Who's shooting who?

Here's one cub reporter who could bearly contain herself as she watched a wildlife photographer at work. As Dean Swartz took pictures of a black bear family in Minnesota, America, he noticed one juvenile bear watching him very closely. After about 45 minutes the bear decided to have a go as well and ambled over to the tripod. Backing off, Dean used another camera on his shoulder to carry on taking pictures as the animal investigated his expensive equipment. 

Picture: Dean Swartz / National News and Pictures

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Guess what this is

Can you guess what this cute little prickly creature might be?

Clue:
They're found in Madagascar.

Here's another cute one:

Here's one, stuck to a boot:

Give up?

These cute little critters are called Streaked Tenrecs

Photo 1: Source

Photo 2: Source

Photo 3: Source

Feeling blue?

An adult male blue iguana in the Queen Elizabeth II botanic park on Grand Cayman Island. Roughly 700 blue iguanas breed and roam free in protected woodlands on the eastern side of Grand Cayman in the western Caribbean, the only place where the critically endangered animals are found in the wild.

Photograph: Will Burrard-Lucas/Cayman Islands Department of Tourism/AP
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Bear falls safely from tree

A young bear, estimated to weigh between 150 and 200 pounds, had wandered onto the University of Colorado at Boulder campus and climbed into a tree.

"The bear was tranquilized by the Colorado Parks and Wildlife Department and it fell onto some mats that the Rec Center provided," CU Police Department spokesman Ryan Huff told the paper. "It is now in a cage and it will be relocated at a higher elevation."

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Pink panther? No, it's a pink leopard

A male leopard with a strawberry-colored coat has been spotted in South Africa's Madikwe Game Reserve, conservationists announced this week.

 Tourists in the reserve had occasionally seen the unusual animal. But it wasn't until recently that photographer and safari guide Deon De Villiers sent a photograph to experts at Panthera, a U.S.-based wild cat-conservation group, to ask them about the leopard's odd coloration.

It is suspected that the pale leopard has erythrism, a little-understood genetic condition that's thought to cause either an overproduction of red pigments or an underproduction of dark pigments.

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Bald Eagles Nesting in Palos Township

How exciting! Just a few minutes from my house!

A pair of bald eagles has nested in Palos Township next to Tampier Slough, a section of the Cook County Forest Preserves near Palos Park. In the last few weeks, eaglets have hatched, making this the first confirmed nesting site in Cook County in more than a century.

The nest itself is about 6 feet wide, leading officials to believe the pair began to build last year.

The eaglets are not expected to venture outside the nest for several weeks and will rely on their parents' fishing. The eagles will generally cover an area of one to two miles in their hunting expeditions.

It was Bill Allaway, owner of Wild Birds Unlimited, in Palos Park who first alerted forest preserve district staff about the nest.

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Can you guess what this is?

The fossa is a cat-like, carnivorous mammal related to the mongoose family, that is endemic to Madagascar. The fossa is the largest mammalian carnivore on the island of Madagascar and has been compared to a small cougar. Adults have a head-body length of 28 to 31 inches and weigh between 12 and 19 pounds.

Credit: worldswildlifewonders | Shutterstock

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What is it?

Three guesses ... what is this?

An Ontario woman contacted a local animal sanctuary after she found this strange creature in her yard.

The folks at Aspen Valley Wildlife Sanctuary in Rosseau, Ontario, have helped plenty of interesting animals, but this phone call from a woman living nearby led to something even more unusual — a small, mysterious, bald creature.

Read the rest of the story to see if you guessed correctly.

The cutest thing you'll see today

pygmy mouse lemur

Photograph: Mark Thiessen/AP/National Geographic

The cutest thing you'll see today

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The cutest thing you'll see today

Photograph: Anup Shah and Fiona Rogers/NPL/Rex Features
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Giraffe tongue

Photo credit: Colin 30d

Ageless Style

Totally by accident, I just discovered the most marvelous blog, Advanced Style, which shows some very stylish ladies of all ages.

This photo, in particular, caught my eye:

This is Lady Francesca Todd with a lion that attacked her Kenya in 1965.

Can you just imagine the adventures this lady has had throughout her very interesting life?

Shark smile

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Mini moose

White Tiger tongue

It's snipers vs. deer in Washington DC

The authorities managing Washington, DC's Rock Creek park could decide as early as this week whether to activate a deer management plan that calls for killing 80% of the white-tailed deer, or more than 300 of the animals living in the area, over a two to three-year period.

It's not exactly a comforting scenario: government sharpshooters, equipped with night-vision goggles and silencers, deployed in the dead of night in a favorite Washingtonian park for the express purpose of slaughtering hundreds of white-tailed deer.

Without such extreme steps, environmental experts say the forest would be eaten into oblivion in a matter of years. There are 80 deer per square mile of park; new shoots and delicate plants don't have a chance. The park is also experiencing severe erosion, because of the lack of regrowth.

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Real dragons!

In Buton, Indonesia, there lives an insanely cool species of gliding lizard which looks like a miniature dragon.

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365 New Species Spotted in Peru

Hundreds of species never before seen in a Peruvian national park have been found during an inventory of the Amazonian forests there, according to a conservation group.

The Wildlife Conservation Society (WCS) announced the discovery of 365 species previously undocumented in Bahuaja Sonene National Park in southeastern Peru. More than a dozen researchers inventoried the park's plant life, insects, birds, mammals and reptiles. The species found are known to exist elsewhere, but have never been seen inside Bahuaja Sonene.

The discovery included 30 undocumented bird species, including the black-and-white hawk eagle, Wilson's phalarope and ash-colored cuckoo. The survey also found two undocumented mammals — Niceforo's big-eared bat and the Tricolored Bat — as well as 233 undocumented species of butterflies and moths. This expedition was the first time that research of this scale has been carried out in Bahuaja Sonene National Park since it was created in 1996, according to the WCS.

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Monkey faces

Each mountain gorilla face is unique. They range from beautiful to expressive, laughable, and noble. Some of the infants have faces like old men, and the toddlers sport wild hairstyles. Here are a few pictures from The Faces of Virunga’s Mountain Gorillas. Source