Most of the animals at the Santa Cruz Foundation in San Antonio, Colombia, have been rescued from traffickers and circuses. The multimillion-dollar illegal wildlife trade is the fourth-largest in the country after drugs, guns and human trafficking
Category Archives: Wildlife
Turf it out: is it time to say goodbye to artificial grass?
It’s neat, easy – and a staggering £2bn global market. But as plastic grass takes over our cities, some say that it’s green only in colour
If your attention during the Women’s World Cup was on the pitch rather than the players, you might have noticed that the matches were all played on real grass. That was a hard-won change, made after the US team complained to Fifa that they sustained more injuries on artificial turf.
In private gardens, however, the opposite trend is happening: British gardens are being dug up and replaced with plastic grass. But this isn’t the flaky, fading stuff on which oranges were once displayed at the greengrocer. Today’s artificial grass is nearly identical to the real thing.
Continue reading...Fewer than 19 vaquita porpoises left – study
Calls for Mexico to crackdown on use of illegal fishing nets after further decline of species
There are fewer than 19 vaquita porpoises thought to be left, according to a study.
In 2016, estimates of the vaquita population stood at just 30, but research published in Royal Society Open Science suggests the figure has fallen further.
Continue reading...Hungry herons and the great otter comeback: the wildlife of canals
A guide to species you might spot on Britain’s urban waterways
Canals are often seen as a kind of second-class version of a river. Perhaps that goes back to their industrial history, but from a wildlife point of view canals and rivers are more or less interchangeable.
Visit a city canal on a fine, sunny day in spring or summer, and you’ll see plenty of dragonflies and damselflies on the wing. Some, such as the red-eyed damselfly, banded demoiselle and scarce chaser, have a special preference for the slow-flowing water of a canal, sometimes perching on waterlilies in the sunshine.
Continue reading...Dreaming of Antarctica: where beauty and fragility meet
Rona Mcseveny, a former patient of UCHL, is showcasing her photos of the continent at the hospital’s Street Gallery. The exhibition is a thank-you to the NHS for the treatment she received. Below, she details the spellbinding sights she captured on her trip
- Dreaming of Antarctica is at the Street Gallery from 18 July to 4 September 2019
Indian villagers beat tiger to death after attacks on locals
Mobile phone video of incident goes viral as one of nine people attacked dies of injuries
Indian police have arrested four people after a mob of villagers brutally beat to death a tiger that had attacked local people.
Mobile phone footage of the incident went viral on social media, and officials said one of nine people injured by the animal earlier had died in hospital.
Continue reading...Don’t stare too long: why our feral, polluted canals are so beguiling
An urban waterway is more than just a short cut through the city – it’s a testament to the power of nature over neglect
The roar of the road is receding with each step down and with it the light is changing; it is dancing, mirrored and then dappled in the ripples of the water. One layer down and the city has become an entirely different place.
I, like many, am using the canal as a quiet cut-through. It smells different down here; there’s the dankness of the water, for sure, but there’s a wealth of green filtering the fumes from above. And the soundscape changes – song birds, the curious grunt of a bank of geese eyeing me and the dog warily, the lap of the water’s edge and the groan of metal sidings that are there to repair the bridge.
Continue reading...The canal revolution: how waterways reveal the truth about modern Britain
The remarkable transformation of canals is a global phenomenon and the ultimate symbol of how our cities have changed – for good and ill
Every second Monday of the month, a small group of volunteers meets in the training room of a Birmingham supermarket. They discuss what has long seemed to many of their friends a crazy and probably doomed idea: how to excavate a contaminated 40-year-old waste dump, create an urban marina, restore three miles of derelict canal and build several new bridges and locks.
Last month, however, the meeting of the 18-strong Lapal Canal Trust committee was joyous. After 20 years of trying to restore this short stretch of the 200-year-old Dudley No 2 canal, permission had finally been granted, they were told.
Continue reading...Make environmental damage a war crime, say scientists
Call for new Geneva convention to protect wildlife and nature reserves in conflict regions
International lawmakers should adopt a fifth Geneva convention that recognises damage to nature alongside other war crimes, according to an open letter by 24 prominent scientists.
The legal instrument should incorporate wildlife safeguards in conflict regions, including protections for nature reserves, controls on the spread of guns used for hunting and measures to hold military forces to account for damage to the environment, say the signatories to the letter, published in the journal Nature.
Continue reading...Give endangered jaguars legal rights, Argentina campaigners ask court
With fewer than 20 left in the South American country’s Gran Chaco forest – the big cats could be classed as a ‘non-human person’
Argentina’s supreme court has been asked to recognize the legal rights of the South American jaguar, of which fewer than 20 individuals remain alive in the country’s Gran Chaco region.
The largest cat in the Americas once roamed the continent as far north as the Grand Canyon, but is now in decline across the entire western hemisphere.
Continue reading...Country diary: a house of God open to heaven and house martins
Segenhoe, Bedfordshire: The birds are stacked in the air above a shallow trench, taking turns to skim insects from it
A flying congregation had assembled by the church gate. We approached on foot, coming on the coffin route, a straight path through fields along which pall bearers had once carried the dead from the nearby village of Ridgmont.
Mourners might have walked through this meadow after the hay had been cut, as we did, and looked down at the grass laid out in strips to dry where it fell. Did a passage from the Bible come to mind? “All people are like grass, and all their glory is like the flowers of the field; the grass withers and the flowers fall.”
Continue reading...Baby dugong becomes Thailand’s national sweetheart – video
A baby dugong that has become attached to humans after getting lost in southern Thailand’s ocean is being nurtured by marine experts in hopes that she can one day fend for herself. The female dugong – named Marium, which roughly translates to “lady of the sea” in local dialect – has become an internet hit in Thailand after images of marine biologists embracing and feeding the aquatic mammal milk and sea-grass spread across social media.
Continue reading...‘The nation’s sweetheart’: Thailand falls in love with orphaned baby dugong
Marium, who is five months’ old, was rescued off Thailand’s southern Krabi province after she was separated from her mother
She eats sea grass, drinks milk from a rubber glove, snuggles up to passing canoes and frequently beaches herself. But these idiosyncrasies have not stopped an entire nation from falling in love with her.
Thailand has a new national sweetheart – an orphaned baby dugong called Marium.
Continue reading...Heatwave cooks mussels in their shells on California shore
Temperatures lead to what appears to be largest local die-off in 15 years, raising fears for broader ecosystem
In all her years working at Bodega Bay, the marine reserve research coordinator Jackie Sones had never seen anything like it: scores of dead mussels on the rocks, their shells gaping and scorched, their meats thoroughly cooked.
A record-breaking June heatwave apparently caused the largest die-off of mussels in at least 15 years at Bodega Head, a small headland on the northern California bay. And Sones received reports from other researchers of similar mass mussel deaths at various beaches across roughly 140 miles of coastline.
Continue reading...Lift ‘unfair’ ban on ivory trade, southern African leaders urge summit
Zimbabwe, Botswana, Zambia, Angola and Namibia call for embargo suspension to allow sale of hugely valuable stockpiles
Southern African leaders have renewed calls for a lifting of the ban on the ivory trade as debate over the “unfair” embargo escalates.
At a wildlife economic summit in Zimbabwe, leaders of the five countries that make up the Kavango-Zambezi conservation area – Zimbabwe, Botswana, Zambia, Angola and Namibia – raised the issue ahead of the August conference of the Convention on International Trade in Endangered Species (Cites) in Geneva, Switzerland.
Continue reading...Two whales flown from Shanghai aquarium to sanctuary in Iceland
Female 12-year-old beluga whales Little Grey and Little White arrive at Klettsvik Bay
Two beluga whales from a Shanghai aquarium have arrived in Iceland to live out their days in a unique marine sanctuary that conservationists hope will become a model for rehoming 3,000 of the creatures currently in captivity.
Little Grey and Little White, two 12-year-old female belugas, left behind their previous lives entertaining visitors at the Changfeng Ocean World and were flown across the globe in specially tailored containers.
Continue reading...US beekeepers lost 40% of honeybee colonies over past year, survey finds
Study marks worst winter on record for beekeepers, despite intensive push to stem losses
Beekeepers across the US lost four in 10 of their honeybee colonies over the past year, as the worst winter on record for tracked bee populations raised fresh concerns over the plight of the crucial pollinators.
Over the past winter, 37% of honeybee colonies were lost to beekeepers, the worst winter decline recorded in the 13-year history of a nationwide survey aimed at charting bees’ fortunes. Overall, 40% of colonies died off over the entire year to April, which is above the 38% average since the survey began.
Continue reading...Polar bear found hundreds of miles from home in Russian industrial city – video
Residents of Norilsk in northern Siberia have been stunned by the sight of a starving polar bear hundreds of miles from its natural Arctic habitat. People captured footage of the bear as it searched a garbage dump for food. The climate crisis has been damaging polar bears’ sea-ice habitats and forced them to scavenge more for food on land, bringing them into contact with humans and inhabited areas
Continue reading...‘Frightening’ number of plant extinctions found in global survey
Study shows 571 species wiped out, and scientists say figure is likely to be big underestimate
Human destruction of the living world is causing a “frightening” number of plant extinctions, according to scientists who have completed the first global analysis of the issue.
They found 571 species had definitely been wiped out since 1750 but with knowledge of many plant species still very limited the true number is likely to be much higher. The researchers said the plant extinction rate was 500 times greater now than before the industrial revolution, and this was also likely to be an underestimate.
Continue reading...Food porn meets Hitchcock horror as seagull spies Maine chance
Pepperdine professor photobombed by lobster mobster bird happy to see picture of roll reversal go viral
Alicia Jessop knew Friday was going to be memorable, but she didn’t realize it would be a day she would never forget.
Related: 'We live in a lobstocracy': Maine town is feeling the effects of climate change
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