Five years after a federal judge blocked Trump administration efforts during his first term to weaken the Migratory Bird Treaty Act (MTBA), the president has reinstated the same provisions across most of the country.

White-nose syndrome, a disease that is fatal to bats and which has been moving across the country in recent years, has been detected in Rocky Mountain National Park in Colorado.

On a recent trip to Tennessee, I lost count of how many people told me the same strange and unusual thing about Great Smoky Mountains National Park. If you stacked up all of the park’s salamanders against its roughly 1,900 black bears, the salamanders would weigh more. Or was it salamanders versus all of the mammals and birds, or even all the wildlife?

Sea ducks such as Common eiders, grassland birds such as Western meadowlarks and Lark buntings, and forest species such as Pinyon jays in the West and Bachman's sparrow in the East are among a wide variety of bird species that are in serious declines, according to the 2025 State of the Birds report.