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Saying you’re a biodiversity reporter doesn’t mean much to a lot of people. “What do you actually write about?” they ask. And this is exactly why there should be more journalists on this beat. The nature crisis continues to fly under the radar.

In 1992, at the Earth Summit in Rio de Janeiro, Brazil, there was a wave of enthusiasm about tackling the great environmental problems, and so governments set up three UN conventions to deal with climate change, biodiversity loss and desertification. Since then, the climate crisis has been treated as separate to the biodiversity crisis, yet there is huge overlap between the two.

Some people think separating them was an error. Both crises have carbon in common. Releasing it as carbon dioxide into the atmosphere is driving the climate crisis, but the main building block of biodiversity on our planet – in soil, forests, wetlands, plants and animals – is also carbon. Dealing with each requires us to store carbon in healthy ecosystems, rather than releasing it into the atmosphere. You fail on one, you fail on both.

Watching people protest for our planet makes the hairs on the back of our necks stand on end. They give us hope for the future

Governments are slowly starting to treat them as one issue. Many commentators said the Cop26 UN climate talks in 2021 marked a new era, with ambitious pledges to protect forests, which store not only vast amounts of carbon but are rich in biodiversity, too.

Mapping has revealed must-not-destroy ecosystems that cannot be lost if we are to avoid catastrophic climate breakdown, including carbon-rich forests and peatlands, from Brazil to Britain.

The Guardian set up its biodiversity desk, the age of extinction, at the end of 2019, in anticipation of the UN Biodiversity Conference (Cop15), a once-in-a-decade opportunity to create targets to stem the collapse of ecosystems globally. Some refer to it as the nature crisis, or the wildlife crisis, but they are all ways of explaining that our ecosystems are in freefall, being destroyed at alarming rates. Indigenous communities, who are key to the survival of many ecosystems, are also under threat, with record numbers being killed in recent years.

We write about three pieces a week, which could be reports, features, investigations, podcasts or videos. The Guardian was way ahead of its time in this, and during the three years we have been covering biodiversity loss, we’ve seen a gradual increase in content by other publications. In February 2020, the Guardian was the only mainstream publication in attendance at the end of pre-Cop15 negotiations, then earlier this year, the BBC put coverage of talks in Geneva on its homepage.

We like to think we’ve paved the way, with extremely close coverage of the lead-up (and many delays) to Cop15 – which takes place in Montreal, Canada in December – as well as laying out the basics of what drives biodiversity loss, and what we can do about it.

Phoebe Weston asks the panel a question at the IUCN World Conservation Congress in Marseille in September 2021. Photograph: IISB

Science tells us that the biodiversity crisis is as urgent as the climate crisis, so we hope in the years to come other newsrooms will have dedicated biodiversity reporters alongside climate, health and politics reporters – which would also mean more job security for my fellow age of extinction reporter, Patrick Greenfield, and me.

If we are expecting new forests to suck up a chunk of excess emissions by 2050, knowing how to plant trees, restore wetlands and peatlands is going to be absolutely key. We have looked extensively at farming, forests, soils and all the complex ways land can absorb carbon, because none of this is simple, and even scientists are still grappling with some of these issues.

Tackling biodiversity is a global challenge, but it is made up of local stories. Readers often ask how they can contribute, and we’ve enjoyed writing about people’s local nature projects and parklets. There is a never-ending love for hedgehogs, bees and beavers. People who do decide to act, often find that wildlife returns quickly, rewarding them for their efforts. One man has built enough nest boxes to house half the UK’s swift populations.

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All of this snowballs into bigger things. Watching people protest for our planet makes the hairs on the back of our necks stand on end. They give us hope for the future.

But the broader picture is bleak. Unlike the climate crisis, it is hard to see any sort of roadmap out of the biodiversity crisis. Wildlife is being annihilated from every corner of our planet at faster rates than ever. Successive heatwaves and droughts – like the kinds we saw this summer – are cumulatively hammering the natural world. I feel increasingly concerned that our response to the biodiversity crisis is not nearly enough.

The world failed on all of its previous UN biodiversity targets, but we cannot afford another decade of failure. Targets are pointless unless you take them seriously, and we must take this seriously because we depend on nature to survive. We are focusing on Cop15, but our reporting will continue after this milestone event, and we will be holding governments to account on their promises.

In 2020, I interviewed Ron Finley, the ‘‘gangsta gardener” who is revolutionising attitudes to gardening in inner-city areas of Los Angeles. He told me governments and municipalities need to put money into things they claim to care about (in this case, getting people to grow their own food). I asked him if he was hopeful (this is a classic thing for me to ask at the end of a bleak interview).

His answer has stayed with me. He said: “I don’t like to use ‘hope’. I like to use the word ‘opportunity’. To hell with hope. It’s not for hope to change it. It’s the opportunity to make shit happen.” Cop15 is an opportunity. We have to use it.

Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on Twitter for all the latest news and features

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Night hangs over the Hoopa Valley Reservation. Stars spill toward the evergreen horizon as Mark Higley, a wildlife biologist for the Hoopa Valley Tribe, places a speaker on an unpaved road. Soon a recorded bird call—Who cooks for you? Who cooks for you all?—tumbles down the Northern California valley. A few minutes later, the faintest of replies. These hoots slowly build as the Barred Owl draws closer, bracing for a turf war, until the calls are almost on top of one another, on top of Higley, filling the entire night.

Then a handsome young male materializes in a copse of hardwoods, calling expectantly. Higley points a 12-gauge shotgun at the dark-eyed bird, eponymous horizontal bars resplendent on its upper breast, and the crack that follows shatters the air. Wings splayed, the Barred Owl lingers a moment before gravity prevails.

The digital owl continues to call from the speaker, and before long another voice resonates through the woods: a female. The second owl swoops up the valley like an echo, and Higley reprises this sober scene. Call, aim, blast, fall. Tufts of down float across the road like moths.

After placing the dead male in the truck bed, Higley smooths the bird’s neck feathers—a movement at once quick and gentle. He does not enjoy killing owls. But he tries to extract as much purpose from it as possible: swabbing their microbes, drawing their blood, collecting their stomach contents, anything that might be of use to science. He has been sending the bodies to museums and universities, but the birds are saturating collections like they are saturating Northwest forests. “Now my freezers are packed full of birds I can’t get rid of,” he says. “Eventually I’ll have to start burying them.”

Higley performs this heavy task night after night as part of a broader effort to save another raptor, the Northern Spotted Owl. A polarizing icon of the Pacific Northwest, the Spotted Owl captured the national spotlight during the so-called Timber Wars of the 1980s and ’90s that pitted loggers against newly minted environmental activists. The bird’s 1990 listing as threatened under the Endangered Species Act (ESA) reverberated through the region and reshaped forest management. Yet scientists say it is now spiraling dangerously close to extinction.

Named for its cloak of white marks, the Northern Spotted Owl—one of three subspecies, along with the California and Mexican Spotted Owls—dwells in mature, structurally complex forests stretching from Northern California into British Columbia. While Timber War tensions may have cooled, loggers still prize the girthy trees that buttress this ecosystem. And two new threats have emerged: the explosive growth of Barred Owls, which have expanded westward into Spotted Owl territory where they’re considered invasive, outcompeting the smaller bird and vacuuming up prey; and catastrophic wildfires, worsened by climate change and historical forest management practices, that could suddenly wipe out those owls that are left.

“These things are all intersecting in a way that dramatically increases the challenges we’re facing,” says Bob Sallinger, director of conservation for Portland Audubon, one of several groups that sued the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service more than three decades ago to get the bird on the endangered species list. “The Spotted Owl is in a significantly more dire situation than when it was initially listed.”

The U.S. Forest Service’s best estimate is that between 3,000 and 5,200 Northern Spotted Owls remain on federal lands. An analysis in Washington, Oregon, and Northern California last year found that between 1995 and 2018, Spotted Owl populations in many areas shrank by at least 65 percent. In some places where the owls used to number in the hundreds, researchers could find only a single bird, if any. “The populations are really at a tipping point right now,” says Alan Franklin, the study’s lead author and a research scientist with the U.S. Department of Agriculture’s National Wildlife Research Center. “Something has to be done quickly.”

“Something has to be done quickly.”

Paul Henson, who led the FWS recovery program for the bird until his retirement in June, says the situation calls for action on multiple fronts: Preserve the best remaining habitat, control the Barred Owl, and manage forests to avoid the most serious wildfires. But progress on some points has been sluggish. And despite a 2020 acknowledgment from the FWS that the threatened subspecies should now qualify as endangered, the Trump and Biden administrations both declined to change its status, citing “higher-priority actions” for other species.

So, three decades after Time splashed the handsome nut-brown bird across its cover, an unsettling question emerges: Will we rise to the challenge in time to save the Northern Spotted Owl?

The cathedral-like forests where Spotted Owls nest and hunt under a closed canopy are vestiges of an ancient Pacific Northwest. Stewarded by first peoples since time untold, these bountiful lands have brought forth incredible biodiversity that makes the spectacular routine, including cedars 15 feet across and redwoods 300 feet high. Around the mid-19th century, European settlers began to more aggressively fell such giants, and the transformation of the forests began.

The timber industry soon dominated the regional economy. After World War II, having thinned private timberlands of their most valuable trees, logging companies turned their new gasoline-powered chain saws toward federal forests. Back then, the Forest Service viewed trees as crops ready for harvest and underestimated the old-growth ecosystem’s value. When the logging trucks arrived, the agency opened its gates. Timber harvests increased throughout the 1960s and ’70s, putting the industry on a crash course with the emerging environmental movement.

Meanwhile, scientists arrived at two key realizations. First, old-growth forests—those around 150 years and older—were in fact immensely productive, diverse ecosystems. Second, a rare owl subspecies was closely associated with them. Throughout the 1980s activists took to the courts to challenge timber sales and even put their bodies between trees and chain saws, but habitat essential to the Northern Spotted Owl and other wildlife continued to topple. By 1987, as timber harvests on public lands reached an all-time peak, concerned environmental groups decided to use a new legal tool to compel action: Portland Audubon, Seattle Audubon Society, and others petitioned the FWS to add the owl to the endangered species list.

It took lawsuits and another three years for the agency to finally list the bird as threatened and then a judge’s intervention to enforce its protection. In 1991 the first of several court orders had a dramatic, immediate effect, pausing new timber sales. But the restrictions arrived just as globalization and a souring economy were straining the lumber industry. Its supporters began sporting T-shirts with the motto “Save a logger, eat an owl.” Franklin recalls being chased by vehicles and shot at in the dark while studying owls in a logging community. “Things did get ugly,” he says.

Tensions boiled over, surging beyond this mossy corner of the country. In 1993 President Clinton convened a forest summit in Portland, Oregon, where he and his cabinet listened to timber executives, scientists, activists, and others. The eventual outcome, the 1994 Northwest Forest Plan, was a milestone, outlining the first federal, landscape-scale environmental policy across the region, agencies, and species. “From an ecological and a conservation perspective, the Northwest Forest Plan, in my opinion, has been a tremendous success,” Henson says.

Even so, timber companies have chafed at the plan’s restrictions on how much they can cut, and legal challenges over logging levels continue to this day. One major battleground has been over how much land the FWS considers critical habitat—basically, the places deemed essential to the bird’s survival. Anytime the federal government undertakes, funds, or permits activities that may affect that habitat, such as logging or road construction, it must ensure the actions will not lead to the owl’s extinction or permanently hobble its recovery.

Critical habitat for the Northern Spotted Owl has been a political football ever since it was first designated in 1992, says Susan Jane Brown, senior attorney and wildlands program director with the Western Environmental Law Center. In 2012, the FWS—better understanding the threats to the bird’s survival—upped the designation by almost 40 percent to nearly 9.6 million acres. In 2021 Trump-appointed officials in the Department of the Interior slashed the extent of critical habitat by 3.4 million acres—despite Henson warning such an action would lead to “the eventual extinction” of the subspecies. The Biden administration later reversed that decision, though it excluded roughly 200,000 acres in Oregon related to the settlement of a timber industry lawsuit.

Given the bird’s perilous position, Brown says federal land managers should halt all commercial logging in its critical habitat that isn’t aimed at restoring forest health. Her organization is filing lawsuits on behalf of conservation groups against Bureau of Land Management timber sales and logging plans. “I cannot believe we are fighting over critical habitat still,” she says. “If you take that political football off the board, you can get down to brass tacks about how we restore and manage the forest. And then what do we do about Barred Owls?”

Since the early 20th century, Barred Owls—perhaps aided by warming boreal forests, settlers planting corridors of trees across the Great Plains, or both—have ventured from their eastern home north through Canada and back south along the Pacific coast. There, the bird’s broad diet gives the larger, aggressive interloper another advantage, enabling it to occupy smaller territories than the Spotted Owl, which eats only tree-dwelling rodents.

Spotted Owls wouldn’t be as vulnerable to the invasive species had people not logged so much old-growth habitat, Sallinger says. To some observers, killing wild animals is an unacceptable answer to those past mistakes. “But it’s even more unacceptable to let a species go extinct,” Sallinger says. “The highest priority needs to be placed on preventing the extinction of the Northern Spotted Owl—including lethal control of the Barred Owl.”

Keith Hamm steps out of his truck off an old state highway shrouded in low-hanging fog. Hamm, conservation planning manager for the family-owned timber firm Green Diamond Resource Company, peers through his binoculars downslope where two streams meet among towering tan oaks and cedars. His colleague Desiree Early Dorvall, a soft-spoken wildlife biologist, quickly loads snow-white mice into a container made from a modified PVC pipe. She slides the plastic tube, now squeaking softly, into a pocket of her backpack and begins to trek with Hamm in search of Spotted Owls.

While its business is cutting down trees, Green Diamond’s state- and federally approved habitat conservation plans require it to balance logging with environmental protection. The company clear-cuts some of its property but practices selective harvesting on one-quarter of its 385,000 acres in northwest California to protect streams and wildlife. On parts of its land, from 2009 to 2014 Green Diamond led the first experiment in removing Barred Owls to observe whether Northern Spotted Owls rebounded. They did: Spotted Owl survival climbed roughly 8 percent and reproduction ticked up. Not only did the population on the company’s land stop shrinking—it grew.

Spotted Owls were once as reliable a presence as the marine fog that rolls in to bathe the region’s iconic redwoods.

But this limited removal program was not enough to stanch the flow of Barred Owls into the forests of coastal California. Where Hamm and Early Dorvall are hiking, Spotted Owls were once as reliable a presence as the marine fog that rolls in to bathe the region’s iconic redwoods. Pairs routinely took up residence and raised their young in the hollows of its aged trees. “Then, all of a sudden, at a site that was really consistent,” Early Dorvall says, “they stopped reproducing.” Before long, a lone male was the only one responding to the humans’ hopeful hoots. Then, in 2018, nothing.

The company resumed Barred Owl removals in 2020, this time across all its property, and last year a pair of Northern Spotted Owls successfully reproduced at this spot. Today the Green Diamond scientists have hiked in to check on them. Where the canopy forms a verdant ceiling held aloft by trees rising like pillars, Early Dorvall lets out a hollow whistle, its pitch rising sharply at the end. She’s mimicking the contact calls that Spotted Owls use to keep tabs on one another. Obligingly, a male and female soon reply with haunting four-note songs. Catching sight of one in a cedar’s branches, the biologist kneels among the damp sword ferns, plucks a white mouse from the PVC tube, and places it atop a long stick where it sits practically motionless—live bait for a hungry owl. She holds it out, waiting.

Soon a dark-eyed owl arrives on silent wings and collects the bait. Hooting softly from a nearby perch, mouse now dead in his talons, the male calls to his mate. Then he swoops in beside her, offering a freshly caught meal. The owls wear leg bands that Green Diamond scientists use to track individual birds’ lives, reproduction, and deaths, creating detailed demographic histories for certain areas. And observing what the birds do with the bait—devour it in hunger, save it for later, share it to woo a mate—allows the biologists to glean courtship and nesting information.

In some places, however, Spotted Owls are so few, or so wary of their invasive cousins, that this established monitoring method is losing its scientific value. It also pulls females away from their nests, potentially exposing the adults and their young to attacks from predators. That’s why Damon Lesmeister, who leads the Forest Service’s Northern Spotted Owl monitoring program, is spearheading a shift toward a lighter touch across a broader expanse: bioacoustics monitoring.

Lesmeister expects the program, which uses autonomous recorders to capture Spotted Owl calls, to soon hit 3 million hours of recordings per year. Advances in machine learning and computer processing allow his team to analyze this vast audio archive to detect the bird’s presence. By 2023 he aims to have these devices listening for Spotted Owls at randomly selected sites across some 25 million acres of federal lands, from the Canadian border to San Francisco. The project is also incorporating camera traps in coastal Oregon to give researchers a better understanding of the birds’ environment.

But this method also comes with a trade-off: It cannot provide the rich detail about populations and behaviors that can be gleaned from drawing the birds from the canopy. “A lot of biologists are concerned whether this is really going to provide the necessary information to adequately monitor the small populations of Spotted Owls that are left,” says the USDA’s Franklin.

An hour’s drive east of Green Diamond’s damp coastal redwoods, the Hoopa Valley Tribe also relies on baiting for the habitat conservation plan it must follow in order to log pockets of its drier, Douglas fir–studded reservation. Here, Higley and the tribe’s wildlife crew leader, Anthony Colegrove, watch as a male, a white mouse in its yellow beak, perches near the top of a crownless tree. “He’s hooting and looking at the broken top, so that’s probably where she’s nesting,” says Colegrove, a tribal member dubbed the “owl whisperer” for his uncanny ability to call in Spotted Owls, a skill honed since childhood.

Colegrove says he wouldn’t have recognized nesting behavior before Higley started removing Barred Owls in 2013 as part of a federally funded experiment, separate from Green Diamond’s, to measure the effects on the native birds. Back then nests were scarce. “Spotted Owls wouldn’t even hoot,” Colegrove remembers. “It was pretty bad.” Since then, monitoring has documented a 3 percent increase in Spotted Owl adult survival and rebounding reproduction.

The success of the Hoopa’s and Green Diamond’s efforts helped inform the federal government’s own Barred Owl removals on public lands from 2015 to 2021. An analysis of data from all three, published in July 2021, revealed the stark difference removing the invading owls can make. Where Barred Owls were taken off the landscape, Northern Spotted Owl populations quickly stabilized. Where they remained, Spotted Owls continued to freefall, their already low numbers dropping 12 percent each year.

Equipped with these findings, the FWS is preparing to write a new management strategy to control Barred Owls in the range of the Northern and California Spotted Owl subspecies. The agency initiated public review in July but says the earliest the strategy could be completed is the end of 2023. For now, just a few land managers continue to shoot the invasive owls. Higley and others worry what this delay will mean for Spotted Owls’ survival. With numbers dropping so fast, every unaddressed threat shoves their prospects in the wrong direction.

Late in the morning on August 16, 2020, a fire began to burn through the ancient, and usually damp, conifers of Oregon’s Willamette National Forest. One of many Pacific Northwest blazes that year, the Beachie Creek Fire would eventually scorch nearly 200,000 acres, claim five lives, and devastate small towns. Northern Spotted Owls also suffered during that smoke-choked summer, losing vast swaths of prime habitat.

Fire has always been a presence in the bird’s habitat, but today it is morphing into something more worrisome. An overheated climate is making even temperate rain forests like the Willamette, whose massive old trees are typically fire-resistant, susceptible to more frequent megafires. “These fires have taken out scores and scores of Spotted Owl sites over the years,” says Henson. That’s true even for more modest blazes, such as the one that burned 3,000 acres of the Hoopa reservation and an adjacent national forest in 2009.

“These fires have taken out scores and scores of Spotted Owl sites over the years.”

Experts say land managers, including the federal government, can take proactive steps to reduce wildfire impacts. That does not mean aggressively logging healthy forests, Henson stresses; what’s needed is targeted thinning and prescribed burning. Fortunately, more funding for such efforts is on the way. Last year’s Bipartisan Infrastructure Law and the Inflation Reduction Act passed this summer together will funnel billions of dollars into addressing the risks and impacts of wildfires.

Three decades since the effort to save the Northern Spotted Owl began, it can feel at times like a lost cause. The bird’s numbers keep sliding while threats keep rising. To make matters worse, more hazards are surfacing: About half of the Barred Owls that researchers remove from Northwest forests test positive for anticoagulant poisons used to kill rodents, including at illegal marijuana farms in national forests. That suggests that Spotted Owls, too, are being poisoned through their prey.

In some ways the Pacific Northwest is a different place than it was when the subspecies was listed as threatened: Today the region has more workers in the tech and outdoor recreation industries than in logging, and few of them personally experienced the Timber Wars. “I think many of those folks think that that’s over and that the owl is doing just fine,” says Brown, the environmental lawyer. Even among her devoted community of Northern Spotted Owl enthusiasts, the fight today is “nowhere near the tenor or ferocity that it was back in the ’90s.”

Is saving the Northern Spotted Owl, as the ESA compels the federal government to do, still possible? “The current prognosis is grim, especially in the state of Washington,” says Lesmeister. Shooting Barred Owls, while effective in certain conditions, is not a silver bullet. He expects the native bird to become locally extinct in some places in the next decade.

Still, he and others insist there’s room for optimism. Provided with healthy habitat and relief from Barred Owls, Spotted Owls can rebound. The Northwest Forest Plan, a document with real regulatory teeth and a century-long vision, has largely succeeded in halting the devastation of the forests the owls need. And with every passing year, those trees are aging into old growth.

At the same time, political leaders and the public increasingly seem to recognize the value of those mature forests, particularly as a climate solution. President Biden, for example, issued an executive order on Earth Day this year to inventory and potentially preserve old-growth habitat on federal lands. And while such woods have generally had weaker safeguards on state and private property, that may be changing. Oregon governor Kate Brown signed a bill in April that increased protections for the Elliott State Forest, where Northern Spotted Owls and Marbled Murrelets—a seabird that the state elevated last year from threatened to endangered—nest among 82,000 acres of mature and old-growth stands. Brown signed separate legislation in May to strengthen protections for riparian habitat in a law that affects more than 10 million acres of private forests. Both measures arose from negotiations that brought timber companies together with Portland Audubon and other conservation groups—a type of cooperation hard to imagine at the height of the Timber Wars. “I look at the last year or two as some of the most important progress on state lands we’ve made in a very long time,” Sallinger says.

Even in places where Northern Spotted Owls are still navigating clearcuts, like on the coastal timberlands Green Diamond manages, the birds are proving resilient. In the twilight of second-growth redwoods and Douglas fir, Early Dorvall and Hamm watch as another male they had been trying to lure regurgitates the bone and fur remains of his latest meal. When a female Spotted Owl joins the scene, the pair of birds exchange strings of excited hoots and suddenly, briefly, fuse their bodies. Early Dorvall exclaims, “Oh, they’re copulating!” Over her many years of monitoring the birds, it’s a scene she’s never before witnessed. In a few short months, fluffy chicks may fill this pair’s nest and brighten the bird’s prospects. Oblivious to the high stakes, the two imperiled owls keep chittering and whistling to each other as the light fades.

This article by Ashley Braun was first published by Audubon in September 2022. Lead Image: Decades of logging old-growth habitat have left the Northern Spotted Owl vulnerable to newer threats. Photo: Morgan Heim.

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Fighting for Wildlife supports approved wildlife conservation organizations, which spend at least 80 percent of the money they raise on actual fieldwork, rather than administration and fundraising. When making a donation you can designate for which type of initiative it should be used – wildlife, oceans, forests or climate.

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An emergency plan is being drawn up to save the capercaillie, one of the UK’s most elusive and threatened woodland birds, after its numbers plunged.

The Royal Society for the Protection of Birds said the latest population survey found its estimated population had fallen from roughly 1,114 in 2015/16 to about 542 birds last winter, putting it at a critically low level.

Officials in the Cairngorms national park are working on plans to close and reroute paths used by ramblers, dog walkers and mountain bikers through the Highland forests where capercaillie mate and nests, in a final effort to halt the species’ decline.

In previous surveys 20 and 30 years ago, ornithologists estimated there were roughly 2,000 capercaillie in Scotland. Since then, unfavourable weather during early summer – thought to be influenced by climate change – has frequently hit their breeding.

Once seen as far west as Loch Lomond and across Highland Perthshire, the bird is now almost entirely restricted to forests in the Badenoch and Strathspey area of the Cairngorms, where it feeds on blaeberries, pine seeds and shoots.

The capercaillie is the largest member of the grouse family. It was the first species to be deliberately reintroduced into the UK, from Sweden in 1837. It had previously been hunted into extinction, and this year the scientific advisory committee for NatureScot, the government conservation agency, warned that at the present rate of decline it could again become extinct in the UK in two to three decades.

Landowners have been stripping out deer fences known to kill capercaillie as they fly, introduced voluntary requests for walkers to keep dogs on their leads and asked walkers and mountain bikers to stay on marked paths through breeding areas from April to August.

Intensive efforts are under way to increase native pine forests in the Cairngorms, the main capercaillie habitat, through an alliance of landowners called Cairngorms Connect, some of whom are at the forefront of the rewilding movement in the Highlands.

Andy Ford, the park’s director of nature and climate change, said there were now moves in hand to stop walkers, cyclists and dogs disturbing capercaillie during the breeding season, when males gather in mating areas known as a lek – the Old Norse word for play – to fight, display and establish dominance.

He said the national park and its partners were pursuing more radical proposals. The survey results had “really brought home the sense of urgency”, he said. “We’ve seen the capercaillie declining and have invested a significant amount of time and money doing what we can. What this does is say we need to do more. We’re going to need an emergency plan for the next three to five years. What more do we need to do to act at speed, and act together wherever possible?”

Ford said the national park put heavy emphasis on collaborative agreements with residents and visitors; mountain bikers and ramblers had already shown they were committed to voluntary restrictions. New bylaws to close down the most sensitive areas during the breeding season could be an option in future, if the present measures fail.

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Ecologists are testing diversionary feeding for predators, laying out carrion to stop pine martens and foxes eating capercaillie chicks.

Gus Jones, the convener of the Badenoch and Strathspey Conservation Group, said the park authority and NatureScot were partly to blame, by allowing housing and holiday developments and by failing in the past to arrest the growth of outdoor sports in sensitive locations.

“The authority and NatureScot have repeatedly made unrealistic assessments,” he said. “These fail to take proper account of the reality that as recreational pressures grow, many users seek out less frequented areas, which are often promoted on social media. Their appraisals have also underestimated the distances people go, especially given the rising popularity of mountain biking, e-bikes and running.”

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The government’s “Brexit freedoms bill” could see all legal protections from pesticides abolished, wildlife campaigners have warned, putting insects, wildlife and human health in danger.

The bill, published a week ago by prime minister Liz Truss’s new administration, would result in all EU-derived laws being removed at the end of 2023, including 570 environmental regulations. The government could retain or amend some regulations, but has not set out plans to do so. Campaigners are worried there is insufficient time to put new regulations in place.

Green NGOs were already concerned by the lack of government action to reduce the harm pesticides cause to the environment, having failed so far to introduce a new national action plan on the sustainable use of pesticides, promised in 2018.

Ministers have also repeatedly overruled the government’s independent expert panel to allow the use of banned pesticides, such as bee-harming neonicotinoids, on an “emergency” basis. Scientists have warned many insect populations such as bees are falling at “frightening” rates that are “tearing apart the tapestry of life”.

Since the publication of the bill, environmental charities representing millions of people have been in revolt over the plan to slash nature protections and potentially remove environmental requirements from the billions of pounds of farming subsidies paid out each year.

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“Pesticide use has caused localised extinctions of bee populations and has made our rivers toxic,” said Steve Backshall, president of invertebrate charity Buglife and wildlife TV presenter. “This is a time for our government to protect wildlife and people from pesticide harm. I urge our new government to reconsider removing pesticide regulation.”

Matt Shardlow, Buglife CEO, said: “There will be over 500 pieces of [environmental] legislation removed by the bill. It took three years for the department of environment to get the environment bill through parliament – the idea that we could have 500 new pieces of primary legislation in 15 months is crazy.”

A spokesperson for the Department for Environment, Food and Rural Affairs said: “The UK upholds strict food safety, health and environmental standards, and our first priority regarding pesticides is to ensure that they will not harm people or pose unacceptable risks to the environment. The UK government has an excellent record on the environment enshrined in law in our landmark Environment Act.”

“Any decision on preserving, repealing or amending retained EU law will not come at the expense of these high standards and we are working to publish an updated UK national action plan for the sustainable use of pesticides.”

Since Brexit, the EU has strengthened its proposals to protect wildlife from pesticides, including reducing pesticide use by 50%. Buglife and dozens of other environmental NGOs resigned from the government’s pesticide forum in 2019, saying the area of land pesticides were used on had soared in the two decades since they joined the forum. The forum has not been replaced.

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For the first time in history, scientists successfully cloned a wild arctic wolf. Sinogene Biotechnology, the Beijing-based gene firm, has released a video of Maya 100 days after her birth in the lab.

Maya’s donor cell came from a skin sample of a wild female arctic wolf. The oocyte was from a female dog, and the surrogate mother was a beagle, according to reports.

The team of scientists constructed over 130 new embryos from enucleated oocytes of a female dog and somatic cells of a wild female arctic wolf. They then transferred over 80 embryos to the uteri of seven beagles, of which one was born as a healthy wolf. Global Times reported that a beagle was selected because they share genetic ancestry with ancient wolves, and it is more likely to succeed through cloning technology.

Maya now lives with her surrogate beagle, and later she will be delivered to the Harbin Polarland, Northeast China’s Heilongjiang Province, and displayed to the public, according to the report.

Experts say that perfecting this cloning technology will help in breeding rare and endangered animals.

While the successful birth of Maya is something to be celebrated, conservationists also warn that the idea of cloning wildlife should not offer false hope.

Cloning and captive breed-to-release programs can boost wild populations and offer essential genetic diversity vital to species survival, but efforts must still be made to protect the integrity of wildlife habitats to prevent them from reaching the brink of extinction in the first place.

This article by Hailey Kanowsky was first published by OneGreenPlanet on 21 September 2022. Lead Image Source : Mircea Costina/Shutterstock.

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The plains-wanderer is a small, critically-endangered bird with a tawny marking on its chest that can only be found in south-eastern Australia’s arid grasslands. It is estimated that only 250 to 1,000 of these speckled birds are left in the wild, according to Bush Heritage Australia. The plains-wanderer is at risk of impending extinction and is the lone surviving species on its branch of the evolutionary tree.

In order to track this rare bird species, fifteen plains-wanderers have been released into their native habitat in New South Wales (NSW) wearing tiny solar-powered backpacks equipped with satellite tracking technology, a press release from the NSW Government’s Minister for Environment and Heritage said.

It is only the second time the birds have been released in NSW and is part of a joint government conservation effort between Southern Australia (SA), Victoria and NSW.

“This second-ever release of Plains-wanderers back into their native habitat in NSW is the culmination of years of conservation work aimed at bringing the species back from the brink,” said NSW Environment Minister James Griffin in the press release. “Plains-wanderers are a small, ground-dwelling bird that is particularly vulnerable to threats such as foxes and feral cats, and native grassland habitat loss. They’re a critical part of the ecosystem because their presence or absence is an indicator of the health of their native habitat.”

As part of the Saving our Species program sponsored by the NSW Government — which has $175 in funding over a ten-year period — the plains-wanderers were released into Oolambeyan National Park, a critical habitat for the rare bird species.

The solar-powered backpacks can provide as much as two years of satellite data. Earlier backpack tracking devices only had a battery life of 12 weeks and were only able to be tracked with field transmitters.

“These solar-backpack wearing Plains-wanderers are paving the way for us to gather important data, which will ultimately help us improve our conservation efforts for wild populations into the future,” Griffin said.

Before a drastic decline in numbers in the past decade, the plains-wanderer was apparent throughout eastern Australia, reported The Guardian. Much of their known remaining habitat is on privately-owned land.

The quail-like birds have very specific habitat requirements. The population isn’t able to sustain itself during droughts, when there are fewer insects and materials to make nests. But during periods of extreme rain, an excess of weeds can cause the birds to relocate, but researchers aren’t sure where the endangered birds go.

All of the fifteen plains-wanderers released into the wild were from conservation breeding programs — eleven from NSW’s Taronga Western Plains Zoo, three from SA’s Monarto Safari Park and one from Victoria’s Werribee Open Range Zoo, the press release said.

“Three of the recently released birds have come from Monarto Safari Park, and this project is a great example of our zoos working together across a number of jurisdictions with the help of private landholders to help save a native species,” said South Australia Minister for Climate, Environment and Water Susan Close in the press release.

The second NSW release follows a release of ten birds in March near Hay in NSW and 16 last year in Victoria in conjunction with a national recovery initiative to bring the species back from the brink of extinction.

“This is the first ever plains-wanderer release to use satellite technology to track the endangered species and the more we know about this elusive bird, the better chance we have at conservation success. This joint initiative is part of our record investment into protecting our precious biodiversity,” said Victorian Minister for Environment and Climate Action Lily D’Ambrosio in the press release.

This article by Cristen Hemingway Jaynes was first published by EcoWatch on 19 September 2022. Lead Image: A female plains-wanderer (Pedionomus torquatus) in Deniliquin, New South Wales, Australia. JJ Harrison / CC BY-SA 3.0.

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Nearly half of the planet’s bird species are in decline, according to a definitive report that paints the grimmest picture yet of the destruction of avian life.

The State of the World’s Birds report, which is released every four years by BirdLife International, shows that the expansion and intensification of agriculture is putting pressure on 73% of species. Logging, invasive species, exploitation of natural resources and climate breakdown are the other main threats.

Globally, 49% of bird species are declining, one in eight are threatened with extinction and at least 187 species are confirmed or suspected to have gone extinct since 1500. Most of these have been endemic species living on islands, although there is an increase in birds now going extinct on larger land masses, particularly in tropical regions. In Ethiopia, for example, the conversion of grassland to farmland has caused an 80% decrease in endemic Liben larks since 2007. Just 6% of bird species globally are increasing.

Bird populations in decline around the world. Photograph: BirdLife International and Dogeatcog

Since 1970, 2.9 billion individual birds (29% of the total) have been destroyed in North America. The picture is just as bleak in other parts of the world – since 1980, 600 million birds (19%) have been destroyed in Europe, with previously abundant species such as the common swift, common snipe and rook among those slipping towards extinction. Europe’s farmland birds have shown the most significant declines: 57% have disappeared as a result of increased mechanisation, use of chemicals and converting land into crops. In Australia, 43% of abundant seabird species have declined between 2000 and 2016.

Dr Stuart Butchart, chief scientist at BirdLife International, said: “We have to stop these declines and start getting on track for recovery. Our future, as well as the world’s birds, depends on it. If we continue to unravel the fabric of life, we’re going to continue to place our own future at threat.”

Silvery-cheeked hornbills in the western Usambara mountains near Lushoto, Tanzania. Photograph: John Warburton-Lee Photography/Alamy

The report is made up of a compendium of other studies, and because birds are the best-studied group on the planet, it gives an idea of the state of nature more generally. “Birds are useful for telling us about the state of the planet. What they say is that nature is in poor condition, lots of species are in decline,” said Butchart.

Birds are cornerstones of healthy ecosystems, so their disappearance is likely to have myriad negative knock-on effects. Hornbills, for example, disperse large seeds in tropical forests; turkey vultures dispose of organic waste, while seabirds help in the cycle of nutrients between sea and land, keeping coral reefs healthy.

The previous State of the World’s Birds report, released in 2018, found 40% of bird species worldwide in decline.

Wildfires feature more prominently in this report than previous editions, having increased and ravaged previously unaffected habitats. The succession of heatwaves, droughts and floods in recent years will lead to widespread species extinctions if they continue, researchers warn, highlighting the importance of addressing the nature and climate crises at the same time.

A Bahama warbler. The birds’ habitat was destroyed when Hurricane Dorian hit the Bahamas in 2019. Photograph: blickwinkel/Alamy

Growing evidence links the health of bird populations to human health. Covid-19 is a warning of what could happen if we continue to destroy the natural world, with 70% of zoonotic diseases originating in wildlife. A highly pathogenic variant of avian flu – the result of intensive farming – has driven rapid declines in some bird populations this year. More than 300 outbreaks have been reported in UK seabird colonies.

The report comes ahead of the Cop15 meeting in Montreal in December, a once-in-a-decade opportunity to create new legislation to tackle the biodiversity crisis. Butchart hopes the findings will feed into the final statement from Montreal. “The key action needed now by governments is to make sure a really ambitious and bold global biodiversity framework is adopted. We’ve got to bend this curve, so by 2030 we’re on a mission of being nature positive,” he said.

This means increasing the number and quality of protected areas, conserving remaining habitats and restoring those that have been degraded. Preventing the illegal killing of birds, managing invasive species, reducing fisheries’ bycatch and preventing overexploitation of natural resources will all help.

The secretary bird is classified as endangered due to destruction of its habitat in sub-Saharan Africa. Photograph: Graham Purse/BirdLife

The report is not all gloom. According to BirdLife, between 21 and 32 bird species would have gone extinct since 1993 without conservation work. It cites the creation of a new seabird haven the size of France in the North Atlantic, estimated to protect 5 million birds.

Juliet Vickery, chief executive of the British Trust for Ornithology, who was not involved in compiling the report, said: “The fact that nearly half of all bird species are declining and one in eight is at risk of extinction reinforces the fact that we are living through a biodiversity crisis. It requires action at every level, from local to global. This carries a strong warning about the health of our natural world.”

Birds in trouble

The South American harpy eagle, which stands 1 metre (3 feet) tall and feeds on monkeys and sloths, is one of the world’s largest birds of prey. It was uplisted from near threatened to vulnerable on the International Union for Conservation of Nature (IUCN) red list in 2021 because of a combination of forest loss, hunting, poaching and collisions with power lines. It has declined by 50% in 60 years.

The secretary bird, a raptor from sub-Saharan Africa, went from being vulnerable to endangered in 2020 after habitat degradation driven by the burning of grasslands and intensive livestock grazing. Birds are also captured for the wildlife trade.

The lesser florican, a species endemic to the Indian subcontinent whose males perform leaping rituals to get the attention of females, has declined by 90% in 20 years, mainly because of the loss of grassland habitats and the predation of its chicks by feral dogs. There are believed to be fewer than 1,000 mature individuals left, and it is now critically endangered.

The impressive vocal abilities of the Central American yellow-naped Amazon has made it one of the most sought-after parrots in the pet trade. It has declined by more than 80% in 30 years, mainly due to poaching and the expansion of agriculture, and as of 2022 is critically endangered.

The Bahama warbler was badly affected by Hurricane Dorian in 2019, especially on Grand Bahama, where 95% of its habitat is believed to have been destroyed. It was listed as endangered in 2020.

Find more age of extinction coverage here, and follow biodiversity reporters Phoebe Weston and Patrick Greenfield on Twitter for all the latest news and features

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What is salient is not important. What is important is not salient. Most of the time, most of the media obsess over issues of mind-numbing triviality. Much of the world’s political journalism is little more than court gossip: who’s in, who’s out, who said what to whom. At the same time, issues of immense, even existential importance are largely or entirely ignored.

With the exception of all-out nuclear war, all the most important problems that confront us are environmental. None of our hopes, none of our dreams, none of our plans and expectations can survive the loss of a habitable planet. And there is scarcely an Earth system that is not now threatened with collapse.

Let’s begin with the ground beneath our feet. Soil is a biological structure, created by the organisms that inhabit it. When conditions become hostile to their survival, the structure collapses, and fertile lands turn to dust bowls. The global rate of soil degradation is terrifying. We rely on the soil for 95% of our food, yet we treat it like dirt.

Ocean ecosystems are in even greater trouble, hammered by a combination of industrial fishing, pollution, and acidification, as carbon dioxide dissolves into seawater. Forests, rivers, wetlands, savannahs, the cryosphere (the world’s ice and snow) – all are being pushed towards the brink. And above all, climate breakdown is gathering at shocking, unanticipated speed, with disasters occurring at 1.2C of heating that scientists did not expect until we hit 2 or 3C.

All of Earth’s systems are complex, which means they do not respond to change in linear and steady ways. They absorb stress up to a certain point, then suddenly collapse. If one goes down, it can trigger the collapse of others: during previous mass extinctions, collapse seems to have cascaded from one ecosystem and Earth system to the next. The conditions in which we and the majority of life on Earth evolved could, if we do not take urgent and drastic action, soon and perhaps suddenly come to an end.

Yet you would scarcely know it. Most of the media, most of the time, either ignore our environmental crisis, downplay it or deny it. The reason is not difficult to discern. Most of the media are owned by corporations or billionaires, who have a financial interest in sustaining business as usual. If governments acted to prevent the collapse of Earth systems, business models would have to change drastically, and these changes would disfavour legacy industries and their investments. To keep the proprietors, shareholders and advertisers happy – or, in the case of public sector broadcasters, to keep the government off their backs – the most important topics of all are neglected.

Part of the Guardian’s mission is to fill in the gaps, to cover issues overlooked by most of the rest of the media, above all the issues whose neglect could be fatal to much of life on Earth, including the majority of human beings. With correspondents all over the world and a dedicated team of expert reporters, thoughtful commentary and an open and empirical approach, the Guardian seeks to put environmental issues at the front and centre. Almost every week, we break major environmental stories, many of which feature nowhere else in the media, and which, by any objective measure, are more important than most of the stories that dominate elsewhere.

Without a proprietor or other such interests leaning on us, we are free to explore issues and express opinions that in other places are treated as a kind of blasphemy. Our aim is to make the important salient and the salient important. But depth and scope do not come cheap. Investigating issues not covered elsewhere, rather than merely recycling press releases, requires a great deal of time and money.

Moreover, we believe that everyone should have the right to learn about such crucial topics, so we have resisted the commercial pressure to paywall our content. Instead, our fiercely independent journalism remains open and free for millions to rely upon every day.

With your help, we can continue to expand the scope of our inquiries, and to place environmental issues where they belong: at the front and centre of people’s minds.

The Guardian puts the climate crisis front and centre, and is committed to doing so. We rely on readers to fund our important work. Please consider supporting us today.

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The California condor is one of the largest flying birds in North America, with a wingspan that stretches nearly 10 feet, helping it reach speeds of up to 50 miles per hour. This majestic bird once ruled the skies of the Pacific coast, long before European settlers arrived.

Since then, indiscriminate poaching, habitat destruction, lead poisoning and the pervasive California condor louse all contributed to the California Condor’s disappearance, CBS News reports. The bird became extinct from the wild in 1987, when there were only 22 California condors left on the planet.

That’s when the US government ordered the capture of all 27 remaining wild birds, which were bred in captivity at the San Diego Zoo and the Los Angeles Zoo.

Conservationists treated all the condors with a pesticide to kill the California condor louse which has since been eradicated in an instance of conservation-induced extinction.

The California Condor has been driven to near extinction by habitat destruction, pollution, and a parasite that has since been killed off. PHOTO: ADOBE STOCK / PHOTOGRAPHY BY ADRI

In the early 1990s, some condors were reintroduced into the wild. Today, the bird inhabits range in parts of California and Utah in the US and Baja California in Mexico, the National Parks Service reports.

As of May 2022, there are 113 condors in the wild in the canyon country of northern Arizona and southern Utah, St George News reports, while the total world population of endangered California Condors numbers more than 550 individuals, with more than half flying free in Arizona, Utah, California and Mexico.

California Condor now fly throughout the skies of Utah, California and Arizona. PHOTO: ADOBE STOCK / JARCOSA

Though this bird is coming back from the brink, the California condor is not yet safe. A significant percentage of all released condors have died or been returned to captivity. The IUCN still classifies the bird as critically endangered.

Poisoning by ingestion of lead shot — scavenged along with carcasses left behind by hunters — is still one of the most widespread and preventable causes of condor deaths, the Center for Biological Diversity maintains.

Dozens of condors have more recently been killed by lead poisoning from hunting ammunition. PHOTO: ADOBE STOCK / JENS

“Since first being reintroduced to the southern Utah area in 1996, 54% of condor deaths have been confirmed as caused by lead poisoning from lead ammunition,” Jake Richards, a master’s student in Utah State University’s Department of Environment and Society told Utah State Magazine. “This number is probably higher, but the remote locations of the condor’s nesting and foraging range makes it impossible to recover and diagnose every death.”

California condors will fly up to 200 miles per day searching for carrion to eat. When those sources of food contain fragments of soft lead-core bullets, it creates a serious health risk for the condor. This threat is created any time a wounded animal escapes a hunt, gut-piles are left behind after a kill, or pest animals are shot and left for dead. Toxic lead accumulates in the bodies of the condors, and has caused the deaths of dozens of birds since they were first reintroduced to the wild.

According to the Center for Biological Diversity, lead ammunition also poses health risks to people. Fragmented lead bullets can leave tiny particles in meat that humans eat. Studies show that even dust-sized particles of lead can infect a radius of 18 inches from the bullet wound. Venison that has been donated to feed the hungry has been recalled by state authorities because of lead contamination from lead bullet fragments. According to the Center for Biological Diversity, Nearly 10 million hunters, their families and low-income beneficiaries of venison donations may be at risk.

Help us save the California Condor from extinction! PHOTO: ADOBE STOCK / TRENT TOWNSEND

For over a decade, the Center for Biological Diversity’s Get the Lead Out Campaign has advocated for California and Arizona to require the use of nonlead ammunition within the condor’s range. This effort prompted California’s Ridley-Tree Condor Preservation Act, which requires the use of nonlead centerfire rifle and pistol ammunition for big game and coyote hunting within specified areas. The Center also achieved a settlement with California’s wildlife agencies eliminating lead ammunition for hunting of “nuisance” animals.

The Utah Division of Wildlife Services, working with The Peregrine Fund, uses incentive programs to encourage hunters to voluntarily adopt non-lead ammunition when hunting big game in the condor range, Utah Public Radio reports. Big game hunters in California condor habitat can receive coupons for free non-lead ammunition. If they use it — or opt to pack out gut piles — they are eligible to enter a drawing for one of five hunting rifles.

If there is anything that can be done to cave the California condor, leaving behind lead-based ammunition will make the biggest impact.

We must convince hunters in Arizona, California and Utah to voluntarily abandon lead-based ammunition when hunting in condor territory. That means helping hunters feel empowered to act and convince them to actually make a change, and that starts with making the change ourselves.

This article by Matthew Russell was first published by The Animal Rescue Site. Lead Image: PHOTO: ADOBE STOCK / JAMES MICHAEL IMAGES AT ONE POINT THERE WERE ONLY 27 CALIFORNIA CONDORS ALIVE ON EARTH..

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