• A big wilderness bill has passed the Senate, and will in all likelihood pass the House. It’ll create 2 million acres of wilderness — that sounds amazing, but much of the area was already in core National Park areas, so not much of a change. Still, fantastic. More on it from California and Oregon.
• It appears that forest re-generation might make the whole rainforest disappearing thing not as bad as it once seemed. Unfortunately, the species adapted to second-growth forest are generally the ones not threatened with extinction.
• When you introduce cats and rabbits to an island that had no cats or rabbits, what do you think happens when you remove the cats? If you answered “rabbit chaos,” you should probably seek a high-level position in wildlife management, because evidently some people aren’t as clever as you.
• Rejoice! The Hispaniolan solenedon has been re-discovered! If you haven’t heard of it, it’s a very weird creature — one of only two mammals (the other being its Cuban cousin) that injects venom through grooves in its teeth. And it’s been around since the dinosaurs. Footage here (not of the dinosaurs, sadly).
• To end on a sad note, a ranger in Virunga has been killed by the Mai Mai militia. If you’re so inclined, you can donate money here — money goes directly to rangers and their families.

• Here’s an article about a BirdLife project emphasizing links between biodiversity conservation and rural livelihoods. They claim they’ve succeeded. Meanwhile, some researchers are wondering if we’ll get an increasingly homogenized landscape as people move to the city and rural areas de-populate.
• They’re going out again to search for the ivory-billed woodpecker. “We’re going to find a big black and white woodpecker,” Allan Mueller says, the avian conservation manager for TNC in Arkansas. Indeed, they’re quite likely to find a few Pileateds. I’m kind of leaning towards the “still extinct” camp — there’s actually a competent overview of the debate on Wikipedia.
• Lots of good gorilla news these days: a new park in Cameroon, African governments are “committed” to protecting gorillas at a conference in Rome, and (perhaps best of all), rangers are returning to Virunga, and finding lots of new babies. Adorable.

The NY Times today has an article on the rangers, gorillas and rebels in and around Virunga. Honestly, it should probably be about 3-5 times longer, though that’s almost certainly the fault of the editor. Now, if you want some nice world-view shift, go ahead and read this article from the LA Times on cell phones in national parks in the U.S. Reading the two back to back is stunning.

Virunga: “We figured if the gorillas can eat leaves, so can we.”

Yellowstone: “I’d love to get my pictures on Facebook tonight.”

Virunga: “I put her in my arms and just ran… I thought she was dead.”

Yellowstone: “One of the things that makes it [the most special times in their lives] is the ability to hear the splash of a geyser . . . and not having that sound drowned out by somebody having a conversation with their family back in New Jersey.”

Oh, America. Despite the whole cell phone / WiFi thing being unmeasurably unimportant as compared to the problems in Virunga these days, it’s another worthwhile thought exercise. Should hotels in our protected areas carry wireless internet? Keep in mind there is a specific policy against televisions…

• All of the rangers missing in Virunga have been accounted for. One has, sadly, died from cholera in a camp.
• The Maldives are (is?) seeking to buy property on the mainland, in the event that their country becomes completely submerged in the next century. Can I get a historian in here to comment on historical precedent for this? Environmental refugees. Flood myths… in a slightly snarkier context, Kevin Drum suggests a Credit Default Swap for climate — surely any good-thinking climate change denier would be happy to take that bet.
• Al Gore and the Ehrlichs each have pretty good suggestions for the new administration.
• Marine census continues to find crazy new species.
• Malaysia and Indonesia are cutting back on oil palm plantations, after a severe drop in prices.

Special Saturday edition.

• 39 rangers are missing in Virunga.
• Putin creates new protected area for Amur leopard.
• Just in time for Halloween Dia de los Muertos, the Pemba flying fox of Tanzania has returned from the brink of extinction.
• They found a new species. Behold: VAMPIRE MOTH!
• Swoon: “I was just reading an article in the New York Times by Michael Pollen about food and the fact that our entire agricultural system is built on cheap oil. As a consequence, our agriculture sector actually is contributing more greenhouse gases than our transportation sector. And in the mean time, it’s creating monocultures that are vulnerable to national security threats, are now vulnerable to sky-high food prices or crashes in food prices, huge swings in commodity prices, and are partly responsible for the explosion in our healthcare costs because they’re contributing to type 2 diabetes, stroke and heart disease, obesity, all the things that are driving our huge explosion in healthcare costs. That’s just one sector of the economy. You think about the same thing is true on transportation. The same thing is true on how we construct our buildings. The same is true across the board.”

• That team of researchers searching for frogs in Costa Rica have discovered a female of “the rarest tree frog.” Coupled (ha) with the males they found this year and last, it appears there may be breeding individuals left in the world. “This has been the highlight of the whole of my career.”
• Camera traps in Virunga (boy that place gets a lot of coverage, huh?) have produced the first ever photographs of Okapi in the wild.
• The ESA Blawg discusses another change to the Endangered Species Act rules that the (sexy, drug-addled) Interior Department pushed through in August — without proposing the changes in the Federal Register. From what I understand (somebody correct me if I’m wrong), the rule change makes a threatened or endangered species only protected in specified portions of its range, not in its entirety.