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All tagged conservation
The giant pandas Qing Bao and Bao Li arrived in Washington, DC on October 15 after their long journey from Sichuan, China. Now the National Zoo is preparing the pandas and their habitat for the big public debut on January 24, 2025.
Thousands of giant spiders are on the prowl in the UK and that’s a good thing, according to the Chester Zoo, which is responsible for setting the arachnids loose.
A brutal drought in southern Africa threatens food supplies across at least six countries. Among them, Namibia and Zimbabwe have recently announced plans to cull hundreds of wild animals, including nearly 300 elephants, as they struggle to feed their populations.
This week the Bureau of Land Management finalized plans to protect the Gunnison sage-grouse, a threatened species in western Colorado and eastern Utah.
Just a few years ago the population of the Florida grasshopper sparrow, a “critically imperiled” species and the most endangered bird on the continent, was hanging by the thread.
A guiding principle of the Bird Photographer of the Year contest is “celebrating bird life from around the world,” but this year’s overall winner instead focuses on avian death. Patricia Homonylo’s “When Worlds Collide” depicts thousands of dead birds, victims of building collisions, arranged in concentric circles.
A herd of elephants has come to New York City’s Meatpacking District. The Great Elephant Migration is a traveling art installation and fundraiser centered on 100 life-sized elephant sculptures.
When the population of vultures in India collapsed in the early 2000s, their absence led to the deaths of some 500,000 people, according to new research published in the American Economic Review.
In places where bat populations have collapsed in the US, infant mortality has gone up. A new study by economist Eyal Frank, appearing in the journal Science, explains the connection.
The northern bald ibis had been extinct in Central Europe for four centuries, but a dedicated conservation and research group has reintroduced a small population into the wild. The only problem: the birds have no clue how or where to migrate when seasons change, so the humans are teaching them.
On the day before her 19th birthday, Ying Ying the panda delivered two cubs, making her the oldest giant panda ever to give birth for the first time. The new arrivals, tiny and pink and as yet unnamed, are also the first pandas born in Hong Kong.
Marine scientists in Australia have deployed eight sea lions to film the seafloor and map the remote, aquatic ecosystems around Kangaroo and Olive Islands. The deep diving animals captured a lot of cool footage while the scientists published their work in Frontiers in Marine Science.
It may not sound like much to go from “endangered” to “vulnerable,” but for the Iberian lynx, the change augurs very good news for the species. Though still among the rarest cats in the world, the lynx’s rebound from near-extinction just two decades ago is evidence that conservation works, especially when all stakeholders are included in the effort.
Seven Przewalski's Horses – the last true wild horse in the world – have been returned to their native stomping grounds, Kazakhstan’s Golden Steppe. An operation to reintroduce the horses to their natural homeland is the culmination of decades of work by a consortium of zoos and other conservation groups.
Almost all of the giant pandas on loan from China have been returned to their homeland as the loan agreements expire, with the last US facility, Zoo Atlanta, scheduled to return their gentle giants by year’s end. But this week the San Diego Zoo has announced it will soon welcome a new pair of pandas, Yun Chuan and Xin Bao.
Here’s an idea for getting humans involved in helping other species: sell them attractive bracelets that come with the ability to track a real animal in the wild using an app. That idea has been realized by Fahlo, the brainchild of co-founders Carter Forbes and D.J. Gunter.
The zookeepers at London Zoo are gushing like new parents, because in a way they are. “To say we’re happy about this new arrival would be a huge understatement,” says primate section manager Kathryn Sanders. “We’ve all been walking around grinning from ear to ear.”
Last week scientists in Berlin announced they had successfully transferred a northern white rhinoceros embryo into a surrogate mom, the first successful use of a method that they say could save the nearly extinct rhino subspecies.
What if we could synthesize rhinoceros horn, would that squeeze out the illegal trade of the real thing? Three companies have been working on such a scheme for over ten years, but nothing has come of it; all three are either out of business or about to be.
A female peregrine falcon sank her talons into a much larger brown pelican mid-flight, and photographer Jack Zhi was on hand to capture the attack on film. The image, among the 23,000 entries submitted to the Bird Photography of the Year contest, is so good it was the Overall Winner and it took the gold in another category, Bird Behaviour.
