Wildlife | featured news

National parks, forests and wildlife refuges are to receive $12.5 million in grants to improve access to them while supporting greener travel.

They're better known as stealthy killing machines to take out suspected terrorists with pinpoint accuracy. But drones are also being put to more benign use in skies across several continents to track endangered wildlife, spot poachers and chart forest loss. Although it's still the "dawn of drone ecology," as one innovator calls it, these unmanned aerial vehicles are already skimming over Indonesia's jungle canopy to photograph orangutans, protecting rhinos in Nepal and studying invasive aquatic plants in Florida.

A massive herd of caribou grazes the Arctic tundra. Sea birds fatten up on shellfish along the Chesapeake Bay before flying thousands of miles to winter in South America. A pod of orca glide past Pacific islands blanketed in fir and cedar as they hunt for salmon.

Wildlife agencies in the Northern Rockies go to lengths to warn people of the dangers of grizzly country -- from signs advising hikers to carry mace-like bear spray to radio ads that warn hunters to take care when stalking elk in bear habitat.

The Columbus Zoo and Aquarium, temporary home of the six animals that survived last week's freeing of dozens of exotic animals by the owner who then killed himself, is seeking to prevent the widow from reclaiming her brood, a spokeswoman said Thursday.

Nighttime deer poachers beware — that shadowy creature on the side of the road may just be remote-controlled.

A badly wounded loggerhead sea turtle that received an emotional send-off three weeks ago after more then a year of innovative treatment has ...

A peacock which had escaped from its home at the Central Park Zoo returned home on its own Wednesday morning, the Wildlife Conservation Society told CNN.

A small but growing number of field biologists study urban evolution — the biological changes that cities bring to the wildlife that inhabits them.

Federal wildlife officials say they will take more than 1,300 gray wolves in the Northern Rockies off the endangered species list within 60 days. An attachment to the budget bill signed into law Friday by President Barack Obama strips protections from wolves in five Western states.