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Don’t Blame Animals for Adapting to Changes Wrought by an Immense Human Footprint
How human-driven changes to climate and habitat are pushing wildlife into new territory. Animals shouldn’t pay the price for adapting.
- Wayne Pacelle
- August 18, 2026
- Don’t Blame Animals for Adapting to Changes Wrought by an Immense Human Footprint
The beavers have arrived.
In northern Quebec.
That’s where the Inuit, in the village of Umiujaq on the eastern shore of Hudson Bay, say the flat-tailed rodents are newcomers. Now the industrious animals, with their gnawing abilities, are building dams, creating ponds, and transforming the valleys around the village.
The starting gun for their race northward was climate change. In the Arctic and subarctic regions of Canada and Alaska, the winters are shorter, snow melts earlier, and shrubs are spreading into places that were once too cold and barren for them.
Like most other mammals, beavers have wanderlust. They colonize habitats, especially when humans shuffle the ecological deck. It’s called range expansion, and it’s as fundamental a behavior for animals as reproduction or food gathering.
Take a look at butterflies in the Northeast United States. In Massachusetts, researchers studying nearly two decades of observations found warm-adapted species increasing near their northern range limits while many cold-adapted species declined near their southern limits — a biological fingerprint of a warming climate.
It is a redistribution of life. Driven by us.
Across the world, species are moving because of temperature rise; surging or declining precipitation; fires, and floods, and drought; and forest and grassland alterations. A 2026 analysis of 1,758 butterfly species found that 80% had experienced range expansion, with climate change and extreme weather associated with most of the documented range shifts.
Former U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service scientist Kent Livezey reported in a scholarly article that 111 North American bird species had recently expanded their breeding ranges into areas where they had not previously bred.
We are scrambling ecosystems. Animals, in turn, are adapting. They are shifting their settlements.
Timber Barons Plan to Fell Forest Owls
In July, the Fish and Wildlife Service finalized a rule rescinding the regulatory definition of “harm” under the Endangered Species Act. For decades, that definition has included certain habitat modification or degradation when it results in injury or death to protected wildlife by significantly impairing essential behaviors such as breeding, feeding, or sheltering. The new rule removes that regulatory definition.
There are many observers who believe that this policy was implemented to take aim, more than at any other species, at the Northern spotted owl. The threatened owls occupy old-growth forests, and environmental groups sued the government for decades to stop the cutting of those trees to save the spotted owls.
Eliminate the habitat protection standards in the ESA, and the bulldozers and the chainsaws can go to work.
That rewrite of the ESA regulations comes less than two years after the agency developed a plan to spend $1.35 billion to kill 450,000 North American barred owls. That plan was ostensibly designed “to reduce barred owl populations to improve the survival and recovery of northern spotted owls,” according to the agency’s Barred Owl Management Strategy.
But if protecting threatened spotted owls is its purpose, why would the same agency, in a separate rulemaking action, take away vital habitat-protection safeguards in the Endangered Species Act?
Putting the two plans under the microscope tells us all we need to know: the original barred owl kill plan is a con job. It’s a plan to target the old-growth trees that the forest owls need to survive.
The public justification is saving spotted owls.
But the larger policy direction points toward something else: making it easier to cut and alter the old-growth forests on which those owls depend.
The barred owl kill plan is a bait-and-switch, distracting the public from the forest harvesting that sent the spotted owls into a population spiral decades ago.
Blaming the Victim
How do we humans respond to adaptations by wildlife? By blaming the victim.
Barred owls are native to North America. For most of their history, they lived primarily in the eastern part of the continent, with some populating as far as the eastern Dakotas. During the past century, they moved even farther westward, eventually landing in the trees of the Pacific Northwest.
Why did they move?
Because they are forest owls. In some cases, we allowed reforestation to occur. And in other cases, we pushed them northward so they could access Canada’s boreal forests that stretch from New Brunswick to British Columbia.
The barred owls followed the trees.
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service has labeled North American barred owls “invasive” because they now live in West Coast forests. I cannot think of a more ecologically ignorant, dim-witted characterization.
That false branding creates the predicate for their mass slaughter.
We don’t regard competition between owls — there are 19 species of them in the United States — as a problem. That’s nature. We don’t target great horned owls because they occasionally kill spotted owls or barred owls. And when it comes to other raptors, we don’t target golden eagles because they overlap in habitat with bald eagles.
The remarkable thing about the barred owl campaign is that we have taken an ordinary ecological relationship and turned it into a case for extermination.
And the more closely we examine the story, the stranger it becomes.
The northern spotted owl was already in serious trouble before barred owls arrived. Its old-growth forest habitat had been devastated by logging. When the spotted owl was listed under the Endangered Species Act in 1990, the Fish and Wildlife Service estimated that its habitat had declined by 60 to 88% since the early 1800s.
We destroyed the forest. And the spotted owl suffered.
The barred owl found a way into the altered landscape.
And now we propose to kill the barred owl.
What would we expect the birds to do instead?
The same questions arise as we think about the mass of wildfires burning forests from northern Canada to New Mexico.
Across the West, enormous fires are transforming forests. Some are natural parts of forest ecology; others are intensified by a combination of climate change, drought, accumulated fuels and human alteration of fire regimes.
When a wildfire destroys an animal’s forest home, what exactly is our expectation?
That it stay behind and face the flames?
Animals do not have the luxury of philosophical arguments about historical range.
They have to survive. Move. Scrape out an existence. Follow the food, water, vegetation and shelter that remain.
Owl Sex as Adaptation
Scientists have genetically identified hybrids carrying genetic material from both barred and spotted owls. The government sees this mixing as another reason for concern, warning about the potential loss of the spotted owl’s genetic identity.
But there is another way to look at it.
What if hybridization is not contamination? What if it’s a survival strategy?
We tend to think of species as fixed entities, with bright genetic lines that nature itself has drawn and humans must defend. But evolution doesn’t work that way. Closely related animals have always exchanged genes, and hybridization can introduce genetic variation that helps populations respond to changing conditions.
We cannot know whether barred-spotted owl hybrids will ultimately thrive, struggle, or disappear. But why should our presumption be that the mixing itself is a catastrophe?
The spotted owl is a closely related owl whose habitat we have devastated. The two encounter one another, compete — and sometimes mate.
Perhaps that is not nature breaking down. Perhaps it’s nature at work.
That possibility should make us pause before we pay people to start slaughtering owls in America.
Animals are responding to crises of our making. Their responses have many forms, and we err in saying that they are the problem.
The beavers did not cause the Arctic to warm.
The butterflies did not change the climate.
The barred owls did not cut down the old-growth forests.
And when wildfire burns an animal’s forest home, the animal did not strike the match.
Animals do what they have always done: find a way to survive.
If we want to assign responsibility for the ecological conflicts of the Anthropocene, we should start by looking in the mirror.
Proper Habitat Protection Needed in Bird Flu Response
Home » Media Releases » Proper Habitat Protection Needed in Bird Flu Response
By Liam Quinn from Canada – Brown Skua landing near a penguin colonyUploaded by Snowmanradio, CC BY-SA 2.0, https://commons.wikimedia.org/w/index.php?curid=15465669
Vica Bayley MP
August 18, 2026
Tasmanian Greens MPs | Proper Habitat Protection Needed in Bird Flu Response
In response to Greens’ questions in Parliament, the Minister for the Environment confirmed plans for some species critically at risk from bird flu. The best thing the government can do to protect these species is to protect their habitat from threatening human activities.
Bird flu is now a clear danger to Tasmanian species, particularly coastal colonial birds and waterfowl. We’ve already seen petrels, gulls and the precious crested terns succumb as our state’s first victims.
There are multiple sites across Lutruwita / Tasmania identified as high importance areas for bird communities. Wildlife biologists and conservationists have long called for their proper formal protection – to no avail.
Despite theoretically being “protected” in reserves, activities like hunting, dog-walking, and four-wheel driving are permitted in areas where threatened wildlife live and breed. These birds remain at risk from significant, human threats because the rules allow those threats to continue.
The Greens are calling on the Environment Minister to accept his responsibility for the survival of species and work with others to adopt the precautionary principle and properly protect areas of significance from threatening human activities. These include the “seabird islands” of the Furneaux Group, St Helens Conservation Area, Moulting Lagoon, and Orford Bird Sanctuary, amongst others
Bird flu could result in mass euthanasia of savable wild birds, as vets warn of mental health risk – ABC News
‘Collapse of civilisation is the most likely outcome’ warn scientists
Crows learn facial features of dangerous humans and pass the details along to their friends
August 18, 2026
Crows memorize facial features of dangerous humans and pass the information along to their friends, remembering the person for up to 17 years.
Editor
Follow Earth on GoogleWild crows learned to treat a rubber mask as a threat after watching people wearing it trap and band their neighbors. Birds that felt the net themselves got the identification right almost every time.
Birds that only picked up the warning from other crows were far less certain. That gap is the most striking number in the study.
The work tracked American crows (Corvus brachyrhynchos) at five sites for five years and captured something researchers rarely document outside a laboratory.
Information about a specific dangerous human moved through a wild population. It moved sideways between adults, downward from parents to chicks, and outward over roughly three-quarters of a mile.
It also degraded along the way.
A mask that meant trouble
Heather Cornell, John Marzluff, and Shannon Pecoraro of the University of Washington set up the experiment around a simple pairing. Two trappers wore the same full-face mask while they fired a net launcher, banded birds, and released them. Every capture happened at the start of the study. Once trapping stopped, no crow could learn about the mask by being caught in it again.
Between 7 and 15 crows were taken at each site, for a total of 40. Handling lasted 10 to 30 minutes. At four of the five sites, a mob of 15 to 40 uncaptured crows circled overhead and scolded for as long as 10 minutes before breaking up.
Afterward, observers walked survey routes of 1.2 to 2.4 miles (2 to 3.8 kilometers). They wore either the trapping mask or one of several neutral masks, in randomized order.
Many of the observers had no idea what the study was testing. They logged whether each crow they passed scolded, which the team defined as a harsh, repeated “kaw” delivered with agitated wing and tail-flicking.
Firsthand fear beats secondhand fear
Ten of the trapped crows were later encountered wearing bands on 41 separate occasions. They scolded the trapping mask in 21 of 23 encounters, a hit rate of 91.3 percent. They scolded the neutral masks twice out of 18 encounters.
Crows that had never been caught behaved differently. They scolded the trapping mask in 137 of 421 encounters (33 percent) and scolded neutral masks in 11.8 percent of encounters. The signal was real. It was also much noisier.
That contrast is the reason animals do not rely on social information alone. Learning by getting caught is expensive and sometimes fatal, but it produces a sharp memory.
Learning by watching costs almost nothing and produces a blurry one. Crows appear to use both, which fits a broader pattern in how corvids solve novel problems by mixing trial and error with observation.
How the warning traveled
The University of Washington campus served as the long-term site. Before any trapping in 2005, only 3 percent of 167 crows scolded a person in the mask.
Two weeks after trapping, 26 percent did. At 1.25 years, the figure was 30.4 percent. By autumn 2008, roughly 2.7 years after the last capture, 66 percent of crows encountered were scolding. The average mob had grown from about seven birds to 19.
The team then searched outside the usual route. Four of 65 crows in that wider sweep scolded the mask. They were sitting at three spots 1,775 feet, 2,188 feet, and 4,094 feet from the trap sites. The farthest was nearly 0.8 miles (1,248 meters) out.
The shape of the increase mattered as much as the size. A linear model proved to be the best fit for the data. An exponential rise to a plateau did not.
Had the birds been conditioned by the original trapping spectacle, scolding should have jumped and then leveled off. Instead, it kept climbing for years, suggesting crows continued to learn from each other long after the traps were gone.
Mobs did the teaching
Scolding rarely stayed private. In 82 percent of 126 scolding events, the noise pulled in other crows. Mobs averaged 6.4 birds and reached 21 at the high end.
They held a fairly consistent distance of about 57 feet (17.4 meters) from the masked person. Birds perched around him and moved when he did. Escorts ran 33 to 330 feet (10 to 100 meters) before the mob lost interest.
The mob locations left a trail the researchers could read. At spots along the routes where a mob had previously formed, 27.8 percent of 54 lone unbanded crows later scolded the mask on their own.
At spots where no mob had ever formed, only 3.3 percent of 181 lone crows did. Attending a mob, in other words, changed what a bird did when it was by itself.
Discrimination also sharpened over time. During the second half of the trials at four sites, lone unbanded crows scolded the dangerous mask more often than they had earlier. They scolded neutral masks less often.
Parents teaching fledglings
The vertical route showed up in the next generation. Researchers followed 24 young fledglings from 10 pairs on the Washington campus in 2007 and banded and radio-tagged fledglings from four pairs at other sites in 2008. None of the chicks witnessed a capture. All watched their parents scold a masked visitor.
Later, tested without their parents nearby, fledglings from seven of 11 families scolded the person in the mask. Only one of the nine families scolded the same person with the mask off.
Young crows scolding alone never managed to recruit adults to join them, which the authors attribute to underdeveloped calls rather than indifference.
That is cultural transmission in the strict sense. A specific human face became a piece of shared knowledge among birds who had no direct evidence of it.
Why crow rumors matter
Marzluff has argued that this kind of learning is what allows a species to live alongside people. “The behavior of individual people towards animals is often changing,” he told CBC News.
Some humans put out peanuts. Three crows were shot at one of the study sites during the research. Telling those two categories apart and warning the neighbors has obvious value.
Juvenile dispersal could carry a learned face several miles per generation, which suggests the reputations crows build can outlast the person who earned them. Earlier work by the same lab found that crows hold onto these associations for years.
One caveat sits at the center of the design. Every captured bird was released unharmed. Learning that follows an actual killing may run through different channels and may place greater weight on direct observation. The authors flag the result as a likely underestimate rather than a flaw.
Studies of bolder behavior in urban animals and of rapid change in city bird populations have since made the same general point from other angles. Crows just happen to be loud about it.
The full study was published in the journal Proceedings of the Royal Society B.
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Horses have much higher intelligence than we thought
August 18, 2024
Horses reveal unexpected intelligence by adapting strategies during a light-based reward experiment in a recent study.
Editor
Our equine friends, horses, just galloped past the conventional wisdom about their intelligence. It turns out they’re quite smarter than we’ve been giving them credit for, according to a fascinating study by Nottingham Trent University.
Leading the study is seasoned equine scientist, Dr. Carrie Ijichi, alongside fellow researcher Louise Evans from the School of Animal, Rural and Environmental Sciences at Nottingham Trent University.
The experts embarked upon this journey of discovery to understand more about how horses learn, a valuable insight that could help us train them more humanely and improve their welfare.
Testing the intelligence of horses
The team set up a unique experiment to see how smart horses really are. The rules? Horses had to touch a piece of card with their noses to get a treat.
A simple task, but the researchers added a twist. The horses were not rewarded if they touched the card while a light was on but rewarded when the light was off.
Despite the change in conditions, horses continued to touch the card whether the light was on or off, still bagging in those goodies they love so much.
Horses can adapt to the rules
In a final twist, the scientists introduced an unexpected penalty – a 10-second timeout where the horses couldn’t play the game or receive a reward if they touched the card while the “stop” light was on. Then, something remarkable happened.
The horses, rather abruptly, began to play the game “correctly,” only touching the card at the right point to receive their treat. It was as if they were adapting their strategy, sticking with the game plan only when there was a risk of penalty involved.
Are horses natural geniuses?
These clever responses from the horses were not anticipated initially. “At first, we found that horses would just keep touching the card over and over, as they probably realized they would still get a frequent reward with minimal mental effort,” noted Dr. Ijichi.
However, the smart responses of the horses when penalties were introduced signified their understanding of the game. This ability to switch strategies and behave differently when a risk was introduced showed a surprising level of cognitive processing.
Unexpected intelligence of horses
“Our horses immediately improved when we introduced a cost for errors. This suggests that the horses knew all along what the rules of the game were,” said Louise Evans.
The results indicate that the horses were able to use a form of learning called “model-based learning.” This cognitive capacity was thought to be beyond their reach.
Even more exciting is the fact that this cognitive ability is usually attributed to the human pre-frontal cortex. Horses, not having a well-developed equivalent, still demonstrated this level of sophistication, suggesting they are using a different part of their brains to achieve similar results.
Future research directions
As we venture further into understanding equine intelligence, this research opens the door to numerous future investigations. Further studies could explore the extent of horses’ cognitive flexibility and how various environmental factors influence their learning processes.
Additionally, examining differences in intelligence among various breeds could help refine training techniques tailored to individual horses’ strengths.
By continuing to expand our knowledge of equine cognition, we move closer to creating a world where horses are recognized not only for their physical prowess but also for their remarkable mental capabilities.
Such strides in research could reshape our interactions with these animals, leading to richer partnerships grounded in understanding and respect.
A leap in understanding
This study not only changes our perception of horses’ intelligence but also prompts us to reassess how we understand animal intelligence as a whole.
Horses aren’t average – they’re as unique and intelligent as any creature on this planet, each in their own special way.
So, the next time you see a horse just grazing around, remember they’re not just brawn -they’re full of brain too.
The study is published in the journal Applied Animal Behaviour Science.
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Hunters urged to check for closures after group intrudes on active wildfire site
Hunters urged to check for closures after group intrudes on active wildfire site
By: Amy Nay
Posted 4:28 PM, Aug 17, 2026
SALT LAKE CITY — As Utah’s hunting season gets underway, wildlife officials are reminding hunters to check wildfire closures before heading into the mountains after hunters entered a restricted area on the Black Canyon Fire this weekend.
Officials with the Manti-La Sal National Forest said hunters ventured into an area that had been closed because of firefighting operations. Firefighting aircraft were grounded because of the intrusion, while crews went in to locate the hunters and bring them out.
The incident happened as Utah’s archery hunting season got underway and wildfire restrictions remain in place across parts of the state.
“Hunters need to be ethical, they need to be responsible, and I think that includes adhering to restrictions that are in place,” said Faith Heaton Jolley with the Utah Division of Wildlife Resources.
Heaton Jolley said officials understand that hunters are eager to get into the field, and some have waited years to draw permits for certain hunting units.
“It is disappointing, it is discouraging, but for a lot of these units, there are other access points that they can utilize,” she said.
DWR is urging hunters to do their research before leaving for the field, including knowing the boundaries of their hunting unit and checking with the land-management agency for current wildfire closures and public access restrictions.
Fire closures can change as wildfire conditions change, making it important for hunters to check for the latest information before heading out.
The Black Canyon Fire closure is currently in effect through at least September 10.
Hunters can check current closure information through the appropriate land-management agency and the Forest Service.
DWR also has a wildfire information page at wildlife.utah.gov, where hunters can find information about affected hunting units and available relief options. The agency also recognizes that some hunters have permits they have waited years to obtain.
“That’s something we’re mindful of, especially these hunters who have once-in-a-lifetime permits,” Heaton Jolley said.
For hunting units heavily affected by wildfire closures, DWR may offer alternative options or other relief. The agency continues to assess conditions as the wildfire season develops.
Wildfire can create challenges for Utah’s elk and mule deer, but the long-term impact isn’t necessarily all negative.
“Wildfires can have both positive and negative effects on populations,” said Jen Doherty, managing director of mission operations for the Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation.
Doherty explained how a fire can be critical to the future health of wildlife habitat.
The Rocky Mountain Elk Foundation plans to invest $3 million over the next three years in wildfire restoration efforts, including projects in Utah where fires have had significant impact on migrating mule deer and elk herds.
The organization says that work can include repairing damaged fencing and replacing it with wildlife-friendly fencing, restoring water developments, and supporting aspen regeneration.
The goal is to help damaged landscapes recover and continue providing healthy habitat for Utah’s migrating wildlife.
For hunters heading into the field, wildlife officials say the immediate priority is knowing where they can legally go, checking for changing closures, and respecting restricted areas so firefighters can safely do their jobs.
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Exposing the Big Game 
