Rewilding the World

From Australia comes the great news that Today’s Endangered All-Star, the Yellow-Spotted Bell Frog—while not really yellow and purportedly sounding more like a motorcycle than a bell—is still with us. While specialists had feared that the species, not seen since 1973, may have succumbed to a fungus that wreaked havoc on Aussie  Read More 

The gentle Baird’s Tapir, Today’s Endangered All-Star, inhabits the murky semi-darkness of Central American jungles, snoozing in muddy wallows during the stiflingly hot days, browsing along well-trodden trails by night, eating fruits, seeds, twigs, and foliage. Too large for most predators—only a jaguar, mountain lion, or a full-size American crocodile could  Read More 

“Warranted but precluded”: That was the word this week from Ken Salazar on Today’s Endangered All-Star, the Greater Sage Grouse, a species that the US Fish and Wildlife Service now says deserves listing on the ESA but is going to have to take a back seat to all the other endangered species that  Read More 

Sought after for centuries, described as “the most delicious mushroom” of Sicily, the White Ferula or Funcia di Basiliscu grows only in mountain pastures among Cachrys ferulacea, a plant of the celery family known as Basiliscu. The Sicilian taste for this fungus has rendered it critically endangered: It survives only in small, fragmented patches  Read More 

Human, fishes, otters: Everybody loves abalone. But Today’s Endangered All-Star, the Black Abalone, has experienced a horrific decline, due to overharvesting and Withering Syndrome, caused by a bacteria that obstructs the animal’s digestion, leading to wasting away and eventual death. The Syndrome has wiped out some 90% of Black Abalone populations along the  Read More 

Today’s Endangered All-Star, the Dark Bordered Beauty Moth presents a fascinating opportunity for rewilding in the U.K. The Beauty is limited to a few tiny patches of habitat in northern England and Scotland, largely because of the decline of aspen. A priority species listed in the UK Biodiversity Action Plan, this is  Read More 

It’s the largest natural predator left in the UK, but it’s no tame tabby: It’s Felis silvestris grampia, the Scottish suspecies of the European wild cat, Wildkatze, El Gato Montés, Le Chat Sauvage. Still hanging on in pockets of wilderness in northern and western Scotland, today’s Endangered All-Star, the  Read More 

Today’s Endangered All-Star, Blakiston’s Fish Owl, highlights the costs of intensive—often illegal—logging across Siberia and northeast Asia. Like the spotted owl, infamous in the American west for sparking a reassessment of logging, the enormous fish owl prefers old growth forests for nesting; it is also dependent on wild riverine corridors  Read More 

“A bad earthquake at once destroys the oldest associations: the world, the very emblem of all that is solid, has moved beneath our feet like a crust over a fluid; one second of time has conveyed to the mind a strange idea of insecurity, which hours of reflection would never have created.” So wrote  Read More 

Andrew Mitchell, in his latest op-ed for the BBC’s Green Room, “Big Business Leaves Big Forest Footprints,” says yes. Everytime we indulge in a fast-food burger or pig out at home on bacon and eggs and bread made with “vegetable oil” or “soy lecithin” or any of the millions of processed foods made  Read More