An annual contest that encourages hunters to kill as many coyotes as they can in one day will be going ahead on Saturday, despite threats against the organizer. The DKD Coyote Tournament will be holding its fifth annual competition just outside of Edmonton — the event’s Facebook page says the location of the check-in will […]
An investigation into the growing South African industry of hunting lions bred in captivity has reignited a long-running controversy among hunters, captive breeders and animal rights advocates. The Guardian’s Patrick Barkham investigated the practices of some of the 160 South African farms that legally breed lions and other wild animals — many of which, animal […]
Aristotle was a brilliant philosopher and observer of nature. He pioneered the study of zoology, but he was utterly clueless about bird migration. The seasonal appearance and disappearance of the birds in his native Greece perplexed him. Similar appearing species must be “transmuted” into each other across seasons, he reasoned, to explain the disappearance of […]
John James Audubon “was struck with amazement” at the darkened skies caused by the birds. The man who would become famous as an artist of nature was, not surprisingly, himself a naturalist. Yet his efforts to document the flock’s numbers were futile. “The birds poured in in countless multitudes,” Audubon would write. “The air was […]
The first strike against the Great Plains in recorded times was the decimation of the American bison in the 19th Century. The second strike was not from a pitch, but rather the plow and the resulting widespread conversion of native grasslands to crops. The third strike, being delivered now, is the massive drilling and fracking […]
“The first sparrow of spring! The year beginning with younger hope than ever! The faint silvery warblings heard over the partially bare and moist fields from the bluebird, the song sparrow, and the red-wing, as if the last flakes of winter tinkled as they fell! What at such a time are histories, chronologies, traditions, and […]