Rewilding the World

It Ought to be Prairie Dog Day! Rodent Week continues on iWild, moving the spotlight to the Gunnison’s Prairie Dog, one of five species of prairie dog in North America that is edging ever-closer to extinction. Like the Passenger Pigeon, prairie dogs once numbered in the millions across the U.S. Now, due  Read More 

A Girl and Her Dog BBC Earth News has posted a wonderful slide show of Carly Vynne—a graduate student at the Center for Conservation Biology at the University of Washington—and her scat-detector dog, Mason, in Emas National Park in Brazil. Mason and other dogs have been trained to find the scats of  Read More 

Sunset Cup Coral Today’s Endangered All-Star is one among many corals threatened by climate change and environmental damage: Corals are exquisitely sensitive to changes in water temperature, acidity, and salinity. Marine biologists have predicted that half of all coral reefs could be destroyed by 2030. The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration leads a Coral  Read More 

Slender-Billed Vulture Vultures have been hard-pressed all over the planet, shot as pests, poisoned by lead bullets and veterinary drugs, and suffering from habitat loss. In India, the slender-billed vulture once lived across the subcontinent, but its numbers have dwindled 97% in little more than a decade due to poisoning by Diclofenac, a veterinary medicine  Read More 

Saiga Antelope Today’s Endangered All-Star is the Saiga, an important grazer on the Eurasian steppes. Poaching and habitat loss have driven it to historic lows in three remaining populations in Russia, Mongolia, and Kazakhstan: Millions once covered the steppes as far west as the Carpathian Mountains of Romania. The male’s horns are  Read More 

ENDANGERED SPECIES COUNTDOWN: Throughout the year, iWild is highlighting an Endangered All-Star every day. Day 25: the Big Leaf Mahogany. A spectacularly beautiful species in the forests of Mexico, Central America, and South America, the Big Leaf Mahogany towers above the mid- and lower-levels of the forest, bearing long leaves, small white flowers, and extraordinary  Read More 

Today’s Endangered All-Star: The Banff Springs Snail, a survivor if ever there was one. This air-breathing, freshwater mollusc, identified in 1926 and described as “no larger than a toddler’s thumbnail,” lived in nine sulphurous thermal hot pools in Banff, adapted to a low-oxygen, high hydrogen sulfide environment. Now, the species occupies only five  Read More 

Today’s Endangered All-Star: The American Bison. Listed as “near threatened” on the IUCN’s Red List, the Center for Biological Diversity has nonetheless sued to list the bison on the Endangered Species List. Conservation threats include the shrinking of prairie ecosystems, the limited number of viable populations—most managed for commercial use—and  Read More 

SAVE THEM ALL: The Giant Armadillo is Today’s Endangered All-Star, one of the most fascinating and unusual animals of the South American rainforest and grassland ecosystems. Like other armadillos, the giant is covered in bony plates but has 80-100 teeth, more than any other mammal. In unique tropical forest and grassland habitats east  Read More 

Famous, beloved, highly-endangered, today’s Endangered All-Star, the chimpanzee, is limited to around twenty countries across equatorial Africa. Populations of four sub-species have shrunk rapidly over the past few decades and are expected to contract for the next 30-40 years due to habitat loss, exploitation of chimps as pets, and disease (including exposure to  Read More