Wildlife

"Federal officials and contractors months ago surreptitiously began what appears to be preparation work for construction of border wall on the Santa Ana National Wildlife Refuge in South Texas. Word recently got out and has galvanized opposition to that plan – and to the way it has been carried out."

"In the 1980s, an ecologist named Thomas Lovejoy conducted an unusual experiment in Brazil’s Amazon rain forest. As loggers moved in with chain saws to clear trees for cattle pasture north of Manaus, he asked them to leave untouched several small “islands” of forest to see how the animals within them fared."

"When Kodiak Island's elderberries started ripening earlier, its icon bears changed their diet. It's another ecological shift amid climate change, scientists say. "

"Each summer, the shallow freshwater streams of Kodiak Island, Alaska, are so thick with sockeye salmon, you literally cannot cross the waterways without stepping on the brightly colored fish. With the salmon come brown bears, often dozens of grizzlies per stream, hauling the fish onto nearby banks for an easy meal.

"The head of an animal conservation NGO who had received numerous death threats has been shot and killed by an unknown gunman in Tanzania."

"Hundreds of Pacific walruses came ashore to a barrier island on Alaska's northwest coast, the earliest appearance of the animals in a phenomenon tied to climate warming and diminished Arctic Ocean sea ice."

"A research vessel located and photographed two critically endangered North Pacific right whales off the coast of Alaska."

"The trend could spell disaster for caribou (and more nasty bites for humans)."

"Eastern larch beetles, tiny burrowing bugs native to Minnesota, are exploding in number across the state’s northern forest and have killed or damaged about a third of the state’s tamarack trees — one of the first clear signs of a rapidly changing climate."

"A group of scientists in the United Kingdom decided to look at how bumblebee queens are affected by some widely used and highly controversial pesticides known as neonicotinoids. What they found isn't pretty."

"By a slow slide of river deep in Washington’s wolf country, Robert Wielgus laughs at the tattoo on his arm of Four Claws, the grizzly that almost killed him. “I would rather face charging grizzly bears trying to kill me than politicians and university administrators, because it is over quickly,” said Wielgus, director of the Large Carnivore Conservation Lab at Washington State University."