Surveys for a rare North American songbird are shedding light on illegal forest clearing in the Dominican Republic, according to researchers from the Vermont Center for Ecostudies and Grupo Jaragua. The ongoing cutting in Sierra de Bahoruco National Park threatens some of Hispaniola’s last remaining undisturbed cloud forest. The park’s forests are a winter home [...]
UPDATE 2: Owing to public interest, the Fish and Wildlife Service has extended the public comment period. If you have not already commented, you can submit comments here until April 2, 2013. UPDATE: We received many requests from readers for information on how to submit a public comment on the proposed listing of the Gunnison [...]
Writing intern Abby McBride explores the caged bird industry with help from Cornell Lab scientist Eduardo Iñigo-Elias, who coordinates our Neotropical Bird Conservation Initiative. Here’s Abby: Environmental crime officials cracked down on wildlife trafficking between Latin America and Europe this summer, seizing more than 8,700 contraband animals in an Interpol bust dubbed Operation Cage. Authorities arrested [...]
The only bird species unique to the state of Florida is the endangered Florida Scrub-Jay—and this week, new research took a step forward in devising ways to protect the 5,000 or so birds that remain. The work was published in the scientific journal Biology Letters on Wednesday and appeared in online news today and in a press [...]
When the gavel fell last week at the auction of John James Audubon’s “The Birds of America” the price for the rare first edition was almost $8 million—the third highest sum ever paid at auction for a book. But what a book! Its phenomenal size and heft simply doesn’t come through in photos, but the 435 [...]
Scientists working in Haiti have obtained the first-ever photos of an endangered Black-capped Petrel chick—a little ball of gray fluff that was discovered at its nest inside a mountaintop cave. The finding helps answer questions about this secretive species’ life cycle. These crow-sized seabirds nest only in the Caribbean and feed as far away as [...]
It’s not every day you get a chance to look back in time at a bird that probably no longer exists. But Cornell Lab of Ornithology scientists were able to do that with the spectacular Imperial Woodpecker of Mexico, when researcher Martjan Lammertink tracked down the only known film footage ever taken of this raven-sized [...]
The emergency effort led by Wildfowl and Wetlands Trust to save Spoon-billed Sandpipers got off to a rousing start with a flurry of hatching in the last few days. In all, 17 tiny sandpiper chicks have hatched, right on schedule as the team were transporting eggs from the field site where they have been [...]
