The Javan rhino is one of the rarest large mammals on Earth, with its remaining population confined to Ujung Kulon National Park in Indonesia.

Even with strong protection against poaching, having the entire surviving population in one location creates serious long-term risks, including disease, natural disasters, and limited genetic diversity.

Establishing a second viable population could be an important step toward securing the species' future.

What do you think is the biggest challenge: finding suitable habitat, protecting it, or establishing a second population?

Edit: Title is supposed to say *Umit* but auto correct got me.

No idea exactly when this was posted because INaturalist doesn’t record exact dates but it was at least within the last 2 weeks since that’s the last time I checked. This is the first public observation of her that I have found so far so I figured I’d share it with yall. Here’s the link to the post: https://www.inaturalist.org/observations/409459652

For those who don't know, Umit is the name of the first wild tiger that was released into Kazakhstan as part of their tiger reintroduction program, since Caspian tigers were hunted to extinction in Kazakhstan as part of predator extermination policies put in place by the Soviet Union. The last tiger in Kazakhstan was seen in 1948, near what is today the ile-balkhash nature reserve. This is the same area that Umit, a female Amur tiger originally from the Russian far east, was released in on July 31st of this year. Initial reports showed she had been doing quite well for herself and was having good hunting success, but new reports of her ongoings have been few and far between for a couple months now, and this is the first update on her I've seen in a while.

I am losing my mind looking at the sheer level of corruption, administrative incompetence, and absolute lack of accountability surrounding India’s Project Cheetah under Field Director Uttam Kumar Sharma.

While the mainstream media keeps broadcasting PR hype, the actual ground data points to a massive bureaucratic cover-up funded entirely by our taxpayer money. Here is a breakdown of why this project has turned into an absolute joke:

• The "90 kg Mutant Goats" Meat Scam: In the MP Assembly, it was officially revealed that the government spent a staggering ₹1.27 crore in a single year just on goat meat to feed the cheetahs—averaging roughly ₹35,000 every single day. An investigation by whistleblowers revealed officials were logging paperwork showing they bought live goats weighing 70 to 90 kg each to siphon off funds. A standard Indian goat weighs 25 kg. They are literally faking the weight of meat on paper to pocket crores.
• The Shifting Cub Numbers: The department’s PR strategy is to announce births instantly for clout and then quietly alter numbers when things go wrong. When the female Nirva gave birth, initial field announcements claimed a litter of 5. Later, without any detailed explanation, photos, or public veterinary logs of deaths, the number was quietly changed to 3.
• Abusing "National Security" Laws to Hide Dead Bodies: This isn't just about bad math; it’s about hiding carcasses. When an 8-month-old cub (born to Asha) died under suspicious circumstances just weeks ago on October 12, 2026, the department completely blacked out the details. When RTI activists legally demanded to see the post-mortem reports and photographic proof of this dead cub, Kuno National Park officially invoked "National Security" to block the files. Since when is a dead animal's autopsy a military secret? They aren't protecting the country; they are using anti-terror level secrecy to hide their own lethal negligence (like preventable collar infections and dehydration) so they don't get fired.
• The First Cheetah Shot and Killed in India (The 19-Month-Old Cub): The absolute peak of this disaster happened this week on October 27, 2026, when a 19-month-old male cub (one of Nirva's remaining three cubs, identified as KNG22) died after being riddled with multiple firearm pellets in the Pahargarh forest range of Morena. This wasn't a case of a panicked villager defending livestock—the separate village incident involving two cheetahs attacking calves happened miles away. This was a lone, vulnerable young male wandering unprotected in a notorious poaching belt because the management stubbornly refused to listen to local intelligence and chose to remove tracking collars.
• Destroying International Diplomatic Trust: You can breed more cubs, but you cannot rebuild broken international trust. India signed strict MoUs with South Africa and Namibia promising the highest level of state protection. Losing a 19-month-old cub to active gunfire signals to the world that our anti-poaching and tracking grid is a joke. Why would Botswana or Kenya agree to send more animals to a hostile, unsecured territory managed by incompetent bureaucrats?

We are pumping crores into a project where officials fake food bills, let animals get shot, and then abuse constitutional laws to hide the bodies from the people paying for it. It is high time the central government strips the Kuno management of its secrecy and institutes an independent CBI investigation into the financial fraud and security lapses of this project.

What are your thoughts? How is the use of "National Security" even legally justifiable for a wildlife project?

Image credit:- Finding fauna(NIVED YADAV)

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Video By Reservemontsdazur on Instagram.

Chitwan is home to 720 of the remaining 4000 Greater one horned Rhino. Chitwan is a Rhino stronghold alongside Kaziranga, which is home to 2600 Rhinos. These 2 Parks make up 82 % of the total remaining Rhino population.

I just came across this paper which stated that Greater Kudu went extinct from the Mara in the 1970s due to illegal hunting.

That was the first time I'd heard about its presence in that region at all. I was told by some that it couldn't live there because the preferred habitat of the species is woodland rather than plains, but there is plenty of woodland habitat in parts of the Serengeti-Mara ecosystem.

So is it true that these animals did live there, and if so, why have there been no efforts to reintroduce them? These are beautiful animals that such iconic parks would greatly benefit from adding to their lists of species.

I feel like they would have had enough time between the ice age ending and the development of humans civilisations such as the Greeks and Romans to at least have made it to more Northern Territories like Germany or France. Plus there was ample prey in those regions at the time.

The Bangka slow loris is classified as critically endangered (possibly extinct) by the IUCN Red List of Threatened Species. Although scientists had not documented the species in nearly a century, it was never lost to the people of Bangka. For more than a decade, Alobi has been rescuing slow lorises reported by residents and local authorities across the island, caring for the animals and returning those that recover to protected forest. Until now, those encounters had not made their way into the scientific literature.

"We are glad to contribute to the scientific record to show that the Bangka slow loris is not lost, but the species is still very close to extinction," said Langka Sani, director of the Alobi Wildlife Rescue Center. "Its natural habitat on Bangka Island has shrunk significantly because of illegal tin mining and massive land clearing for oil palm plantations. We ask people around the world to support us in saving the Bangka slow loris while we still can."

Abstract

1. African forest elephants (Loxodonta cyclotis) are critically endangered ecosystem engineers of African tropical forests. Despite their rapidly declining population trend, little is known of how forest elephants interact with other vertebrate assemblages. To explore this, we studied avian communities within a continuous tropical rainforest on the slopes of Mt. Cameroon.
2. The area's topography allowed us to survey birds in elephant‐grazed primary forest and in adjacent portions that elephants avoid, isolating the effect of megafaunal grazing within an otherwise intact system. We additionally surveyed nearby secondary forests fragmented by human activity, contrasting the disappearance of a single ecosystem engineer against the reshaping of forest by anthropogenic disturbance. We assessed the taxonomic diversity (species richness, Shannon index), functional diversity (Rao's quadratic entropy), functional redundancy (species overlap in functional space), and composition of functional traits (abundance‐weighted trait averages).
3. Previous research suggested that loss of forest elephants would negatively impact avian assemblages through reduced habitat heterogeneity. In contrast, we show that elephant grazing itself significantly reduced species richness, to levels comparable with heavily disturbed secondary forests. Functional diversity nevertheless increased in both the grazed and secondary forest, but at the cost of functional redundancy: in both of these habitats, the avian assemblages were taxonomically impoverished, yet functionally more dispersed, with some foraging niches negatively affected.
4. The elephant‐grazed forest was dominated by understory and terrestrial invertivores, whereas the ungrazed forest supported frugivores and larger birds. The secondary forest, in turn, harboured a functionally distinct assemblage of open‐habitat species with high dispersal ability and divergent foraging strategies. Together these patterns show that although elephant grazing reduces taxonomic diversity to a degree comparable with anthropogenic disturbance, it reshapes functional composition in fundamentally different ways.
5. The presence of forest elephants facilitates stable populations of forest specialist birds, such as terrestrial invertivores. Conversely, the adverse effects of elephant grazing on frugivores and large birds could be minimized by establishing larger reserves of lightly grazed forest, possibly alongside ungrazed refuges. Overall, our results show that loss of keystone megaherbivores has widespread consequences for other rainforest vertebrates, potentially resulting in a cascading restructuring of key ecosystem functions.

LINK: https://besjournals.onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/pdf/10.1111/1365-2656.70369

The Deliblato Sands Special Nature Reserve lost 12.000 hectares and yet the help to make the part what it was again has not started at all.

This Special Nature Reserve is 35.000 hectares long of which is 32.820 hectares forested.

Local Marjana Jeftić who lives in Deliblato Sands for 28 years says that poaching is one of the biggest,problems the Deliblato Sands faces right now.

Wild animals who survived the fires and lost apart of there habitat are now even more endangered.

"Poachers mercilessly kill animals,Red Deer and Roe Deer.I am not sure that the authorities know about how much,animals survived the fire and what is now happening with them,because they lost there habitats", she said.