Rewilding the World

News comes from the Center for Biological Diversity that today’s Endangered All-Star is now one step closer to protection from the ever-finicky and glacially-slow powers at the US Fish & Wildlife Service. USFWS announced on Monday that the Oklahoma Grass Pink “may” warrant protection on the Endangered Species List.

But don’t start celebrating (more…)

Today’s Endangered All-Star, newly named by scientists in 2008, is believed to be critically endangered, with only 250 or so individuals hanging on in an area of Colombia being steadily deforested, according to stories in the LA Times and Wired.

And on top of that, it’s monogamous, and it purrs.

The scientist who said this was talking not about the BP oil spill but about the fungus known as “White-Nose Syndrome.” In a recent article in the Boston Globe, Winifred Frick, a researcher at Boston University, commented on projections suggesting that the fungus may cause even common species like today’s Endangered All-Star, the (more…)

Richard Black, the BBC’s excellent Earth Watch reporter brings our attention to a tale from Japan, where the Oriental Stork, today’s Endangered All-Star, was extirpated in 1971: Modern farming methods destroyed wetlands along with the stork’s fish and frog food supply.

Now, Toyooka City hosts the Hyogo Prefectural Homeland for the Oriental (more…)

Botanists from Bonn, Germany, collected the last specimen of today’s Endangered All-Star from the muddy bank of a hot springs in Rwanda. The plant has not been seen in the wild since its spring disappeared two years ago, the water drained for agriculture.

But propagating the plant turned out to be fiendishly difficult (more…)

Only about a thousand of today’s Endangered All-Star, the Wild Bactrian Camel, are left in the wild. Critically endangered by hunting—for meat and skins—the ancestor of all domesticated camels has also lost much of its habitat to toxic mining, gas-line development, and other misappropriations of the land. Much of its former (more…)

As if we need one. It’s become regrettably common in the American south to pour gasoline in holes to flush out rattlesnakes. One of the creatures often killed by this is the Eastern Indigo Snake, today’s Endangered All-Star. The most endangered subspecies of the Indigo Snake, the Eastern occurs in Georgia and (more…)

Think kangaroos can’t hack it in the trees? Sure they can, with specially-adapted fur whorls to shed water, long claws for clinging, and an extra-long tail for balance. As long as no one cuts the trees down. Unfortunately for today’s Endangered All-Star, the Huon Tree Kangaroo (or Matschie’s Tree Kangaroo) is (more…)

The Pink Pigeon hails from the island of Mauritius in the Indian Ocean, once the home of the Dodo. Like so many island ecosystems, Mauritius gave rise to astonishing numbers of endemic species, found nowhere else, but those creatures were terribly vulnerable to the disruption of their habitat. Many island birds are already extinct, (more…)

That’s the title of a commentary in Science—and a terrifying study that accompanies it—about the wave of extinctions decimating lizards, like today’s Endangered All-Star, on five continents. Forty percent of lizard species could vanish by 2080, and it’s entirely down to global warming, not habitat loss. Although lizards are clever (more…)