Wildlife returning, wild places recovering, and people protecting what they love, from all over the world.
Global Good News
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.
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 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.
On a Sunday morning in Rajasthan's Thar Desert, two young male Great Indian Bustards, hatched and raised by people, walked out of a soft release pen in Desert National Park and into the wild. Ten years of patient work came down to those first free steps, with 97 more birds growing up behind 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.
In 2015 a robot camera 1,773 metres down beside Darwin Island caught a small blue octopus crossing the sand, and the scientists watching live could not believe their eyes. This year it got its name, and was described whole, in thousands of X ray slices.
Between Yakushima and Amami, the Tokara Islands are twelve specks of volcanic rock with a ferry twice a week. A small olive warbler that sings there every spring is now its own species, Japan's first new bird in 45 years, told apart by its genes and its song.
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.
Helper is an old railway town in the Utah desert, and the Price River through it used to shrink to a trickle. In 2019 a Utah State University student began moving beavers there. Six years on the river runs all year, the fish are back, and the town floats down it all summer.
West of Bora Bora, a small island paired every fish with a breadfruit variety so each one got the rest of the year off, and a geographer and a Tahitian researcher have just written down what the islanders carved in stone.
On Lios Mor, a limestone island in Loch Linnhe on Scotland's west coast, the historical society paid for the excavation, islanders dug beside the archaeologists, and a paper out this week says their monastery was melting gold and silver thirteen centuries ago.
