Every story we have published, newest first.
Conservation
Two stations on the Gulf Plains and one on Cape York Peninsula, almost 396,000 hectares of wetlands, waterholes and savanna woodland, are joining Australia's protected area network. Queensland bought them with The Nature Conservancy and two philanthropic partners.
Mala, the rufous hare wallaby, vanished from the wild in 1991. Twenty four were brought home to Uluru in 2005. This May, Anangu, Mala Rangers and park staff counted them at nearly 500.
Fly a laser scanner over the rainforest of Acre in western Brazil and the ground underneath gives up its secrets: ring after ring of ditches and banks, dug by a people archaeologists now call the Aquiry, who may have numbered three million at their height.
Paaru Natural Products was founded by three Malyangapa and Barkandji women on medicinal plant knowledge handed down through their mothers' lines. With CSIRO they have turned it into a process six times more efficient, and the plant's identity never left the room.
America's rarest wolf lives wild in one corner of North Carolina, fewer than forty animals in all. In April three pups born at a zoo in Missouri were placed in a wild mother's den at seven days old. Months later, the cameras found all three alive and growing.
In 2017 the bogong moths all but vanished. People who climbed into the alpine caves that spring found bare rock. This October the moths are back in their billions, and at Zoos Victoria there have been happy tears.
Gunlom is the waterfall everyone knows, an 85 metre drop with a natural pool at the top looking out over Kakadu. It closed in 2019 and stayed closed for almost six years. On 1 July it opened again, and the reason it took that long is the best part of the story.
On 35 acres of bush at Dural, against Berowra Valley National Park, a sanctuary founded in 1977 has cared for Sydney's injured and orphaned wildlife on volunteer hours and donated food. Twice a week the boxes come up the hill from the Harris Farm store, and now there is a cool room to keep them.
An early start from the ferry, a family of brush turkeys, cockatoos free falling out of the canopy, and a swim I could not resist. Five special places, one short ferry ride from home.
In 2021 a Colorado nursery owner posted a photo of himself beside some very large lily pads on a river in eastern Colombia. At Kew, Carlos Magdalena knew no giant waterlily had ever been recorded there. A satellite search and one night boat ride later, Victoria colombiana has a name.
We caught the train up the coast on a spring Sunday for Woytopia, the free sustainable living festival the Peninsula Environment Group has run with volunteers since 2008. Here is the day as we lived it, from the first plate to the last tree.
About 63 kilometres south east of Blackall, Geoscience Australia drilled three kilometres down looking for rock salt. What came up instead was nearly a kilometre of core packed with fossil corals, sponges, trilobites and ammonites from a reef more than 325 million years old.
