Endangered Species

Gray wolf. Photo courtesy USFWS

The controversy over gray wolves in the Northern Rockies is heating up. Federal biologists deem the animal recovered, but for various reasons it remains on the endangered species list, to the frustration of officials in Montana, Idaho, and Wyoming. As a result, they've starting pushing for decreasing protections, and even threatening to take matters into their own hands.

Courtesy of the USFWS

It’s official: The eastern cougar, that subspecies of the cat also known as puma, mountain lion, painter, and panther, is extinct, according to a new report by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Ralph, a brown pelican, has spent six months in Canada. Photo: The Chronicle Herald/Mark Goudge
 
It wasn’t Ralph’s fault that he ended up at the strip club. The storm made him do it. Last September Hurricane Earl swept a young brown pelican to Nova Scotia, where he landed at Ralph’s Club, a strip joint that he was subsequently named for. Now, after months of Canadian hospitality, Ralph is heading home.

This adolescent chick, L4-10, was hatched and raised at the USGS Patuxent Wildlife Research Center and is one of 10 whooping cranes being released in Louisiana in February 2011. Photo: USGS

Like superheroes, whooping crane caregivers don disguises, never revealing their true identity to those they’re protecting. While raising the young birds in captivity, they wear white costumes and never use their human voices while using a crane puppet to feed them or taking them for walks and swims.

Photo: Alisa Opar

The Great Backyard Bird Count starts today! Grab your binoculars, friends or family members, a guidebook and head outside this weekend to tally the avian species you spot.

Bats with white-nose syndrome in Hailes Cave, Albany County, NY. Photo: N. Heaslip/NYSDEC

White-nose syndrome, a deadly disease that has killed more than 1 million bats in four years, has been found in two more states this year—Indiana and North Carolina. A total of nine bat species in 16 states are affected.

                                     Photo by Brennan Mulroone, NPS
Thank heaven for business trips. When I wrote about the Bird-A-Day Challenge last week, things were getting really tough. Day by day, I was checking through the bird species I could find in the New York metropolitan region, which was getting hammered with front after front of snow and ice. And gradually, as the ponds, reservoirs, and Hudson River iced over, I was running out of birds.

Then, I got a call on Monday that changed the game completely.

This tree shows how species are related, the estimated number in each group, and the percentage of those threatened. Illustration by Peter Grundy

 
Around 18,000 species are discovered each year. At the same time, as many as 26,000 are disappearing.

                   Red-winged blackbirds. Photo: Jerry Segraveso
Now that one whole month of the Bird-A-Day Challenge has passed, things are really starting to get interesting. And by interesting, I mean tough. It's hard enough to find a wide diversity of birds in winter; it's even harder to find variety in a winter like this. Some days I've wondered if I would see any birds at all.

Male short-tailed albatross and chick. Photo: Pete Leary/USFWS
 
On January 14, for the first time in recorded history, a short-tailed albatross hatched outside of Japan, on Eastern Island in the Midway Atoll. Read more, and see photos of the chick and its parents.