The United Nations Building in New York City. (Credit: Steve Cadman / Wikimedia)

UN Recognizes Wildlife Crime as Threat
(Empowered News) 
Poaching and the illicit trafficking of wildlife products were raised on the floor of the United Nations General Assembly for the first time Monday, during discussions on strengthening national and international governance. World leaders gathering in New York for the global body’s 67th annual meeting highlighted wildlife trafficking along with other severe threats to the rule of law, such as corruption and drug running. MORE

Jaguar Conservation Gets a Boost in North and Central America
(Mongabay)      
Jaguar conservation has received a huge boost in the past few months both in Latin America and in the U.S. An historic agreement signed between the world’s leading wild cat conservation organization Panthera and the government of Costa Rica in addition to a new U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service proposal bring renewed hope to the efforts to revive the iconic jaguar in its current habitat and return the cats to the American Southwest. MORE

Colorado Wildlife Officials Work to Reintroduce Cutthroat Trout in San Juan Mountains
(The Associated Press via The Republic)
Colorado Parks and Wildlife officials are reintroducing native cutthroat trout to a part of the San Juan Mountains where they once lived. Last week, state biologists took more than 250 native cutthroat trout that had been captured on the Uncompahgre Plateau and stocked them in Woods Lake southwest of Telluride. MORE

Two Wolves from Washington State Gray Wolf Pack Killed for Preying on Cattle
(NBC News) 
Two gray wolves in Washington state were killed from a state helicopter after officials decided the entire pack — believed to be at least eight wolves — needed to be killed because of repeated attacks on cattle, officials said. An airborne marksman with the Washington Department of Fish and Wildlife killed the two wolves about seven miles from the Canadian border — a week after marksmen and wildlife biologists spent days looking for the pack. MORE

Desert Tortoises Released as Part of Recovery Study
(Imperial Valley News)  
A team of conservationists translocated 60 juvenile tortoises into a large protected habitat area in southern Nevada. The project is part of a long-term collaborative effort involving U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the Nevada National Security Site and San Diego Zoo Global to learn about and recover a species that has become threatened in the wild. A transmitter has been placed on each of the tortoises to allow researchers to track the movements and health of the juvenile reptiles. MORE

Wildlife Officers Seize 500-plus Sets of Deer, Moose, Elk and Caribou Antlers
(Canadian Press via the Tyee)
Wildlife officers in Alberta have seized more than 500 sets of big-game antlers and charged a man with illegal trafficking of animals. The charges against Garland Larry Poyser of Sedgewick, Alberta, and his business, Poyser Auto Service came after a four-month undercover investigation. MORE

National Zoo: Baby Panda Death ‘Devastating’
(CBS News)   
Zookeepers and vets at the National Zoo in Washington, D.C. faced devastating news over the weekend. It was a noise from mother panda Mei Xiang, caught on the zoo’s panda-cam, that alerted officials that something wasn’t right. Within hours they confirmed the news: the zoo’s one-week-old cub had died. They had been trying to get Mei Xiang, their 14-year-old giant panda, pregnant for years. MORE

Turkey Federation Joins Efforts to Bring Back Bobwhites
(GateHouse News Service via The Register-Mail)
Bobwhite conservation efforts are getting a lift from the National Wild Turkey Federation. The NWTF has agreed to lend its organizational muscle and habitat restoration experience to efforts to bring back the Northern bobwhite, commonly referred to as quail. The NWTF announced the signing of a memorandum of understanding with the National Bobwhite Conservation Initiative, a consortium of 25 wildlife agencies working to restore populations of northern bobwhites. MORE

KWS Launches Conservation Strategy for Black Rhino in Kenya
(China.org.cn)
Kenya Wildlife Service has launched a five-year conservation and management strategy for the black rhino in the East African nation. The strategy to be managed from 2012-2016 is the fifth edition of its kind of the Rhino Strategic Plan which re-focuses efforts on rhino conservation despite the ever increasing challenges. “The strategy defines a revised overall goal of conserving at least 750 black rhinos by the end of 2016,” KWS Chairman Davis Mwiraria said. MORE

Drones Help Conserve Sumatran Orangutans and Other Wildlife
(Scientific American – BLOG)
What better way to study the world’s largest arboreal animals than by putting an eye in the sky? A team of scientists working in Indonesia has done just that by launching inexpensive unmanned aerial vehicles (aka drone airplanes), to study critically endangered Sumatran orangutans from above the treetops. The technology is already being put into use in other conservation projects around the world. MORE

In Tanzania, People and Lions Face Off Over Wildlife Corridors
(Worldcrunch)  
Laly Lichtenfeld has reason to be cautious. White outsiders have left some painful memories in this region of vast plains in the north of Tanzania. Thousands of people were expropriated to create the nearby national parks of Tarangire and Manyara, as well as the Serengeti, further north on the Kenyan border. In East Africa, there are few tribes who have paid as heavy a tribute to conservation as the Maasai. MORE