Indholdsfortegnelse for June 2025 i BBC Wildlife Magazine

Iolo’s River Valleys Iolo Williams explores four of Wales’s most stunning river valleys from sea to source, uncovering their hidden wonders and remarkable wildlife, including wild beavers in the Dyfi Valley and rare butterflies in the Vale of Clwyd. Catch up on iPlayer BBC Teach Live Lessons In a special episode to coincide with Earth Day, hosts Naomi Wilkinson and Lizzie Daly explore the rainforest biome at Cornwall’s Eden Project to find out how the water cycle is essential to sustaining life on our planet. Catch up on iPlayer Unexpected Elements This engaging science series, which helps you see the world in a new way, turns its attention to eggs – including a look at how climate change is affecting the breeding patterns and nesting behaviour of sea turtles. Catch…

LESSER GOLDFINCHES WERE ONCE restricted to the south-western portions of the United States – they are common in California and Texas. The birds are present in areas of Arizona, Colorado and New Mexico and range into Central America as well. Now, the warming climate is pushing them north in significant numbers. A new study in the journal Ornithology has found that lesser goldfinch populations have grown in states where the species was previously uncommon. According to observations from FeederWatch and eBird, coordinated by the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, numbers of lesser goldfinches have increased substantially in north-western states – growing as much as 110 per cent in Washington and 66.3 per cent in Idaho between 2012 and 2022. Populations are booming in Oregon too. “I was seeing groups of 30…

THERE’S A SECRET I have to share with you. I think I was a puma in a previous life, living in the Rockies in western North America. You might laugh but I am deadly serious. I was athletic and lived a solitary existence. And, in keeping with true puma lifestyle, I was prone to leaping from rock to rock, springing across wide, deep precipices or bounding up trees – just because I could. Since I was a child, I have always identified with this slinky cat, though I have yet to actually see one. A few years ago, I was in the west Hollywood Hills in Los Angeles on an afternoon walk through a well-vegetated canyon. On seeing an unknown sparrow dart into some brush I decided to go in…

ABOUT THE PHOTOGRAPHER Georgina is a nature photographer from Australia. She loves teaching the art and joy of photography through workshops and talks.…

Springwatch airs from 26th May to 12th June IT WAS SPRING 2013. A little afternoon sunlight was glinting through the rushes into one of the most secret spots in the world: a quarter of a square metre of marsh at RSPB Ynys-hir in Powys where, remarkably, we had a camera focused on a water rail’s nest. These are super-shy birds. They scream like pigs at night but during the daytime you won’t hear a rustle. The thought of ever finding a nest, let alone getting a camera on it, was frankly absurd. But our crack team of nest-finders and camera-riggers had pulled off the impossible, and at every opportunity I was in the truck, glued to the screen. The bird was cupped in a scruffy little dish of reeds, and…

ABOUT 50 YEARS AGO, RESEARCHERS Beatrix and Alan Gardner taught a young female chimp called Washoe how to sign using American sign language. They raised her like one of their own. They dressed her, played with her, ate at the table with her and took her for rides in the family car. They communicated exclusively with her in sign language and, pretty quickly, Washoe began to sign back. By the time she was five, she had learned about 350 signs. Her fingers were dextrous and fast, and often she would combine signs together to make new meanings. When she saw a swan for the first time, Washoe made the signs for ‘water’ and ‘bird’. Similar projects followed, with mixed results. When chimps were treated less like family, and more like…

PLENTY OF ANIMALS CAN HANDLE extreme heat and, for obvious reasons, they tend to live in the tropics, often in deserts. Camels, for instance, can cope with temperatures of up to 49°C, thanks largely to their humps, where lots of their fat is stored. These allow them to lose body heat rapidly and efficiently. In addition, their densely furred coats and leathery foot-pads insulate them from the scorching midday heat. As a last resort, they sweat to cool down, though seldom need to. Desert animals (camels included) also have a range of adaptations to reduce how much water they lose, so can endure remarkably long periods without taking on fresh supplies. Reptiles are brilliant at it, which explains why deserts are home to an impressive variety of snakes and lizards.…

WALRUSES LIVE IN THE ARCTIC and sub-Arctic. They are one of the largest pinnipeds (meaning fin-footed) and are related to seals and sealions. Their Latin name, Odobenus rosmarus, translates as ‘tooth-walking seahorse’ and refers to their most distinguishable feature – large tusks. What do they eat? These marine mammals feed in shallow, coastal areas and usually only embark on short dives. Foraging trips can last from a few hours to several days. They mostly prey on bivalve molluscs, which they search for in soft sediment, using their super-sensitive whiskers. Walruses also eat worms, snails, crabs, amphipods, shrimps, sea cucumbers, tunicates and slow-moving fish. Where do they live? These pinnipeds are extant in Canada, Greenland, Russia, Svalbard and Jan Mayen, and Alaska in the USA. The species is documented as ‘presence…

“THE RED LAND CRAB IS A CURIOUS contradiction of part armoured warrior, part comedic crustacean. It’s found in the San Blas Islands (also known as Kuna Yala or Guna Yala) – a breathtaking stretch of paradise across 160km of Panama’s northern coast. The crab’s body, encased in a hard, segmented shell, ranges in colour from pinks and earthy reds to peachy deep browns. Beady, stalked eyes swivel with mischievous intelligence, and its many-jointed legs splay outwards, propelling it sideways in a rapid-fire staccato scuttle. There is little grace in a crab’s movement, but there is undeniable efficiency. It darts, hesitates, then charges like a tiny gladiator. When startled, it freezes for a split-second before retreating into a burrow or crevice, as if the earth has swallowed it whole. Crabs are…

THE MOUNTAIN BONGO – A LARGE, FOREST-dwelling antelope with a chestnut coat and white stripes – is classed as Critically Endangered, with fewer than 100 surviving in scattered populations in Kenya. But there is new hope. Earlier this year, 17 individuals were translocated from a breeding facility in Florida to a dedicated 8ha fenced enclosure on the slopes of Mount Kenya, which will serve as a secure home and breeding ground. The aim is to re-establish a sustainable population across the Mount Kenya ecosystem and beyond. The mountain bongo is a subspecies of its more numerous lowland cousin. “As a child in the 1970s, I’d see them but they were rare,” says former Kenyan environment cabinet secretary Judi Wakhungu. Hunting with dogs and loss of habitat have since reduced it…

COMPARE TIM FLACH’S WILDLIFE portraits with almost identical images created by artificial intelligence (AI) and you are aware of two things – they are remarkably lifelike but you can still quite easily spot the fake. The AI colours of a snow leopard, for example, are a little too bright, the definition too sharp. The AI bald eagle stares back at the viewer with cartoonish malevolence – it appears that computers don’t do birds, or perhaps feathers, especially well at the moment. In short, AI is good – but not that good. Not yet, anyway. “It’s only a matter of time before the AI image is indistinguishable from the real thing” Leaving aside the fact that Flach’s photos were ‘scraped’ from his website without payment to enable the AI program to…

THERE’S A PECULIAR posse of amphibians creeping through the damp leaf litter of the North American Great Lakes. They’re about the size of a slim sausage, splotchy brown with watery smiles and bulging eyes. Cute, maybe – but, biologically, they are rewriting the rules of sex. Meet the unisexual mole salamanders, an all-female lineage that’s been thriving for millions of years by not just cloning but occasionally stealing DNA from other mole salamander species. They are the only known vertebrate to reproduce via a process called kleptogenesis. If that sounds like the reproductive equivalent of a Netflix heist drama, you’re not far off. These self-replicating sisters are members of a group that also includes five sexually reproducing mole salamander species. The unisexual sisterhood evolved from a hybridisation event, more than…

The broadcaster, naturalist and tour guide shares the most breathtaking seasonal events in the world LONG BELIEVED TO BE A SYMBOL OF GOOD fortune, the albatross has its own annual world awareness day on 19th June. As legend would have it, the bird embodies the souls of sailors lost at sea, and to harm one was considered disastrous and likely to invoke the sea’s wrath. Nowhere is this better conveyed than in Samuel Taylor Coleridge’s poem The Rime of the Ancient Mariner. It chronicles the story of a mariner who shoots an albatross and is forced to wear the dead bird around his neck – as penance and to ward off any future misfortune at sea. A deceased albatross ‘necklace’ still serves as a metaphor for a weighty burden. The…

IT’S DAWN IN A MEADOW IN southern Bavaria. A faint breeze ruffes the grass and whispers through the leaves of the woodland nearby. It seems deserted. Yet look closely – there, in the shadow between blades of grass, two glossy brown eyes glitter. Curled unseen in its green den lies a tiny roe deer, with black nose, outsized ears and fur dappled with spots. Not far away, farmer Klaus Waldschütz is busy attaching his mower to his tractor. It’s hay season, and the weather is fine and dry – perfect for haymaking. Klaus has 6ha of grassland and meadow to cut, dry out, rake and bale. It will be a long few days, but the hay crop is vital nourishment for the farm’s dairy herd through the winter months. With…

HUMAN FREEDIVERS CAN DESCEND to significant depths on just one lungful of air. To do this they massively overbreathe beforehand to clear their systems of as much carbon dioxide (CO₂) as possible. This is the gas that triggers the normal urge to breathe when we hold our breath. But the technique doesn’t always work. Freedivers can black out underwater and must have teams of scuba divers on standby to rush them back to the surface. Seals can dive to great depths for long periods of time, chasing their fishy prey. So why do they never seem to end up unconscious? This question intrigued marine ecologist Chris McKnight and his colleagues at the University of St Andrews. To find out, they lined up six grey seals, temporarily taken from the wild,…

Going green The spineless forest lizard is one of four Calotes species endemic to Sri Lanka, all of which share common characteristics such as a short head, swollen cheeks and downwards-pointing scales. Sasindu Pinibindu Maduwage, Sri Lanka Sleep like a baby We were watching sealions lazing on the rocks of a beach on San Cristóbal when I spotted this baby fast asleep. He hardly stirred, just stretching a flipper every now and again. Jo Whiting, Galápagos Islands All of a flutter I spent a wonderful evening watching silver-studded blue butterflies dance among the heather – here is a roosting male. Verity Hill, Weymouth Fragile fungus This delicate Mycena stood alone on a mossy stump against a soft background of late summer beech trees in Stoke Park Wood. Mike Blacknell, Hampshire…

How did your career start? While at university, I went on an expedition to Borneo to study proboscis monkeys. None of the team had any photography experience, so I borrowed a camera from my grandparents and became the ‘expedition photographer’. I read an Idiot’s Guide to photography on the plane and spent three months taking terrible pictures. But I was hooked. Which of your images is most important to you? A photo of a tiger walking away, taken in Kanha National Park in India. It won the Gerald Durrell Endangered Wildlife category in the 2000 Wildlife Photographer of the Year competition. It really helped to raise my profile. What’s been your most memorable experience with wildlife? The first time I saw a tiger in the wild, in 1985, in Kaziranga…

The crossword ACROSS 1 ___ crab, crustacean with a coat of soft hairs (6) 4 Herons that may be little or great white (6) 9 Jumping parasite (4) 10 Long-legged birds with spatulate beaks (10) 11 Swamphen of New Zealand (6) 12 Body of water in North America, home to a subspecies of northern watersnake (4,4) 13 Diving duck (9) 15 ___ tiger, Siberian subspecies (4) 16 Rounded marking, as seen on a leopard or ladybird (4) 17 Plant also known as great mullein (6,3) 21 Intestinal parasite (8) 22 Flightless parrot (6) 24 Insectivorous nocturnal bird of South America (5,5) 25 Scottish island noted for wildflowers and corncrakes (4) 26 African bird, also called an indigobird (6) 27 Milk organs, in some mammals (6) DOWN 1 ___ swiftlets, bird…

I COMPLETELY AGREE WITH MARK Carwardine’s opinion on grouse shooting (May 2025 issue). The law that is supposed to protect birds of prey against persecution is quite ineffective, because the nature of the crime makes it almost impossible to obtain the evidence required to secure a conviction unless the perpetrator is caught in the act. I would therefore go even further than Mark and call for all game-bird shooting (not just grouse) to be made illegal, as I believe that the only way to make the UK safe for birds of prey is to get rid of shooting estates altogether. George W Henderson, Surrey I disagree with the practice of driven grouse shoots for the same reasons outlined by Mr Carwardine. To this I would add a further environmental hazard…

For many years, Cecil the lion was the big-cat star attraction for visitors to Hwange National Park, Zimbabwe. Then, in 2015, he was shot by a trophy hunter with a bow and arrow, just outside the safety of the park border. A decade on, we look at how lions are faring across Africa, and how the loss of Cecil inspired a will to safeguard this iconic feline. ON SALE 26th JUNE…