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As Minister for Fisheries and Oceans Dominic LeBlanc makes announcements on Canada's West Coast this week, and with World Whale Day approaching (February 18), WWF-Canada calls upon the federal government to release its recovery plan for the Southern Resident Killer Whales (SRKWs). The action plan for their recovery under the Species At Risk Act (SARA) is long overdue, and unless strong protection measures are quickly implemented, it is unlikely this group will survive in the long-term.

The mighty Brahmaputra and its tributaries serve as the winter visiting ground to many migratory birds. From the marshes of Kaziranga to the forests of Eaglenest in western Arunachal and further up to the alpine areas of Arunachal -- one come across more than 750 species of birds that includes most of the winter visitors. Assam, along with the other six northeastern states, shares a common migration route for many of the avifauna that flies over Bhutan, Tibet, China, Myanmar and Bangladesh.

Farmland covers 45% of the EU’s land area and these habitats are rocketing towards biodiversity oblivion. We cannot afford to mince our words here, the situation is very serious and requires both monitoring and action. The European Bird Census Council (EBCC), where many BirdLife partners play a key role, has been coordinating the collation of data on more than 160 common bird species across 28 European countries. The data collected is fundamental to understanding the future of European biodiversity – and the forecasts are alarming.

Although the silver Y still remains the most common moth of the Netherlands, the species is declining sharply. In the course of the last 30 years the abundance has dropped by 56%. This corresponds to the situation in Great Britain. As an abundant species, the silver Y plays various important roles in the ecosystem. First, moths pollinate nocturnal flowering plants. Second, larvae and adults of moths are important prey for insectivorous birds and bats, and this is particularly true for numerous species that are not too small, such as the silver Y.

Agricultural intensification is an important anthropogenic perturbation of the environment. It is characterized by a specialization of the production process, which results in a switch from diverse plantations to large monocultures. Agricultural intensification is also associated with increased use of pesticides, harvest frequency, and density of plantations in cultivated areas. This type of practice is linked to the population decline of several bird species in Europe and North America.

With its unmistakable fiery red plumage, which was used to decorate the robes worn by Hawaiian royalty in ancient times, the Iiwi Depranis coccinea (pronounced ee-EE-vee), or Scarlet Honeycreeper, is tightly entwined with Hawaiian folklore. Endemic to the islands, it was once abundant in forests through-out the archipelago, but now finds itself largely restricted to high-elevation forests on the islands of Hawaii, Maui and Kauai, where temperatures are too low for regular disease transmission.

One of the sure signs of spring — monarch butterflies (Danaus plexippus) — might be harder to find this year, scientists announced this week. The number of monarch butterflies at winter breeding grounds in Mexico is around 78 million , down from 100 million a year before. The figures illustrate the striking decline in the migrating butterflies' population in past two decades. Today, monarchs number less than one-tenth of their population in 1996, when scientists estimated a whopping 1 billion of the insects.

Butterflies have vanished from towns and cities more rapidly than from the countryside over the past two decades, according to a new study. Industrial agriculture has long been viewed as the scourge of butterflies and other insects but city life is worse – urban butterfly abundance fell by 69% compared to a 45% decline in rural areas over 20 years from 1995. Butterfly species such as the small copper and small heath have suffered particularly disastrous urban declines, according to the study published in the journal Ecological Indicators.