#whale-beachings

#whale-beachings

"They didn't even try to fly away. They just feebly made noise," a woman told the Santa Barbara Independent on Saturday after spotting over two dozen dead or dying cormorants near Goleta Beach. "A few were on their stomachs, wings spread [and] gasping for breath.... Heartbreaking."

'Our results show that the next 20 years are critical,' lead author Dr Rob Cooke told the Daily Mail. 'By around 2050, we reach a point where the choices we make on emissions and land use will largely determine whether Britain moves towards a much more degraded or a much more nature‑positive future.'

As the rust expands, it weakens the rock and helps break it apart. It's a very red part of the country, it's got that rusty hue, so you get that color getting whipped up with the strong winds.

A whale's death offers a unique window and opportunity to study the animal up close and in this particular case, learn more about how this adult female gray whale may have been behaving in San Francisco Bay. We are hopeful that samples taken during the necropsy will shed some further light on the animal's death and help highlight the importance of keeping whales safe while they utilize this urban-wildlife habitat.

This golden strip of sand, fringed by turquoise waters, is part of the popular Abel Tasman National Park on Tasman Bay (also known as Te Tai-o-Aorere) at the top of the South Island. Awaroa Beach is nothing if not beloved. So much so that in 2016, almost 40,000 Kiwis banded together to buy the beach from a private entity for more than $2 million and donated it to New Zealand's Department of Conservation.

Mendocino County is throwing four different whale fests, on the four weekends of March, each in a separate coastal community. After that comes Monterey, in April, with its big annual celebration full of science and wharf fun.

For decades, whale watching has been a seasonal ritual along the Sonoma Coast, drawing locals to wind-swept bluffs, binoculars in hand. Now the pastime has earned national notice: Travel + Leisure has declared Sonoma County the best place in the country to see whales. In a story published Feb. 3, the magazine said there is "no better place" in the United States for whale watching than the stretch of coastline

The baby turtle was found stranded in New South Wales's Booderee national park last April, much further south than the usual hatching grounds. After days of feeding on squid, sardines and marine vitamins, BB, whose sex cannot be determined until it is fully mature, revived. Through winter, BB remained in heated rehabilitation pools to thermoregulate while offshore waters remained too cold.

A deep area of low pressure to the south-east of New Zealand's North Island swept into the region on Sunday, bringing heavy rain, gale-force winds and dangerous coastal swells that lashed exposed shorelines. The storm triggered power outages, forced evacuations and damaged infrastructure, with further impacts likely on Monday as the system lingers for a time, before tracking southwards later.

'Orcas are psychos,' quipped a close friend recently. He wasn't joking, nor was he ill-informed. In fact, he is probably the world's leading historian of whales and people. He had just watched a BBC Earth clip, narrated by David Attenborough, in which three killer whales separate a male humpback calf from his mother in the waters of Western Australia. The video's closing footage, with two of the orcas escorting the naive youngster to his imminent death, resembles nothing so much as a kidnapping:

“devastating to receive the news we have all been dreading.”

A boy has been attacked by a shark in Sydney's east and is in a critical condition after suffering serious injuries to both legs. The boy, believed to be aged about 12, was pulled from the water at Shark beach at Neilsen Park, in the eastern suburb of Vaucluse, on Sunday afternoon. He was treated at the scene by first responders with tourniquets, New South Wales police said. Emergency services were first called to the harbourside beach at about 4.20pm, police said.

A tiny critically endangered moth, named after the Avatar films because of the proposed mining activity threatening its primary habitat, has been crowned New Zealand's bug of the year. The Avatar moth won by a wide margin, earning 5,192 of the more than 11,000 total votes cast. It won 2,269 more votes than the runner-up, the mahoenui giant weta, one of the world's largest insects. Other contenders included the wonderfully spiky hellraiser mite, the country's heaviest spider the black tunnelweb and a giant earthworm