Wildlife

"The Trump administration’s effort to open up drilling across more than a million acres in the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge (ANWR) faces significant legal hurdles, according to experts who are likely to assist in challenging the newly announced plan.

The Interior Department on Monday finalized plans to move ahead with a longstanding item on the GOP’s wishlist: allowing drilling in the Alaskan wilderness. The move could have dire consequences for polar bears, caribou, birds and other species that live in the coastal area in the northern part of ANWR.

"A little-known mammal related to an elephant but as small as a mouse has been rediscovered in Africa after 50 years of obscurity."

"The creatures once symbolized our efforts to save the planet; now they demonstrate all the ways we have devastated it."

"Mink at two Utah fur farms have tested positive for the virus that causes covid-19 in humans, the Department of Agriculture said Monday, announcing the first U.S. cases in a species that has been widely culled in Europe following outbreaks there."

"The Trump administration finalized plans Monday to open up the Arctic National Wildlife Refuge to drilling, a move that will auction off oil and gas rights in the heart of one of the nation’s most iconic wild places. Achieving a goal Republicans have sought for 40 years, it marks a capstone for an administration that has ignored calls to reduce fossil fuel consumption in the face of climate change."

"It is not just at sea that North America’s smallest marine mammals with a huge appetite are benefitting the ecosystem"

"U.S. authorities on Friday gave wildlife managers in Washington, Oregon and Idaho permission to start killing hundreds of sea lions in the Columbia River basin in hopes of helping struggling salmon and steelhead trout."

"Pacific walruses have begun massing onshore in Alaska on a Chukchi Sea beach, one of the earliest of the now-annual congregations at that site yet recorded, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service said.

Walruses were spotted on July 29 a beach near the Inupiat village of Point Lay and numbered about 5,000 as of Aug. 5, said Andrea Medeiros, a spokeswoman for the Fish and Wildlife Service.

"New emails detail drained ponds, salvaged fish and a tense relationship with the Department of Homeland Security."

"Illegal hunting for meat, fur, and newly grown antlers—along with the warming climate—are depleting wild reindeer on Russia’s Taymyr Peninsula."

"The scene was pure carnage. Dozens of reindeer carcasses were sprawled on the sandy shore of the Khatanga River or floating in the current toward the Arctic Ocean, as if the animals had drowned in mid-stream. The story of what actually befell these reindeer on the Taymyr Peninsula, in Russia’s Krasnoyarsk region, however, was far more grisly.