Once upon a time, flocks of passenger pigeons were so dense they blocked the sun like great gray thunderclouds flying overhead. Composer Stephanie Ann Boyd imagines this with music. “You will feel this movement before you hear it: a deep rumble in the low voices of the orchestra suddenly crescendo and explode into a grand, flying murmuration of sound and flurry,” Boyd writes. The passenger pigeon movement is part of Carnival of the Nearly Extinct Animals, a work honoring species facing extinction and a few that have already crossed the threshold. This staged production pairing music with puppetry, dance, and spoken word opens at the historic Hawaii Theatre in Honolulu on Sept. 18 and 19, produced by Ocean Music Action in partnership with the Hawaii Theatre Center. Carnival of the Nearly Extinct Animals has 14 movements covering 13 species: tigers, bees and butterflies, polar bears, hawksbill turtles, elephants, black rhinos, coral, blue whales, ivory-billed woodpeckers, passenger pigeons, gray wolves, American buffalo and kāhuli, snails native to Hawai‘i, with a finale. Boyd designed the orchestral piece as a sister work to an older, famous piece of music called Carnival of the Animals, written by French composer Camille Saint-Saëns in the 1880s. The two pieces share the same number of movements and are roughly the same length. Musicians from the Hawai‘i Symphony Orchestra play the score in Honolulu, with dancers from Ballet Hawaii and guest artists from New York. Obie Award-winning puppeteer Greg Corbino built dozens of the animals by hand. Hawaiian…This article was originally published on Mongabay

In the villages of India’s Western Ghats, some of the oldest and tallest trees do not grow inside a national park. They grow in sacred groves, small patches of old, mostly untouched forest that local communities have protected for generations, because they believe the trees belong to their deities and ancestors. A new study published in the journal PLOS One found that young trees regenerate far more successfully in these groves. Seeds dropped by fruit-eating birds are much likelier to survive and grow there than in surrounding farms and villages. India has more than 100,000 sacred groves, which are recognized as essential to community-based conservation. The Western Ghats is a mountain range that runs about 1,600 kilometers (nearly 1,000 miles) down India’s west coast, across six states. The study began there by chance. A team from the Applied Environmental Research Foundation (AERF), which runs a giant-tree program, had signed up a man in Vanzole village with a huge Terminalia bellirica (beheda) tree in his yard. Visiting, they saw giant trees all over the village. “It sparked a series of questions,” study co-author Kevin Matteson, associate director of Project Dragonfly at Miami University in the U.S. state of Ohio, told Mongabay in an email. How many giant trees were hiding in plain sight, and were birds like hornbills really using trees in such busy places? To find out, the team walked the whole village with two local experts, Namdev and Anant Shivgan, who mapped the land, identified the trees and led…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Two municipalities in the Peruvian Amazon have granted native stingless bees the legal right to exist, thrive and be represented in court. This is the first time any insect has been recognized as a rights-bearing entity anywhere in the world, according to a correspondence published in Nature. The ordinances passed in the municipalities of Satipo and Nauta-Loreto guarantee the bees’ right to exist, reproduce and flourish. This establishes a legal framework allowing Indigenous groups and conservationists to sue on behalf of the bees. The campaign was led by Rosa Vásquez Espinoza, founder of Amazon Research Internacional. She spent years traveling into the Amazon to document the bees in collaboration with Indigenous communities. Indigenous peoples have cultivated stingless bees since pre-Columbian times, and they have cultural and spiritual meaning for Indigenous groups such as Asháninka and Kukama-Kukamiria peoples. “Within the stingless bee lives Indigenous traditional knowledge, passed down since the time of our grandparents,” Apu Cesar Ramos, president of EcoAshaninka of the Ashaninka Communal Reserve told The Guardian. “The stingless bee has existed since time immemorial and reflects our coexistence with the rainforest.” The Nature authors noted that stingless bees pollinate roughly 80% of tropical flora. However, they face climate change, deforestation, pesticides and competition from invasive European honeybees. Peru’s national Law No. 32235, passed in 2025, formally recognized stingless bees as a species of national interest. This milestone helped pave the way for the municipal ordinances. “This ordinance marks a turning point in our relationship with nature: it makes stingless bees visible,…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Fungi are living below your feet. Roughly 110 quadrillion kilometers of living fungal threads are woven through the world’s soils. Stretched end-to-end they would cover a distance nearly a billion times that from Earth to the sun. Now, scientists have mapped where those networks are, how dense they are, and what threatens them. Last year, researchers published global analyses in Nature about the diversity patterns of underground mycorrhizal fungal communities along with the Underground Atlas to help decision makers visualize where to prioritize conservation. Now, they ask the question: How much fungal infrastructure exists, and where? A new study published in Science by researchers with the Society for the Protection of Underground Networks (SPUN) and collaborators produced the first global maps of arbuscular mycorrhizal (AM) fungal network density and biomass. “There could be up to 10 meters (32 feet) of mycorrhizal network in just a teaspoon of soil,” lead author Justin Stewart of SPUN said in a press statement. Nearly all land plants live in partnership with arbuscular mycorrhizal fungi. The fungi exchange water and nutrients for carbon made from sunlight. These underground networks act as a living circulatory system for the planet, and the new study found they move an estimated 4 billion tons of CO2 equivalent into soils annually, roughly 11% of global human-related emissions. To build the density maps, the team drew on data from more than 16,000 soil cores collected across nine biomes referenced in 322 published studies. They developed machine-learning models to predict network density…This article was originally published on Mongabay

Deep in Taiwan’s misty mountains, researchers have confirmed the tallest tree in the country: a thousand-year-old fir tree higher than a 20-story building, which they’ve named “the heaven sword of the Da’an River.” Climbers scaled the tree and dropped a measuring tape from the top to the forest floor during the Lunar New Year holiday in January 2023. The tree measured 84.1-meters (276-feet). The findings have been published in Frontiers in Forests and Global Change. A team of ecologists, geologists, remote-sensing specialists, professional climbers and Indigenous people that calls itself the “Taiwan tree seekers” began the search in 2014. “The common characteristics [of the team] are probably that we are all tree lovers and like adventures,” Rebecca Chia-Chun Hsu, lead author from Division of Forest Ecology, Institute of Taiwan Forestry Research, told CNN. ‘The Heaven Sword’, Taiwan’s tallest tree, measures 84.1 meters. Photo courtesy of Steven Pearce. Taiwan is one of the few places on Earth where trees can grow this tall. The island sits where the tropics meet the subtropics, and its mountains host several giant conifer species. The species behind the new record, Taiwania cryptomerioides, is known to the Indigenous Rukai people as “the tree that hits the moon.” Although nearly 60% of Taiwan is covered in forest, loggers cleared much of the island’s old-growth forest between 1912 and 1991. However, its steep slopes were too dangerous to reach, and pockets of ancient forest survived. Still, finding the tallest tree amid the rugged terrain was a task. Taiwan…This article was originally published on Mongabay