Dennis Carroll doesn’t mean to sound callous when he says the coronavirus outbreak was predictable. And he doesn’t. He sounds sympathetic to people frightened by the outbreak.…

Eugene Schieffelin was the eccentric ornithologist who in 1890 shipped 60 starlings from London to New York City and set them free in Central Park. The next year he released 40 more,…

Human “exceptionalism” is for many people an unquestioned assumption. For the religious, it is a God-given fact; for humanists, it is a celebration of our unique mental capacities.…

Living in the flat, arid landscape of the Kalahari, meerkats are one of the most cooperative species of mammal on the planet. The scarcity of food and few places to hide from predators…

As they often do after a rainstorm, butterflies had gathered around puddles on Pigeon Mountain in northwest Georgia. Nets in hand, James Adams and his friend Irving Finkelstein watched…

Frans de Waal calls his new book Mama’s Last Hug in reference to an emotional encounter between Mama, a 58-year-old chimpanzee, and Jan van Hooff, an 80-year-old biology professor.…

Cull auctions sell animals who have been culled from the herd: those who have been deemed no longer productive or economically viable. Animals sold at cull auctions will typically…

On March 3, 1942, a brief item with a rather peculiar headline appeared tucked away in the Berliner Morgenpost newspaper. “Fledermaus No Longer!” the bold letters proclaimed. The…

Wrangel Island carries a certain profoundness, a divine story of a different sort. Life here is postapocalyptic, a kind of rebound. It portends the future. My sponsor is Alexander…

Dead animals were scattered across the steppe in front of us. Up to the horizon. Thousands of them. That was the moment we understood that we were observing a mass mortality of catastrophic…