Unearthed

Climate change affects coastal North Carolina, leading to flooding and environmental ills.

Until the late l9th century, American bison thundered across plains and trails from Kansas to West Virginia, carrying with them the seeds of running buffalo clover—embedded in hooves, entangled in hair and lodged within droppings. Within this symbiotic relationship, wherever buffalo went in eight states, clover followed. The last buffalo east of the Mississippi was […]

Beaked whales, distinguished by the strange, teeth-like protuberances from their lower jaws, have been around virtually unchanged for 30 million years, but are still the least studied large mammal in the world. Found in tropical and temperate waters worldwide, beaked whales are generally shy animals. Their habitat’s ocean-depth topography rivals the Grand Canyon and they […]

Andy McIntosh made his way through a maze of garbage, undeterred in his search for a new energy source. After a 10-minute hike through the city dump, McIntosh found what he was looking for: thousands of discarded tires. "When I see a tire, I see green," says McIntosh, speaking in both the environmental and monetary […]

While Floridian beachgoers may wonder if the state will suffer the same rash of shark attacks it did last summer, scientists are still debating what prompted the bites. The attacks weren’t more frequent than usual, but conservation groups have pointed fingers at four small tour operators that offer educational, adrenaline-packed feeding dives where, at popular […]

Wildlife researchers have discovered a new best friend. In studies from Alberta to Vermont, specially trained dogs are now being used to gather valuable information about bears, foxes and other elusive species from their droppings. The idea of using dogs to systematically detect wildlife "scat" was initiated five years ago by Samuel Wasser, director of […]

Adding to Norway’s already controversial wildlife policies regarding seal and whale hunting, the Norwegian government equipped hunters with helicopters, snowmobiles and a budget of nearly $885,000 last February to kill 10 of the estimated 25 wolves in the country. During the hunt in Osterdalen, a valley along the Swedish border, one wolf escaped after the […]

Every day, the 550 half-ton Holstein cows on Dennis Haubenschild’s dairy farm near Princeton, Minnesota each eat 90 pounds of food, produce eight gallons of milk and create 220 pounds of waste and manure. On another farm, cows making a quarter of their weight in waste pose a daily hazard. Manure from dairy farms festers […]

"SAVE OUR KELP! NO KELP, NO FISH, NO OTTERS, NO WILDLIFE, NO DIVERS, NO TOURISTS!" read one placard carried by supporters who rallied the California Fish and Game Commission to curtail kelp harvesting in the Ed F. Ricketts Marine Park near Monterey, California’s historic Cannery Row. The kelp forest off California’s central coast has been […]