Hunters pursuing foxes, coyotes, raccoons, opossums, striped skunks, weasels, bobcats and porcupines in Pennsylvania may now use handheld and sporting-arm mounted night-vision and infrared (thermal) optics. A law permitting those devices in hunting furbearers became effective November 6, when it was published in the Pennsylvania Bulletin. The Pennsylvania Board of Game Commissioners in September gave […]
Tag: Porcupine
Petition: Maine Police Officers Fired After Beating Porcupines to Death
Two Maine police officers have been fired from the Rockland Police Department after beating porcupines to death with batons while on duty Addison Cox, 27, and Michael A. Rolerson, 30, were both charged Oct. 2 with Class C aggravated animal cruelty and a misdemeanor count of night hunting. Cox was also charged with misdemeanor unlawful […]
With the help of an app, Nunavut hunters document the changing Arctic
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 […]
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 […]