When the British explorer James Cook circumnavigated the islands that he would later call New Zealand in 1769, he described the birdsong on the densely forested archipelago as “deafening.” One…
DAVAO CITY, Philippines — The courtship involves a partition screen in an enclosure the Philippine Eagle Foundation (PEF) calls a pairing dome, where two Philippine eagles (Pithecophaga jefferyi) are stationed…
On the remote island of St. Paul, located in the Bering Sea off the coast of Alaska, more than 350 severely emaciated carcasses of sea birds, primarily tufted puffins, washed…
The way humans have changed the forests of Central and South America may be making it impossible for subsistence hunters to continue their way of life, according to two conservation…
In the Guaraní language spoken in some parts of South America, the words “Ñembi Guasu” mean “the great hideout” or “the great refuge.” Ñembi Guasu is also the name of…
It’s hard to imagine how the oceans might operate without the sway of human activity. The recent assessment by the U.N. Intergovernmental Science-Policy Platform on Biodiversity and Ecosystem Services found…
In November 2017, two volunteers assisting researchers of the Florida Museum of Natural History dig through a large excavation site in North Florida unearthed the bones of a bird. Those…
It might seem harmless enough at first. The big eyes and the rambunctious, bounding play of the tiny cats and monkeys on your social media feed draw you in, and…
Ritidian, a cliff-top refuge on the island of Guam, is one of the last places in the Pacific where you can find the mossy pillars and plunging crevices of a…
Life on this planet, in all its wide diversity, is disappearing more quickly now than it has at any time in human history, and some 1 million species of plants…
Himmatrao Kanjra Pawar stood in the grassland and whistled different bird calls, starting with a female rain quail. Soon, we saw a male running towards Himmatrao. “How many bird calls…
Antarctica’s second-largest colony of emperor penguins has likely not produced any chicks over the last three years, a new study has found. Until recently, the emperor penguin colony at Halley…
In 1995, there were only 51 kākāpō left on Earth, and it seemed that the giant flightless parrots were headed for extinction. Once abundant in New Zealand, the ground-dwelling kākāpō…
For more than three months, penguins living off the coast of Namibia have been battling an outbreak of bird flu. The worst of the disease seems to have passed, but…
Due to their remoteness, the high-altitude tropical forests of the Cerros del Sira, an isolated mountain range in the eastern Andes of central Peru, are known to harbor a diverse…
The responses of wildlife species when their natural habitat is converted into urban areas are many and varied. Urbanization is one of the leading causes of biodiversity loss around the…
Scientists have fretted over the expanding masses of plastic in the ocean for decades. Most have seen the rise with their own eyes, and yet the available datasets typically don’t…
To many in North America, the sound of birds among the early spring trees is the sound of renewal: after a long, cold winter, the colorful warblers and vocal thrushes…
Gliding over the moors of England in search of prey, the hen harrier (Circus cyaneus) may never have suspected it would itself fall prey to a greater predator—man. Scientists have…
Countries should concentrate on outcomes instead of actions when they set aside areas for parks and reserves to shore up the loss of biodiversity, according to a group of scientists.…
