News & More
We now have a national mammal, and it’s Bison bison. On Monday, May 9, 2016, President Obama signed the National Bison Legacy Act, honoring American bison with this first-ever designation.
Nature Photography
Every Friday, we choose our favorite photo of the week from our Wildlife Photo of the Day website. This week we selected an egret in flight, capturing breakfast. Photographer Jeffrey West captured this image while photographing at a lake in Texas. Have you taken some amazing wildlife photos during your travels?
Videos
Imagine a world without birdsong. That’s the scenario a new documentary, titled The Messenger, wants you to envision, because it could actually happen sooner than we think. Songbird populations throughout the world are in trouble. By some estimates, we may have lost almost half of the songbirds that filled the skies only 40 years ago.
News & More
Cloud-gazing is, perhaps, a lost pastime. Before the Internet grabbed their attentions and took up most of their time, children would lie back on a summer day and try to find pictures in the clouds.
Videos
Because of many, current cultural biases around the world, vultures don’t immediately bring up in us feelings of empathy and likability. But they should. According to BirdLife International, vultures are the bringers of life—not the takers. They clean our world and halt disease, stopping the spread of anthrax, botulism, rabies and tuberculosis.
Videos
Environmental philosopher and early national park advocate John Muir wrote in his 1911 book, My First Summer in the Sierra, “When we try to pick out anything by itself, we find it hitched to everything else in the universe.” It may be the truest thing anyone ever said about nature.
News & More
Last night, Leonardo DiCaprio accepted his first Best Actor Oscar award. He used his moment at the podium to remind us about the planet’s most urgent threat: rapid climate change. His message was timely.
Conservation
Poaching has pushed species of elephants and rhinos to the brink of extinction. Poachers are also bringing another type of animal to the edge of existence, but I bet you haven’t even heard of its imminent demise at their hands. I’m talking about vultures.
Videos
Each spring, more than 500,000 sandhill cranes come together on a narrow stretch of the Platte River in central Nebraska, as they have for thousands of years.
Conservation
Corvids—a family of birds that includes crows, jays, magpies, nutcrackers and ravens—are smart animals. They can make tools, recognize individual human faces and give our five-year-old children a run for their money in solving puzzles.
Conservation
On December 10, 2015, an 18-year-old southeastern Texas man shot two whooping cranes in a rural area located about 18 miles west of Beaumont, Texas. He said he was hunting ducks. Whooping cranes are migratory birds protected under the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MBTA).
Conservation
Radio collars, GPS tracking devices and remote-controlled drones—when it comes to monitoring wildlife, it’s easy to get caught up in high-tech devices. It turns out, however, that our best tool for endangered species conservation work might be the least technological of all.
