They once ruled most of California, mountains of tooth, claw, and tawny fur that changed the landscape just by living there. Now they exist only on the state flag.
https://www.kcet.org/redefine/bringing-back-the-california-grizzly
Partly driving the hunger is a dramatic decline in the numbers of sea lions’ main prey, sardines and anchovies, including around the Channel Islands, where many sea lions breed, according to fisheries scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration.
http://www.care2.com/causes/what-drives-this-california-woman-to-save-starving-sea-lions.html
Though he was a prodigious and talented naturalist, Steller died young, at only 37 years old, a mere four years after his trip to Alaska.
Twelve years after being put on the endangered species list, three subspecies of Channel Island fox are no longer considered to be on the verge of extinction, in what the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service is calling the fastest recovery of a mammal in the 43-year history of the Endangered Species Act. A fourth subspecies that had been listed as endangered has been upgraded to threatened.
http://www.scpr.org/news/2016/08/11/63443/the-channel-islands-fox-will-be-removed-from-endan/
"Bears are made of the same dust as we," wrote John Muir, "and breathe the same winds and drink of the same waters."
https://www.kcet.org/redefine/the-malibu-bear-can-be-a-good-neighbor-if-we-let-it
All scientists follow in the footsteps of earlier scientists. Steve Beissinger, Jim Patton and their colleagues at UC Berkeley’s Museum of Vertebrate Zoology take this more literally than most. Since 2005, they have tried to walk exactly where their predecessors walked 100 years ago, in an attempt to understand where California’s native animals are heading in a warming climate.
http://universityofcalifornia.edu/news/100-years-national-parks-100-years-climate-change-data
As authorities in California battle devastating wildfires across the state, experts are weighing the infernos’ effects on wildlife.
http://www.foxnews.com/science/2016/08/19/california-wildfires-experts-weigh-wildlife-impact.html
This was the third year of mass sea lion strandings along the California coastline that scientists at the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration say is due to a warming ocean and lack of food for these marine mammals birthed by the thousands each year on the Channel Island rookeries. The mass strandings were declared an “unusual mortality event” by federal officials.
http://m.ocregister.com/articles/center-726806-sea-marine.html
The small mammal – ‘one of the cutest animals in America’ – is struggling to survive as summers get hotter and drier.
Each [sea lion] death is a loss — and an opportunity.
