A ghastly orange grin extends across the treetops in Guarayos, Bolivia, marking a cruel turn of fate for rescued wildlife. On the ground, the air is too smoky to breathe, and hot enough to scorch. The woods are so dry that everything burns. Fire is eating its way through one of the world’s great efforts […]
Tag: trafficking
French couple paid $7,000 for tiger cub they thought was Savannah cat
No wonder they were purr-plexed. A couple in France thought they bought a special kitty — only to discover they had taken a tiger cub home, according to a report. The unidentified couple from Le Havre told police they stumbled across an online ad two years ago for a Savannah cat, which is a cross between […]
Decoy turtle eggs put in nests to track illegal trade in Costa Rica
Decoy eggs made by a 3D-printer and fitted with satellite tags have been placed in sea turtle nests on beaches in Costa Rica to track the illegal trade of their eggs. A quarter of the fake eggs put among 101 turtle nests on four beaches in Costa Rica were stolen, with some eggs successfully tracked […]
In the Horn of Africa, conflict and illegal trade create a ‘cheetah hell’
The 8-week-old cheetah cubs should have been with their mother. Instead, they were penned up in a small village near Erigavo, Somaliland, after a group of nomadic livestock farmers chased the mother away and captured the cubs from a nearby cave. “There were actually three [cubs],” Asma Bileh, a Somaliland veterinarian for the Cheetah Conservation […]
Bolivia’s jaguar seizures down as suspicions rise over new mafia
In 2016, in the midst of the first investigations into jaguar trafficking in Bolivia, biologist Ángela Núñez received a short audio clip via Whatsapp: “Teeth, tiger”. That was all she could hear and it was enough. The file was sent by an informant close to the Manuripi-Heath Amazon National Wildlife Reserve in Pando who claimed […]
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 […]
For South America’s wilderness areas, COVID-19 brings risk and respite
The Bolivian government’s decision to close all national parks in response to the COVID-19 pandemic in mid-March was supposed to stop the spread of the coronavirus. But it’s also had unwanted consequences for the wildlife and for the financial viability of the very parks themselves, not just in Bolivia but across Latin America. Within days […]
Is Chinese investment driving a sharp increase in jaguar poaching?
A decapitated jaguar found floating in a river by a scientist doing fieldwork in the Brazilian Amazon; a dead jaguar spotted on the highway between Boa Vista and Manaus, its carcass first observed whole by the side of the road, later seen without its head or paws; dozens of media reports documenting the seizure of […]