The pick of the world’s best flora and fauna photos, including a perky grasshopper and a sleepy turtle
Continue reading...Category Archives: Wildlife
Scottish villagers plan to buy out landowners for eco moorland project
Despite funding challenges, community aims to increase biodiversity at Langholm Moor making it resistant to climate change
A small community in the rolling uplands of southern Scotland hopes to create a major new nature reserve, straddling more than 10,000 acres of heather moorland home to hen harriers, black grouse and curlew.
The 2,300 villagers of Langholm, a small settlement a few miles north of the English border, hope to buy one of the UK’s most famous grouse moors, owned by one of the UK’s most powerful hereditary landowners, the Duke of Buccleuch.
Continue reading...‘My land is now owned by lions’: Maasai farmers offer Kenya’s wildlife a lifeline
Kenya has lost 70% of its wildlife in 30 years, but conservancy schemes could halt the decline – and benefit local communities
Parsaloi Kupai’s home, situated on the edge of Ol Kinyei conservancy near the Maasai Mara game reserve, is no different from any other Maasai homestead – oval-shaped huts with an almost flat roof and walls plastered with a mixture of water, mud and cow dung. At the centre of the homestead is a cattle boma, an enclosure where his livestock spends the night, safe from the many predators that roam the area.
Kupai, 47, and his two wives chose to live here after they surrendered 69 hectares (170 acres) of land to the 7,500-hectare conservancy. He is among 240 landowners who gave up their highly valued grazing land for the project.
Continue reading...‘We live in a cage’: residents hide as macaque ‘gangs’ take over Thai city
Officials in Lopburi plan to sterilise the animals that have turned nasty after tourists’ bananas were replaced with junk food
Residents in Lopburi, Thailand, are hiding behind barricaded indoors as rival monkey gang fights create no-go zones for humans. The ancient Thai city has been overrun by a growing population of monkeys super-charged on junk food – as locals try to placate the macaques with snacks. The monkeys usually enjoy a steady supply of bananas from tourists, who have dwindled amid the coronavirus pandemic.
Pointing to the overhead netting covering her terrace, Kuljira Taechawattanawanna said: “We live in a cage but the monkeys live outside.”
Continue reading...Pandemics result from destruction of nature, say UN and WHO
Experts call for legislation and trade deals worldwide to encourage green recovery
Pandemics such as coronavirus are the result of humanity’s destruction of nature, according to leaders at the UN, WHO and WWF International, and the world has been ignoring this stark reality for decades.
The illegal and unsustainable wildlife trade as well as the devastation of forests and other wild places were still the driving forces behind the increasing number of diseases leaping from wildlife to humans, the leaders told the Guardian.
Continue reading...Divers in Thailand attempt to free whale shark entangled in rope – video
A group of divers in Thailand tried to save a whale shark whose tail was tied by rope. Video filmed on Saturday shows the whale shark swimming with a nylon rope tied around its tail.
But the knife was too small and could not cut through the rope. Injured and with a rope still tied to its tail, the whale shark eventually swam away
Plastic superhighway: the awful truth of our hidden ocean waste
Solving the issue of waste in our seas turned out to be more complex than scrounging for bottles off the beach, Laura Trethewey found
We called the competition Who Found the Weirdest Thing? So far, the entries that day were a motorcycle helmet, a lithium battery covered with scary stickers asking that we return it to the military, and a toy dinosaur.
The dinosaur was warm from the sun and starting to degrade. The ocean had smoothed and worn down its edges. Rocks and sand had crosshatched its skin. It was missing a hind leg. On one side it was dark grey; the sun had bleached its opposite flank white.
Continue reading...Diego the tortoise, father to hundreds and saviour of his species, finally retires
Giant tortoise, whose reproductive efforts almost single-handedly saved his species, has been moved to an uninhabited island
Diego, the giant Galápagos tortoise whose tireless efforts are credited with almost single-handedly saving his once-threatened species, has been put out to pasture on his native island after decades of breeding in captivity, Ecuador’s environment minister said.
Diego was shipped out from the Galápagos national park’s breeding program on Santa Cruz to the remote and uninhabited Española.
Continue reading...Canadian conservation officer fired for refusing to kill bear cubs wins legal battle
Casavant shot mother black bear under province policy but was suspended and eventually fired for not killing cubs
A conservation officer in Canada who was fired for refusing to kill two black bear cubs has won a protracted legal battle over his termination.
“I feel like the black clouds that have hung over my family for years are finally starting to part,” Bryce Casavant told the Guardian. “But the moment is bittersweet – my firing should have never happened in the first place.”
Continue reading...Indian man upsets wife by bequeathing land to two elephants
Akhtar Imam says animals saved his life from ‘gun-carrying criminals’ last year
An Indian man has opted to bequeath most of his land to two elephants that he says saved his life from intruders, a decision which has upset his wife and children.
Akhtar Imam, from a village in the eastern state of Bihar, said he changed his will to bequeath 2.5 hectares (6.2 acres) to gentle giants Moti (Pearl) and Rani (Queen).
Continue reading...‘I raised hell’: how people worldwide answered the call of World Oceans Day
From protecting fishing communities to regrowing coral reefs, Guardian readers and environmentalists share how they’re working to defend the ocean
World Oceans Day, which took place on Monday, is marked by hundreds of beach cleans and events globally. Despite Covid-19 restrictions, environmentalists and readers from around the world shared how they are continuing to work to protect the ocean, and told us about the local marine issues that matter to them.
Continue reading...‘Like a Stephen King movie’: feral chickens return to plague New Zealand village
Lockdown may have vanquished Covid-19, but it has enabled the birds to make an unwanted comeback
Their raucous clucking deprives residents of sleep. They leave the neighbourhood “wrecked”. And food left out for them attracts “rats the size of cats” to an otherwise peaceful, leafy suburb.
New Zealand’s national lockdown to quell the spread of Covid-19 appears to have vanquished the virus, but it has had one unintended consequence: the re-emergence of a plague – not of frogs or locusts but of feral chickens, a flock of which is once again menacing an area of west Auckland.
Continue reading...Spanish police search river after sightings of Nile crocodile
Residents of towns in Castilla y Léon region told to stay away from banks of Pisuerga River
Police and specialist wildlife officers are using boats and a drone to search a stretch of river in north-west Spain after three sightings of what is thought to be a Nile crocodile.
People in and around the towns of Simancas and Tordesillas in the Castilla y León region have been told to stay away from the banks of the Pisuerga River while the search continues.
Continue reading...Teenager’s collection of 37,000 tadpoles turns her into a TikTok star
Hannah McSorley’s videos prove a big hit online and lead to deal with influencer agency
“TikTok tadpole influencer” is not a career path that Hannah McSorley would have been told about at school. In lockdown, however, with her GSCEs on hold, the 17-year-old has turned a time-honoured pastime – collecting frogspawn – into a potentially lucrative online empire.
McSorley’s hypnotic daily videos of her tens of thousands of tadpoles have attracted 535,000 followers on TikTok as @.baby.frogs, leading to a deal with a US influencer agency.
Continue reading...Many of the 300 plants and animals endemic to Canada at risk, report finds
Ours to Save identified 308 species and subspecies but only 10% considered ‘globally secure’ or ‘apparently secure’
There are few animals more iconically Canadian than the moose and the beaver, and few plants more closely associated with the country than the maple leaf.
But while those species have long considered part of the nation’s ecological identity they are also found elsewhere.
Continue reading...Snake eels burst through the stomach of predators in bid to escape being eaten alive
Creatures’ attempts are in vain, and as they are unable to burrow through the fish’s ribcage, the eels become trapped in the gut of their captor
It’s no secret that nature can be brutal and violent, but a new Queensland Museum report on the death of some snake eels reads more like the plot of a horror movie than a scientific paper.
Snake eels are a family of eel species that live most of their lives burrowed in the soft sand on the floor of the ocean.
Continue reading...Six elephants killed in one day by poachers in Ethiopia
The deaths in Mago National Park are unprecedented, say officials
Poachers have killed at least six elephants in a single day in Ethiopia, wildlife officials said on Tuesday, the largest such slaughter in memory in the east African nation.
The elephants died last week, when they ventured out of the Mago National Park in the far south of Ethiopia to drink water, Ganabul Bulmi, the park’s chief warden, told reporters.
Continue reading...Sixth mass extinction of wildlife accelerating, scientists warn
Analysis shows 500 species on brink of extinction – as many as were lost over previous century
The sixth mass extinction of wildlife on Earth is accelerating, according to an analysis by scientists who warn it may be a tipping point for the collapse of civilisation.
More than 500 species of land animals were found to be on the brink of extinction and likely to be lost within 20 years. In comparison, the same number were lost over the whole of the last century. Without the human destruction of nature, even this rate of loss would have taken thousands of years, the scientists said.
Continue reading...Bid for first eco-labelled bluefin tuna raises fears for protection of ‘king of fish’
Conservationists warn the species, which was almost extinct 10 years ago, could be under threat if Japanese fishery is MSC certified
A decade ago, the highly prized “king of fish”, the bluefin tuna, was taken off menus in high-end restaurants and shunned by top chefs, amid warnings by environmentalists that it was being driven to extinction. Recent assessments of Atlantic bluefin tuna, which can grow to the size of a small car and live for up to 40 years, have shown much healthier populations.
But now conservationists and scientists are warning that the largest and most valuable tuna species could once again be under threat if a Japanese bluefin fishery in the Atlantic Ocean is awarded an internationally recognised “ecolabel” they claim is based on flawed science.
Continue reading...Crab blood to remain big pharma’s standard as industry group rejects substitute
Animal rights groups have been pushing a synthetic alternative to horseshoe crab blood in drug safety testing
Horseshoe crabs’ icy-blue blood will remain the drug industry’s standard for safety tests after a powerful US group ditched a plan to give equal status to a synthetic substitute pushed by Swiss biotech Lonza and animal welfare groups.
The crabs’ copper-rich blood clots in the presence of bacterial endotoxins and has long been used in tests to detect contamination in shots and infusions.
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