What to look for in nature in Alaska this November

Faster in the north than anywhere else in the country, though the pace eases a little as the month goes on. Over November, Sitka and Juneau give up close to two hours, Anchorage about two and a quarter, and Fairbanks and Kotzebue over three. The table below runs from November 1 to November 30. At Utqiagvik there is nothing left to lose by the end: the U.S. Naval Observatory puts the last sunrise and sunset of 2026 on Wednesday, November 18, with the sun clearing the horizon at about 12:42 p.m. and dropping out of sight at about 1:42 p.m. Alaska Standard Time. It stays below the horizon for 65 nights and next rises on Saturday, January 23, 2027.

Polar night is not pitch dark: around noon the sun sits just below the southern horizon and twilight gives hours of usable blue light. Fairbanks never loses the sun entirely; its shortest day, at the December solstice, still runs about three hours and forty minutes.

Alaskans set clocks back an hour in the small hours of November 1, a Sunday; the change pulls sunrise an hour earlier for a few days and makes the afternoon dark arrive with a jolt. For your exact spot, including twilight times, open the Field almanac; it recalculates sunrise and sunset for any coordinates.

Yes, with one catch: clouds. The nights are now long almost everywhere in the state, so the limiting factor is a clear sky rather than darkness. The University of Alaska Fairbanks Geophysical Institute, which runs the state’s best-known aurora forecast, points to the middle of the night, centered on midnight, as the likeliest time, with strong displays usually falling between about 9 p.m. and 3 a.m. In November, though, the sky is dark well before 9 p.m., so an early show over the Interior or the Arctic is entirely possible.

The sun has passed the peak of its current cycle. NOAA’s Space Weather Prediction Center lists the smoothed sunspot peak of Solar Cycle 25 as 160.9 in October 2024, and the monthly count has since fallen, to about 60 in September 2026. A declining sun still produces big storms, and Alaska sits under the auroral zone, so check the forecast on the day; nobody can predict a particular storm weeks ahead.

A clear-sky forecast matters as much as the space-weather one. Before leaving town, look at the cloud cover for your area on Today’s sky.

Late fall into early winter, according to Alaska State Parks, and November sits squarely in that window, which is why Haines holds its festival then. The birds start arriving along the Chilkat River north of town in mid-October and some stay into January. What draws them is geology. A deep fan of gravel and sand beside the river holds water that stays above freezing as the air chills, and that water keeps seeping into the Chilkat all winter, so several miles of channel stay open long after nearby rivers have locked up. Late salmon spawn and die in the open stretches, and the eagles come for the carcasses. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game puts the gathering at more than 3,000 bald eagles over the season.

Elsewhere, look for wintering eagles wherever a river stays open or fish waste collects around a harbor.

Often, yes, though fewer each week. Most humpbacks that spend the summer feeding in Alaska head to Hawaii to breed, a trip NOAA Fisheries says can take as little as four weeks for roughly 3,000 miles. They do not all leave at the same time, and the organizers of Sitka WhaleFest, now in its 30th year, describe Sitka as a place where whales and other marine mammals can be watched each November during the festival.

Late fall, which makes November the month to watch the mountain hoofed animals. The Alaska Department of Fish and Game puts the Dall sheep breeding season in late November and early December. The horn clashing that rams are famous for, it explains, is less a fight over ewes than a way of settling rank, and it happens most often when strange rams of similar size meet in the weeks before and during the rut. For most of the year the adult rams keep to their own bands, but they now move in among the ewes. Mountain goats breed a little earlier, between late October and early December, and coastal goats drift down to old-growth forest at or below tree line for the winter, browsing hemlock, blueberry and lichen.

More than you might expect, and November is when the winter cast settles in. Some come down from the north and west to the ice-free southern coast; others are year-round residents with remarkable ways of staying alive.

Project FeederWatch, the Cornell Lab and Birds Canada’s winter survey, begins on November 1 and continues into April; U.S. participants pay $18 and count as often or as rarely as they like. In Alaska, put feeders out only once the bears around you are denned, and keep them clean.

After a calm night’s snowfall, go out early, before wind blurs the tracks.

Almost everywhere, yes. The NOAA 1991–2020 normals below show that Nome, Fairbanks, Bethel and Anchorage normally see their first 32 °F night in September or the first day of October, and Kodiak and Juneau’s airport by early October. By November the places still waiting are the mildest corners of the coast. Sitka is the standout: its median first freeze falls on November 1, and in the latest tenth of years Sitka is still waiting after November 21. Ketchikan’s median is October 23, but one autumn in ten it gets past November 10 without a frost, and Dutch Harbor’s late date is November 5.

In the Interior and the west, the November story is freeze-up on lakes and rivers. The National Weather Service’s Alaska-Pacific River Forecast Center collects freeze-up observations for rivers across the state, tracking the date of first ice, full freeze-up, and when observers judge the ice safe for people and then for vehicles. Offshore, the Arctic Ocean is refreezing after a September minimum that the National Snow and Ice Data Center ranked tied for tenth lowest on record. Station-by-station frost dates for the whole state, including towns not in this table, are on the Alaska frost dates page.

November is the month the Interior and the Arctic turn properly cold. By the NOAA 1991–2020 normals, Fairbanks averages a high of 12 °F and a low of −4 °F for the month, and Utqiagvik is barely warmer. Anchorage averages 29 °F by day and 18 °F at night with about a foot of snow. Southeast stays mostly above freezing in the daytime and wet: Ketchikan’s November normal is over 17 inches of precipitation, mostly rain. Bethel and Nome also average about a foot of snow; Kodiak gets half that.

El Niño. Federal forecasters see El Niño as all but certain: the Climate Prediction Center’s mid-September update put the odds above 90 percent that this winter’s event will be very strong. The agency’s formal December to February outlook comes out on October 15; the maps then go up with the rest of the CPC 90-day set. For Alaska, history says to expect a nudge rather than a shove. Brian Brettschneider, who manages climate services for the National Weather Service’s Alaska Region, found that 20 of 30 El Niño winters since 1925 were warmer than normal, driven by southerly winds off the Gulf of Alaska, and that they also tended toward less precipitation. He also cautioned that the state of the tropical Pacific explains no more than about a fifth of the year-to-year swings in Alaska’s winter temperatures. The USGS Climate Adaptation Science Centers rate the boost in odds of a slightly warm winter at only five to ten percent, largest in Southeast, and note that the Aleutian Low and North Pacific sea temperatures often matter more. For the forecast where you live this week, see the weather page.

Moonrise and moonset swing wildly at Alaska’s latitudes from one night to the next; the moon phases page gives the times for your own town.

1. Count birds from the kitchen window. Project FeederWatch starts November 1. Redpolls, chickadees, nuthatches and woodpeckers all count, and a count can be as short as you like.
2. Go to Sitka WhaleFest, November 5–9. The student art show and film night on the 5th, the run and walk on the morning of the 7th, and the whale-watching cruises on the 7th and 8th are the most family-friendly parts.
3. Ride out to the eagles at the Alaska Bald Eagle Festival in Haines, listed for November 6–8. Check the American Bald Eagle Foundation’s events page for the final schedule.
4. Make feeders at Thanksgiving for the Birds, Saturday, November 14. The Friends of Creamer’s Field list the event from noon to 4 p.m. at the Farmhouse Visitor Center in Fairbanks, with crafts and an introduction to the birds that winter in the Interior.
5. Watch rams at Windy Corner. Pick a calm weekend afternoon, park properly in a turnout at milepost 106 of the Seward Highway, and bring binoculars.
6. Look for Leonids before school on Wednesday, November 18, while the sky is still dark. Give your eyes 15 minutes to adjust.
7. Try Anchorage Audubon’s November evening program, Thursday, November 19, 6 to 7:30 p.m. The chapter lists the date and time, but had not posted the topic or venue by early October, so check its website.
8. Watch the Beaver Moon rise on Monday, November 23, or Tuesday, November 24. It rises around sunset, which in November is well before bedtime.
9. Get outside the day after Thanksgiving, November 27, in the middle of the day, when the light is best.
10. Start a snow log: the date your pond freezes, and snow depth on the first of each month.
11. Sign up for a Christmas Bird Count. The 2026–27 counts run December 14 to January 5. Audubon’s map shows the count circles and compilers in Alaska; feeder watchers inside a circle can often take part from home.

Guides for other months and other states are collected on the nature index, and last month’s Alaska page, with bears, swans and the first snow, is at October in Alaska.

• Ice. New ice is deceptive. River ice forms unevenly and stays thin over currents, near inlets and outlets, around springs and under snow, which insulates it. Do not trust any ice you have not tested or that local people are not already using, and hold kids and dogs back from new pond ice until someone has measured it. The Alaska-Pacific River Forecast Center’s freeze-up reports are a useful guide to rivers, but they do not replace a chisel and a tape measure.
• Cold and wind. With Fairbanks averaging lows below zero and the coasts windy, frostbite comes fast on exposed skin. Tell someone where you are going, carry extra layers, and keep a winter kit in the car.
• Short days. Anchorage is down to about six hours of sun by November 30, and the north has far less. Start hikes by late morning, turn around early, and carry a headlamp even on short walks.
• Moose on dark roads. Moose feed along road edges and railway lines in winter and are almost invisible in the long dusk. Slow down, especially where willows crowd the road.
• Avalanches. Early-season snow in the mountains can slide, often on a weak base. In Southcentral, the Chugach National Forest Avalanche Information Center forecasts for Turnagain Pass, Girdwood, Summit Lake, Seward, Chugach State Park and Hatcher Pass; check it, or your local center, before heading onto steep slopes.
• Hunting. Seasons in Alaska vary by Game Management Unit and are listed unit by unit in ADF&G’s 2026–2027 regulations booklet, valid until June 30, 2027. Some that overlap November: on Kodiak’s road system, deer may be taken by bow, crossbow or muzzleloader only from November 1 to 14, then by youth hunters aged 10 to 17 with those weapons from November 16 to December 31 (across the remainder of Unit 8, deer of either sex may be taken October 1 to December 31); in the Anchorage Management Area of Unit 14C, an antlerless moose permit hunt by shotgun or muzzleloader runs November 1–30; and in Unit 22B east of the Darby Mountains, residents may take an antlered bull from November 1 to December 31. Duck seasons, from ADF&G’s 2026–2027 migratory bird regulations, run September 1 to December 16 in the Gulf Coast and Northern zones, September 1 to November 30 in Southeast (closed December 1–15, then open again December 16–31), and October 8 to January 22 in the Kodiak and Pribilof/Aleutian zones. Emperor geese have no open season anywhere.
• Blaze orange. Alaska does not have a general hunter orange law; the 2026–27 regulations require orange outerwear only in a few special areas, such as the Hatcher Pass Youth Management Area. ADF&G’s hunter education program points out that orange clothing is still proven to cut hunting accidents. If you walk or ski where hunting is open, wear something bright, and dress your dog in orange too.

When you come in from the cold, a few lines on paper keep the day. Most of what this page describes has its own plate in the Naturalist’s Field Journal.