Wildlife

Ross’s Gull. Photo: John Breitsch/CC BY-NC-SA 2.0

Hurricane Sandy swept a rare visitor to New York’s Finger Lakes Region: A Ross’s gull. This small, dove-like bird is seldom seen outside of the Arctic. It’s just one of the birds swept off its path by the storm.

Maricela Flores stands in the tallgrass prairie with two others. Photo: Adrian Olivera

Tall, swaying grasses and bright sunflowers define the prairie, home to hundreds of kinds of birds and insects. For Maricela Flores (above), the draw of the tallgrass prairie is not one species or another but the ecosystem as a whole. 

Photo credit: Flipkeat

UPDATE: We've narrowed down the entries to these three finalists. Vote for the winner!

Every week we post a funny animal photo that's begging for a caption. Click "Read more" to add your suggestion in the Comments section by 11:59pm (Eastern time) on Sunday. On Monday we'll choose our three favorite captions and list them under the image.

Long-tailed macaques are passing on their own diseases to humans. (Photo by Andy Lawson/CCBY-NC 2.0)

It can be tempting to think of health and the environment as two separate categories. One concerns what happens in hospitals and labs, where patients lie hooked up to blinking machines and scientists stare through microscopes at pathogens. The other concerns what happens out in the world, in felled forests and wildlife preserves.

In his engaging new book Spillover: Animal Infections and the Next Human Pandemic, environmental writer David Quammen blows any such notions out of the water.

Now that the days are getting shorter, our lights burn brightly later into the morning and earlier in the evening. There may be no better visual reminder of where humans live on the planet than a photograph of the earth at night. Cities shine, suburbs twinkle, and the few remaining locales that don’t glow with electricity look both desolate and peaceful. Despite our love of light, so-called light pollution can have detrimental effects to wildlife and humans. That’s why the National Park Service and the International Dark-Sky Association, a nonprofit focused on preserving the night, protecting wildlife, and conserving electricity, have begun to identify dark sky reserves across the world.

Animal lovers, be warned: After watching the video of the orphaned walrus calves Mitik and Pakak, you may want to take them home. You can’t. But if you’re in the Big Apple next spring, you should be able to go visit Mit at the New York Aquarium (Pakak is moving to Indianapolis Zoo).

A brown-headed cowbird (By Alan Vernon/CC BY-NC-SA 2.0)

It was the opposite of Rachel Carson’s “Silent Spring.” Avian ecologist Andrew Cox had spent a lot of time in Missouri’s woods and fields filming bird nests for his doctoral thesis, and songbird chicks seemed to be doing better than expected. He also noticed that brown-headed cowbirds, which lay their eggs in songbirds’ nest, were doing so less often than earlier reports suggested. A question came to mind: Could the two be related?

Forget vampires, werewolves, and zombies. What really spooks me isn’t even supernatural. Put simply, frogs are the freakiest. So, as Halloween approaches, the timing is perfect to salute what I would consider its patron amphibian, the “Freddy Krueger frog.”

A wild horse in Nevada (By Hassell Painter/CC BY-NC-ND 2.0)

The Bureau of Land Management (BLM) has been selling wild horses to a dealer suspected of reselling them to slaughterhouses, according to a recent Propublica investigative report. It’s causing a stir among wild horse advocacy groups in the West.

UPDATE: We've narrowed it down to three entries for this week's caption contest. Now it's up to you to select the winner!

Every week we post a funny animal photo that's begging for a caption. Click "Read more" to add your suggestion in the Comments section by 11:59pm (Eastern time) on Sunday. On Monday we'll choose our three favorite captions and list them under the image.

Check out our top choices from last week’s photo of a hanging sloth and all previous weeks.