{A national park in Botswana is struggling to support the staggering number of animals fleeing from poaching in other countries.} The elephants swim across the river in a straight line, trunks jutting out of the water like snorkels. With low, guttural bellows, they push their bodies together, forming a living raft to bolster a calf […]

{The birds have some clever adaptations to keep their noggins safe.} During election season, everyone can relate to woodpeckers: We all feel like banging our heads against the wall. The birds handle it better, though, so Weird Animal Question of the Week was pleased to look into Derek Halas’ question: “Why don’t woodpeckers get headaches?” […]

{Veterinarian Olivier Nsengimana is driving the rescue of the gray-crowned crane.} {Many conservationists devote careers to saving one endangered species. Barely into his 30s, Rwandan Olivier Nsengimana is well into helping rescue and revive two.} Soon after receiving a degree in veterinarian medicine in 2010, Nsengimana became a field veterinarian with Gorilla Doctors, a nonprofit […]

{The shiny reptile likely numbers only a thousand individuals in its remote Bahamas habitat, experts say.} On an uninhabited island in the southern Bahamas, a scientist noticed a snake that shined like metal as it climbed a tree. “We all came to take a look at it, and it was instantly clear that this was […]

{For years people have promoted bamboo as an eco-friendly material for everything from countertops to chopsticks. The fast-growing plant has been thought to store up carbon from the atmosphere as it grows, trapping the greenhouse gas.} But scientists had never actually measured bamboo's storage ability. Now a study casts doubt on that process and even […]

{In Zimbabwe, there’s no effective way to track cyanide—and elephants are suffering terrible deaths because of it.} According to Zimbabwe authorities, poachers have killed a total of 80 elephants by poisoning them with cyanide, a highly toxic industrial chemical, during various incidents in recent months. First, 11 elephants were killed in Hwange National Park and […]