Armed with flashlights, recordings of bird calls, a small notebook and a stash of candy bars, scientist Rich Kostecke embarked on an annual 24-hour Christmastime count of birds along the Texas Gulf Coast. Yellow rail. Barn owl. Bittern. Crested Cara-Cara. Kostecke rattled off the names and scribbled them in his notebook.
Conservationists have built an artificial bat cave deep in the Tennessee woods to see if it can be a blueprint for saving bats, which are dying by the millions from a fungus spreading across North America.
Conservationists have built an artificial bat cave deep in the Tennessee woods to see if it can be a blueprint for saving bats who are dying by the millions from a fungus spreading across North America.
The cash cows on Carlos Marques' farm used to be nothing but that: herds of dairy cattle that grazed the grassy, rolling hills of his property, where most of the dense tropical forest was long ago cut down for pastures and cropland.
Strange things are aloft in the bird world.
The Venus flytrap's precarious survival in the wild along the coast of the Carolinas faces an added threat from poachers looking to cash in by uprooting and selling them.
Villagers living on the Indonesian side of Borneo killed at least 750 endangered orangutans in a year, some to protect crops from being raided and others for their meat, a new survey shows.
Speculation is mounting that BP may go bankrupt paying costs associated with the Gulf oil disaster. Pre-spill, BP had net assets of $105 billion and annual cash flow of up to $40 billion per year, excluding dividends and capital expenditures. Goldman Sachs estimates that BP will spend about $40,000 per barrel for cleanup, containment, litigation and related costs. If estimates hold, BP's present liability already has reached as much as $56 billion. Another $50 billion in liability is not unrealistic, and a few analysts are giving a high estimate of as much as $398 billion.
Shock and awe — we are living it! We stand, mouth agape, staring at the pump — at $4 gallons and fast-emptying pocketbooks. Even worse, with crude oil already costing more than $120 a barrel, many predict this wave has yet to crest.
