Field Notes from the Wild
Wild Wonders Daily
A new dispatch from the natural world, every single day. The creatures, the landscapes, the quiet wonders, gathered from every corner of the wild.
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Automatically refreshed as new stories are published, always the newest wonders first.
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Newest Story
The Harpy Eagle Has Talons the Size of a Grizzly Bear’s Claws.
Harpy eagle facts reveal why this Amazon rainforest raptor is often described as one of the world’s most powerful birds of prey. There is an eagle in the Amazon rainforest that is large enough to look a grown person in…
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Monarch Butterfly Navigates 4,500km, With a Brain the Size of a Pinhead.
In the autumn of 2001, researcher Orley Taylor at the University of Kansas attached tiny radio transmitters to monarch butterflies and tracked…
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Komodo Dragon Doesn’t Need a Partner to Reproduce.
In 2006, a Komodo dragon named Flora at Chester Zoo in England produced a clutch of fertile eggs. This was not unusual…
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African Wild Dogs Has 80% Hunt Success. So Why Is It Vanishing?
African wild dog, Lycaon pictus, has an 80% hunt success rate- more than twice that of lions, which manage around 25%, and…
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The Quokka Smiles. But Not for the Reason You Think.
Every few years a photograph goes viral. A small, round-faced marsupial sitting upright on a rock, mouth curved upward in what looks…
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The Humpback Whale’s Song. Nobody Knows Why It Changes.
There is a detail in Roger Payne’s original 1971 paper in Science that stopped me cold the first time I read it. Payne, the…
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The Mantis Shrimp: The Most Violent Predator in the Ocean
A peacock mantis shrimp is about the size of a cigar. It lives in a burrow on a coral reef, eats crabs…
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Follow along as fresh field notes arrive every day, from tidal pools to mountain ridgelines.