Good wildlife news from 2020!
- Published
The year has been difficult for many reasons, but not all the stories from 2020 have been bad news. Wildlife started to reclaim the world during lockdown. Fish were spotted in the canals of Venice in Italy, wild boars roamed the streets of Barcelona in Spain and a herd of goats took over a deserted town centre in Llandudno, Wales. They are just some of the wonderful wildlife stories from this year, but the animal charity Born Free has released details of several animal welfare and conservation success stories from 2020.
This year the charity worked to protect foxes and other British wildlife across the UK. As well as rescuing, raising and releasing five abandoned fox cubs back into the wild in 2020, the organisation provided wildlife rescuers with funds to buy vital equipment so hundreds of sick, injured and abandoned foxes and other species could be cared for and then released.
Elsewhere, the Kenyan government say its estimated that the number of lions living in the country has increased by 25%, from 2,000 in 2010 to 2,489 now - which has been described as "fantastic news" for a species experts thought was heading for extinction.
Staying in Kenya and more than 140 elephants have been born in Amboseli National Park this year, including two sets of twins. This brings Kenya's overall wild elephant population to more than double that of 1989 when there were just 16,000 elephants in the country. By 2018 that number had increased to 34,000.
The increase in the numbers of elephants in Kenya is party due to the country taking a much tougher approach to poaching - where people hunt the elephants because the ivory from their tusks is valuable. Kenya's tourism minister, Najib Balala, said: "In the past couple of years, we have managed to tame poaching in this country." A near-total ban on the trade in ivory was upheld in court in May - meaning, in most cases, it can't be sold legally.
On the Asian island of Borneo, six baby orang-utans were born in Lamandau Wildlife Reserve during 2020. Orang-utans are an endangered species with around 100,000 Bornean orang-utans left in total.
A total of 48 new Ethiopian wolf pups were born this year. The species is Africa's most threatened meat-eating animal and the world's rarest species of dog. It's estimated there are only 500 left in the world.
Two cheetah cubs were saved from the illegal wildlife trade, where the selling of animals is against the law. The cheetahs were only a few months old when they were found by the Somali regional authorities in Ethiopia. They had probably been taken from the wild and separated from their parents to be sold as exotic pets. After being rescued they were given a new home at a wildlife sanctuary in Ethiopia.
More than one million native tree, coffee and cocoa seeds were given to 2,000 farmers in the forest of Bulindi, in the Hoima District of Uganda. The forest is in bad condition because it's been harvested for chocolate and coffee. By giving the farmers the seeds to plant more trees it will help to restore the habitat for the chimpanzees who live there.
A total of 19 vervet monkeys and baboons were rescued from illegal captivity in 2020, and 21 confiscated vervet monkeys were released back to the wild in Kafue National Park, Zambia.
- Published20 May 2020
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