Photo: Hugh Rose, Accentalaska

The critical habitat established to protect Alaska’s polar bears is the largest of its kind in the United States.

For the first time polar bears in the U.S. have their own critical habitat. The 187,157-square-mile swath around Alaska is mostly offshore, where roughly 3,500 Ursus maritimus dwell on sea ice—and large oil deposits may lurk. Set last fall, the Interior Department designation means all future drilling plans will be federally scrutinized (existing structures are exempt). It also protects barrier islands and the coastline where more mother bears are denning as sea ice melts.

Map: Jerome N. Cookson, NGM staff. Sources: IHS Energy; U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Click to enlarge.

So far, reactions have been mixed. The state of Alaska and Alaska Native corporations, which rely heavily on oil and gas dollars, say the red tape and the habitat’s vast size will spell huge revenue losses. Environmentalists cheer the move but fear it won’t be enforced. To save polar bears, they say, list them as endangered, not threatened. That would bolster legal protections and leave more room to tackle the chief threat to the animals’ territory: the greenhouse gas emissions causing climate change.
—Jeremy Berlin

Photograph by Debapratim Saha

The protected pachyderms of West Bengal, India—such as those in the Mahananda Wildlife Sanctuary (top)—are hardly out of harm's way. In fact, since 2004, 27 have been killed by trains barreling down the hundred miles of track that run where they roam. Now the Ministry of Railways is under pressure from conservationists and the environmental ministry to enforce speed limits, reduce travel at night (when most casualties occur), and prune vegetation to improve the driver's view. —Catherine Zuckerman

Photo: Rescuers pull a dolphin from the too shallow Pailas River in Bolivia. Photograph by Dado Galdieri 

The pink river dolphin of Bolivia is the landlocked country's only cetacean—a colorful but unprotected character known locally as the bufeo. No wonder, then, that scientists and environmentalists scrambled last spring after 20 of these mammals got stuck in a half-mile-long, five-foot-deep part of the drought-stricken Pailas River, a tributary of the Grande River.

Tiger eye, Madhav National Park, India, 1997; photograph by Michael Nichols

To mark Big Cat Week on the Nat Geo Wild channel, meet the people who are fighting to save the big cats in ways that may sometimes seem fanatical. In India a man risks life and limb in a battle against armed poachers. In the Americas another man is spearheading one of the largest conservation projects ever known to provide safe passage for the jaguar. And in the remote mountainous regions of Asia see what creative means have been undertaken to save the elusive snow leopard. Take a Big Cats Quiz and find out more about the National Geographic Society's Big Cats Initiative.

• 2009 June/July -- National Geographic Adventure magazine. Cat Fight: The War on India's Tigers. 60-68, 81-83. Dharmendra Kandal had been researching spiders when he happened to get a job surveying tigers in Ranthambhore National Park and wound up capturing poachers and tracking down rifle purveyors because no one else would. Author Paul Kvinta follows Kandal on the job and Tom Pietrasik photographs him in action.
• 2009 March -- National Geographic magazine. Path of the Jaguar. 122-133. From Mexico to Argentina the jaguar migrates, sometimes venturing into populated areas with tragic results. Mel White describes the ambitious effort led by the Panthera Foundation's Alan Rabinowitz to provide a network of corridors and refuges as a safe path, the Paseo de Jaguar. Photos show Alan Rabinowitz, and the jaguars, in motion.
• 2008 June -- National Geographic magazine. Out of the Shadows: Snow Leopards. 106-129. Douglas H. Chadwick reports on local conservation efforts to help this secretive animal who faces the challenges of a prized pelt, overgrazed lands and angry livestock owners. Photos by Steve Winter, who won the Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2008 award for one of the photos in this article.

Animals skitter away from a vehicle in the Serengeti.

Every May when the dry season starts to settle over Tanzania, great herds of wildebeests, zebras, and gazelles head northward, leaving the Serengeti National Park for greener pastures in Kenya. As the rains return in November, so do almost two million animals. Now their migration path is the focus of a debate over the proposed construction of a commercial highway.

Scottish Highland cattle, such as this bull in the Netherlands, will be used in early efforts to bring back aurochs. Photo: Ardi Hoogendijk, Foto Natura/Minden Pictures.

For centuries they roamed Europe’s forests—massive bovines called aurochs that were depicted on cave walls by Paleolithic artists (inset) and prized as hunting trophies. They died out nearly 400 years ago. Now genetics may bring them back to life.

Sound like a Jurassic Park sequel? It’s actually the real-life plan of Project Tauros, a consortium of European scientists using DNA sequenced from aurochs teeth to steer a novel breeding program. Project researchers are currently identifying living cattle—including Spanish Limiana and Italian Maremmana—that still carry aurochs genes. Then breeders will cross those cattle to retain the pertinent DNA, jettison the rest, and make bovines that, in about a decade, are expected to look and act just like their extinct ancestors.

What if you knew exactly which appliances in your home are the worst energy hogs—that the hot tub pump kicks in overnight when it shouldn't, or that the flat-screen TV is sucking energy even when it isn't "on"? Would that change the way you use—and save—electricity?

Residents of Boulder, Colorado, are finding the answers to such questions, thanks to a new "SmartGridCity” program that allows them to track electricity usage in near-real time. Instead of conventional electricity meters that require a reader to come and take a monthly reading, customers of utility Xcel Energy are outfitted with newfangled digital sensors that send real-time usage information back to Xcel’s computers. That data helps the company better avoid power outages—and also lets customers log on to their utility accounts online, where they can track when their usage spikes, then make adjustments.

Although still in its early stages, Boulder’s SmartGridCity program has already yielded a bevy of ways for residents to cut their bills:

1. Kill Your "Vampire" Loads. Those ‘stand-by’ modes that keep your flat-screen TVs, gaming systems, cordless drills, and the rest at the ready are mighty convenient. But they suck up so much electricity that they can add 10 percent to your monthly bill. To save electricity, Boulder, Colorado, resident Tim Hillman did the same thing with the power strips he plugs his electronic gadgets into that some folks do with their living-room table lamps: He attached the strips to automatic timers that switch off overnight. The resulting tangle of timers, strips and cords might look like deranged cootie toys, but they’ll slice your electricity bill.

2. Swamp Your Air Conditioner. Anyone who's hung out by a cold river on a hot day knows that the cold water creates its own microclimate, cooling the air that surrounds it. Evaporative coolers, commonly called "swamp coolers," operate on the same principle. A cold water line is attached to the cooler's reservoir. A filter then sucks up the cold water while a fan blows air through it. The result: a cool, nicely humidified house along with an air-conditioning bill that's as much as 90 percent lower than what it would cost to use conventional air conditioning— the biggest energy hog in the average home. Even better, most swamp coolers (available at appliance stores) can be had for $100 and up—about two-thirds the cost of equivalent A/C units. One caveat: swamp coolers are great for low-humidity climates like Arizona but are far less useful in muggy places like Washington, D.C.

Spearing lions used to be a rite of passage for young Maasai men. Now some warriors are guarding the big cats instead. As Africa’s exploding human populations vie with wildlife for land and resources, the number of lions speared, shot, snared, and poisoned has soared, imperiling the species. As few as 20,000 now remain. In response, Living With Lions, funded by the NGO Panthera, has hired tribesmen to protect their former foes. Warriors track lions, help cattle owners build lion-proof corrals, and educate Maasai communities on lions’ value. One study in Kenya found that each cat kills livestock worth $290 a year, yet brings in $17,000 in tourist revenue. Nevertheless, some experts warn that within 25 years there may be no lions left outside of the biggest, best run parks. Wildlife biologist Craig Packer says for lions to survive, parks must be fenced and heavily guarded—perhaps by the United Nations. —Karen E. Lange

Ernie’s eyes, though his oversize square glasses, spotted whoopers in the wild during early surveys. His hands first carried whooper eggs out of Canada’s Wood Buffalo National Park to seed captive programs aimed at saving the birds from extinction (see “Counting Cranes” in our June issue). As a young biologist he’d contemplated a life studying wolves and caribou, but witnessing the grandeur of a whooper in flight turned his focus to the sky. Crane conservation would be many strides behind if the birds hadn’t won Ernie over at such a critical time.

There’s a hillside village outside Lima, Peru, called Bellavista—even though the “beautiful view” is blocked in winter by dense fog that rolls in from the Pacific. But locals are putting all that moisture to good use. With the help of German conservationists Kai Tiedemann and Anne Lummerich, they’re coaxing it out of the air, using multilayered nets to capture fog and condense its fine droplets into water—lots of it. Just half an inch of rain falls here each year, so before the nets were set up on the hillcrest in 2006, villagers had to spend up to 15 percent of their earnings to truck water up from Lima. Now the fog generates tens of thousands of gallons of water a year, with which residents can sustain 700 young trees and ten farm gardens year-round. As the trees grow, Tiedemann hopes they’ll help naturally restore a formerly lush landscape. “These hills used to be covered in forests,” he says. “Once the trees were cut down, nothing was left to catch the fog.” In the meantime, today’s 26-foot-long nets are designed to serve that purpose. Globally, fog-catching projects have caught on in small communities from Ecuador to Eritrea when other options are too costly or unavailable. The downside? For now, says Lummerich, “we can produce a lot more water than we can store.” —Hannah Bloch

Classifying the world’s tallest, thickest, biggest, and oldest trees can be an extreme challenge. For the National Geographic "Extreme Trees" poster, featured in several of the magazine’s international editions, we took a look at what counts when measuring. Trees grow, limbs fall, ways of measuring change, and new trees are discovered, so figuring out which trees to highlight wasn’t easy.

As a chemical compound,  nothing could be simpler than water: two atoms of hydrogen joined to one of oxygen. From a human point of view, simplicity fades. Though water covers our world, more than 97 percent is salty. Two percent is fresh water locked in snow and ice, leaving less than one percent for us. This “precarious molecular edge on which we survive,” as Barbara Kingsolver says in this month’s special issue, will only grow more precarious. By 2025, 1.8 billion people will live where water is scarce.

In the pages to come, we bring to life the drama behind that statistic. And this is only the start of a larger commitment, at the magazine and throughout the National Geographic Society, to explore the world of water. To that end, the Society recently named Sandra Postel its first National Geographic Freshwater Fellow. As a researcher, lecturer, and writer, Sandra has worked in the field of sound water management for 25 years. The initiative she heads will not only educate; it will “reshape how people and communities think about, use, and manage fresh water. It will provide the tools to enable individuals, corporations, and communities to become part of the solution,” Sandra says. 

Vernon Yates took one of his 18 tigers to a party—his fee varies by event. “You can’t trust tigers,” a guest said. To prove her wrong, he told her he’d stick his head in the animal’s jaws and tug its tongue for $20. She had to pay up.

The antlered animals weren’t made for this—to stumble onto a boat in the middle of an autumn night and bump and sway on the water for six hours until they attain solid ground again and resume their overland migration to a winter refuge. In Norway, both reindeer and their seminomadic herders, members of the indigenous Sami, are struggling to find their balance as development intrudes on traditional grazing lands, changing the way humans and animals move.

When Louisiana lawmakers named the brown pelican the state bird, they missed an important point: There were no brown pelicans left there. That was in 1966, after years of pesticide runoff had ruined eggs and silenced once teeming coastal rookeries. Not long after the legislative gaffe, biologists set about reviving the state’s nesting colonies, relocating young birds from Florida. It was a huge success: 350,000 pelicans were born in Louisiana after 1971. Then came the hurricanes.

The muskox may look otherworldly, but it’s very much a creature of the Earth. In fact, this 800-pound primal relative of sheep and goats has roamed the Arctic for about a million years, since the Pleistocene. Scientists want to make sure it stays around for a long time to come. 

Call them cougars, mountain lions, or pumas. Americans think they see them everywhere. That’s no surprise in the West; strict management helped the predatory cat make a remarkable recovery after “varmint hunters” took numbers very low by the mid-1900s. Eastbound cougars are also turning up in the Midwest. South Dakota has a breeding population of 200-plus; just last year, Chicago cops cornered and shot one on the North Side.

There’s no question we love the Atlantic bluefin tuna (above). The problem is we love it only for its taste. Flopped out in a Japanese market, the best specimens of the sleek fish, which grow up to 15 feet long, can fetch $100,000 or more.