Rhett Ayers ButlerIf someone who dedicated their life to protecting nature and wildlife has recently passed away, you can use this form to share that information with me.
I write obituaries to honor the lives and legacies of those who worked to safeguard the natural world—especially those whose contributions might otherwise go unrecognized.
On June 19th, 2015, Philippine officials raided a warehouse on Palawan and found thousands of turtles in cement tanks. More than 3,800 were endangered Palawan forest turtles, a species known only from the island and nearby Dumaran. The turtles were piled as many as a dozen deep, awaiting export. Some had ulcers on the undersides [Continue reading]
I started working on a piece about Dan Janzen in 2022. I had long known his work, both the scientific and conservation sides. But as I became more aware of how the scope of that work expanded over the course of his career, I came to understand more fully his legacy, as well as the [Continue reading]
As a boy in Port of Spain, John Agard made toys from parts salvaged from old radios and household appliances. His family did not own a television until he was about 17, so he built engines, model planes, boats, and circuit boards. He also read and spent time outdoors. On weekends and holidays, his family [Continue reading]
In the early 1990s, the logging roads running through Sarawak’s Upper Baram became the site of a bitter confrontation. Penan families built wooden barricades across red-dirt tracks, blocking bulldozers and timber trucks and facing units of the Police Field Force. As the protests drew international attention, the government of Chief Minister Abdul Taib Mahmud restricted [Continue reading]
For much of the year, Llanos de Challe National Park is dry and sparsely colored. Cacti rise from gravel and bare hillsides. Seeds remain underground, sometimes for years. After sufficient winter rain, flowers cover parts of the coastal desert in white, yellow, violet, and red. Most visitors arrive during the few weeks when the bloom [Continue reading]
In the late 1970s, a group of young naturalists in Lima used a room in the Rubio family home as a headquarters for their expeditions. They called it the Gabinete de iconoclastas. There were maps to study, frogs to look for in neighborhood ponds, plants to collect, and places along Peru’s coast that seemed worth [Continue reading]
In the 1970s, studying wild tigers still involved more nerve than equipment. A biologist could not rely on camera traps, GPS collars, or satellite-linked data. To understand where a tiger went, what it killed, how far it ranged, and how its territory overlapped with others, someone had to follow it through forests and grasslands with [Continue reading]
The giant anteater is easy to treat as a curiosity: a narrow head, poor eyesight, strong claws, and a tongue that can reach beyond its mouth. Its life can appear simple until someone tries to study it. Then come harder questions: where it feeds, what cover it needs, and how fire, drought, roads, and ranching [Continue reading]
The bear came out of the forest with enough force to kill him. It mauled the hunter badly and cost him an eye. During three months in a hospital, he began asking why he was hunting and killing animals. Hunting had come through his family. His father and grandfather were known around Sreemangal, in northeastern [Continue reading]
By some accounts, in the Philippine reefs of the 1970s, large groupers appeared every 50 feet or so. Some seemed as large as Volkswagen Beetles. Around them were snappers, fusiliers, wrasses, turtles, and corals, along with fish whose identities were still uncertain. Kent E. Carpenter arrived in the Philippines at 22, soon after graduating from [Continue reading]
Gus Mills spent a lifetime studying Africa’s carnivores On visits to Kruger National Park, children were awoken by Gus Mills at midnight to look for bushbabies and again at five in the morning to search for big cats. Wildlife kept inconvenient hours, and he expected his companions to adjust. Michael “Gus” Mills, who died on [Continue reading]
On the far north coast of New South Wales, the Big Scrub once covered about 75,000 hectares of rich basalt country. It was a lowland subtropical rainforest of figs, vines, palms and fruit doves. By the time modern conservationists took stock of it, little more than one percent remained, divided among small patches on farms, [Continue reading]
Montañita is a place many people intend to pass through. They come for surf, sun, music, and a stretch of Ecuador’s coast that has long sold itself as free-spirited. Some stay longer. They open small businesses, learn the workings of the communes, put children into local schools, and begin to notice what visitors often do [Continue reading]
At Bradford Island, near Bonneville Dam, the river carried more than water. Beneath the Columbia’s surface were toxic sediments, dumped near a place where Yakama people had fished since time immemorial. To officials, it was a cleanup site. To the Yakama Nation, it was a usual and accustomed fishing place, protected by treaty. To Davis [Continue reading]
To Mike Salisbury, patience was not a virtue so much as a working method. Lions did not hunt on cue. Plants did not move at a human pace. Polar bears did not respect production schedules, or much else. The task was to wait, improvise, and find a way to show TV audiences that the natural [Continue reading]
Norlan Pagal knew the waters of Tañon Strait from a lifetime spent fishing them. By the early 2000s he had watched catches decline as commercial boats entered waters reserved for small fishers and destructive fishing practices damaged reefs. In 2002 he joined the bantay dagat, the volunteer sea patrol that protects coastal waters in the [Continue reading]
To Monica Montefalcone, the sea was a place to study: its plants, reefs, hidden habitats and seasonal changes. A meadow of Posidonia oceanica was not just a patch of green beneath the water. It provided nursery habitat, shelter, carbon storage and coastal protection. To most swimmers it might have looked like seagrass. To her it [Continue reading]
As his 100th birthday approaches, David Attenborough occupies an unusual place in public life: not a practicing scientist, not quite a conventional journalist, and no longer only a broadcaster. His voice has become one of the most recognizable ways the public encounters the living world. That was not always his role. When Attenborough began at [Continue reading]
Ted Turner, who died today, liked to present himself as a businessman who had simply applied the same habits to a larger subject. First he bought a struggling billboard company and made it work. Then he built a television empire, beginning with CNN in 1980. After that, he turned much of his attention to land, [Continue reading]
In the open ocean, the sunfish appears almost improbable—rounded, truncated, adrift in ways that seem to resist explanation. For Thys, that improbability was an invitation. A small photograph sparked a line of inquiry that would shape decades of her life, not only in studying the fish itself, but in asking what its form revealed about [Continue reading]
Over more than six decades, he helped reshape how scientists understand the natural world—not as a set of isolated species, but as a network of relationships. His work on coevolution, developed with Paul Ehrlich in the 1960s, showed how plants and animals shape one another over time. It remains foundational. Raven is perhaps best known [Continue reading]
In a zoo, a crisis often begins before anyone names it as such. An animal stops responding to treatment. A pregnancy fails to progress. A procedure goes as planned, yet recovery does not follow. The work is technical and uncertain, and the margin for error is narrow. Outcomes depend on biology, timing, judgment, and factors [Continue reading]
“One of the great tragedies of the 21st century,” Schaffer once said, “will be humanity’s homogeneity.” The remark was less a warning than a diagnosis. In a world where landscapes were being simplified and species reduced to remnants, she concerned herself with what would be lost when difference itself began to disappear. For rhinoceroses, that [Continue reading]
For much of the late 20th century, oil development in the Ecuadorian Amazon proceeded with little restraint. Wastewater and drilling residues were discharged into rivers or left in open pits. Forest was cleared. Communities downstream relied on contaminated water for daily use. Over time, residents reported rising rates of illness, including cancers and respiratory disease. [Continue reading]
They were described as moving in loose formation along the rocky margins of the Galápagos, holding position where the water deepened and currents carried plankton past. Accounts from divers and early surveys note their presence as steady and unremarkable—part of a system that functioned with enough regularity to make such sightings routine. The Galápagos damselfish, [Continue reading]