absent, though the bones are still visible. 

It’s one of a handful that have washed ashore in Haines since late November, with at least three recovered at Letnikof Cove. This fall, the National…

Rashah McChesney is a multimedia journalist and editor who has reported and edited newsrooms from the Deep South to the Midwest to Alaska. For the past decade, she has worked in collaborative news as the...