Bald eagles are a breathtaking sight, no matter where you see them. Bald eagles are making headlines again, as proven by NPR’s story about the birds’ amazing recovery in Chesapeake Bay.

“Forty years ago, we probably would not have seen a single bald eagle here,” says Bryan Watts, a conservation biologist. This is a familiar story across a nation where pollution and pesticides(杀虫剂) nearly wiped out the species in the United States. The bald eagle was on the endangered species list for decades, and considerable recovery efforts were put into place to bring the national symbol back.

It was delisted in 2007, and stories of its recovery have continued to be a source of celebration from Glenwood, Iowa to Chicago to Sandy Island Eagle Sanctuary in Missouri. The fascination with watching this species come back with vigor(活力) has been equally as wonderful as witnessing the recovery itself. Some efforts to help endangered species recover can be controversial, but the recovery of the bald eagle has been a story everyone can get behind. A bald eagle nest in Decorah, Iowa brings in millions of viewers every season as the parents hatch their chicks. It’s not often a livestream angled on a bird’s nest gets that kind of viewership!

The conservation effort has not been easy and in some areas, such as the Channel Islands off the California coast, it is really tough to carry out. Bald eagles once called these islands home but disappeared with the emergence of the pesticide DDT. In addition, humans changed the ecosystem there by introducing invasive species. Restoration efforts have included removing the alien species and helping native species. A program for reintroducing bald eagles starting in 2002 has been a success, with 2010 seeing a record-setting 15 wild chicks hatched.

At present, while there are many dangers that still face the bald eagle, the incredibly successful recovery over the last several decades is a conservation story to champion - and one to feed hope for other endangered species whose recovery is still underway.

MEXICO CITY — Gently holding a baby hummingbird between her hands, Catia Lattouf says, “Hello, cute little guy. Are you very hungry?” It’s the newest patient at her apartment in Mexico City where she has nursed hundreds of the tiny birds back to health over the past decade. Since Lattouf turned her apartment in Mexico City’s Polanco neighborhood into a clinic for sick, injured or infant hummingbirds, about 60 of which currently fly around.

Lattouf explained that she began caring for them a year after surviving colon cancer in 2011. It started with one hummingbird that had an eye injured by another bird. A vet friend encouraged her to try to help it. She named it Gucci after the brand of the glasses case she kept it in. The bird became her inseparable companion, perching on her computer screen while she worked.

“It wrote me a new life,” she said of the nine months the bird lived with her. It helped pull Lattouf out of the sadness and loneliness she had experienced after her husband’s 2009 death followed by her own cancer. Later, friends and acquaintances began bringing her more hummingbirds. Some have injuries to wings after colliding with things or fallng from nests. Some have infections from drinking polluted water.

Most of the hummingbirds are in the bedroom where Lattouf sleeps. They stay there until they are strong enough to fly and feed themselves. Then she moves them to a neighboring room to prepare them to eventually be freed.Their release comes in a wooded area on the city’s southside. Many of them do manage to return to the wild, but the ones who die under Lattouf’s care are buried near her building between small plants.

But Lattouf remains optimistic and is betting on other bird lovers planting more flowers to feed the great pollinators. “Nothing is guaranteed,” she said. “I believe God gives life and God takes it, but we do everything possible.”

Homing pigeons combine precise internal compasses and memorized landmarks to re-trace a path back to their lofts — even four years after the previous time they made the trip, a new study shows.

Testing nonhuman memory retention (保持) is challenging; in research studies, “it’s rare that there is a gap of several years between when an animal stores the information and when it is next required to retrieve it,” says University of Oxford zoologist Dora Biro. For a recent study in the Proceedings of the Royal Society B, Biro and her colleagues compared domestic homing pigeons’ paths three or four years after the birds established routes back to their loft from a farm 8.6 kilometers away. The study built on data from a 2016 experiment in which pigeons learned routes in different social contexts during several flights — on their own or with peers that did or did not know the way.

Using data from GPS devices temporarily attached to the birds’ backs, the researchers compared the flight paths a pack of pigeons took in 2019 or 2020, without the birds visiting the release site in between. Some birds missed a handful of landmarks along the way, but many others took “strikingly similar” routes to those they used in 2016, says Oxford zoologist and study co-author Julien Collet: “It was...as if the last time they flew there was just the day before, not four years ago.”

The team found that the pigeons remembered a route just as well if they first flew it alone or with others and fared much better than those that had not made the journey in 2016.

The result is not surprising, says Verner Bing-man, who studies animal navigation at Bowling Green State University and was not involved with the study. But it provides new confirmation of homing pigeons’ remarkable memory, he says: “It closes the distance a little bit between our self-centered sense of human intellectual abilities and what animals can do.”