Wildlife

"A humpback whale has made one of the longest and most unusual migrations ever recorded, possibly driven by climate change, scientists say."

"The Iowa Department of Natural Resources is monitoring the spread of epizootic hemorrhagic disease and chronic wasting disease in Iowa deer and says Iowa hunters can play an important role."

"The Biden administration’s decision to include restrictions in the auction of oil drilling rights in part of Alaska’s Arctic National Wildlife Refuge is legally vulnerable as the state looks to the next administration to allow more oil development."

"Nestled in eastern Congo’s Ituri province, the Chinese-run gold mine is rapidly encroaching on an area that many say it shouldn’t be operating in at all - the Okapi Wildlife Reserve, an endangered World Heritage site."

"U.S. wildlife officials announced a decision Tuesday to extend federal protections to monarch butterflies after years of warnings from environmentalists that populations are shrinking and the beloved pollinator may not survive climate change."

"The Bureau of Land Management is required to auction off opportunities to drill in the Alaska wildlife refuge by the end of this year under 2017’s Tax Cuts and Job Act."

"In humanity’s war against rats, other animals are often collateral. The U.S. Environmental Protection Agency released its final biological evaluation on rodenticides on Nov. 22 and found that the rat poisons are jeopardizing at least 78 endangered species such as black-footed ferrets and California condors."

"California researchers say the world may be just one genetic tweak away from human-to-human transmission of the H5N1 bird flu virus — a worrisome mutation that could open the door to widespread human infections and possibly even a pandemic, according to some experts."

"For millions of years, North America was home to a zoo of giants: mammoths and mastodons, camels and dire wolves, sloths the size of elephants and beavers as big as bears. And then, at the end of the Pleistocene Epoch about 12,000 years ago, most of them vanished."

"It is the world’s rarest whale, with only seven of its kind ever spotted. Almost nothing is known about the enigmatic species. But on Monday a small group of scientists and cultural experts in New Zealand clustered around a near-perfectly preserved spade-toothed whale hoping to decode decades of mystery."