Wildlife

"If the circus is coming to town, that town won’t be San Francisco under a new regulation that would ban all performances by wild and exotic animals in the city."

"Montana has closed the hunting season on a wild herd of bighorn sheep, with pneumonia suspected of killing dozens of the animals whose seasonal mating rituals attract scores of wildlife watchers."

"In a settlement with a coalition of animal advocacy groups, Mendocino County has agreed to suspend renewal of its contract with a federal wildlife management agency pending completion of an environmental impact report that will consider nonlethal methods of predator control."

"MEXICO CITY — President Enrique Peña Nieto and his top military commanders flew to a modest fishing village in Mexico’s far northwest on Thursday and made a promise to protect a small porpoise called the vaquita that is on the edge of extinction."

"Although contaminants buried in the sediments of Green Bay may be out of sight, they should not be out mind, according to research published last month in the Journal of Great Lakes Research. Two invasive species – the quagga mussel and round goby – can allow a group of toxic chemicals deposited more than 45 years ago to reenter the food web, passing them to predatory fish and possibly people."

The news media became part of the story when a mountain lion took refuge under a Los Angeles-area house.

"After the decimation of his species by poachers, Sudan the rhino finds himself in an extremely precarious position: He is the last male northern white rhinoceros on the planet."

"Federal biologists will consider increasing Endangered Species Act protections for the northern spotted owl, reflecting the bird’s continued slide toward extinction despite steep logging cutbacks in the Northwest. The United States Fish and Wildlife Service said Wednesday that there was enough new information in a conservation group’s petition to warrant looking at changing the owl’s listing from threatened to endangered."

"An influential European scientific body said on Wednesday that a group of pesticides believed to contribute to mass deaths of honeybees is probably more damaging to ecosystems than previously thought and questioned whether the substances had a place in sustainable agriculture."

"The neonicotinoid insecticide clothianidin is a likely contributor to monarch butterfly declines in North America, finds new research by a team from the U.S. Department of Agriculture. Theirs is the first report of neonicotinoids affecting monarchs or any other butterflies."