According to a new study published this week in the journal Current Biology, Secretary birds can kick with 195 Newtons, which is equivalent to about 5 times their own body weight, when they kill their prey. The Secretary bird (Sagittarius serpentarius) is a large terrestrial bird of prey, which stands around 4 feet (1.2 m) […]
Category: News
Mali’s desert elephants face extinction within three years
Mali’s elephants, one of just two remaining desert herds in the world, will be gone in three years unless the government does more to protect them, a conservation group has warned. Poachers have taken advantage of the chaos from a growing Islamist insurgency and other unrest in the lawless north to step up ivory trafficking […]
Shooting lobby calls for five-year moratorium on duck hunting rules
The shooting lobby has called for a five-year moratorium on new duck hunting restrictions in Victoria, saying it would allow regulators to study the impact of hunting on duck and other waterfowl populations. The RSPCA has described the suggestion as “unbelievable” given the wealth of data, collected by the University of NSW annual aerial bird […]
Video: Tense Standoff With a Male Elephant in Mating Mode
“About 97 percent of all the elephants were killed, and the ones that are left don’t like us very well,” says National Geographic filmmaker Bob Poole, referring to the elephants who live in Gorongosa National Park, a population that was heavily hunted by soldiers during Mozambique’s civil war. During the 15-year war, elephants in Gorongosa […]
Video: Let’s Not Force Eagles to Fight Rogue Drones
Watching a giant eagle streak out of the sky to capture a rogue drone is undeniably cool. A story has been sweeping the Internet about how the Dutch National Police are training eagles to be a new avian air force that will protect us from evil flying robots. The idea that eagles could be turned […]
Peru issues its first sentence against species traffickers, setting a precedent
On January 6, two men happened to be near San José church in the Lima district of Jesús María, when they were stopped by various agents from the Office Against Illegal Logging and Protection of Natural Resources (Dirección Contra la Tala Ilegal y Protección de los Recursos Naturales, or DIRCTIPRN – PNP), in coordination with […]
Icelanders Don’t Like Whale Meat – So Why the Hunts?
When it comes to commercial whaling, Japan is in the limelight. The country has been widely accused of using a scientific research program as a guise for hunting hundreds of whales a year and selling their meat. Last year, an international court agreed that the program isn’t scientific and ordered Japan to shut it down—to […]
Over 40 years, half of China’s land vertebrates disappear
From 1970 to 2010, the world’s populations of mammals, reptiles, amphibians, birds, and fish shrunk by about 52 percent. China is right in the middle of the global pack with a nearly 50-percent loss of its land-based vertebrates, according to a recent report by the international NGO World Wide Fund for Nature (WWF). The situation […]