For many birds, survival depends heavily on their beaks. Beaks are used for eating, hygiene and even fighting, so a broken or deformed beak can often be a death sentence. But for one kea parrot, an endangered species endemic to Aotearoa New Zealand, scientists observed the exact opposite, despite the bird missing its entire upper beak.

Scientists found that the male kea parrot (Nestor notabilis), which they named Bruce, was using his lower beak as a jousting weapon, thrusting the implement forward — a behavior that other parrots with intact beaks did not replicate. Researchers observed Bruce participate in 36 combative interactions — and win all of them.

“Bruce shows us that behavioral innovation can help bypass physical disability, at least in species with the cognitive flexibility to develop new solutions,” Alexander Grabham, lead author of a recently published study describing the findings, said in a statement. “Previous research has shown links between large brains, behavioral flexibility, and survival at the species level.”

Kea parrots are listed as endangered on the IUCN Red List, with an estimated 4,000 adults left in the wild.

Bruce was born in the wild but was taken into captivity around 12 years ago, after he was found with his entire upper beak missing. He has since lived in the Willowbank Wildlife Reserve in Christchurch, where the study was carried out.

Researchers found that Bruce was jousting more frequently than other keas, using different techniques and targeting different areas of his opponents’ body. Usually, keas target the neck, but Bruce distributed his attacks across the back, head, wings and legs. In total, researchers recorded 227 combative interactions among 12 different parrots, nine males and three females. Bruce participated in around 16% of them.

Fecal testing showed that Bruce had the lowest levels of a stress hormone metabolite called corticosterone in his group. They also noted that he had priority access to feeders, and he was the only male groomed by other males. In fact, four other males participated in his grooming.

“Bruce is the alpha male of his group,” said Grabham, a behavioral ecologist at the University of Canterbury. “Our findings also raise an important welfare question: if a disabled animal can innovate its way to success, well-intentioned interventions like prosthetics might not always improve their quality of life. Sometimes the animal can do better without help.”

A previous study, published in 2021, recorded another innovative behavioral adaptation by Bruce: he used pebbles to preen his feathers, a behavior that had never been seen before by other individuals of his species with intact beaks.

Banner image: Kea parrot Bruce at New Zealand’s Willowbank Wildlife Reserve. Images courtesy of Alexander Grabham.

Forest authorities in central India have successfully helped establish a new breeding population of the vulnerable hard-ground swamp deer, an animal previously restricted to just one protected area, reports contributor Sneha Mahale for Mongabay India. 

Once widespread in India, the hard-ground swamp deer (Rucervus duvaucelii branderi) was until recently reduced to a single, isolated population of around 1,100 individuals, restricted to Kanha Tiger Reserve in central India’s Madhya Pradesh state.

The hard-ground swamp deer is the only subspecies of the swamp deer — or barasingha, meaning “12-horned” in Hindi — that’s adapted to solid grassland. The two other subspecies live in swampy grassland habitats in other parts of the country.

“Confining the entire subspecies to Kanha effectively created a single point of failure,” Neha Awasthi, a member of the Deer Specialist Group at the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, told Mongabay India. She said small isolated populations face risks from fluctuations in population, gene patterns and inbreeding, as well as external threats including disease outbreaks or large-scale environmental disturbances.  

To help the deer survive future catastrophes, the Madhya Pradesh forest department translocated 98 deer from Kanha to Satpura Tiger Reserve, also in Madhya Pradesh, between 2015 and 2023. The deer were first transferred into a 50-hectare (124-acre) predator-proof enclosure to allow for acclimatization, before being released into open grassland.  

Awasthi is a co-author of a recently published study that found that the hard-ground swamp deer population had increased from the original 98 to 172 individuals by 2023. The researchers recorded fawns, including second- and third-generation deer, annually, suggesting they were successfully breeding.

“Several independent indicators suggest the population is establishing rather than simply persisting with management support,” Awasthi said.

During the monitoring period, the researchers also found that the swamp deer in Satpura were in good physical condition, comparable to that of deer in Kanha, suggesting that Satpura’s grasslands offered sufficient food, water and shelter for the subspecies.

The forest department actively managed much of the habitat inside Satpura to aid the swamp deer’s translocation, Awasthi said. These interventions included restoring grasslands and planting key forage species such as black speargrass, kangaroo grass and wild sugarcane. They also removed invasive plants such as lantana and congress weed.

Awasthi cautioned that the project’s long-term success will depend on continued management.

Since 2023, 48 hard-ground swamp deer have also been introduced to Bandhavgarh Tiger Reserve, also in Madhya Pradesh. That population has already grown to 64, according to Anish Andheria, president of the nonprofit Wildlife Conservation Trust, who wasn’t involved in the Satpura study.

“The swamp deer (barasingha) translocation programme in Madhya Pradesh is a landmark effort to secure the future of the species,” Andheria told Mongabay India.

Read the full story by Sneha Mahale here.

Banner image: Hard-ground swamp deer in their new habitat in Satpura Tiger Reserve. Image courtesy of L. Krishnamoorthy.

Herpetologists are calling for greater inclusion of amphibians in African conservation planning, in a recent letter published in the journal Science. 

Africa is home to roughly 1,170 known species of amphibians, 99% of which are endemic. Some 37% of the amphibians are recognized as threatened with extinction.

The researchers note that amphibians — frogs, salamanders and caecilians — are especially important as early-warning detectors of ecological disruption, given their sensitivity to pathogens, thermal stress, pollution and hydrological changes in their wetland habitats. Yet amphibians as a group remain poorly represented in protected-area planning and management tools in Africa, the authors write. They note there are only 12 documented amphibian-specific action plans across the continent. These include a conservation plan for frogs in Cape Town, South Africa, and for the golden mantella frog (Mantella aurantiaca) in Madagascar.

The Democratic Republic of Congo (DRC), for example, doesn’t yet have conservation action plans specifically dedicated to amphibians, according to the letter’s lead author, Bienvenu Mwale, an expert on amphibians in the DRC and Cameroon. “To date, the DR Congo existing legal frameworks remain broad and give limited attention to this taxonomic group, with a stronger focus on large mammals,” Mwale told Mongabay by email.

Cameroon, on the other hand, has given full protection to six amphibian species, including the Goliath frog (Conraua goliath), the world’s largest, through a ministerial decree. This could be a good model for African conservation planning, Mwale said.

He added that several African amphibian species are currently classified as data deficient on the IUCN Red List, meaning there’s not enough information to assess their conservation status.

“One of the needs for amphibian conservation plans in Africa (that citizens can help with) is specific information on distribution,” Amaël Borzée, a co-author of the letter and member of the Amphiban Specialist Group at the IUCN, the global wildlife conservation authority, told Mongabay by email. “This is something anyone can help with, and for instance, doing it through the iNaturalist platform is a great way for people to get engaged. This is easy: take a picture of any amphibian and upload it on iNaturalist, and the job is done, and it helps.”

Karen Lips, an amphibian expert not affiliated with the letter, told Mongabay in an email: “I agree that much more research and much more conservation is needed in Africa. It is a continent with incredible richness of biodiversity, but still needs research to understand patterns of distribution and threats to that biodiversity.

“Africa is one of the regions with the least amount of information on amphibian population biology, meaning that we are not able to assess how land use change, climate change, disease, or other factors affect those species, because we have no baseline population data for comparisons,” Lips added.

Banner image: The golden mantella, an endangered frog species found only in Madagascar. Image by Frank Vassen via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY 2.0).

Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries.

Stop telling people to protect wildlife. Start paying them instead.

That’s the idea in a new experiment in Kapuas Hulu district, in Indonesia’s West Kalimantan province, which is testing whether conservation can be made to work with local incentives rather than against them. The initiative, known as KehatiKu, asks residents to record wildlife sightings in exchange for modest payments. In its first year, the program has generated a large volume of data while drawing hundreds of participants into regular contact with the forests around them, reports contributor Linnea Hoover for Mongabay.

The premise is straightforward. Participants download an app and use it to submit photos, audio or video of animals they encounter. Payments vary by species, from a few thousand rupiah for common birds, to more substantial sums for rarer animals such as orangutans. Observations are verified before payments are distributed at month’s end. The process is simple enough to fit into daily routines, yet structured enough to produce usable data.

The scale is notable. More than 800 observers across nine villages have recorded roughly 300 to 400 sightings a day. That has produced a data set covering species from hornbills to gibbons. The cost, by the standards of conservation programs, is low. Biologist Erik Meijaard, managing director of Borneo Futures, the scientific consultancy that organizes the project, estimates spending of less than $1 per hectare (40 U.S. cents per acre) annually across a 200,000-hectare (nearly 500,000-acre) area.

The effects extend beyond data collection. In some villages, residents have begun to discourage hunting and trapping. Informal agreements have taken hold, supported by the new income stream tied to living wildlife. For a few participants, the activity has become a primary source of earnings, comparable to or exceeding typical local wages.

The approach reflects a frustration with earlier efforts. Large sums have been spent on species protection, with mixed results. KehatiKu attempts a different route, placing small, direct incentives in the hands of those who encounter wildlife most often.

Early results suggest that modest incentives can shift attention and, in some cases, behavior. If that alignment between livelihoods and living wildlife holds, it may offer a practical model for conservation that grows from the interests of the people most closely tied to the forest.

Read the full story by Linnea Hoover here.

Banner image: Photograph of a Bornean orangutan (Pongo pygmaeus) submitted by a KehatiKu citizen observer. Participants can earn 100,000 rupiah (nearly $6) for finding and photographing orangutans. Image courtesy of Borneo Futures.

Meat and dairy production are significant drivers of deforestation and greenhouse gas emissions. Many companies claim to be tackling this, but nearly all these claims, 98%, could be considered greenwashing, a recent study found.

Researchers logged more than 1,200 environmental commitments made by 33 of the sector’s largest companies between 2021 and 2024. They found a pattern of “deceptive” information about environment strategies, goals and actions that “can create the illusion of progress,” lead author Maya Bach, an environmental science and policy researcher at the University of Miami in the U.S., said in a statement.

At least 16.5% of human-generated greenhouse gas emissions, including from deforestation, come from meat and dairy production. More than one-third of all environmental claims, 467 in total, include vague climate goals such as emissions reduction and net-zero targets. Yet these promises were found to lack plans for implementation and were rarely evaluated for practicality, the study’s authors wrote.

They categorized each commitment by the type of greenwashing, including selective disclosure, vagueness, empty claims, and no proof. They quoted the companies’ own sustainability claims and analyzed them for greenwashing.

For example, in 2023, commodity-trading giant Cargill wrote in its sustainability report that it would “eliminate deforestation and land conversion from direct and indirect supply chain of key row crops in Brazil, Argentina, and Uruguay by 2025.”

In 2024, Mongabay reported that Cargill had pushed its baseline year for evaluating deforestation ahead by 12 years. Its original cutoff year, 2008, aligned with Brazil’s soy moratorium. However, its 2024 sustainability report moved this to 2020, the cutoff date for the European Union Deforestation Regulation (EUDR), the EU’s antideforestation law, expected to take effect at the end of this year.

That change allowed Cargill to claim that 99.3% of its soy, rather than 94% under the 2008 baseline, was grown on deforestation-free land — without changing anything about where it gets its soy from.

Other companies employed vague and selective wording. Minerva Foods, one of the Brazil-based meatpackers responsible for huge amounts of deforestation, said it would “aim for zero illegal deforestation throughout the South American supply chain by 2030.”

Danone, one of the world’s largest dairy companies, promised in 2023 that it would have “no deforestation across its primary deforestation-linked commodities” by 2025. Researchers pointed out there was “no proof” it had done so, and that it was “unclear how this will be measured or independently verified.”

In 2024, in preparation for the implementation of the EUDR, Danone had more difficulty than its competitors in tracing its suppliers.

“When so much of what these companies say seem to be empty promises that are not backed up with evidence or investments, it starts to look more like a public relations exercise rather than caring for the planet,” said co-author Jennifer Jacquet, an environmental scientist at the University of Miami.

Banner image: Cattle ranching in Serra de Ricardo Franco State Park, Brazil. Image © Ednilson Aguiar/Greenpeace.

On April 13, 2026, TotalEnergies EP Congo announced it had discovered hydrocarbons on the Moho permit, offshore of the Republic of Congo. The company estimates the find could amount to nearly 100 million barrels of recoverable resources, though observers warn that the windfall won’t likely reach many Congolese citizens, roughly a third of whom live below the poverty line.

Many African countries rely on foreign oil and are struggling amid the war in Iran and blockage of the Strait of Hormuz. “The continent is facing a fuel energy crisis,” said Amos Wemanya, senior adviser on renewable energy and just transition at Power Shift Africa. “The fossil fuel industry is making windfall profits while people are suffering. This oil being discovered in the Republic of Congo, whose oil is it? Is it for the people of Congo or for multinational corporations?” he asked during a phone interview with Mongabay.

Congo’s national oil company, the National Petroleum Company of the Congo has a 15% stake in the recent find.

The Republic of the Congo is Africa’s third-largest oil exporter but it’s hard to pinpoint how much oil is actually produced. According to a World Bank report, it appears that Congolese oil companies underreport and undervalue their exports to reduce their tax bills. Meanwhile, more than half the population of Congo lives on less than $2 a day. Corruption and governance challenges have also contributed to the disconnect between industry profits and local poverty.

In a press release, TotalEnergies welcomed the discovery. “This new discovery on the Moho license benefits from its proximity to existing production infrastructure, enabling a short-cycle, low-cost development,” said Nicola Mavilla, TotalEnergies’ senior vice-president of exploration. “By leveraging our technical expertise and existing infrastructure, we are creating the conditions for future value-generating production for the Company.”

Since the United States and Isreal attacked Iran on Feb. 28, Iran has blocked the passage of vessels through the Strait of Hormuz, a critical chokepoint through which roughly a quarter of the world’s seaborne oil passed each day prior to the war. Nearly 20% of global liquified natural gas and roughly one-third of global fertilizer also once passed through the waterway. Following the closure of the strait, speculation in oil markets drove up prices in many countries.

“Many African countries depend on imported energy. Since the beginning of the crisis, prices for petroleum products have increased. This is affecting transport, food and the overall cost of living,” Wemanya said.

He said even oil-producing countries in Africa are struggling because they don’t refine oil to a usable state domestically.

“Most of the oil produced in African countries is not for African people, it is for export,” he said, adding, “We need to build energy sovereignty. We need to invest in energy systems that meet our needs [including] clean cooking, powering industries [and] agriculture that ensures food availability.”

Banner image: Vessel near the coast. Image by ajs1980518 via Pixabay.