It’s fall in Nunavut, Canada, and Richard Kakk is hunting caribou. Snow that started in September has placed him in a landscape of white, broken only by the ice-crusted slate blue of the Gulf of Boothia to the west, the patches of exposed black rock in the rolling hills to the east, and the brown […]
Tag: Porcupine
Porcupines Face a Poaching Crisis — and It’s All Because of What’s in Their Stomachs
A porcupine’s diet is wide, varied, and a little hard to digest. A lifetime of grasses, herbs, bark and other vegetation can leave little bits of indigestible matter behind in a porcupine’s digestive tract, where they occasionally congeal into a hard ball called a bezoar. That sounds uncomfortable, but a porcupine’s health probably doesn’t suffer […]
How wildlife may fare under Trump
What a president will do for wildlife has never been much of a campaign issue. Debates focus on national security, trade, economics, and to a lesser degree in this election cycle, on the environment. Wildlife, however, plays a part in all those concerns. Take, for example, the illegal wildlife trade. It’s a multibillion-dollar business that […]
How Did Porcupine Repel 17 Lions? Explaining Viral Video
When the going gets tough, the prickly get going—especially in the case of a plucky porcupine that recently fended off 17 lions in South Africa’s Londolozi Game Reserve. In late October, wildlife guide Lucien Beaumont came across the pride of big cats, including some youngsters, milling around an object of interest. “To my surprise, it […]
Saving the Atlantic Forest would cost less than ‘Titanic’
Want to save the world’s most imperiled biodiversity hotspot? You just need a down payment of $198 million. While that may sound like a lot, it’s actually less than it cost to make the film, Titanic. A new study published today in Science finds that paying private landowners to protect the almost-vanished Atlantic Forest would […]
Critically endangered species in Sumatra on the road to extinction
Critically endangered wildlife, including some of the last Sumatran tigers as well as rhinos, bears and eagles, could be wiped out if plans go ahead to construct a major road through an Indonesian tropical forest reserve currently being restored by British conservationists. The 51km-road, which would enable 850 truckloads of coal a day to be […]
Wildlife Slaughter in South Dakota
Imagine my amazement this morning to see a Google advertisement inviting me to hunt wildlife in South Dakota – and I live in Switzerland! It seems that South Dakota is being promoted as the ideal tourist destination for wildlife hunting. So I clicked on the advertisement and within a few minutes realized that wildlife hunting […]
