Nature & Wildlife
The continental United States and many global regions experienced their hottest summer on record in 2026, driven by human-caused climate change and an intensifying El Nino, according to the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration’s National Climate Report published on September 9, 2026. Average temperatures were roughly 3 degrees Fahrenheit above the 20th-century baseline.
Conservation
In the shadow of Yellowstone’s ancient and dense pine forests, a sage grouse burrows beneath a blanket of deep snow. Guided by starlight, a snowshoe hare drifts through the frost-covered grasslands like a snowy specter—swift-footed and sure.
Nature & Wildlife
One of the scariest movies I have ever seen is the 1968 film Night of the Living Dead. In 1985, it was followed by the flick Return of the Living Dead. That movie created the pop-culture trope that zombies specifically crave and shout for brains.
Nature & Wildlife
As soon as the month of October starts, your thoughts probably turn to spooky fun as we lead up to October 31 and Halloween.
Nature & Wildlife
On August 4, 2026, a Manhattan-sized ice island broke away from Greenland’s Petermann Glacier after years of progressing fractures had weakened its floating ice tongue. This Arctic iceberg will now be tracked as it drifts, breaks apart and potentially affects shipping routes.
Nature & Wildlife
I’m not a fan of escaping winter; in fact, I think it’s an endangered “species” that we need to cherish while we still have it. But millions of birds appear to disagree with me. Every year, they migrate in huge flocks to escape the season.
Nature & Wildlife
Antarctica has always been—for lack of another, less trite description—“otherworldly.” It’s clear, clean air and wild, untouched mountains hardly seem part of this planet. But that depiction of the icy continent is usually meant in a metaphorical sense. Now, however, it has taken on a more literal meaning.
African Safaris
Often referred to as the “eighth continent,” the island nation of Madagascar has developed its own distinct ecosystems and extraordinary wildlife since it split from the African continent an estimated 160 million years ago. Approximately 95% of Madagascar’s reptiles, 89% of its plant life and 92% of its mammals exist nowhere else on Earth.
Nature & Wildlife
While I have never considered insects my favorite category of fauna, I have to admit that some “fun facts” about them intrigue me. For example, ants can lift and carry more than 50 times their own weight. While gathering food, a bee may fly up to 60 miles in one day.
Conservation
Wildfires are complicated. On one hand, they can be extremely destructive forces. On the other, they are natural events that certain animals and plants have evolved to depend on for ecological balance. And then, you have to add climate change into the equation.
Nature & Wildlife
Deserts are far from the lifeless, slow-growing and always arid places they’re often depicted to be. For example, even in Chile’s ultradry Atacama Desert, tiny soil-dwelling nematodes (roundworms) are thriving in surprising diversity.
Nature & Wildlife
Some tiny birds on remote Scottish islands are undergoing a dramatic evolutionary transformation. Four isolated populations of British wrens have grown astonishingly large. At the other end of the scale, however, leopards in South Africa’s Cape Floristic Region have become much smaller than most African leopards.
