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.
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.
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.
In Tla-o-qui-aht waters off Tofino, guardians, scientists and a kelp grower are raising baby kelp on four long lines under the sea and planting it out so young salmon and herring have a forest again. About 1,500 sea otters, back after the fur trade, are helping.
Naidiri is 32 households on Fiji's Coral Coast. Since 2009 it has kept a stretch of its own sea closed to fishing, and in one year planted 18,000 corals and 10,000 mangroves. Now its youth group wants the protected line pushed further out.
At Long Nanny on the Northumberland coast, National Trust rangers kept watch over the dunes day and night all summer, and 126 pairs of little terns nested there, more than double the 1994 record. At Blakeney Point, a thousand pairs of sandwich terns came back after two years away.
Voting is open in the ABC's Australian Insect of the Year, a tortoise shelled ladybird is in the final six, and the reigning champion is a dragonfly with painted wings.
On the last day of July a female Amur tiger called Umit walked out of her enclosure into 450,000 hectares of river forest and reed bed in south east Kazakhstan, the first tiger to live wild there since 1948.
In the strait that runs through the middle of Istanbul, researchers are photographing dorsal fins the way police photograph fingerprints, and the fins keep coming back with calves beside them.
On 5 October the Wombat, Pyrenees and Mount Buangor forests become Victoria's first new national parks in more than a decade, after decades of local people looking after them. Greater gliders, platypus and powerful owls live there, and they are a couple of hours from Melbourne.
