Videos
Around the world, deforestation is causing millions of species to lose their natural habitats. Estimates are that tracts half the size of England are lost annually, and scientists say that the world’s rain forests could completely vanish in a hundred years at the current rate of clearing.
News & More
Glacier National Park is smack-dab in the center of the breathtaking Crown of the Continent Ecosystem, which spans 10 million acres on either side of the U.S.-Canada border. Alpine meadows, grizzly bears, mountain goats, wildflowers and vast tracts of wilderness helped draw 2.9 million visitors to the park last year.
Nature & Wildlife
The largest wild cat in North America, the mountain lion—also known as a catamount, cougar, panther and puma—has powerful limbs and can leap as high as 15 feet and as far as 40 feet. That makes it an expert at attacking prey from behind. It also tends to make hikers in mountain lion territory wary.
Videos
One of the largest birds in North America, a golden eagle is an expert hunter. It can dive on prey from tremendous heights and has been clocked flying close to 200 miles per hour. Golden eagles primarily hunt ground squirrels, jackrabbits, marmots and prairie dogs.
Nature & Wildlife
Whales are complex creatures with very large brains. We are only just beginning to understand small portions of their highly developed cultures. Among the many things we don’t know about them is why they beach.
News & More
Polar bears struggling to find the ice floes they need for hunting and survival became the icon of climate change and our rapidly warming planet decades ago. And we’ve often heard how hotter temperatures are affecting the globe’s north and south poles and their oceans.
Videos
Watching wild animals being returned to their natural habitats after an accident or injury is immensely gratifying and often thrilling. Restoring even just a bit of nature makes our hearts instinctively feel that a wrong is being righted. Our senses of justice are assuaged.
Videos
Arapaho and Shoshone people on the Wind River Reservation in Wyoming—2.2 million acres of tribal lands—released 10 genetically pure bison on November 3, 2016. Imported from the Neal Smith National Wildlife Refuge in Iowa, these animals are the first to establish a wild herd there in 131 years.
Conservation
Wildlife tourism—tourism specifically based on encounters with undomesticated animals—accounts for 20 to 40 percent of the total $1 trillion annual, global tourism industry. This comes from a paper published in late 2015 in the peer-reviewed, science journal PLOS ONE. The paper further states that wildlife tourism is the leading foreign-exchange earner in several countries.
Videos
Although prominently featured on the California flag, a wild grizzly bear hasn’t been seen in the state since the 1920s. In the early 1800s, about 50,000 grizzlies roamed between the Pacific Ocean and the Great Plains. In California alone, before the Gold Rush (1848–1858), there were probably 10,000 grizzlies.
News & More
Later this month, in late July 2017, Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem grizzly bears outside Yellowstone National Park and nearby Grand Teton National Park will lose their Endangered Species List protections. Jurisdiction over the bears will be handed over to Idaho, Montana and Wyoming. In general, that will mean fewer restrictions on killing the bears.
News & More
Today is the Fourth of July, the day we celebrate the founding of the United States and all the things that make our nation unique.
