gracious/environment

In a good year, David Hackenberg can make a $100,000 profit from beekeeping, but this past year has been a financial disaster. And it all began one afternoon last November when he checked on some of his hives in Florida.

"When I pulled into a bee yard in Florida, there was 400 hives of bees that three weeks before that looked great. And all of a sudden, here we got roughly 400 beehives that are totally empty," he recalls.

The bees were gone, and Hackenberg says he doesn't know where they went. "I mean, I literally got down and crawled around. I mean, seriously, I got down on my hands and knees and crawled around. And there's no dead bees. There are no dead bees anywhere. I mean, you can't find any bees. They flew off someplace," he recalls.

The bees, Hackenberg says, never came back. It's something he says he'd never seen before . . .

The world's most endangered cat species may be slightly less endangered than previously thought.

A new population of Iberian lynx has been discovered in a remote area of Spain--raising the number of known populations from two to three--a conservation group reports.

The newfound population appears to roam private estates in the Castile la Mancha Province of central Spain, according to the international conservation group WWF.

The two other known populations occupy isolated portions of Andalusia in southern Spain.

Walton County's fi rst-ever documented leatherback sea turtle nest has hatched, and 23 babies have made their way safely to the Gulf of Mexico.

After 79 days of close watch by the South Walton Turtle Watch Group, Walton County's sea turtle nest No. 12, located in Seagrove just west of Seagrove Villas, came to life Oct. 6 following the day's heavy rain.

At 9:15 p.m., Turtle Watch Volunteer Joe Burton checked on the nest and found a tiny flipper coming out of the sand. After making several phone calls, Burton, fellow volunteer Sharon Maxwell, and 23 other spectators crowded around the nest as the baby sea turtles slowly emerged and crawled into the water.

"A truly awesome sight," Maxwell said.

Scientists reported this week that the population of Southern Rockhopper penguins on Isla Noir, in southern Chile, the most important colony for the Eudyptes chrysocom family in all of South America, has risen to 316 thousand. Environmentalists stressed the importance of this increase in population, especially in light of the drop in the species' population in previous decades.

The overall decline of the world's penguin population began in the middle of the 19th century when the European whaling industry devastated the species by using their eggs and meat for food. In 1860 the reward for a captured penguin was so lucrative that in just three years hunters managed to kill around 500,000 penguins.

Best known for their large, yellow crests, the Southern Rockhopper has been able to live on Isla Noir, Magallanes Region, close to Punta Arenas, in relative isolation due to the heavy rain and winds that are typical of the island. The penguins occupy a large area - 15 km long by 3 km wide - on the peripheries of the island's southern canals. This area is extremely conducive to their reproductive habits, as the penguins are known to nest in highly vegetated areas that are difficult to reach.

Some of climate's best canaries are turning out to be penguins. Down the mine, an upturned songbird in a cage was the first warning of a deadly gas seep. Above ground, an age of fossil fuels later, there are different silences.

In the sub-Antarctic, king penguins fledge fewer chicks if the parents must forage in warming seas. Rising waters are swamping limited nesting space for African penguins in Namibia.

But it's on the the west coast of the Antarctic Peninsula that the signal is clearest. The raucous cacophony of Adelie penguins has disappeared from the landscape as colonies collapse.

"There are no sounds but the wash of the sea, the occasional calls of skuas."

"Every penguin is gone, the nests are abandoned. Listen to the silence. The silence of absence. The sound of failure."

Look at this series of photos of a pigeon who raises a family on a bed of nails.



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A surprisingly large number of people are unaware that there are lots of different types of bee in Britain, including bumblebees (genus Bombus), honeybees (Apis mellifera) and numerous small solitary species. Bumblebees are the large, furry and often colorful insects that frequently feature in children's books, cartoons and on greetings cards.

A temporary, 30-ranger gorilla-protection force has been deployed in the troubled African park where at least five mountain gorillas were killed, execution style, in July.

The emergency measure is intended to end the attacks on endangered gorillas in the Democratic Republic of the Congo's Virunga National Park.

More than half of the world's 700 endangered mountain gorillas are found in Virunga National Park, which straddles the border of Congo, Rwanda, and Uganda.

Last month four mountain gorillas from the Rugendo family were found shot dead in the park, execution style."