11/12/14 Have Myanmar's highly endangered Asian elephants been saved in a counter-intuitive way —in part, by keeping them employed in logging camps? By Vicki Croke As President Obama touches down in Myanmar today and many people talk of human rights and democratic reform, conservationists also see an urgent agenda: the future of elephants. Here is a country at the crossroads, ...

11/6/2014 If any bird can be considered an iconic New Yorker, he's it. At 24, a venerable age for a hawk, Pale Male has lived the lyrics of the famous song--he's done it his way. By Vicki Croke If any bird can be considered an iconic New Yorker, I’d say he’s it. Handsome. Successful. Tough, yet caring. Widowed several times ...

8/24/2015 IFAW-run wildlife rehab center in India develops a kindly curriculum to get orphaned big cats back into the wild. By Vicki Croke Scared, sick, and tiny, the orphaned clouded leopard cub has made it to safety. So far, experts don’t know how he was separated from his mother or who took him from the forest. But they do have ...

9/4/2015 After 18 years of patient study, of course Lisa Dabek knew, but she never really saw exactly what they were up to ...until now. By Vicki Croke For 18 years, the very patient and determined field biologist Lisa Dabek has been traveling to Papua New Guinea to study the mysterious Matschie’s tree kangaroo. These kangaroos, unlike the better-known ones ...

12/9/2013 CAPTURING TINY SAW-WHET OWLS AS THEY MIGRATE  By Vicki Croke It’s 8:45 in the woods of Lincoln, MA, and we’ve got our first Northern saw-whet owl of the night. She’s no bigger than a kitten—about 7 inches tall and weighing less than a stick of butter. The brown and white ball of feathers, talons, and huge yellow eyes hangs ...

9/22/2015 New study from the University of Vienna reveals nighttime humming in the giraffe house. By Vicki Croke Scientists have usually described giraffes as tall silent types. But a new study from the University of Vienna shows that that description was only half right. It turns out that under cover of darkness, zoo giraffes do something odd…they hum. We've known ...

8/24/2013 Listen to the story here: By Vicki Croke and Christen Goguen NEW BEDFORD, MA — Considering that there is no store called “Elephants-R-Us,” where can a zoo find toys for the biggest, smartest and most playful animals in their care? For the Buttonwood Park Zoo in New Bedford, the answer has come from an unlikely place — the world ...

4/6/2016 Long considered dead, a great mellow bull reappears at Andrea Turkalo’s study site in the Dzanga Bai. By Vicki Croke Andrea Turkalo, who’s gotten to know some 4,000 forest elephants over the past 20 years, has recently spent months focused on a bit of sad detective work: Through careful observation, she’s been slowly piecing together a list of the ...

12/30/2015 In a place that welcomes hyenas after dark, an anthropologist ends up bonding with one of the fiercest predators on earth. By Vicki Croke Hyenas aren’t the most popular animals. In Western literature, they are depicted as giggling, cowardly, and dangerous. In almost all of Africa, where the formidable predators are known to bite people’s faces off, kill children, ...

3/24/2016 With just 50 of their kind left, Asiatic cheetahs find an ally in legendary field biologist George Schaller. By Vicki Croke It was a call on a cell phone from a herdsman in Iran saying, “There are some carnivores chasing some gazelles near us!” that tipped off George Schaller. Schaller’s team, including the herdsman’s son, raced a short distance ...