Wildlife

"NORTH GRAFTON, Mass. – By the time the veterinarian saw the Canada goose, it was starving. Lumpy bulges ran the length of its neck, from its white chinstrap to its shrunken breast. It was too weak to squabble – so sluggish, in fact, that the veterinarian could scoop up the goose and move it to the stainless steel table without throwing a blanket over it."

"New York City is launching the latest salvo in its never-ending war on rats. City officials are ramping up efforts to teach regular New Yorkers how to make their streets, businesses and gardens less hospitable to rodents — in other words, to see their neighborhood the way a health inspector would."

"Summer is high season for 'frogging.' The North American Amphibian Monitoring Project has hundreds of volunteers crisscrossing the country to get a better handle on the fate of the nation's frogs.""

"A measles-like virus that is blamed for killing hundreds of dolphins on the U.S. East Coast has spread into a Florida lagoon where hundreds of manatees, brown pelicans and dolphins already died mysteriously in recent years."

"Bald eagles continue to expand in Kentucky, extending a steady increase in breeding pairs especially during the last decade."

"The controversial six-month dolphin hunting season began on Monday in the infamous town of Taiji, but bad weather would delay any killing, a local official told AFP."

"JACKSON, Wyo. – Meghan Warren grabbed the bald eagle’s legs with thick leather gloves to secure its powerful talons. With her other hand, she pinned the bird’s wings before they could unfold to a six-foot span."

"In a sharp rebuke of state plans for a massive water tunnel system in Northern California, federal environmental officials say that the project would violate pollution standards and could worsen conditions for imperiled fish species."

"FLATEY ISLAND, Iceland – When the days grew long, seabirds flocked to this hamlet on the edge of the Arctic to rear their chicks under the midnight sun. “Kria,” shrieked the terns, calling summer up from the slumbering ground. Black cliffs were transformed into snowbanks of white kittiwakes. Puffins whirred between land and sea. Murres plied the shoreline, fulmars patrolled the skies. Everywhere sounded their vibrant chorus."

The wolf known as OR7 prompted some reflective writing -- and a flood of reader response -- in the Pacific states. The coverage reminds us that there is room for the personal and evocative as well as the objective and informative in environmental journalism. And it restored Sacramento Bee writer Matt Weiser's faith in the newspaper.