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The Wilderness Society


You're probably familiar with the literary classic "Moby-Dick."

But in case you're not, here's the gist: Moby Dick is the name of a huge albino sperm whale.

(Get your mind outta the gutter.)

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Joy

Chatty animals get 'interviewed' with a teeny tiny microphone, and boy is it entertaining

Here to answer all your burning questions, such as "may I touch your snoot?"

Freya from Maya Higa's YouTube video.

Ever wonder what an ideal date for a lemur would be? Or a lizard’s favorite Disney princess?

Thanks to one YouTube poster with a passion for animals and an endearing sense of humor, all questions shall be answered. Well, maybe not all questions. But at the very least, you’ll have eight minutes of insanely cute footage.

In a series titled “Tiny Mic Interviews,” Maya Higa approaches little beasties with a microphone so small she has to hold it with just her thumb and forefinger. And yes, 99% of the animals try to eat it.

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Science

How rock cairns became a weird wilderness battleground

And why we should resist the urge to build—or topple—the ubiquitous rock towers.

Rock cairns are everywhere, but they're not as harmless as they look.

For the past several years, largely thanks to Instagram culture, rock cairns—those carefully balanced towers of rocks that look like something straight out of a Zen garden—have become ubiquitous across the natural landscape. It's not terribly surprising, really. There's something satisfyingly primitive about balancing rocks on top of one another, and the urge to create art and order out of the wildness of nature is a decidedly human instinct. Plus, they just look cool.

But according to environmental experts, that's not a good enough reason to make them.

Rock cairns have become a wilderness battleground of sorts, with people loving to make them but many places making it illegal to erect them in natural areas. Even the freedom-loving state of Texas, where you can basically build a tower of guns as high as you want, has made building rock towers illegal in its state parks.

Why? As it turns out, stacking rocks isn't as harmless as it may seem.

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Don't be so surprised.

At a time when news about the environment generally stirs up feelings of anxiety and fear, there is one bright spot that can change your stripes: Tigers are making a major comeback away from extinction.

Over the past seven years, tiger numbers have increased more than 40% across Asia, according to the latest International Union for Conservation of Nature’s (IUCN) Red List of Threatened Species Assessment. Another report released on July 29 revealed that in Nepal, tiger populations have doubled.

Yes, both figuratively and literally, 2022 is the Year of the Tiger.


tigers endangeredRawrGiphy

Counting tigers might sound like a dream job (at least for big cat lovers like myself), but it can be a daunting and costly task. Rather than traverse rugged terrains in search of the notoriously elusive beasts, scientists used to instead count in smaller areas and extrapolate the results to larger areas of similar environments.

Technological advancements in data tracking have made counting much easier, but it’s hard to be absolutely certain that tiger populations have increased as much as these reports indicate.

Still, even with that caveat, there’s much to be optimistic about.

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