Wildlife

A bunch of rude parrots who are notorious for swearing are in the process of being reformed with the help of birds from a new flock at a wildlife park, with the hope that they’ll adopt less offensive sounds.A British wildlife park has come up with a new plan to rehabilitate its potty-mouthed parrots.Back in 2020, five vulgar African gray parrots were donated to Lincolnshire Wildlife Park in eastern England. They were subsequently isolated from the flock in an attempt to improve their language, CNN reported.However,…

When Marijane Sisson looks out the kitchen window of her home outside Cañon City, she is greeted with views of rolling hills and a grassy meadow. Some days, when she’s lucky, a herd of elk appears in the meadow. Sisson and her husband purchased the property in June and moved from Louisiana to live in the South T Bar Ranch development. In the neighborhood of more than 100 properties, located a 45-minute drive northwest of Cañon City, they found a peaceful home nestled in a remote community. Then the couple received a…

Windsor, Ont.-born photographer Brandon Broderick drives tens of thousands of kilometres each year, crisscrossing the backwoods of British Columbia and capturing photos of beautiful, but elusive, wild animals.  All of that hard work paid off this week when Broderick was named the Canadian Geographic's Photographer of the Year for 2023. "My knees buckled. I almost fell to the floor. It was quite an email to receive," said Broderick, 37. "When I got that email that said I won the whole thing, that was surreal. It still…

Canada is home to the largest boreal forest in the world, a vast expanse of wilderness rich in biodiversity that stretches from coast to coast.But a major new study examining nearly a half century of logging in Ontario and Quebec warns that clear-cutting has left forests in the provinces severely depleted — and puts woodland caribou at risk.The peer-reviewed research, published in the academic journal Land, found that logging practices between 1976 and 2020 have resulted in the loss of more than 14 million hectares of…

Scientists observed a rare half-male, half-female Green Honeycreeper in Colombia, offering significant insights into avian biology and sex differentiation. Photos of a bilaterally gynandromorphic Green Honeycreeper near Manizales, Colombia, 20 May 2022. Credit: John MurilloA striking and extremely rare half-female, half-male bird has been spotted by a University of Otago zoologist.Sesquicentennial Distinguished Professor Hamish Spencer was holidaying in Colombia when an amateur ornithologist John Murillo pointed out a…

Ten other entrants were highly commended by the judges: Tzahi Finkelstein, John Blumenkamp, Zoe Ashdown, Brian Matthews, Lara Matthews, Delphine Casimir, Pratick Mondal, Wendy Kaveney, Jacques Poulard, and Dakota Vaccaro.“One of the greatest pleasures we experience in this competition is seeing the incredible standard of photography, combined with humor, which consistently increases each year. This year’s People’s Choice Award winner is like the cherry on the cake. To have a junior entrant win this major prize is…

A few years ago, a couple of Google employees reached out to a Minnesota scientist with an unusual proposal: What if they could teach computers to spot beaver habitats from space? "They wanted to know if I thought it was possible to find beaver wetlands from aerial imagery myself, and then if that could be scaled up with machine learning," Emily Fairfax, a University of Minnesota beaver researcher and assistant professor of geography, told As It Happens guest host Megan Williams.Fairfax knew that beavers' sprawling dams…

A team of University of Queensland scientists conducted a biodiversity survey in their Annerley share house, uncovering 1,150 unique species. This finding significantly exceeded the expected 200 species, revealing a high level of biodiversity in urban environments. The study showcased a variety of species from insects to birds and highlighted the importance of how urban homes and gardens are maintained for fostering biodiversity. Credit: SciTechDaily.comUniversity of Queensland scientists discovered an unexpected…

Deer Creek Golf Course is dying. Where once lay verdant fairways, the 18-hole course near Jefferson County’s Ken Caryl Ranch community is now largely weeds, cattails and long grasses. Nature, inexorably, reclaims its own. No one has played a legitimate round of golf here in three years. The clubhouse sits empty and forlorn, with a four-tiered fountain at its entry now dry and defunct. And though Deer Creek Golf Course claims on its website that it is merely “closed for renovation” and looks forward “to serving you in the…

Small wooden tree-mounted boxes for bats are an increasingly common sight in B.C.'s urban parks, often resembling birdhouses except with entrances underneath.After a string of tragedies near bat boxes, B.C. scientists teamed up to investigate.What they learned over four years, they say, has changed how we should be building summertime homes for mother bats and their pups, with the species' survival at stake."For them to to raise that young they need just-right temperatures to do so," explained study co-author Cori Lausen.…