Radheshyam Bishnoi was born with a calling to save wildlife. From a young age, he was driven by a deep sense of responsibility to protect the fragile ecosystems around him, shaped by the strong environmental values of the Bishnoi community.

Hailing from Dholiya village in Rajasthan’s arid Thar Desert, Bishnoi grew up immersed in a tradition that regarded nature and wildlife as sacred. His community’s commitment to conservation — rooted in centuries-old practices — was more than a guiding force in his life. The principles of the Bishnoi faith, which emphasize the protection of all living beings, were instilled in him early on, compelling him to engage with nature’s most vulnerable creatures.

By his teens, Bishnoi had become a tireless wildlife rescuer. He began by helping injured animals in the desert, learning the delicate art of handling wildlife, especially the Great Indian Bustard (GIB) one of India’s most endangered species. But it wasn’t enough to simply rescue injured creatures; he became determined to prevent harm before it occurred. His early conservation efforts laid the groundwork for a lifetime of impactful work. Bishnoi trained as a veterinary assistant at Jodhpur’s Rescue Centre, equipping himself with the skills necessary to address some of wildlife’s more pressing threats.

The GIB, once common across the grasslands of India, was of particular concern. With fewer than 150 remaining in the wild, the bird’s survival was precarious. Bishnoi’s efforts to protect its habitat — patrolling the desert, preventing poaching, and advocating for the installation of underground power lines to prevent fatal collisions — became his defining work. His leadership of the Godawan Community Conservation project in Rajasthan, where local volunteers worked alongside authorities to protect the bird, earned him wide recognition.

Bishnoi’s commitment to preserving wildlife in Rajasthan’s desert ecosystem was broad and far-reaching. He constructed water reservoirs to combat dehydration, rescued Himalayan Griffon vultures, and fought poaching — from spiny-tailed lizards to Chinkara gazelles. His work inspired many, particularly within his community, where his actions demonstrated the power of local stewardship in conservation.

At the age of 28, Bishnoi’s life was cut short. On May 24th, he was killed in an accident while en route to prevent poaching in the Thar Desert. The vehicle he was traveling in collided with a truck, claiming his and the lives of three other conservationists. His loss was deeply felt, especially among those who knew him as a champion of conservation and a man whose dedication never faltered.

Bishnoi’s death is a devastating blow to the conservation community in Rajasthan and beyond. He was, in every sense, a product of his community’s values: someone who believed that conservation was not just a career, but a duty to future generations. In a time when the natural world faces unprecedented threats, his life and work serve as a reminder that meaningful change is possible — and that it starts with one person’s unwavering commitment.

Header image from Instagram.

More than 6,400 attacks against human rights defenders were reported between 2015 to 2024, according to a new report from nonprofit Business & Human Rights Resource Centre (BHRRC).

“That’s close to two attacks every day over the past 10 years against defenders who are raising concerns about business-related risks and harms,” said Christen Dobson, co-head of BHRRC’s civic freedoms and human rights defenders’ program, during a media briefing on the report. Dobson said it was “just the tip of the iceberg” since they only used publicly available information, including reporting from journalists and civil society groups, but many attacks are never reported publicly.

“We also, over these past 10 years, have seen a consistent pattern of attacks, and that many defenders face multiple attacks, and there’s often an escalation,” Dobson said.

Of the recorded attacks, three in four were against climate, land and environmental defenders.

Although attacks happen in almost every business sector, one of the report’s co-authors, BHRRC senior legal researcher and project coordinator Lady Nancy Zuluaga Jaramillo said during the briefing that “mining has consistently been the most dangerous sectors for human rights defenders.” It’s responsible for one in every four reported attacks, the report found.

The report said five sectors “intimately connected to the climate crisis” have been linked to the highest number of attacks. A total of 1,681 attacks were attributed to the mining sector, followed by 1,154 from agribusiness, 792 from fossil fuels, 454 from renewable energy, and 359 from logging.

“Latin America and the Caribbean, and Asia and the Pacific have consistently been the most dangerous region for human rights defenders,” Jaramillo said.

Roughly one in five attacks were against Indigenous people, though they only make up 6% of the world’s population. And 31% of people killed were Indigenous defenders, mostly from Latin America and the Philippines.

Journalists were targets of nearly 600 attacks, most of them were reporting on climate, land, and environmental issues or corruption.

In terms of types of attacks, more than half or 3,310 were strategic lawsuits against public participation (SLAPPs), 1,088 were killings, 835 were in the form of intimidation and threats, and 629 were nonlethal cases of physical violence.

Despite government responsibility to investigate the attacks, especially killings, “the majority of attacks — both lethal and non-lethal — go uninvestigated and unpunished, fostering a culture of impunity that only emboldens further violence,” the report said.

BHRRC and its partner organizations say there need to be laws to protect human rights defenders and companies need to recognize the value of defenders and engage with them as part of due diligence processes.

Banner image: Photos of human rights lawyer Ricardo Arturo Lagunes Gasca, who disappeared last year in Mexico. Photo by Luis Rojas via Global Witness.

In a recent paper, a researcher noted a bird’s surprising urban adaptation: A young Cooper’s hawk used a pedestrian crossing signal to help it hunt more successfully in a busy neighborhood.

Vladimir Dinets, an assistant professor at the University of Tennessee, U.S., and study author, noticed the Cooper’s hawk’s (Accipiter cooperii) behavior while taking his daughter to school. At an intersection, cars traveling on a side street rarely had to wait more than 30 seconds at a red light, unless a pedestrian pressed the crossing button. Then the red light lasted 90 seconds, causing a longer line of stopped cars.

The flock of birds feed at house #2. The hawk appeared in the tree in front of house #11 Image courtesy of Dinets, 2025.

Those cars backed all the way up to a house where a family regularly ate dinner outside resulting in bits of food on the lawn every day.

“They didn’t throw food on purpose they just had a bunch of kids, so they left breadcrumbs and stuff,” Dinets told Mongabay in a video call.

Those breadcrumbs attracted a small flock of birds every morning, including house sparrows (Passer domesticus), mourning doves (Zenaida macroura) and European starlings (Sturnus vulgaris).

The flock of birds caught the attention of a hungry young hawk. It learned the sound of the pedestrian signal meant cars backed up to the house with birds dining on breadcrumbs, which blocked the flock’s view of the approaching hawk.

Whenever the hawk heard the pedestrian signal, it flew to a branch in a tree down the street and out of sight of the feasting birds, Dinets said he observed. It then used the cover of the cars waiting at the light to issue a surprise attack.

Notably, the hawk appeared in the tree before the long line of cars formed. Meaning it understood the sound meant an advantageous hunting situation would soon form.

“I was just impressed because, to do this, you have to have a mental map of the whole area,” Dinets said. “You have to know when the birds are there, you have to understand the connection between the sound signal and the line of cars. You have to plan the whole thing in advance. So, it’s quite impressive.”

Several bird species are known to take advantage of the built environment.  Carrion-eating birds, for example, patrol highways for roadkill, some passerine species gather dead insects from cars, and Eurasian sparrowhawks (A. nisus) have been observed chasing prey into narrow streets with no escape routes.

However, cities are generally dangerous for birds. There are cats to contend with and cars, windows and wires to avoid flying into, all while navigating an unnatural environment for food.

“I think my observations show that Cooper’s hawks manage to survive and thrive there, at least in part, by being very smart,” Dinets said.

Banner photo of a Cooper’s hawk eating a morning dove, courtesy of Mike’s Birds via Creative Commons.

The European Union’s landmark anti-deforestation law could fail to deliver on its environmental promises if enforcement authorities disproportionately focus on small importers while missing less obvious violations from major commodity firms, according to a new analysis by U.K.-based investigative nonprofit, Earthsight.

The EU Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), which comes into force Dec. 30, 2025, aims to prevent new tropical deforestation from Europe’s supply chains for soy, beef, palm oil and other commodities. To do so, it will require geolocalized data from indirect and direct suppliers that prove their products didn’t contribute to deforestation since December 2020.

The largest importers “will submit due diligence statements accurately and on time. They will have due diligence systems in place. They will have correctly identified risks. They will have traceability systems of some kind in operation,” the report’s authors write.

“The problems with these importers will lie deeper. Their mitigation measures will be weak. Their traceability systems will have fundamental flaws, but these will be well hidden,” they added.

In February, Cargill, one of the largest exporters of soy from Brazil’s Amazon Rainforest and Cerrado savanna, took advantage of the EUDR to weaken already existing anti-deforestation agreements. The agribusiness pushed up its deforestation cutoff date from 2008, the year established by the soy moratorium, to 2020, the cutoff date set by the EUDR. That would allow the company 14 more years of deforestation without consequence.

“There is good reason to be mistrustful of such firms,” Earthsight’s analysis writes. “Unfortunately, there are reasons to fear they will nevertheless get an easy ride when EU Member States start enforcing the new law.”

In the Ivory Coast, Earthsight’s data show, the top 10 importers buy up 83% of the local cocoa. In Brazil, the largest 10 multinational import companies ship out 64% of the nation’s soy exports.

Small companies will have an additional six months to comply with the law after it comes into effect, but producing accurate paperwork may be more challenging. They often lack the financial and technical resources necessary to quickly set up comprehensive due diligence systems with all the data points required by the law, experts say.

According to a report by Profundo, the relative cost for EUDR compliance is three times higher for small and medium-sized importers than large importers.

Europe’s enforcers will need to focus more on the quality of the largest importers’ reports, Earthsight said, rather than simply check bureaucratic boxes. “Going after such small firms will be much easier … and [authorities] will be tempted to focus most of their energy on this,” the group writes. “For the law to achieve its aims, it is essential that [they] avoid falling into this trap.”

Banner image: On the left, rainforest deforestation for an oil palm plantation in Sabah, Malaysia. On the right, soy fields next to Gran Chaco forest in Bolivia. Images by Rhett A. Butler/Mongabay.

Sightings of a young harpy eagle in southern Mexico’s Lacandon Jungle in 2023 have now been verified, marking the first time in more than a decade that South America’s largest bird of prey has been spotted in the country, contributor Astrid Arellano reported for Mongabay Latam.

Photos and video of the bird were taken by a farmer in the state of Chiapas, near the Guatemalan border, challenging the assumption that the species had gone extinct from Mexico. The images were later verified and the discovery publicly announced at the Chiapas Bird Festival in April 2025.

“What’s interesting about this sighting is that we’re not just talking about one eagle, but three: that young eagle and its parents, which indicates the presence of a breeding territory in the country,” Alan Monroy-Ojeda, a tropical ecologist who coordinated the verification of the images with the Mexican conservation organization Dimensión Natural, told Arellano.

Harpy eagles (Harpia harpyja) can grow to 1 meter tall (3.3 feet), with a wingspan of 2 m (6.5 ft). They have huge talons and are powerful enough capture prey that weigh as much as them. They raise just one chick at a time until their offspring is fully independent, which can take up to two and a half years.

The presence of the juvenile bird, estimated to be between 28 and 38 months old, suggests it had recently left its nest and was still within close range of its birthplace.

“At that age, they usually don’t move more than 10 kilometers [6 miles] from the nest,” Monroy-Ojeda told Mongabay. “Eagles are very faithful to their nesting sites and can use the same nest for many years.”

The Lacandon Jungle where the harpy eagle was spotted has lost more than two-thirds of its native tree cover to agriculture, cattle ranching and other human activities. “For the last 20 years, the Lacandon Jungle has been suffering severely,” Silvano López Gómez, a member of the local community monitoring group Siyaj Chan, told Mongabay. López photographed a harpy eagle in the region in 2011, the last time the species was definitively spotted in Mexico before this latest discovery.

The IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, lists the harpy eagle as vulnerable to extinction. In many parts of its historical range, particularly in Central and North America, the eagle survives in fragmented islands of habitat. Its remaining stronghold is largely confined to the Amazon Rainforest.

Local conservationists say they’re hopeful the resurgence of the harpy eagle in Chiapas will help fuel local conservation efforts. “It helps us regain our motivation,” said Francisco Centeno, another member of Siyaj Chan.

This is a summary of “Águila harpía: reaparece la majestuosa ave rapaz que se creía extinta en México” by Astrid Arellano for Mongabay, originally published in Spanish on May 17, 2025. 

Banner image: A harpy eagle (Harpia harpyja). Image by Brian Gratwicke via Flickr (CC BY 2.0). 

For the last several decades, global biodiversity has been in crisis. Yet, as we celebrate International Day for Biodiversity on May 22, which commemorates the adoption of the Convention on Biological Diversity, a global treaty, we offer some recent Mongabay stories highlighting lessons from undoing past harms and conserving biodiversity for our planet’s future.

What do forest restoration efforts ‘restore’?

Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler recently wrote about a review that warns how biodiversity is often an “afterthought” in forest restoration.

The study authors say that “biodiversity will remain a vague buzzword rather than an actual outcome” unless restoration projects intentionally prioritize and measure it.

Typically, tree-planting initiatives that plant a few different tree species dominate the agenda of forest restoration initiatives, the authors say. But while these offer carbon sequestration and benefits in the way of timber and food production, they often fail to focus on the recovery of a range of species or restoring ecological functions.

There are other methods that help achieve both reforestation and improved biodiversity, the authors add. This includes natural regeneration, where native vegetation in forests is encouraged to grow back by various interventions including reducing competition, especially from invasive plants.

The benefits of diverse forests

Long-running reforestation experiments show that planting a variety of tree species can improve climate resilience, Sean Mowbray reported for Mongabay in April.

One study from China that monitored various forest plots over six years found that forests with more diverse plant species had greater “temperature buffering” effect. For example, experimental forest plots with 24 species reduced temperatures by 4.4° Celsius (7.92° Fahrenheit) during peak summer heat compared to monocultures.

A 16-year study from Panama found that forests with greater tree diversity were more stable, storing more carbon than less diverse forests. The stability persisted during extreme weather events such as periods of drought and intense storms, lead author of both studies, Florian Schnabel, told Mongabay.

Genetically biodiverse populations are important too

Earlier this year, researchers found that genetic diversity has been declining worldwide.

Study lead author Catherine Grueber, from the IUCN’s Conservation Genetics Specialist Group, told Mongabay that any threat that reduces animal or plant populations also results in shrinking gene pools. This is a problem since genetic diversity ensure that species can be more resilient in the face of disease, hunting, climate change and habitat loss.

However, genetic loss can be slowed or reversed “by improving habitat quality, by restoring habitat, by establishing new populations, or by moving individuals among populations, among many others,” Grueber said.

The study identified several such successes, including with the golden bandicoot (Isoodon auratus) in Western Australia, black-tailed prairie dog (Cynomys ludovicianus) in the U.S., and Arctic fox (Vulpes lagopus) in Scandinavia.

Banner image of a diverse planted forest in Panama. Image courtesy of Florian Schnabel.