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, […]
Results of the Best Photo of the Month July 2020
We are delighted to announce the results of our latest photo competition. Paamul Jack wins First Prize for his outstanding image ‘Dragonflies at Sunset’. Leigh Lofgren wins Second Prize with “You See Me’ and Third Prize goes to Ken Billington with ‘Love is in the Air – Kestrels Mating’. Please give kudos to the photographers […]
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, […]
VOTE for the Best Photo of the Month July 2020
Welcome to the “Best Photo of the Month” competition showcasing and celebrating the biodiversity of Planet Earth. Voting is easy and lots of fun. First click an image and the slideshow will start automatically. Then select the three images you like best of all and click the VOTE button at the bottom of the page. […]
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 […]