In a newly published special issue on kestrels in The Journal of Raptor Research, Dr. Smallwood and David Bird, an emeritus professor of wildlife biology at McGill University in Montreal, list seven possible factors for kestrel declines that they argue merit more research, in no particular order. Could a surge in the population of Cooper’s […]
Read More Could a surge in the population of Cooper’s hawks be limiting kestrel habitat? What’s happening to kestrels’ winter habitat? In the spring, do agricultural fields lure kestrels to nest, only to let them down as the land changes over the season with planting or harvesting? Could kestrel declines be related to insect declines? Are rodenticides, […]
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BERLIN — Germany’s coalition government was always an awkward trio of center-left Social Democrats, climate-conscious Greens and pro-business Free Democrats. Yet in the heady days after their election victory in 2021, the parties vowed to stick to a tradition of consensus-driven politics, keeping the drama behind closed doors. Those doors have now swung open. In […]
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David Duffy, a wildlife geneticist at the University of Florida, just wanted a better way to track disease in sea turtles. Then he started finding human DNA everywhere he looked. Over the last decade, wildlife researchers have refined techniques for recovering environmental DNA, or eDNA — trace amounts of genetic material that all living things […]
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RIO VERDE FOOTHILLS, Ariz. When interviewing people in their homes here, I didn’t have the heart to ask them if I could use the bathroom. There’s no water to spare, so some families flush only once a day. As for showers, they’re rationed and timed: “You get in, you soap up, you turn the water […]
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Overall, humanity has made a lot of progress, albeit uneven, over the past decades. Our environment, on the other hand, might be in worse shape than ever. So, what if we all agreed that nature had basic rights similar to human rights? Today I want to talk about the “rights of nature” legal movement. The […]
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The Interior Department last summer dropped a bomb on the seven states that depend upon the Colorado River for water. It declared an emergency over the two-decade drought that was parching the West and instructed these states, already scrambling to conserve water, to come up with a plan to cut consumption of as much a […]
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In the early 1970s, things looked grim for India’s tigers. A wild population estimated in the tens of thousands at the time of independence in 1947 had shrunk to around 1,800. The tigers’ decline also held worrying implications for the nation’s environment because the apex predator is part of a complex but fragile ecosystem. Something […]
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It’s a familiar, dreaded scenario in many parts of Africa and Asia: An elephant shows up, wanders into farmers’ fields, and tramples and eats crops. Sometimes farmers fight back, and elephants are killed. That series of events seemed likely to play out recently when a forest elephant bull emerged from the dense jungle surrounding Gbarnjala […]
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WASHINGTON — President Biden on Tuesday will designate two new national monuments in the Southwest, insulating from development a half million acres in Nevada that are revered by Native Americans and 6,600 acres in Texas that were once admired by the writer Jack Kerouac. In southern Nevada, Mr. Biden will protect a large portion of […]
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The National Audubon Society announced on Wednesday that its board of directors had voted to retain the organization’s name despite pressure to end its association with John James Audubon, the 19th-century naturalist and illustrator who enslaved people, drawing backlash from fellow bird groups that have already changed their names. The bird conservation group said its […]
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The kelp forests off the West Coast are dying, and with their decline, an entire ecosystem of marine plants and animals is at risk. A large starfish with an appetite for sea urchins could come to the rescue. One reason for the disappearing kelp is the tremendous expansion of the sea urchin population that feeds […]
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BRAWLEY, Calif. — The drought crisis on the Colorado River looms large in California’s Imperial Valley, which produces much of the nation’s lettuce, broccoli and other crops, and now faces water cuts. But those cuts will also be bad news for the environmental and ecological disaster unfolding just to the north, at the shallow, shimmering […]
Read MoreTo hear more audio stories from publications like The New York Times, download Audm for iPhone or Android. The American caviar rush began on the lower Delaware estuary, a landscape today crowded with chemical plants, container ports and the sprawl of Philadelphia. But this was the 1870s, when nature edged up to the city’s limits, […]
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