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In a decision that proves how much more impressed we Brits are with money than with our natural heritage, Donald Trump has finally been given permission to destroy an invaluable piece of coastal Scotland so that people have yet another place to whack balls with sticks…the BBC News website has the sorry details.

Have you seen the new Nature Blog Network blog, or for that matter, how cool the new Nature Blog Network looks? Call me biased but I think it’s awesome, not to mention worthy of your comments, praise, Stumbles, and Diggs…

Not necessarily. Birdlife International is reporting the near miraculous recovery of a logged Sumatran lowland forest which is being protected and restored by three conservation groups working to regenerate a 101,170 hectare site on an island on which most forests have been lost to oil palm or timber plantations. Sending a message to the world [...]

you’ll love the first ever MetaCarnival! Alvaro at SharpBrains conceived and executed the brilliant idea of aggregating the best posts from the best carnivals across a wide range of topics. Pretty sharp! Speaking of carnivals, today is the deadline for inclusion in the next I and the Bird, hosted by Ecobirder.

If you’re the type of person who craves photos of the newest and cutest exotic animal babies from zoos and aquariums around the world, you’ll positively adore the Zooillogix spin-off site. Check out ZooBorns.

Today is your last opportunity to send me a plant-themed post for the next edition of Berry Go Round, scheduled here for Wednesday, October 29. Flowers, bushes, trees, weeds, grasses, leaves… heck, I’ll even accept algae and fungus posts which is really stretching the boundaries of the plant kingdom!

Yes, you got it, these protected birds were targeted illegally by hunters and one was killed - despite the presence of three police units and BirdLife Malta members! The arrogance of Malta’s ‘hunters’ is breathtaking and described by Birdlife’s Dr Andre Raine thus: “In my career, I have never seen poachers being so blunt in [...]

Thanks to the fantastic efforts of a coalition of international conservation groups (and in particular Birds Korea) the decline of Asia’s rare shorebirds due to the ill-thought out reclamation scheme at Saemangeum is still making headline news - as this report on Reuters today proves. Congratulations to all involved…

In a welcome moveEBay Inc will ban trading in ivory products from next year after IFAW found over 4,000 elephant ivory listings by sellers. Elephants are protected under CITES and EBay had (unwittingly) become a major market-place for illegal trades.

In just five years two Santa Cruz-based researchers found 3000 dead Loggerhead Turtles (an Endangered species) along a 43km stretch of Mexican beach - and they blame (and no surprises here whatsoever) poor fishing practices. We’re heading for the “Silent Seas” folks…

Up to a million Tree Swallows have been roosting in a cornfield in California, and the local news station has a video report. It’s not quite Planet Earth but definitely worth watching.

Get excited, plant people! I’ll be hosting this month’s edition of Berry Go Round, the carnival devoted to fantastic flora blogging. Please send me links and summaries to your best plant posts of the last month or two. Also include, if you’d be so kind, permission for me to use any exceptional associated images… [...]

The genetically distinct (and rapidly declining) population of Alaska’s Cook Inlet Beluga has finally been listed as “endangered” under the Endangered Species Act. It’s only taken eleven years incidentally - delays caused not only by the stonewalling Bush administration, but the governor of Alaska …

Did President Bush actually say, “I believe the Agreement to be fully in the U.S. interest” in reference to The Agreement for the Conservation of Albatrosses and Petrels? He did and one hopes the U.S. Senate will feel the same way.

The BirdLife International website has details of the banding of a young male Golden-cheeked Warbler caught at a banding station in Montecristo National Park, northern El Salvador. The article includes a rather mouthwatering in-hand photo of the bird…

Enjoy your filet-o-fish (TM) while you can because numbers of Alaska Pollock, a staple of the U.S. fast food industry, have shrunk 50 percent from last year to a record low and unsustainable levels of capture is putting the world’s largest food fishery on the brink of collapse, Greenpeace has reported.

The marshy ecosystems that beavers help create are good for songbirds.  At least, that is the conclusion of a study by the Wildlife Conservation Society published in the October issue of Western North American Naturalist.  “The study found that the more dams beavers build, the more abundant and diverse local songbirds become.”

If you’ve ever fancied seeing the world’s wildlife you might want to hurry. On October 6th, the IUCN released the 2008 IUCN Red List of Threatened Species which lists a whopping 16,928 species threatened with extinction. Of these, 3,246 are Critically Endangered, 4,770 are Endangered and 8,912 are Vulnerable to extinction. 1,226 (or 12.4%) of [...]

Considering the host, it should come as no surprise that the newest Carnival of the Blue coincides with the 2nd annual International Cephalopod Awareness Day. Happy Squid Day!

Overfishing in the Mediterranean is driving the bluefin tuna rapidly towards extinction, with - it seems - the Italians especially landing far more than their quotas allow. Italy’s overfishing is blamed on a “lack of control, clandestine fishing boats…(and) a presence of organised crime”. The future looks bleak indeed for one of the ocean’s most [...]