At least 126,000 gallons of crude oil have gushed from a pipeline just five miles off the Southern California coast Sunday, wreaking still-unknown devastation on local wetlands and fouling Huntington Beach. “It’s terrible,” Jon Ely, a 58-year-old Huntington Beach resident, told the Los Angeles Times. “This stuff is not going to come up. It’s goo, […]
What happens to us as the wild world unravels? Vanishing, an occasional essay series, explores some of the human stakes of the wildlife extinction crisis. Our small family knew bobolinks from a bird refuge four hours away. Each spring my partner and I made the trip to Oregon’s Malheur National Wildlife Refuge with our daughter […]
Harpy eagles are the largest eagles in the Americas and one of the largest eagle species in the world, with adult females weighing as much as 22 pounds. But these massive birds are running out of room and food, a study published in Scientific Reports Wednesday has found. These apex predators are extremely vulnerable to […]
Some birds have mastered living in the scorching, dry environment of a desert. But even desert-adapted birds can’t handle extreme temperatures like those seen during heat waves. A heat wave is said to occur when unusually high temperatures prevail for several days in a region. During one heat wave that lasted eight days, all of […]
A mysterious ailment is killing off hundreds of birds in at least six states and the nation’s capital, and wildlife experts don’t know why. The strange disease was first widely observed in Washington, DC, Virginia, Maryland and West Virginia in late May, according to the U.S. Geological Survey (USGS). Since then, it has also spread […]
Two illegal drones flew over the Bolsa Chica Ecological Reserve in May, and one crash-landed in the wetlands, causing 3,000 adult terns to flee. The seabirds left behind around 2,000 eggs. “We’ve never seen such devastation here,” said Melissa Loebl, an environmental scientist who manages the Huntington Beach reserve in a LA Times report. “This […]
After a year of learning from behind a screen, it’s time for some outdoor play this summer. It’s widely accepted that spending time in nature has unparalleled benefits for children; kids who play outdoors are happier, more attentive, and less anxious than those who spend more time indoors. Being in nature builds confidence and creativity, […]
For the first time, scientists have found and described an egg belonging to an extinct species of dwarf emu that only lived on one Australian island. The find, written up in Biology Letters Wednesday, also helped scientists understand more about the now lost dwarf emus and how their eggs evolved to protect the birds inside. […]
By John R. Platt As I sat in a pharmacy chair for the required 15 minutes after my first vaccine dose, my mind turned to animals. There weren’t any animals nearby, of course — the buzzing fluorescent lighting of the run-down drugstore wasn’t anyone’s natural habitat, including mine. And that very absence of visible sky […]
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