The weekend before last, Yoav Perlman forwarded the following email from Ron Efrat, a researcher in the wider region studying Egyptian Vultures, to Jem Babbington and me and asked if we might use our contacts here in Saudi to track down the missing vulture. I opened the link in Google Maps and realized that the […]
Category: Blogs
Possible Breeding Basra Reed Warbler in Al Ha’ir, Riyadh Province, KSA
On a visit to Riyadh in May 2019, I headed to Al Ha’ir in the hopes of gathering further evidence Basra Reed Warbler Acrocephalus griseldis was indeed breeding there. This would be significant, if confirmed, as this species is currently listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species, its decline understood to […]
Stalking the Sublime: Target Acquired in Asir Province!
Why do we bird? The standing theory is that our passion is a sublimation of primal predatory instincts. To be sure, birders employ their senses and a similar set of skills as hunters in pursuit of their quarry, particularly those of us who’ve become “target birders”, focusing our efforts on tracking down and documenting a […]
Confessions of a Wildlife Photographer
It was the fall of 2001 when I walked into a Thursday night meeting of a local nature photography club. It was competition night and the members of the Camera Naturalist Photo Club handed in their slides to be sorted and loaded into the slide projector. I took a seat in the back of the room, […]
New research shows, two closely-related species of wild cats in Ontario, Canada, may face starkly different futures. Is this “survival of the fittest?”
To the untrained eye, the two species might pass as overgrown house cats. They’re actually “felids” or mammals belonging to felidae, a family of wild cats. Both live side by side in the wilds of Ontario, north of Lake Huron. Researchers at the University of Trent in Peterborough, Ontario, looked at bobcat and lynx numbers, […]
According to a new study – there’s simply no proof that wolf culls – aimed at saving western Canada’s endangered mountain caribou – are working.
New research by a team of biologists, seems to support critics who have long argued that wolves are being sacrificed unnecessarily in efforts to save mountain caribou in British Columbia and Alberta from the growing threat of extinction. Since the 80s, authorities in the two provinces (Canada’s westernmost) have been conducting “culls” which have probably […]
New research suggests, zoos and aquariums in Canada do little to protect endangered creatures in the wild.
A study published in the Canadian journal, Facets recently, begins positively enough. It acknowledges that the thirty Canadian zoos and aquariums represented by CAZA, a private, non-profit charity, do try to be leaders in researching this field. And, they do take part in programs aimed at species survival by breeding animals in captivity, then re-introducing […]
Rapidly warming oceans have left many northern marine mammals swimming in troubled waters. But perhaps none more so than than the strange and mysterious “unicorn of the sea,” the narwhal.
An exhaustive new study estimates, habitat suitable to narwhals could shrink by a staggering twenty-five percent by century’s end. Thanks to manmade climate change, their watery home is warming faster than anywhere else on Earth. And, in a scant few decades, sea-ice, so vital to their survival, could be gone altogether during Arctic summers. Narwhals […]