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All in Animal Welfare
The staff at the Columbus Zoo and Aquarium were surprised to find a newborn baby in their gorilla troop, partly because they hadn’t realized the mother was pregnant, but mostly because they’d thought the mother was a male.
Nassir the gorilla, a 14-year-old male living at the Toronto Zoo, is distracted – by visitors who show him their smartphone pics and videos. The zoo is concerned that too much screen time is not good for the primate.
Most birds are monogamous(ish) and a few species even mate for life, but divorce is also common, and may even be on the rise. A German-Chinese research team analyzed data on 232 bird species to document the avian discontent.
The panda population in South Korea just went up by two, as beloved mom Ai Bao gives birth to twin girls. Officials at the Everland theme park near Seoul said mother and babes are in good health.
“It tastes like chicken,” declared the NPR reporter on her visit to UPSIDE Foods facility in Emeryville, California. As well it should: UPSIDE’s “textured chicken product” is made almost entirely from chicken cells, but no chickens were harmed in the making.
The rambunctious orcas off the coast of Spain continue to harass boats, going so far to disturb a couple of entrants in The Ocean Race last week. More concerning, now come reports of killer whales ramming boats off the coast of Scotland, some 2,000 miles from the original attacks.
Wilson, the 2-year-old Belgian shepherd that helped find four children lost in the Amazon for 40 days, is himself now lost in the rainforest. The Columbian army is desperately searching for the national hero, last seen one month ago.
This week Iceland's government declared there would be no whaling this summer, at least until the end of August. The decision, based on animal welfare concerns, could mean the brutal practice has finally come to an end.
A new species of gliding gecko has been uncovered in northern India. The Mizoram parachute gecko (Gekko mizoramensis), named after the Indian state where it was found, is one of 14 gecko species known to glide between the treetops.
In Los Angeles, a robust population of an invasive species – the red-crowned parrot – is thriving. For once, the aliens are not a threat to native species; in fact, the LA parrots might end up saving their cousins in the wild, where these birds are threatened.
A poppy farm in Slovakia has been taken over by a bevy of swans. Dozens of the big birds “do not intend to leave this area at all,” Baltics News reports, “because the birds have turned into ‘drug addicts.’”
he covid lockdown restricted the movement of humans – by a lot – but let loose animals expand their travel habits, also by a lot. A new study in the journal Science has the numbers.
The decades-long endeavor to save the bearded vulture population in eastern Spain has hit a speedbump: the planned construction of a large wind farm. The Foundation for the Conservation of Bearded Vultures has put its project on pause while it assesses the impacts of the proposed farm.
The desert cat, so elusive in the wild, just increased its population by three, as triplet kittens have arrived at the North Carolina Zoo. Zookeepers don’t know the sex of the new arrivals yet, but they are “small enough to fit into the palm of your hand,” according to the zoo’s press release. “The kittens were born to first-time mother Sahara, 3, and father Cosmo, 9.”
The friendly beluga whale known as Hvaldimir — a combo of the Norwegian word for whale (hval) and Vladimir (as in Putin) — has been charming crowds as he swims south down the coast of Norway, where he was first spotted by fishermen in 2019.
Wyoming’s Bear River State Park announced the arrival of a white bison this week, an event that occurs only once in ten million births.
Mundi is a 41-year-old African savannah elephant who spent 35 years alone in a small enclosure at Puerto Rico’s Mayaguez Zoo. The troubled zoo was closed for good this year, and Mundi was relocated to the comparatively luxurious Elephant Refuge North America in Georgia.
The U.S. 10th Circuit Court of Appeals ruled this week that the Fish and Wildlife Service's authorization to kill up to 72 grizzly bears on public land outside of Yellowstone National Park violated federal law. The license to kill had been granted in 2019 as a sop to private grazing operations and would have allowed an unlimited percentage of females to be killed in response to livestock conflict.
There’s one basic rule at Yellowstone National Park: Don’t mess with the wildlife. Do not feed, attempt to ride, pose for selfies, or even approach the animals. And definitely do not try to “help” a bison calf cross a river.
The Oregon Zoo’s condor-breeding program deploys a devious method to monitor conditions in the critically endangered birds’ nests. When an egg is laid, the scientists swap it with a hi-tech fake, a 3D-printed “egg” packed with sensors.
