Wildlife Conservation Stories

Illegal snaring is a rampant threat to wildlife and people in the forests of Southeast Asia. Snares are used to capture animals for the illegal wildlife trade. WWF-supported ranger patrols are working to address this crisis by removing snares. 

Elusive and solitary nature, snow leopards are rarely spotted and even less frequently studied within their rugged and harsh habitat. However last November, two snow leopards were captured, fitted with satellite-GPS collars, and successfully released back into their rocky homeland in Western Nepal. The two male snow leopards were the first since the 1980s to be fitted with collars within Shey Phoksundo National Park in Western Nepal.

WWF India, in association with the Sundarbans Biosphere Reserve (SBR) Directorate, has implemented a program to significantly reduce the number of tiger-related deaths of honey collectors.

The Rosebud Sioux tribe committed 28,000 acres of native grassland for the creation of a new plains bison herd. With a capacity to support 1,500 animals, the Wolakota Buffalo Range will become North America’s largest Native American owned and managed bison herd.

New camera trap images reveal the highest-elevation sighting of a tiger in Nepal, captured at over 8,000 feet in a densely forested area.

In the aftermath of Australia’s devastating bushfires, WWF deployed field detection dogs to help locate surviving wildlife. During five days of searches in January 2020, the dogs found 10 koalas.

Sloths are slow-moving creatures that spend their lives in tree canopies, munching on leaves and napping. When you spot one, you have time to think. Still, getting this shot had its challenges.

Leigh Henry and her colleagues from WWF’s Tiger’s Alive team visited Thailand, Laos, and Vietnam to continue the work of ending the illegal tiger trade and phasing out tiger farms.

Tiger King, Netflix’s new docu-series, is roaring with popularity, but behind the drama, there is a frightful truth: captive tigers in the United States are a significant conservation issue and could impact tigers in the wild.

In honor of World Wildlife Day, we celebrate some hopeful conservation stories to remind us actions make a difference and there’s still time to preserve our natural world if we all do our part.

Once virtually extinct in Russia, the Persian leopard is showing signs of a comeback in the region. Restoring a population takes time so each sighting of a leopard in the wild stirs excitement.

An estimated 1 million pangolins were trafficked in the last ten years, though this number may be conservative given the volume of recent pangolin scale seizures. Learn what WWF and partners are doing to stop the extinction of this elusive mammal.

Illegal killings of rhinos in South Africa are on the decline. In 2019, poachers killed 594 rhinos, down from 769 in the year prior, according to South Africa’s Department of the Environment, Forestry, and Fisheries.

New tallies from the country’s 2018 tiger survey demonstrate a stable or growing population, estimated at 2,967 individuals, bringing hope for the species’ recovery.

WWF, U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, and Model Avionics developed an innovative system to deliver plague protection for black-footed ferrets in the form of peanut butter-flavored baits by drones or all-terrain vehicles to prairie dogs. Recently, the team received a patent for the design—a first for WWF!

While monarchs are not endangered, their marvelous migration is at risk. Because they cluster in an area of just a few squares miles, loss of habitat to forest degradation has serious consequences.

Lions used to attack Kenyan farmer John Mpoe’s cattle almost nightly. Then he installed solar-powered LED lights around the pen where he keeps his livestock at night. He hasn’t lost a cow since.

Established by WWF Nepal in 2016, RRTs help to engage communities in wildlife protection efforts, manage human-wildlife conflict, and monitor poaching and other illegal activities. Today, there are nearly 60 RRTs across Nepal.

Leigh Henry, WWF’s Director of Wildlife Policy, recently returned from a trip to China – the country where tiger farms started back in the 1980s. Leigh and her colleagues visited one of the world’s largest tiger farms– the Harbin Siberian Tiger Park – in the northeast corner of China. This is what she saw on her visit.

Two years ago this month, China took the monumental step of banning elephant ivory trade within the country. Dec. 31, 2017 was the last day it was legal to buy or sell ivory there.

A recent survey revealed the largest number of mountain gorillas ever recorded in a large swathe of protected forest in Uganda and the Democratic Republic of the Congo. WWF and partners counted 459 individuals, up from an estimated 400 in 2011, in the 83,840-acre Bwindi-Sarambwe ecosystem.

Wildlife Insights is a one-of-a-kind cloud-based platform housing the largest publicly accessible database of camera trap images in the world. It allows researchers and conservation organizations around the world to share and analyze wildlife data to ultimately better anticipate threats, understand where and why wildlife populations are changing, and take action to protect wildlife.

Established in 2010 and dubbed Tx2, it is arguably the most ambitious effort ever undertaken to recover an endangered species. Today, the overall tiger population decline has begun to reverse, with better data and improved surveys indicating there are likely now close to 4,000 tigers roaming free across the range states.Here are the Tx2’s top nine achievements to date.

Tigers living on the Malayan Peninsula—a region that includes parts of Thailand, Malyasia, and Myanmar—are at risk of going extinct in just the next two to three years.