Nature

Survey finds about 180,000 giant tortoises on Aldabra Atoll

A new count by Seychelles Islands Foundation and the University of Exeter puts the free-roaming tortoises of Aldabra at roughly 180,000, the largest figure on record. In the 1800s hunting had left fewer than a thousand.

It shows a species pushed to the edge can come back when a place stays protected for decades.

Berlin's tree map has 12,000 neighbors watering street trees

Berliners use a free app called Gieß den Kiez that colors each of the city's 900,000 street trees by how thirsty it is, so volunteers know where a watering can helps most. On the city's hottest day this year, residents poured about 8,000 liters over trees.

City crews cannot reach every tree in a heatwave, and a shared map turns ordinary care into real help.

Scientists describe 'D. rex,' a giant fungus from Chinese forests

Researchers named a new, very large wood-decaying fungus from forests in China. Its DNA suggests its family began about 65 million years ago, shortly after the dinosaur-era mass extinction.

Even well-studied groups of life still hold surprises, and new species hint at how forests recovered after past upheavals.

A news-site summary of a scientific description; the 65-million-year date is a DNA-based estimate.

Tasmania begins a world-first effort to vaccinate wild albatrosses against bird flu

Wildlife staff are spending three to four weeks on remote Albatross Island to give two doses each to about 100 nesting shy albatrosses, a seabird that breeds only around Tasmania. No bird flu has been found in the colonies yet, and the birds will be watched by remote cameras afterward.

Protecting a vulnerable species before a disease arrives is far easier than rescuing it afterward.

A pilot program; whether the vaccine protects wild albatrosses is still being studied.

Great Lakes piping plovers set a record for the fifth year in a row

Ninety-nine pairs of the endangered shorebirds nested across all five Great Lakes this year and fledged a record 184 chicks. Plovers also returned to restored Cat Island in Green Bay for the first time in 75 years.

Years of beach protection and habitat repair are paying off for an endangered shorebird.

The recovery goal is 150 pairs for five straight years, so there is still a way to go.

Bogong moths headed for the Alps are showing up as phantom rain on weather radar

On nights with no rain on the ground, radars across eastern New South Wales have been painting widespread light rain. The Bureau of Meteorology says large numbers of insects can look like that, and researchers think the echoes are endangered bogong moths migrating toward the Australian Alps.

A migration people can see on a weather map is easier to notice, and easier to study.

The bureau says temperature inversions can cause similar echoes, so moths are a likely reading rather than finished proof. City swarms also do not, by themselves, show the whole population has recovered.

North America's largest wildlife overpass has cut I-25 collisions by 91%

In the roughly 10 months since a 209-by-200-foot bridge opened between Larkspur and Monument, state officials say drivers have hit two animals, a 91% drop. Five underpasses and fencing guide elk, deer, bears and even frogs across, and a pronghorn was confirmed over the interstate there for the first time in decades.

A busy highway does not have to stay a wall when animals are given a crossing they will use.

Counts come from troopers and highway crews. A wider study of the same corridor had already found a large drop before this 10-month update.

Two damselfly species turn up for the first time in a restored Hertfordshire wood

After a three-year restoration across seven nature reserves, Herts and Middlesex Wildlife Trust says Beautiful Demoiselle and Willow Emerald damselflies have been recorded at Astonbury Wood near Stevenage. A National Lottery Heritage Fund grant of £162,698 paid for the work, which included bringing a football-pitch-sized patch of ancient woodland back into coppice so more light reaches the ground. The trust also says silver-washed fritillary butterflies were much more numerous there this summer.

Opening a dark wood back up to flowers gives insects a place to return, and the records show some already have.

The first-time sightings and the butterfly comparison come from the wildlife trust.

A family of barn owls on a Manhattan water tower has people out on the sidewalk at dusk

Barn owls have nested in a water tower on West 75th Street, near Central Park, and neighbors have been gathering at night to watch them. A Cornell Lab of Ornithology migration ecologist said that, as far as birders know, this is the first documented barn-owl nest in Manhattan. A local birder counted one adult and five fledglings; some photographers think they have seen six young, and a second adult is believed to be there too.

A secretive bird choosing a rooftop water tower gives a dense neighborhood a reason to look up together.

The claim of a first Manhattan nest is one expert's reading of birding records, not a finished historical survey. Counts of the young differ among observers.

Sandwich terns wiped out by bird flu are nesting again at Pagham harbour

The sandwich tern colony at Pagham harbour in West Sussex was emptied by bird flu in 2022. The RSPB says it now holds 756 breeding pairs, which raised 570 fledglings this summer, among the largest counts the Solent has recorded. Little terns rose from 21 to 34, and black-headed gull fledglings went from 51 last year to 504. Staff and volunteers added predator fencing, rat checks, cleared nesting ground, and put rafts and new lagoon islands in place as part of the wider Solent Seascape project.

A colony that went to zero can come back when people keep the nesting ground quiet and harder for predators to reach.

The counts come from the RSPB. A local rebound does not mean bird flu has left these coasts.

A rewilded Sussex hill counted 5,290 butterflies, including two species new there

Halnaker Hill Farm near Chichester, 330 acres that were intensively farmed two years ago, recorded 5,290 butterflies of 28 species. The dingy skipper and the small blue, the UK's smallest butterfly, were seen there for the first time. The project, run by Halnaker Hill Natural Capital, has planted more than 20,000 trees and about four miles of hedgerow. Nick Heasman of the South Downs National Park said the survey shows how fast the land can change when it is given room.

Two summers of letting a farm grow wild was enough for butterflies that had not used the hill before to show up.

The counts and the first-time sightings come from the project and the park authority.

London volunteers have planted more than 1,000 rare tower mustard plants

Volunteers with Citizen Zoo and Habitats & Heritage have grown and planted more than 1,000 tower mustard plants, a native wildflower that had dwindled to two sites in London. In March the Mighty Mustard volunteers learned to sow the tiny seeds, using stock from the last populations at Lesnes Abbey Woods and Stain Hill Reservoir. Plants are now in the ground at Wimbledon Common, Hounslow Heath, Lesnes Abbey Woods and Barnes Common, and a last planting day is set for Tuesday at Hampton Court Palace's Home Park. The species is listed as near threatened in Great Britain and endangered in England. Charlotte Harris of Habitats & Heritage said the volunteers have grown attached to the plants they raised.

A flower that feeds bees and moths can return to old ground when neighbors raise the seedlings themselves.

The 1,000-plant figure, and the claim that the flower has been saved in London, come from the project. This is the first year of planting, not a count of plants that have survived a winter.

A small cash stipend in the Peruvian Amazon lined up with less forest burning

A University of Bath analysis of a two-year Cool Earth pilot followed 211 people in three Asháninka communities in Peru. Each person received six transfers of 1,032 soles, about £2 a day, with no rules on how to spend it. The researchers say nearly 90 percent of participants took up practices such as planting trees together, restoring water sources, and burning less forest. Households unable to afford nutritious food fell from 73 percent to 26 percent, and the share who left home to find work fell from 43 percent to 18 percent. The authors call it the first unconditional basic income for an Indigenous community in the Amazon. Local women's groups helped shape the project, which also offered voluntary classes on money, conservation, and climate.

People can look after a forest more readily when dinner is secure and leaving home is a choice.

The pilot covered a little over 500 hectares and did not measure trees, soil, or other projects that may have changed what people did. The figures are the study's own. Elsewhere, researchers have found that extra cash can sometimes increase clearing.

Young giant manta rays keep to Central American shallows until they are large enough to roam

A Frontiers in Fish Science study, the first to track giant manta rays across Central America at this scale, finds that young animals stay in shallow coastal water while most of the tagged adults travel long distances along the shelf break. From 2018 to 2025 the team worked at five sites, with acoustic tags on 59 rays, satellite tags on 12, and photographs to tell individuals apart. More than 12,000 detections showed mantas with a disc of about three metres or less remaining in nearshore refuges, close to food, hiding places, and reef cleaning stations, and away from open-ocean predators. Nine mature rays made those longer trips. One adult, nicknamed Mickey Mouse for the spots on his underside, returned to the same coastal shelf years after he was first tagged.

The shallows where young mantas linger are a different place to protect than the routes adults use once they are big enough to leave.

The pattern comes from tagged animals at five sites, not a census of the species. The authors also note that adult routes cross waters with fisheries and ship traffic.

Orangutans reached more often for food they had heard paired with laughter

In a Biology Letters study, Erica Cartmill and colleagues worked with six captive orangutans at two zoos. The apes learned to search bowls for a treat hidden under moss, sawdust, or a similar filler. Just before each search, the team played either the sound of orangutans laughing at play or ordinary outdoor noise such as wind, matched to whichever filler covered the food that day. On the test day both bowls held a treat. Taken together, the apes chose the filler that had come with laughter, and four of the six showed a clear preference. Cartmill said the laughter may have left them in a better mood while they were learning which bowl was worth the search.

A better mood at the moment of learning may change what an animal later treats as the good choice, even when both bowls hold the same prize.

Six captive orangutans, not wild ones, and four of the six drove the preference. Any suggestion about human classrooms is the researchers' idea, not a result of this experiment.

New Zealand releases more than 200 rare knobbled weevils raised on carrot

The Canterbury knobbled weevil, a critically endangered beetle described as a living fossil, was thought to be extinct until a small population turned up in 2004 at Burkes Pass, near Takapō/Tekapo. After another pocket was found in Mid-Canterbury late in 2024, the Department of Conservation and Te Rūnanga o Arowhenua tried raising the beetles with weevil specialist Barbara Barratt at the Bioeconomy Science Institute at Invermay. Senior science advisor Tara Murray said they started with six, tried experimental foods that included chunks of carrot, and now have more than 200. The team has put weevils back at Ōtūwharekai/Ashburton Lakes, onto Aciphylla, the spear grass they favor. It is a soft release: protective covers stay over the plants for about a week while the beetles are watched. Spear grass has been cleared from many landscapes, which is one reason the weevil declined. If this week holds, the partners plan to collect more wild weevils and start further populations, so a fire cannot wipe out every animal at once. Monitoring continues at Burkes Pass.

A beetle that nearly vanished can be given a second patch of spear grass, so its whole future is not one valley.

This is a first soft release, not proof the weevils will breed at the lakes. The covers are still on, and any wider release depends on how this week goes.

A year after rats and pigs left, Nu'utele is growing food and nesting birds again

Nu'utele, a Samoan island that still holds some of the country's best-preserved tropical forest, is showing new growth a year after invasive rats and feral pigs were removed. Island Conservation, Samoa's Ministry of Natural Resources and Environment, the Pacific Regional Invasive Species Management Support Service, and people from Aleipata did the work. Between March 2025 and May 2026, field teams made 12 trips and spent more than 130 days on the steep ground. Project manager Paul Jacques said native seedlings are carpeting the floor, knee-high where regeneration had been held down, and that people are harvesting giant taro in places where crops had failed. A local family is growing bananas, pineapples, papayas, and taro. The project says sea turtles are nesting after decades away, and a land crab not previously recorded on the island has turned up. One month after the removal, researchers found shy ground dove nests with eggs in bird's-nest ferns, a nest of the endemic Samoan starling, and breeding by the Samoan flycatcher and whistler. Nu'utele holds Samoa's largest remaining population of the shy ground dove. A later move of the threatened mao, a forest bird, is planned and has not happened. The island sits inside a marine protected area and was never cleared.

When the animals eating eggs and seedlings are gone, a forest can feed both the birds and the people who harvest from it.

These are early observations from the groups that did the removal, not an independent census. The mao has not been moved, and the decades without nesting turtles are the project's account. Long-term monitoring is still ahead.

A mother cougar and three kittens are leaving tracks again in northern Minnesota

Minnesota Star Tribune reporter Greg Stanley went into the woods north of Orr with Tom Gable of the University of Minnesota's Voyageurs Wolf Project. In late March a GPS-collared deer turned up cached under leaves, the way a cat hides a kill. Cameras over the carcass recorded about four hours of a female cougar and three kittens eating, growling, and being groomed. John Erb of the state Department of Natural Resources estimated the kittens at seven to nine months, born in late summer 2025, so they had already lived through a winter. The project and the department then set about 100 more cameras around that site. After a quiet stretch, July footage showed the family again, with a male of more than 120 pounds nearby. DNA from scat pointed to a father related to Black Hills cougars in South Dakota and a mother related to a small population in northwestern Nebraska. Mark Elbroch of Panthera put each journey at more than 700 miles. Two of the three kittens tested as male. On the August trip the paper describes, after a long day of empty cameras, one animal too small to be the adult male walked the road, and a clear print sat in mud from the night's rain.

A cat that was hunted out of the state can find enough deer and quiet woods to raise young, without anyone trucking animals in.

The Minnesota DNR first released the March footage on April 30. This October feature adds the genetics and later sightings. It is one family, not a counted population. Erb has said the kittens might still be lost, and the state has not yet set out how it will handle livestock conflicts. Cougars are protected in Minnesota, and ranchers may not shoot one that threatens stock.

Nantucket's reintroduced burying beetles produced a record late-summer count

Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence says this is the fifth year it has sent American burying beetles from its breeding program back to Nantucket. With wild beetles trapped for the work as well, the team provisioned 320 animals with carrion so they had a carcass to bury and raise young on. When researchers dug up 30 percent of those pairs, they counted 1,274 larvae. Later in the summer, over four nights, they processed 490 newly emerged beetles and 191 they had seen before, which the zoo calls a record for the project. Partners include the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Nantucket Conservation Foundation, and The Nature Conservancy's Block Island office, which supplies wild founders. Volunteers came from the Nantucket Land Bank, the Maria Mitchell Association, and the Linda Loring Nature Foundation. The beetle is federally protected. It buries small dead animals, which the zoo describes as returning nutrients to the soil and keeping flies and ants from taking every carcass. The same season includes new research on how much carrion is available and how climate affects breeding. The stated aim is a population that can continue without being restocked.

A beetle that buries the dead is a sign the island still has the quiet food chain those beetles need.

The counts and the word "record" come from the zoo that runs the breeding. The larvae figure is from 30 percent of the provisioned pairs, not every nest. The release does not show that the island population can hold without further releases.

New South Wales passed the law for a national park built around koala forest

After more than 14 hours of debate and about 160 amendments, the New South Wales parliament passed the law creating the Great Koala National Park. It takes in 478,000 hectares between Kempsey and Grafton on the Mid North Coast, which the state government calls the state's second-largest national park. The area mixes existing parks with more than 178,000 hectares of state forest and Crown land. Environment Minister Penny Sharpe said it would protect more than 100 species of plants and animals. Conservationist Ashley Love, who has campaigned for the park for more than a decade, called it a big step and also said the forest is fragmented, with gaps between sections. The day before the vote, the federal Clean Energy Regulator registered a carbon project covering more than 117,000 hectares tied to ending native-forest logging there. A logging moratorium on the proposed area began last year. Timber NSW president Andrew Hurford said mills in the region are running out of wood and that layoffs have already spread to suppliers. In July the Forestry Corporation of NSW said it would cut more than 30 jobs in Coffs Harbour. The government said affected staff would be offered suitable roles with the National Parks and Wildlife Service.

A forest where koalas still live can be taken out of the logging rotation, so the next argument is about connecting the pieces rather than whether to cut them.

The law has passed. The article does not say the new boundaries are fully signed, staffed, or closed to every remaining logging operation. Love says surrounding forest was left out. Job losses in the timber industry are part of the same decision. The species count is the minister's.

Corvo switches off its streetlights so young shearwaters can follow the stars out to sea

Each autumn the smallest island in the Azores goes dark for five nights. Since 2019, Corvo's roughly 450 people have switched off the public lights so fledgling Cory's shearwaters can leave the nest and aim for the ocean by the stars. The young birds spend about three months in the burrow before that first flight. Streetlights pull many of them into the lanes of Vila do Corvo instead. Neighbours have been walking those lanes since 1991, when the deaths became too many to ignore. In 1995 the Azorean government widened the rescue, called SOS Cagarro, to the other islands, and the Portuguese Society for the Study of Birds later joined. Corvo is still the only island that blacks out the public lighting. Household lamps can stay on. Many people turn those off too. A bird that has landed in the street spends the night in a cardboard box and is let go the next day from a cliff above the water. The campaign says more than 30,000 fledglings have been picked up across the Azores since 2015, about 6,000 of them on Corvo.

A dark village and a cardboard box are enough to give a lost chick a second try at the sea.

The rescue totals are the campaign's. The photo essay documents a blackout the island has repeated every autumn since 2019. It does not give this year's count. Cats still hunt chicks, and the story does not claim the lights-out nights have ended those deaths.

Arizona's Wonderland of Rocks is a national park, a century after it became a monument

Chiricahua National Monument in southeastern Arizona is now Chiricahua National Park, the 64th national park in the United States and the first new one in six years, after West Virginia's New River Gorge in 2020. The 12,000-acre site has been a monument since 1924. It sits in the Chiricahua Mountains, a sky island about 120 miles from Tucson where the Rockies, the Sierra Madre, the Sonoran Desert, and the Chihuahuan Desert meet. About 27 million years ago a volcanic eruption laid down ash that hardened into rhyolitic tuff. Wind, rain, and frost have since cut that layer into spires and balanced rocks, the Wonderland of Rocks. The Chiricahua Apache lived across a territory that reached into New Mexico and northern Mexico until the U.S. government forced their removal in the late 19th century. The same ground later held Buffalo Soldiers, homesteaders, and Civilian Conservation Corps crews. Smithsonian Magazine says nearly 200 bird species have been recorded, along with deer, javelina, bears, and coatis, and that the park has 17 miles of trail. In 2025 the monument counted 70,406 visits. Local businesses and outdoor groups hope a national-park name brings more.

A maze of stone that already had a century of protection now has the name that makes a person pull off the highway and walk into it.

The change reported here is a redesignation of land protected since 1924, not a new boundary. The hope of more visitors is a hope. The bird count and the 2025 attendance figure are the ones Smithsonian Magazine cites. The article does not say staffing or the budget changed with the name.

A buyback of surplus farmed oysters has replanted reefs at 35 sites since 2020

On 26 October The Pew Charitable Trusts published an account of Supporting Oyster Aquaculture and Restoration, a program it runs with The Nature Conservancy. SOAR buys oysters that farms cannot sell and puts them back on native reefs. Since 2020 it has bought more than 7 million oysters from more than 150 growers, including 1.4 million clusters of baby oysters grown on shell, and sent oysters and shell to 35 restoration sites in eight states. Pew says that work has helped regenerate more than 60 acres of reef and supported more than 1,000 aquaculture and related jobs. Reefs filter water and take the edge off waves. The same piece points to a new handbook, Partnering With Oyster Growers to Rebuild Reefs, written so other coasts can copy the arrangement. Extra money came from Builders Vision and the National Fish and Wildlife Foundation. The program began as an emergency buy during the pandemic and stayed on as a way to keep both farms and reefs going.

An oyster that a restaurant did not need can still be a living brick in a reef.

The totals are Pew's, for the whole program since 2020, not a count from this month. The article does not report how many of the replanted oysters are still alive, or how much cleaner the water is at the 35 sites.

A Thai rescue center is teaching burned leopard-cat cubs to hunt before they return to the forest

A government wildlife rescue center in Khon Kaen, in northeastern Thailand, is taking in far more leopard-cat cubs than it used to. Mongabay reported on 28 October that admissions rose from about 10 a year before 2023 to as many as 65. Staff tie that rise to habitat broken into smaller pieces, fires in sugarcane fields, and more people using a wildlife hotline. From January through August this year the center took in more than 60 kittens, and more than half came out of burned fields with burn injuries. Keepers treat burns, infections, and poor nutrition, then move the cats into rehabilitation pens of about 24 square meters. For about two months the cubs practice climbing and hunting live prey, including mice and chicks, and learn to keep their distance from people. Veterinarian Warisara Thomas said some cubs are afraid of the chicks at first. Mortality at the center fell to about 33 percent in 2026, from about 60 percent in earlier years. Thomas said many of the cubs that died had first been kept at home, which is illegal and can expose them to diseases from pets. Before release, the cats are tested for several viruses and given a microchip. Those that clear the checks go to Phu Pha Man National Park nearby. Head veterinarian Nuntita Ruksachat said that forest can take only a few more releases, and that the team is looking at other ground. Jim Sanderson of the Small Wild Cat Conservation Foundation called this kind of soft release vital.

A cub that has practiced hunting in a pen has a better chance of feeding itself once the gate opens.

The admission counts, the share found in burned fields, and the mortality rates are the center's, as Mongabay reports them from Ana Norman Bermúdez's reporting. The lower death rate is among cubs at the center, not a count of how many live after release. More rescues also means more cubs are being displaced.

Namibian rangers pair old tracking skills with phones so farmers hear about lions in time

Positive News reported on 29 October on Namibia's Lion Rangers, a community programme in 11 conservancies in the arid Kunene region. Field coordinator Benjamin Kordom, whose family first met lions at the edge of their farm in 2018, now oversees more than 40 rangers, patrol leaders, and rapid-response drivers. They walk as far as 40 kilometres a day, noting tracks, scat, kills, and how the cats are holding up, across about 40,000 square kilometres from the Skeleton Coast toward Etosha. Since 2021 they have logged that work on smartphones with a free tool called SMART, instead of notebooks that could take days to reach anyone able to act. With camera traps and GPS collars on 44 lions, the reports tell a patrol where to walk and when to warn a remote farm. In one 18-month stretch the rangers covered almost 280,000 kilometres, 88,000 of them on foot. Coordinator Mathilde Brassine said illegal killings have stopped in six of the conservancies, and that the desert lion population now stands at 60, which the programme considers stable. Text alerts and 16 early-warning towers also tell some herders when a collared lion crosses a virtual fence. Kordom said the phone still loses to a footprint: once, a collar's coordinates sat empty for 12 hours until the team stepped off the vehicle, found fresh tracks, and a pride on a giraffe kill.

A warning that arrives before the goats are in the open is how a farm and a lion can share the same dry country.

The counts of rangers, kilometres, collars, towers, and lions are the programme's, as Positive News reports them. The population rebounded from about 20 adults in 1997 to about 180 by 2015, then fell; 60 is not that earlier peak. Conflict incidents were down by a third as of 2023 and have risen since, which the programme ties in part to better detection and to prey moving with the rains. This is not a claim that conflict is over.

Pamarawan is slowing Manila Bay's waves with bamboo poles and bags of oyster shells

Agence France-Presse reported on 29 October from Pamarawan, a flood-prone island of about 3,000 people in Malolos, on Manila Bay. Residents have long stacked concrete under their houses, then watched the water come back. With the city and a Dutch engineering consultancy, they are trying bamboo poles packed with brushwood, and a breakwater of discarded oyster shells in coconut-fibre bags, to weaken waves and catch sediment so the seabed can rise and, later, hold mangroves. Work with bamboo began in May 2025. The first phase was done in late 2025. When AFP visited, crews, many of them islanders, were still building an oyster-shell barrier about 100 metres offshore. Project manager Lyana Galang said that barrier's job is to take the force out of a wave before it reaches the houses. Fisherman Edgar Javier, who once lost a concrete wall to the sea, said this year's typhoons and monsoon rains felt weaker at the shore. Arsenia Cabigao, 58, who dries fish for a living, said her feet are dry in places that used to flood. Mayor Christian Natividad put the installations, about 14 hectares including upkeep, at 70 million pesos, about $1.1 million, against about 90 million pesos for a concrete seawall.

A barrier the tide can pass through, made from what the island already has, is a way to stay home without fighting the water quite so hard.

Javier's account of weaker waves is his, not a measured drop in wave height. Natividad said a scientific assessment next year will decide whether mangroves can be planted, and that the fuller effect is a decade of piled-up sediment away. Scientist Antonio Contreras told AFP that bamboo and shells are not a stand-in for every flood, and that both have to be sourced with care because bamboo wears out. The peso figures are the mayor's.

Wildlife Trusts raise £30 million, much of it from the public, to buy Northumberland's Rothbury estate

The Guardian reported on 30 October that the Wildlife Trusts have raised £30 million to buy the Rothbury estate in Northumberland, and that the purchase can now go ahead. The campaign opened two years ago after Max Percy, the Duke of Northumberland's youngest son, put the land up for sale. At more than 3,800 hectares, nearly 15 square miles, it is an area the paper compares to Athens, and the largest piece of land in single ownership to come up for sale in England in more than 30 years. About 25,000 people gave £17 million. The National Lottery Heritage Fund gave £5 million, foundations and philanthropists gave more, and the government this week pledged £1.94 million. David Attenborough, who had backed the appeal, thanked the public on Friday and said the land could be a place where nature, community, farming, and heritage sit together. Mike Pratt, chief executive of Northumberland Wildlife Trust, said he felt elated and humbled, and that the public money has to be honoured by letting people get close to wildlife. The ground runs from the Simonside hills through moor, valley woods, the River Coquet, and farm fields. At Lordenshaws, an iron-age hill fort, Pratt pointed to one of England's largest clusters of ancient cup-and-ring marked rocks. The trust hopes to bring back water voles, encourage pine martens already returning on their own, and see more curlew, red squirrels, and mountain bumblebees. The longer hope is a nature corridor of about 40 miles from Druridge Bay on the coast to reserves at the Scottish border. Project manager Sophie Bulgin said volunteers have already been walking through shoulder-high bracken to place sound monitors, and that earthworm counts are coming in a fortnight. Not everyone is pleased. Guy Renner-Thompson, a councillor who chairs Northumberland Conservatives, said farmers on the estate have raised worries about food production, traditional management, and whether their businesses can stay profitable, and that those questions need answers. Pratt said the trust has been working with the farmers and wants wildlife and a working farm business on the same ground.

A moor bought with thousands of small gifts is a landscape neighbors can walk, not only a line on a fundraising page.

The £30 million is the sum raised to buy the estate, not a count of species already recovered. Water voles, more curlew, and the 40-mile corridor are hopes Pratt and the trust described, not results in hand. The farmer concerns are Renner-Thompson's account of what farmers have said. The sale itself is announced as able to proceed; the story does not say the deed has been signed.

Kites and spinning-eye buoys lowered the odds that Cornish gillnets caught guillemots and razorbills

Mongabay reported on 27 October on a Conservation Letters study led by Tom Horton, a research fellow at the University of Exeter, with fishers off Cornwall. Between October 2023 and March 2025, ten fishers set 1,057 nets, about 129 kilometres in all, in pairs at least 200 metres apart: one net with a deterrent, one without. Cameras and GPS recorded every haul. Nets with a kite shaped like a bird of prey had 71 percent lower odds of catching an auk, the family that includes guillemots and razorbills. Nets with a looming-eye buoy, a pole whose spinning head carries a pair of large eyes, had 59 percent lower odds. The nets still brought up 191 animals that were not fish: 153 birds, 25 seals, and 13 dolphins or porpoises. Guillemots and razorbills were nearly three-quarters of that toll, and almost all were dead when the net came in. Horton told Mongabay the clarity of the result surprised him. Bycatch piled up in January and February, in nets for sea bass and mackerel. Yann Rouxel of the Royal Society for the Protection of Birds, a co-author, said gillnets have been a hard gear to make safer. The kites worked better within about 30 metres and struggled in very light wind and in strong wind. The buoys were easier to handle. Fifteen seals came up in buoy nets, against six in plain nets and four in kite nets, which the authors say needs more testing. A separate 2026 trial in Denmark found the buoys' effect on birds at a fixed trap faded within about a month. An earlier trial of the eye buoys in Iceland's lumpfish fishery did not cut bycatch.

A scarecrow that floats can keep a winter net fishing while fewer diving birds go down with it.

The odds are for auks in this Cornwall trial, not a promise for every seabird or every fishery. The Iceland trial of the same buoys did not help, and the Danish test suggests birds can learn to ignore them. The seal counts are a hint, not proof the buoys draw seals in. A 2024 review cited by Mongabay, that gillnets in the Baltic and Northeast Atlantic kill more than 95,000 seabirds a year, is background, not a result of these devices. The journal date is earlier than Mongabay's 27 October writeup.

An ecologist's handheld detector picks up a rarely recorded bat 650 km from its last known spot

Australian Wildlife Conservancy said that ecologist Oli Aylen, nicknamed the Batman by colleagues, recorded the call of an Arnhem Sheath-tailed Bat at Pungalina-Seven Emu Wildlife Sanctuary, on Yanyuwa and Waanyi-Garawa Country in the Northern Territory. He was setting up mist nets around mangroves and happened to have his handheld bat detector running. The species, first described in 1979, has very few confirmed recordings; its previous easternmost detection was near Jabiru, about 650 km away. Aylen noticed the unusually short call, and Damian Milne, a bat specialist with the Northern Territory government, confirmed it. The conservancy says the bat will now be a priority in its surveys, with the hope of finding where it roosts.

Knowing a shy animal lives further than anyone thought is the first step to looking after the places it needs.

This is one acoustic recording, not a captured or photographed bat, and nobody yet knows how many live there or whether the species is threatened. Some coverage converted the distance to about 400 miles.

Coral Harbour hunters and Elders see healthy calves in Southampton Island's caribou herd

Nunavut News reported on 28 October on a Government of Nunavut study of Inuit knowledge about the Southampton Island caribou herd. The island's original caribou were gone by the mid-1950s; at Coral Harbour's request, 48 animals were brought from Coats Island in 1967. The herd grew to nearly 30,000, then crashed in the 2000s from brucellosis, hard winters, and heavy harvesting. After commercial hunting ended and a harvest limit began, aerial surveys counted 12,054 in 2019 and 12,651 in 2023. In 15 interviews in May 2025, hunters, Elders, and other knowledge-holders described healthy animals, strong calf survival, and far less disease. Researcher Andrew Kadykalo said such knowledge can help track the herd between costly flights.

When the people who live with a herd are asked what they see, the count becomes a shared watch rather than a distant number.

These are observations from 15 interviews alongside earlier aerial counts, not a new population survey. Participants raised freezing rain as a growing threat, and views differ on whether harvest limits should change; the department is not recommending any change.

In Veracruz, mangroves planted on Aztec-style mounds grew into forest, and crocodiles came back too

Mongabay reported on REVIVE, a nonprofit restoring mangroves in the Alvarado lagoons of Veracruz, Mexico. Biologist Aníbal Ramírez Soto watched seedlings planted in rows die, then noticed that wild mangroves grew on raised clumps. He began building small soil mounds, which he calls chinampas after the Aztec farming islands. About 2,000 trees were planted on the first mounds; when the team returned, more than 4,000 had taken root, as seedlings floated in on the tide. By the eighth year the canopy covered 80%, and the work has grown to 15,000 mounds over 40 hectares. Since 2017 the team has also released about 80 Morelet's crocodiles, learning from a Colombian project, in the hope that they keep water channels open.

Putting the soil back the way it was let the forest do most of the replanting itself.

The 17 years of results are in a preprint that has not been peer reviewed. A crocodile specialist told Mongabay there is no solid evidence that crocodiles are needed for mangrove health, and the released crocodiles are not formally monitored.