If you go down to the woods today, it may surprise you that they’ve withered, or disappeared. Nature’s vanishing act goes largely unnoticed, despite its dramatic scale. And as the animals and plants die along with it, so too does what conservation biologist Kevin Gaston calls our “personalised ecology”.
Yves Vanderhaeghen
Edith’s Checkerspot butterfly Euphydryas editha. This unlikely champion of resilience is an unglamorous, unadventurous butterfly that normally travels less than a few hundred metres in its two-week life.
Edith’s Checkerspot butterfly Euphydryas editha. This unlikely champion of resilience is an unglamorous, unadventurous butterfly that normally travels less than a few hundred metres in its two-week life.
Dr Camille Parmesan is a climate change researcher who knows what it feels like to have one’s habitat wither.
His name’s Bond, William Bond, and he says it’s time to put fire to the veld. To save it.
Keep an eye on the lions; watch where the elephants are, where the people are; track the poachers; count the nesting vultures.
That’s a tall order far on the veld, or deep in a vast nature reserve, where constraints of distance, cost, connectivity and a shortage of hands make conservation a thorny task at the best of times.
There’s little as rare as a rere’s egg on Madagascar. So when Chris Ransom, the Director of Field Programmes at the Durrell Wildlife Conservation Trust, announces that they’ve had a few eggs hatch it’s huge news. “We got quite excited,” he says. “We haven’t managed to breed them at our Ampijoroa breeding facility since 2017, but this year we managed. That was a real achievement”.
Can tracking mouse footprints give clues to climate change? Yves Vanderhaeghen speaks to the founders of WildTrack, which is pioneering technology in South Africa to track small mammals so they can tell us about disruptions to ecosystems.
In the midst of political alliances with coal lobbyists, environmentalists are urging strategic voting and active citizenship to address the deepening climate crisis and stave off the collapse of natural systems.
There’s no disguising it; researchers have rumbled the elusive, shapeshifting, mimic octopus off the coast of Mozambique for the first time, thousands of kilometres away from what has up to now been considered its habitat.