Brazilian authorities point to Russian biologist Kyrill Kravchenko as an international wildlife trafficker. They had been monitoring him since 2017, after he was arrested in the Netherlands with rare wildlife from Brazil in his possession. In mid-January this year, as he tried to board a plane to Russia at São Paulo’s international airport, they intercepted […]
Tag: Brazil
Lear’s macaws threatened by planned wind farm in Brazil, experts warn
Conservationists in Brazil have raised alarms about the impact of a wind farm being built in a region that’s the last stronghold of the endangered Lear’s macaw. French renewable energy developer Voltalia has started construction of the facility in Canudos, in the northeastern state of Bahia. It will install 28 turbines for the first stage […]
‘Highway of death’: animals pay ultimate price on Brazil’s most dangerous road for wildlife
The last time Schwartz’s tracking monitor registered his location, he was standing at the edge of the “highway of death”. A massive male giant anteater, he was roaming his habitat in the Brazilian Cerrado – a vast tropical savanna that neighbours the world’s largest tropical wetland, the Pantanal – when he disappeared next to the […]
New Species of Bird Discovered in Brazil
A team of ornithologists from the United States, Canada, Brazil, and Paraguay has described a new species of trogon from the Atlantic Forest of north-eastern Brazil. The trogons and their close relatives, quetzals, are members a pantropically distributed order of birds consisting of a single family, the Trogonidae, which contains at least 43 species and […]
Two new species of endangered screech owls identified from Brazil
Two new species of tiny screech owls from the Amazon and Atlantic rainforests in Brazil have been described by science. “They’re cute little owls, probably five or six inches long [13-15 centimeters], with tufts of feathers on their heads,” said John Bates, curator of birds at the Field Museum in Chicago and one of the […]
An Illicit Trade in Brazil Is Sending Tiny Songbirds to Their Deaths
Thousands of saffron finches are being snatched out of South American forests and sold in Brazil for use in brutal, illegal fighting rings. Lax wildlife laws have made it difficult for authorities to crack down on the lucrative trade, leaving traffickers and ring runners undeterred. Dozens of tiny yellow birds chirped as they flitted from […]
For Brazil’s most trafficked parrot, the poaching is relentless
It’s a natural phenomenon that you could set your calendar by: every August, the turquoise-fronted parrots (Amazona aestiva) of Brazil’s Cerrado biome start laying their eggs. The chicks hatch soon after, and by November have left the nest. The cycle is so constant that every year, for decades, poachers have been stealing eggs and chicks […]
The next great threat to Brazil’s golden lion tamarin: Yellow fever
In April 2018, workers with the Associação Mico-Leão-Dourado, a Brazilian NGO dedicated to the protection of the golden lion tamarin, found one of the endangered primates, apparently sick and unable to climb trees, lying on the forest floor in Aldeia, some 80 kilometers (50 miles) northeast of Rio de Janeiro city. The following day, field […]