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Nearly a thousand birds were killed in a single night in Chicago this month, as they flew into the side of a single building, the McCormick Place Lakeside Center. It was both horrifying and frustrating, because the tragedy could have been prevented with some fairly simple precautions.
Female frogs, specifically the European common frog, deploy a number of strategies to ward off hyper-amorous males, including faking their own deaths. Researchers from the Museum für Naturkunde in Berlin publish the sex-averse findings in the journal Royal Society Open Science.
The bears have eaten and the people have spoken. The winner of the 2023 Fat Bear Week is an empty-nest mom named Grazer 128. The zaftig beauty beat out the competition at Katmai National Park and Preserve in Alaska, where she won the final round in a landslide – 108,321 votes to 23,134.
The UK’s Natural History Museum has announced its annual Wildlife Photographer of the Year winners. Top marks go to French marine biologist-photographer Laurent Ballesta, who captured on film a gold-colored horseshoe crab patrolling the sea floor off Pangatalan Island, Philippines, closely followed by three tiny golden trevally fish.
A bear in Tennessee had an awful August and September as he spent the entire time with a plastic jug stuck on his head. Finally, on October 3, rescue angels were able to tranq the little bear and remove the thing, which turned out to be part of an automatic pet feeder.
We’ve talked about the mad scientists trying to resurrect the extinct wooly mammoth before, but now a Belgian company wants to go a step further and produce edible meat from the long-dead creatures. Startup Paleo has a patent pending for this macabre product.
Commander, Joe Biden’s 2-year-old German shepherd, has been removed from the White House after biting a Secret Service agent, at least the eleventh such incident since Biden took office in 2021. Commander may now join Major, another biting shepherd, who was exiled to Delaware last year to live with the president’s friends.
When the US government came within a few hours of shutting down last weekend, alarmed citizens across the republic wondered if the shutdown would cancel a crucial government function: Fat Bear Week.
The mighty bald eagle, which had not been seen in Gotham for about a hundred years, has found purchase on Staten Island, where at least four adults and a dozen offspring now call home.
A research team in southern Thailand has discovered a new species of tarantula with a dazzling feature they describe as “a blue-violet hue resembling the color of electrical sparks.”
A deep sea live video stream captured several minutes of the delightful “Dumbo” octopus, placidly swimming near the seafloor of the Papahānaumokuākea Marine National Monument in the Northwestern Hawaiian Islands.
A female peregrine falcon sank her talons into a much larger brown pelican mid-flight, and photographer Jack Zhi was on hand to capture the attack on film. The image, among the 23,000 entries submitted to the Bird Photography of the Year contest, is so good it was the Overall Winner and it took the gold in another category, Bird Behaviour.
Researchers from the University of Tokyo think they can decipher the emotional states of chickens based on the birds’ vocalizations. It sounds borderline silly, but the scientists are quite serious.
The Clydesdale horse – featured in Budweiser commercials since forever – will no longer have their tails lopped off, according to the brewer. The move to discontinue “tail docking” comes as the company faced pressure from animal-rights activists and veterinary groups to end the cruel practice.
It’s been a year since African cheetahs were brought to India in an attempt to reintroduce the species that had been extinct on the subcontinent for 70 years. So far the project is going … not great.
A scent-detecting dog named Dory has been sniffing out the location of sea turtle eggs on the Florida coast for the past five years or so. Researchers monitored her uncanny ability and found she was better at it than the human volunteers who normally scour the beaches.
When Australian surfer Higor Fiuza took his bredli carpet python Shiva out to catch some waves, he got a lot of positive attention — a viral video on social media and an interview with Nine News. But then the Queensland Department of Environment and Science wanted a word.
In 1996 severe flooding around Brisbane, Australia swept six young bull sharks into a landlocked (mostly) freshwater lake on a golf course. The floodwaters receded but the sharks were trapped in the 51-acre lake off the 14th hole. Incredibly, the sharks lived there for 17 years.
Escaped murderer Danelo Cavalcante was finally nabbed this week after two weeks on the lam. US Marshals and the Pennsylvania State Police deployed search teams, armored carriers, horses, helicopters, and aircraft equipped with thermal imaging to catch the killer, but the ultimate hero in the capture was Yoda, a 4-year-old Belgian Malinois.
The ferruginous pygmy owl, found in the American Southwest and northern Mexico, once again enjoys the protection of the Endangered Species Act. Last month the US Fish and Wildlife Service restored the status of the little hooters after it lost those protections 17 years ago.
