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The Wildlife Log, London (2026)

10/09/2026

In the 1940s, the entire population of whooping cranes on Earth had been hunted and squeezed down to 15 birds.

Decades of protection helped the species claw back, but by the 1990s biologists worried that having only one migratory flock, wintering on the Texas coast, meant a single hurricane or disease outbreak could erase the whole population at once.

Their fix, starting in 2001, sounds almost too strange to be real. Captive bred chicks at Wisconsin's Necedah National Wildlife Refuge were raised by handlers in full crane costumes so the birds would never learn to trust a human face. Then each fall, the young cranes were trained to follow small ultralight aircraft, flown by a costumed pilot from the nonprofit Operation Migration, on the full 1,200 to 1,500 mile journey south to Florida.

It worked, in the sense that it was possible. Over fifteen years, Operation Migration's pilots led 186 whooping cranes across 17,457 total miles of flying, spending more than 10 million dollars keeping the ultralights airborne, part of a wider reintroduction effort that eventually cost more than 20 million. And once a crane made that first trip south behind an aircraft, it reliably found its own way home the following spring, then kept migrating that route on its own every year after.

But the birds had one serious problem. Cranes raised by costumed humans and taught to migrate behind an airplane turned out to be lousy parents. Officials found the reintroduced birds were struggling to hatch and raise chicks that survived in the wild, the one outcome the entire expensive, camera ready program actually needed. In 2015, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service pulled its support, judging the method "too artificial" to produce cranes capable of raising their own young. The final ultralight led flight touched down in Florida in January 2016, closing out fifteen years of costumed pilots leading young birds south by hand.

Today the Wisconsin to Florida flock survives on quieter methods instead, releasing costume reared birds directly among older, wild taught cranes rather than flying them south. As of 2025, that flock stood at around 80 birds, a small piece of a total whooping crane population that has climbed past 800 worldwide. It is wild and self sustaining now, built on flying lessons from a program its own overseers eventually gave up on.

Image is for illustration purposes only
Source: Operation Migration / International Crane Foundation / U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service / All About Birds

10/09/2026

Along stretches of the California coast, a single marine mammal is currently the only thing standing between the seafloor and total collapse, and the crisis it's holding back started with an entirely different animal.

In 2013, a disease called sea star wasting syndrome swept the West Coast and gutted populations of sunflower sea stars, one of the ocean's most effective sea urchin predators. With one of their main predators gone, purple sea urchins exploded. They mowed through California's kelp so thoroughly that parts of the northern coast lost up to 90 percent of their kelp forest, turning it into what scientists call an urchin barren: bare rock, carpeted in spiny purple urchins, with almost nothing else alive on it.

Monterey Bay had a backup the northern coast didn't: a large resident population of sea otters. Otters are the textbook example of a keystone species, meaning their impact on the ecosystem is wildly out of proportion to how many of them there are. One otter eats 20 to 25 percent of its body weight a day, sometimes 15 to 20 pounds of shellfish and urchins, hunting with the help of a rock it carries in a loose pouch of skin under its foreleg, using the stone to crack shells open while floating on its back.

After the urchin boom hit, Monterey's otter population grew, climbing from about 270 to about 432 animals as food became more abundant, and researchers found the otters had tripled how many urchins they were eating compared to before 2014. Tim Tinker, who leads the USGS's California sea otter research program, has described how fast these animals respond once a "prey bonanza" like that shows up.

But the otters weren't saving everything. Divers found the otters were only hunting urchins inside the remaining patches of healthy kelp, where the urchins were still plump, and mostly ignoring the barrens next door, where starved urchins survive on almost nothing and aren't worth the energy to crack open. The barrens held on anyway, patchy but stubborn, right beside the healthiest otter population on that stretch of coast.

Sea otters were hunted to near extinction along the entire Pacific coast by the fur trade, and California's population was believed gone completely until a colony of around 50 animals was found hiding near Bixby Creek, north of Big Sur, in the 1930s. Every otter now floating in Monterey Bay descends from the handful that fur traders somehow missed, and whether that population can save California's kelp on its own is still an open question.

Image is for illustration purposes only
Source: U.S. Geological Survey / U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service / UC Santa Cruz

10/09/2026

By 2018, the only wolves left on Isle Royale were a father and his daughter, who were also half siblings to each other.

Seventy years of isolation on a roughly 210 square mile island in Lake Superior had folded the population's family tree in on itself so many times there was nowhere left to go. Numbers had fallen from about 24 wolves in 2009 to just two.

This wasn't the first time inbreeding nearly finished the island's wolves off. In 1997, a single male crossed an ice bridge from mainland Ontario and became so genetically dominant that by 2008, nearly 60 percent of the population's ancestry traced back to him alone. The genetic boost faded as his descendants kept mating with each other, and by 2016 the island was down to one non breeding pair.

Meanwhile, with almost nothing left to hunt them, the island's moose population exploded past 2,000 animals, up from around 500 in 2011, and researchers watched moose start breaking trees just to reach branches beyond their normal range. Left unchecked, biologists warned, the moose could strip the island's forest bare.

So the National Park Service did something it rarely does: it moved the predators itself. Between September 2018 and September 2019, wildlife managers relocated 19 wolves from Minnesota, Michigan, and Ontario onto the island, chosen for good physical condition and, where possible, moved in groups to keep existing social bonds intact.

It worked, for now. No wolf litters had been born on the island at all from 2015 through 2018. After the new wolves arrived, one litter was born in 2019, two in 2020, two in 2021, and as many as four in 2022. By April 2023, researchers counted a minimum of 27 wolves, up from just 10 in the first winter they monitored.

Not everyone thinks the fix will hold. Rolf Peterson, who has studied these wolves for decades, has watched this exact cycle before: genetic diversity spikes after new wolves arrive, then slowly erodes again as an isolated population keeps breeding with itself. "All in**ed populations tend to collapse," he said. On an island this cut off, the wolves flown and boated in by biologists may only be buying a few more decades before the whole story has to happen again.

Image is for illustration purposes only

Source: Michigan Technological University / National Park Service / Great Lakes Echo

09/09/2026

On May 3, 2022, something happened that had not happened along California's North Coast for 130 years. The Yurok Tribe and Redwood National and State Parks released the first two California condors into the heart of their former range since 1892.

For the Yurok people, this was much more than a conservation project. The bird, known as prey-go-neesh, is sacred and plays an important role in the tribe's creation story and continuing world renewal ceremonies.

The Yurok had spent more than a decade planning and preparing for the return. The first group consisted of four birds, three males and one female, ranging from two to four years old.

One of them, Condor 746, arrived by plane and car in late March 2022. He had apparently had a rough landing and was described as being rather irritable. At eight years old, he was brought in partly to help settle and guide the younger birds before their release.

The return was remarkable because the species had come incredibly close to disappearing altogether.

Only 23 California condors remained worldwide in 1982. By 1987, every remaining wild condor had been brought into a captive breeding program.

By 2026, the global population had increased to 607 birds. The species still faces serious threats, including lead poisoning and avian influenza, but the recovery represents one of the most ambitious bird conservation efforts in North America.

The Northern California Condor Restoration Program plans to release another six condors every year for the next 20 years.

Then, in February 2026, two birds from that original 2022 group appeared to be doing something even more extraordinary.

A nearly seven-year-old female named Ney-gem' Ne-chweenkah, meaning "She carries our prayers," and a male named Hlow Hoo-let, meaning "At last I fly," appeared to be incubating an egg in an old-growth redwood.

It would have been the first condor egg in the Pacific Northwest in more than a century.

Yurok biologist Chris West described it as "a huge moment for our Northern California flock."

By April, however, flight-pattern data suggested the nest had probably failed.

Even so, the attempt mattered. For the first time in more than 100 years, a wild condor pair on this coast had tried to reproduce.

Image is for illustration purposes only.

Source: Yurok Tribe / U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service / National Park Service / Mongabay / San Francisco Chronicle / Smithsonian Magazine

09/09/2026

A northern elephant seal can spend as much as eight months a year alone at sea. During that time, it averages only about two hours of sleep a day. On land during breeding season, that can rise to around 10 hours.

For years, scientists knew surprisingly little about how these animals managed to sleep while spending so much of their lives underwater.

That changed in 2023.

Jessica Kendall-Bar, then a graduate student at UC Santa Cruz, developed a waterproof EEG system and attached it to elephant seals at Año Nuevo State Park, north of Santa Cruz. She also used time-depth recorders and accelerometers to track what the animals were doing while they were underwater.

The results, published April 20 in Science, revealed something almost unbelievable.

The seals would spend roughly one to two minutes at the surface breathing before beginning dives that lasted around 30 minutes. About 10 minutes into a dive, their brain activity shifted into slow-wave sleep while they continued gliding downward.

Then came REM sleep.

During this stage, some seals appeared to lose control of their posture and became temporarily paralyzed while still deep underwater. They would turn upside down and slowly corkscrew toward the seafloor.

Scientists called this unusual behavior a "sleep spiral."

Over several months at sea, the elephant seals averaged just two hours of sleep per day. That gives them one of the most extreme sleep schedules known among mammals.

In shallower waters over the continental shelf, some seals take a different approach. They can rest motionless on the seafloor while sleeping.

For an animal that spends most of its year alone in the open ocean, sleep isn't exactly a peaceful pause.

It is something the seal has learned to do while still diving, drifting, and moving through the ocean.

Image is for illustration purposes only

Source: Kendall-Bar et al. (2023), Science / UC Santa Cruz / National Science Foundation / Scripps Institution of Oceanography

09/09/2026

North Atlantic right whale Snow Cone gave birth in December 2021 while still trapped in fishing rope that had been cutting into her jaw for nine months.

Despite the injury, she made the roughly 1,300-mile journey north with her calf, eventually reaching the waters off Cape Cod with the old fishing gear still attached to her body.

Snow Cone was already a survivor.

In 2020, her first calf was struck and killed by a ship. Then, in 2021, she survived another potentially fatal entanglement. It was her fourth documented entanglement, and this time the rope had become deeply embedded in her upper jaw.

Responders tried to remove it but couldn't get all of the gear off.

Scientists were not sure she would even be able to carry the pregnancy to term. Producing and nursing a calf requires enormous amounts of energy, and Snow Cone was already dealing with a serious injury.

But she kept going.

She was seen with her calf off Florida in January 2022 and later off Cape Cod in May. The calf was last seen in April 2022 and may have weaned normally, although scientists could not confirm whether it survived.

Then, in September 2022, survey teams spotted Snow Cone again south of Nantucket.

This time, she was caught in even more fishing gear.

New rope was wrapped around her tailstock, while the older gear from her 2021 entanglement was still tangled around her head. It was at least her fifth documented entanglement.

She had lost weight, her skin appeared pale, and orange lice had spread across her callosities, something often seen in weakened or unhealthy whales.

Heather Pettis of the New England Aquarium summed up the situation simply: "Losing her is devastating."

Snow Cone has not been seen since October 2022 and is presumed dead.

At the time, she was one of only an estimated 336 North Atlantic right whales remaining.

More than 86% of the population has experienced at least one entanglement, with some individuals becoming entangled as many as eight times.

The damage goes far beyond the injuries caused by the ropes themselves. Repeated stress and trauma have contributed to the species' calving interval increasing from roughly three to four years between calves to seven to ten years, and some females stop producing calves altogether.

That means the loss of a whale like Snow Cone isn't simply the loss of one animal.

For a species already struggling to survive, losing a breeding female can also mean losing years of potential population growth.

Image is for illustration purposes only.

Source: NOAA Fisheries / New England Aquarium / Center for Coastal Studies / Oceana / Sierra Club

07/09/2026

Almost every black-footed ferret alive today can be traced back to just seven animals. Those seven were among the last 18 wild black-footed ferrets ever found, and they were discovered only because a ranch dog brought one home dead.

On September 26, 1981, rancher John Hogg and his wife Lucille were awakened by their dog's barking outside their bedroom window. The next morning, Hogg found the carcass of a strange little animal with a black mask, black feet, and a black-tipped tail.

A local taxidermist identified it as a black-footed ferret, a species that scientists had already presumed extinct.

By 1985, the remaining wild population had fallen to just 18 animals. They were captured and brought into captivity after canine distemper devastated the colony. Of those 18 wild-caught ferrets, only seven ultimately became the founders of today's population.

One of the animals that didn't become a founder was a female named Willa.

Willa died in 1988 without leaving surviving offspring. But wildlife managers preserved tissue from her body and sent samples to the Frozen Zoo at the San Diego Zoo. Her cells were cryopreserved just three days after her death, long before scientists had any practical way to use them for conservation.

Years later, researchers discovered something remarkable. Willa's genome contained roughly three times more unique genetic variation than the average black-footed ferret in the living population.

Then came the breakthrough.

In November 2020, scientists from Revive & Restore, ViaGen, and the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service created embryos using cells from Willa and implanted them into a domestic ferret surrogate.

On December 10, 2020, a clone was born.

Her name was Elizabeth Ann, and she became the first cloned individual of a U.S. endangered species.

Two additional clones of Willa followed in 2023. They were named Antonia and Noreen.

Then, in 2024, something even more important happened. Antonia gave birth to two offspring. For the first time, genetic material that had effectively been lost from the living population was passed back into an endangered species through cloning.

By late 2025, 15 ferrets in the breeding population carried Willa's genetic material. She had effectively become the eighth founder, helping break a genetic bottleneck that had limited the species for decades.

Elizabeth Ann herself died in 2025 at around four to five years old. But by then, the population she was created to help had already begun carrying more of Willa's genes than it had since 1988.

Image is for illustration purposes only

Source: Revive & Restore / U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service / San Diego Zoo Wildlife Alliance / Smithsonian Magazine / Fort Collins Museum of Discovery

07/09/2026

Grizzly 399, Grand Teton, Wyoming.

In 2020, a 28-year-old grizzly bear gave birth to four cubs, something so rare that researchers had documented only ten other quadruplet litters in the Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem since 1973. She was 24 when she had them, already an unusually old age for a female grizzly to still be reproducing.

Grizzly 399 became famous in 2006, when she started appearing regularly along the roadsides of northern Grand Teton National Park with a litter of three cubs. Over the next 18 years, she kept doing something remarkable. About every three springs, she would reappear with another litter. In total, she had 18 known cubs across eight litters, including the extraordinary four born in 2020.

Then, in 2023, at the age of 27, she emerged with a single cub. That made her the oldest known female grizzly in the entire Greater Yellowstone Ecosystem to still have a cub. Frank van Manen, who leads the Yellowstone Interagency Grizzly Bear Study Team, described her survival as "the next chapter in an amazing conservation success story."

Her popularity also had a real economic impact. Yellowstone and Grand Teton generate upwards of $1.5 billion in economic activity each year and support around 15,000 jobs. Watching bears and wolves is also among the parks' top attractions.

But Grizzly 399 ultimately died in the same landscape where so many people had come to know her. On October 22, 2024, she was struck and killed by a vehicle in Snake River Canyon. Researchers later confirmed her identity using her ear tags and microchip. She became the 66th known grizzly bear to die in the region that year. More than 70 grizzlies were killed across the ecosystem in 2024, a record compared with an annual average of just 3.3 grizzlies killed by vehicles.

And her story did not end with her death.

One of her famous 2020 quadruplets, Grizzly 1057, was euthanized by Wyoming Game and Fish in 2022 after repeatedly seeking human food near Cora. Then, in 2025, his brother 1058 was struck by a vehicle on the eastern side of Grand Teton. He managed to reach a patch of willows roughly 125 yards from the road before eventually dying.

Of the four cubs whose rarity helped make Grizzly 399 a global celebrity, at least two have now died on the same roads that helped make their mother famous.

Image is for illustration purposes only

Source: WyoFile / U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service / Jackson Hole News & Guide / Smithsonian Magazine / Mountain Journal / CBS News

07/09/2026

At just a few weeks old, a black bear cub is entirely dependent, nearly blind, and exceptionally vulnerable. Weighing less than a pound at birth, these tiny creatures need the intense warmth of a mother and the rich, fat-heavy nourishment of her milk to survive the brutal winter months. Without these vital things, an orphan faces certain death.

These two wildlife researchers Gary L. Alt and John J. Beecham faced a heartbreaking but incredibly common problem in the field of wildlife management. They regularly encountered orphaned cubs and desperately needed a viable way to give them a second chance at life. Hand-rearing bears in captivity is notoriously difficult. It often leads to habituation, meaning the bears become too used to humans, making them entirely unfit for release back into the wild. The absolute best mother for a bear cub is a mother bear. But a critical question loomed over their work. Would a wild, fiercely protective black bear accept a fragile baby that was not her own?

To find out, Alt and Beecham embarked on a remarkable and daring field study that would span across the forests of Pennsylvania, Idaho, Maine, and New York. We can look at a typical scenario from their groundbreaking work to understand the sheer tension and wonder of their methods.

The researchers trekked through the dense, snow-covered woods of Idaho on a freezing February morning. Tucked securely inside a heavy winter coat to share human body heat is a tiny, whimpering orphan named Little Bear by the rescue team. The researchers are tracking a radio collar signal. The rhythmic beeping leads them to a specific, secluded location. They find a winter den hollowed out beneath the roots of a massive fallen pine tree. Inside this dark, cramped space, an adult female black bear is curled up. She is nursing her own newly born litter. She is entirely wild, completely undrugged, and instinctively ready to defend her territory.

Approaching a wild bear den requires incredible nerve and absolute silence. The researchers carefully clear away the snow and brush from the narrow entrance. The mother bear shifts in her sleep, her massive, fur-covered frame taking up almost all the available space in the dirt hollow. With slow, deliberate, and practiced movements, the scientists gently place the shivering orphan directly into the den. They position Little Bear right alongside the mother's biological offspring. Then, they slowly retreat into the freezing air and wait with bated breath.

What happens next consistently defies the common perception of ruthless wild nature. The mother bear wakes up, catches the scent of the new addition, and then simply tucks the orphan in with her own cubs. She begins to groom the newcomer, offering it the exact same care, warmth, and rich milk as her biological babies.

This incredible act of acceptance was not an isolated miracle and their findings revealed a striking difference that depended heavily on exactly when and how an orphan was introduced to a new family. The researchers introduced 30 orphaned cubs to undrugged lactating mothers inside their natal dens across various states. The results were astounding. Out of those 30 cubs, 28 were successfully adopted. That translates to a massive 93 percent success rate.

However, the scientists noticed something fascinating. If they tried to introduce an orphan to a mother after the family had already emerged from the den in the spring, the success rate dropped dramatically.

Why is this timing so critically important? The answer suggests that the adoption is not necessarily because the mother consciously decides to perform a noble rescue of an orphan. Instead, the behavior is a direct consequence of the bear's maternal behavioral system working exactly as biology intended.

During the denning period, the mother is intensely hormonally primed to care for newborns. Any cub she encounters in her den is small, vulnerable, and completely dependent. Because the environment is pitch black and confined, the mother may not strongly discriminate between her own cubs and a newcomer at this early stage. The cub is simply recognized as a baby in need of care within her safe space.

Furthermore, Alt and Beecham showed the practical, resource-driven side of the equation. Raising extra cubs can become energetically costly when food is scarce in the wild. However, when food is adequate, adding one more tiny mouth to feed is relatively inexpensive for a massive mother bear. Their observations therefore strongly support the idea that adoption is highly advantageous, and much more likely to happen, when the mother has the bodily reserves and environmental resources to afford another cub.

Photo: North American Bear Cente

Source: Wildlife Society Bulletin / Orphan bear cubs: Rehabilitation and release guidelines. / Black Bear Denning Chronology and Den Site Selection.

07/09/2026

Wildlife footage shows a mountain lion walking around a camper while sleeping.

This is incredibly shocking!

How did he not know?

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