In the mid-1990s, the kākāpō seemed destined for extinction. Only 51 individuals of the flightless, nocturnal parrot remained, all of them descended from a shrinking gene pool and spread across remote corners of New Zealand. A victim of its own evolutionary success, the kākāpō had once flourished in a predator-free island ecosystem. But its defenses—freezing […]
A pair of Montagu’s harriers have raised four chicks in an English wheat field, the first success for Britain’s rarest breeding bird since 2019. The fledglings took their maiden flights this week after being closely monitored by the RSPB and the local farmer, with a protective wire-mesh fence installed around the nest to repel predators […]
The Democratic Republic of the Congo (DRC) is home to many species of rare and endangered wildlife, such as mountain gorillas, eastern lowland gorillas and bonobos. But the country has plans to open more than half its land — including 306 million acres of intact tropical forest and vital gorilla habitat — to oil and […]
Wildlife crime scenes rarely feature fingerprints or cameras. Instead, investigators are turning to bits of tissue, feathers, and soil-stained knives that hide genetic clues linking poachers, poisoned bait, and endangered animals. A study from the Hebrew University of Jerusalem detailed a toolkit that pulls those clues together and makes them stick in court. Dr. Gila […]
Imagine a vast, protected marine sanctuary, which contains extraordinary and unique marine life and globally important bird nesting sites, all amid a remote chain of islands, atolls, reefs, and shoals. From octopods and the world’s largest sponge, to the oldest marine organism—a deep-sea black coral that can live up to 4,500 years—and the biggest colonies […]
A new peer-reviewed study has linked pesticides as a likely cause to a mass die-off of Western monarch butterflies that occurred in 2024. In January 2024, researchers found hundreds of dead or dying monarch butterflies near the Pacific Grove Monarch Sanctuary in California, where Western monarch butterflies typically overwinter. As The Guardian reported, researchers found […]
Canada is stepping up efforts to protect the critically endangered North Atlantic right whale, a species that now numbers only about 370 individuals. According to Patrick Whittle from the Associated Press, Transport Canada confirmed on June 27 that new protective measures will be enforced this summer to address the ongoing threats to the whale, especially […]
An attempt by the New South Wales government to reintroduce koalas to a forest in the state’s far south has failed after more than half of the moved animals died, including two with signs of septicaemia, and the remaining marsupials were taken into care. The translocation and deaths of seven out of 13 koalas in […]