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There has been a lot of discussion about the decline in bee populations and its dire consequences for agriculture. We have also talked about the efforts to save the monarch butterfly, whose numbers have been dropping dramatically over the years. But the rest of the insect world does not get much attention. For the most part, we think of insects as a nuisance or as potential pests. A number of studies in recent years in Germany, Great Britain, and in the United States have concluded that many insect populations worldwide are in severe decline, and this is not a good thing.

At a time when the bird population should be peaking, the Johnson's Mills Shorebird Reserve has seen a sharp decline in numbers, according to the Nature Conservancy of Canada. Some flocks of shorebirds that normally visit the reserve, which is near Dorchester in southeastern New Brunswick, are down by half. "This time of year we typically see flocks of 140,000 birds, 100,000 at least. [Tuesday] there was 70,000," said Andrew Holland, the national spokesperson for the Nature Conservancy of Canada.

Traditional farming and gardening has long taken a straightforward approach: if an unwanted plant or animal interferes, it is to be killed. We even developed a special vocabulary to help justify our actions: the animals were “vermin” and the plants were “weeds”. And, in the case of one hen-house plunderer, we came up with the elaborate ritual that is fox hunting, complete with a special ‘language of avoidance’ that anthropologists have found in cultures around the world (the fox is a “dog”, its face is a “mask”, its tail is a “brush”, the dogs are “hounds”).

The link has been established before. When we reduce pests with most insecticides, they discriminate too little between friend and foe. We can’t always see butterflies as friends because of the function of their caterpillars. However, as birds, reptiles and mammals rely on these insects and their relatives for food, what happens is simply Silent Spring, all over again.

Wild bee declines have been ascribed in part to neonicotinoid insecticides. While short-term laboratory studies on commercially bred species (principally honeybees and bumblebees) have identified sub-lethal effects, there is no strong evidence linking these insecticides to losses of the majority of wild bee species. We relate 18 years of UK national wild bee distribution data for 62 species to amounts of neonicotinoid use in oilseed rape.

Biologists have spent 30 years painstakingly nurturing the California condor (Gymnogyps californianus) back from the brink of extinction. They are America's largest land bird, with a wing span reaching up to 9 feet. Due to lead poisoning, the majestic birds' population had dropped to just 22 nationwide by 1982. In a desperate gamble to save the birds, federal biologists captured all the remaining wild condors in 1987 and began a breeding program in zoos. The birds' young have been gradually released back into the wild.

At first the biologists noticed something unusual about the dead fish washing up on the shore of the Salton Sea: All of them were fully grown, at least 7 inches long. There were no smaller fish among the carcasses pushed ashore by the lapping waves. Then the biologists started seeing other clues in the birds. Western grebes, which normally arrive by the thousands to forage, were nowhere to be found. Thousands of Caspian terns would normally stop off to nest, but they were also missing.

Bats, generally known as a natural seed dispersers, are on the verge of extinction in the Kathmandu Valley. Keshar Mahal and Narayanhiti palace premises in Kathmandu and Sallaghari in Bhaktapur are the prime habitats of bats in the Valley. Dr Pushparaj Acharya, a research fellow at National Academy of Science and Technology, said just around 700 bats had been recorded on Keshar Mahal and Narayanhiti palace premises in the 2015. At least 1,300 bats were recorded in the previous count in 2006.

Scientists have discovered a new species of colorful songbird in the Galápagos Islands, with one catch: it's extinct. Researchers from the California Academy of Sciences, San Francisco State University (SFSU), the University of New Mexico (UNM), and the San Francisco Bay Bird Observatory (SFBBO) used molecular data from samples of museum specimens to determine that two subspecies of Vermilion Flycatchers, both found only in the Galápagos, should be elevated from subspecies to full species status.

The boatmen helped us scramble ashore and soon there were 50 people wandering on an uninhab­ited slab of sea-battered dolerite called Staple Island. It is one of the National Trust-owned Farne Islands in Northumberland and among England’s most spectacular wildlife locations. There are 100,000 pairs of breeding seabirds here and they were everywhere: at our feet, overhead, across every rock face. The stench of guano was overwhelming. While the birds seemed to be boundless, the human beings converged on the grassy knoll where the local star attraction resides.