This is an abridged version of a piece I wrote shortly after her death a year today. I find it hard to believe Jane Goodall is gone. She was more than an icon to me. She was a friend, a mentor, and someone whose presence felt like both a gift and a lesson. Our friendship began in the most Jane way possible: an email that opened, “Yes, this is the real Jane Goodall,” followed by a request that I not share her “secret email address.” She said she admired Mongabay and wanted to meet. That message was the start of thirteen years of laughs, tears, and conversations that often stretched late into the night over vegan Indian food and a glass of whisky in her hotel room—even though I rarely drink or stay out late. Jane had a way of making every encounter feel personal. When she first met my children, she lit up as if she had been waiting her whole life for them to enter the room. She crouched to their level, told stories, and pulled up YouTube videos of rats performing clever tricks. “Aren’t they marvelous?” she said, with the same awe she once expressed for the chimpanzees of Gombe. She told my son he was an inspiration for starting a trash cleanup at his school.  She believed hope was not simply a feeling but a tool. Hope, she would tell me, creates agency. The larger the crisis, the more powerless people feel. But small, local…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. For much of the 20th century, Cuba’s spiders and scorpions received limited attention beyond specialist circles. Identifying them required careful research in museum collections and comparing them with descriptions published abroad. Giraldo Alayón García spent much of his career documenting Cuba’s arachnids and bringing them to the public’s attention. In San Antonio de los Baños, southwest of Havana, he used Radio Ariguanabo to discuss wildlife with a general audience. At the National Museum of Natural History of Cuba, where he spent almost four decades, he helped build one of the Caribbean’s principal collections of arachnids. At the museum, he curated specimens collected in Cuba and elsewhere in the Caribbean, and added the records that made the collection useful to other researchers. Under Alayón, the museum’s arachnological collection became one of the Caribbean’s most substantial. In 1994, he published a list of Cuba’s spiders, which became a standard point of reference for work on the island’s arachnids. Across his career, he described about 95 species and genera, most of them endemic to Cuba. He also worked abroad. From 1993 to 1995, he directed the Arachnological Project of Yucatán in Mexico. In 1999, he led an expedition to Navassa Island — contested between Haiti and the U.S. — where researchers identified several species new to science. One, the scorpion Cazierius alayoni, was named for him. Alayón first took wildlife to a wider audience on Radio…This article was originally published on Mongabay

With illegal logging and agricultural expansion closing in on their lands, four Indigenous Wounaan and Emberá-Wounaan villages in Panama’s Darién forest started a biodiversity monitoring project to document their forests’ conservation status, reports Mongabay contributor María Paula Rubiano A. Their biodiversity monitoring project recorded more than 200 species across 18,000 hectares (44,500 acres) of threatened forest, including three “umbrella” species: Jaguars (Panthera onca), Baird’s tapirs (Tapirus bairdii) and crested eagles (Morphnus guianensis). At least 15 of the species they documented are classified as threatened. The communities are now using the data as a baseline for joining the biodiversity credit market, which they hope can generate revenue in an area where there are few opportunities to earn money. The communities are using bioacoustic monitoring and camera-trapping with the support of the Panama-based NGO FSC Indigenous Foundation and Health In Harmony, an international nonprofit. They are employing a methodology developed by Savimbo, a biodiversity credit company co-founded by Indigenous community members, that uses 15 indicator species as a proxy for forest health. Samuel Cheucarama, who lives in an Indigenous Wounaan village, told Rubiano the efforts have already changed behavior in the communities. “People don’t go hunting anymore. They’re saying, ‘We’re going to put up a ‘No Hunting’ sign.” Read the full article here. Banner image:Baird’s tapirs (Tapirus bairdii) are the largest native land mammals in Central and South America. Image by user Rhododendrites via Wikimedia Commons (CC BY-SA 4.0).  This article was originally published on Mongabay

Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. On April 9, a farmer named Rupalal heard noises in a well at his field in Dhawadi village in the state of Rajasthan in India. He looked down and saw a leopard 21 meters (70 feet) below. A Rajasthan Forest Department team arrived at the scene and lowered a cage into the well, but the leopard would not enter. So Pratap Singh Chundawat, a ranger, descended into the shaft by rope. He tranquilized the animal with a dart gun, and the team was able to remove it safely. Before its release, the leopard was given a veterinary examination, which found that it was a healthy, one-and-a-half-year-old male. For Chundawat, while the event was particularly dramatic, it was in line with his work. Chundawat was well known for wildlife rescues and his work in tree nurseries, and had won awards at the district and division level. On the eve of this year’s World Environment Day, the Rajasthan Environment and Energy Conservation Centre honored Chundawat in Jaipur, the Rajasthan state capital, for “outstanding contributions to forest and wildlife conservation.” Suresh Agrawal, deputy conservator of forest in Rajasthan’s Pratapgarh district, called Chundawat “our best officer.” On Sept. 22, Chundawat died after he was run down by people allegedly involved in a local soil mining mafia. According to news accounts, at roughly 11:30 p.m. on Sept. 21, forest staff were notified that an earthmover and a truck…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. In 2022, poachers had taken 14 white rhinos from private farms in Namibia in six weeks, so owners started removing their horns. One cow had a horn 86 centimeters (34 inches) long. Jaco Muller said he was nearly in tears when it was removed. “It is such a magnificent animal,” he said. “But for the animal’s sake, it is for the best.” Dehorning gave poachers less reason to kill a rhino. For Muller, the sight of a dehorned rhino was preferable to finding a dead one. The idea for breeding rhinos came from his son, then 15, as a school project. In 2010, Muller converted the family’s antelope-breeding operation into what became the Rhino Momma Project in Namibia’s Kunene region. Muller believed that breeding more white rhinos (Ceratotherium simum), keeping them secure enough to reproduce, and then replenishing populations across Africa could help save the species. So he built a breeding program with a rhino-custodianship farm and the nonprofit Help Our Rhinos Now, or HoRn. The first calf was born in 2013; by 2025, the project had become one of Namibia’s larger privately run rhino-breeding operations. Kifaru Lodge, which Muller opened in 2018, brought in money from tourists to help cover security and rhino care. Muller also supported legalizing the trade in rhino horn. His argument was that prohibition let criminals collect the profits while farm owners and conservation groups paid for security.…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Founder’s Briefs: An occasional series where Mongabay founder Rhett Ayers Butler shares analysis, perspectives and story summaries. A mountain lion in front of the Hollywood sign sounds almost too convenient. When photographer Steve Winter proposed the picture, National Park Service biologist Jeff Sikich thought he was crazy. There were, as far as Sikich knew, no mountain lions in Griffith Park. Then P-22 turned up. Winter spent more than a year trying to get the photograph. Remote cameras were stolen, and equipment failed. Eventually, he captured P-22 walking beneath the Hollywood sign at night, his tracking collar visible around his neck. The photograph made P-22 famous and gave Los Angeles a symbol of the problems faced by wildlife boxed in by roads and development. P-22 became closely associated with the campaign for the Wallis Annenberg Wildlife Crossing over U.S. Route 101, which is intended to reconnect habitat divided by one of the region’s busiest freeways. The story is one of nine in Big Cats, a new book by Winter and journalist Sharon Guynup, who is also Mongabay’s wildlife editor. The pair revisit some of their most consequential reporting projects in the book in their recent conversation with Mike DiGirolamo, the host and producer of the Mongabay Newscast. One of those projects took them to Thailand’s Tiger Temple, a lucrative tourist attraction where visitors could pose with captive tigers. Guynup and Winter spent a year investigating the operation and documented its links to illegal wildlife trafficking. Thai authorities eventually raided and closed…This article was originally published on Mongabay