Obituaries and tributes
At the San Diego Natural History Museum, Drew Stokes would slide open a drawer to reveal dozens of bats—some the size of bottle caps, others like éclairs. They were not trophies. Most had died of natural causes and were donated to science. For him, they were data, clues, and—
Obituaries and tributes
For most Americans, the loss of a tree might pass unnoticed. For Rex Mann, it changed the course of his life. As a boy growing up in the mountains of western North Carolina, Mann listened to his father—once a moonshiner, later a Baptist lay minister—describe the American chestnut
Obituaries and tributes
Few men have stood so squarely in the crosshairs of development and conservation in Sri Lanka as Jayantha Jayewardene. A former rugby forward with a spine of steel, he spent decades grappling with a quieter, more consequential struggle: How to protect the island’s dwindling wild elephants amid its swelling
Obituaries and tributes
For most people, the bush falls silent after dark. For Edward McNabb, it came alive. In the folds of night across Victoria’s forests, he attuned himself to sounds few others could name: the resonant trill of a Sooty Owl, the scratch of a glider, the croak of a burrowing
Obituaries and tributes
To work in Alaska as a wildlife biologist is to accept hardship as part of the job: blizzards, isolation, and a daily intimacy with life, death, and the difficult questions in between. For John Landsiedel, it was not only worth it—it was the dream. He arrived in Dillingham in
Obituaries and tributes
Among those who cared about freshwater fish—and there were many—Paul Loiselle stood out not for how loudly he spoke and cared, but for how deeply he understood. His grasp of ichthyology was vast, his judgment trusted across both scientific and aquarium hobbyist circles. But what set him apart
Obituaries and tributes
When flames overtook the hillsides above the Zagros and Hassanabad neighborhoods in the Abidar highlands of Iranian Kurdistan, there was no formal emergency response team. No firebreaks. No protective gear. Only a handful of local environmentalists—among them Hamid Moradi—stepped in, as they had so many times before, to
Obituaries and tributes
Note: In July 2025 I discovered this piece was still in drafts. I published it now, about a year after intended. It began with a buffalo. The animal lay slumped beside a dry waterhole in Tsavo West National Park, its great ribs rising and falling slowly in the dust. No
Obituaries and tributes
The eastern reaches of the Democratic Republic of Congo are no strangers to tragedy. Yet the loss of two Virunga National Park rangers in a surveillance plane crash near Ishango on July 23 underscores once again the mortal risks faced by those charged with defending one of the world’s
Obituaries and tributes
He spent a lifetime defending an animal few people understood, and even fewer could name. In 1967, on the spring-fed waters of Florida’s Crystal River, a teenager named James “Buddy” Powell encountered a stranger in a rowboat. The man, a Cornell graduate student, was looking for manatees—a
Obituaries and tributes
In the final months of her life, Sharon Haussmann could still be found walking fence lines, coordinating anti-poaching patrols, and debating the finer points of dehorning protocol with field rangers and policy-makers alike. The work was unrelenting, the stakes immense. But for Haussmann, the head of the Greater
Obituaries and tributes
In the United States, there are few things more American than ice cream. And few names more synonymous with it than Baskin-Robbins. The company’s pastel storefronts, pink spoons, and 31 flavors became part of the cultural wallpaper. John Robbins could have had it all: the corner office, the