Inspiring Wildlife Comebacks
- Date: 04 March 2025
In this special World Wildlife Day episode of Nature Breaking’s “Headlines & Trendlines” series, hosts Seth Larson and Hayley Lawton share uplifting conservation success stories that prove we can make a difference for endangered species.
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Discover how mountain gorillas have rebounded from critically endangered to endangered status with populations now exceeding 1,000 in Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. Learn about Bhutan's remarkable 40% increase in snow leopard numbers—these elusive "Ghosts of the Mountain" are making a comeback thanks to strategic conservation efforts. We also explore how cutting-edge AI technology and camera traps are helping monitor wildlife recovery after Australia's devastating 2020 bushfires, and how black rhinos have grown from just 2,400 to over 6,000 animals through targeted conservation initiatives.
These success stories demonstrate that while many species face threats from habitat loss and poaching, collaborative conservation work is creating real impact. Join us to celebrate these wildlife victories and find hope for our planet's biodiversity.
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TRANSCRIPT:
Seth Larson: Welcome to Nature Breaking, a World Wildlife Fund podcast focused on the news and trends affecting our natural world and the people and species who call it home. I'm Seth Larson, and today, in honor of World Wildlife Day, I'll be joined by my colleague Hayley Lawton for another edition of our Headlines and Trendlines series.
World Wildlife Day is celebrated every year on March 3rd, and it's a moment to raise awareness about the plight of species around the globe and motivate people to think about how they can make a difference. But we know there's plenty to be stressed out about in the world right now. So rather than use this time to talk about the decline of wildlife, we'll be focusing on some positive stories of species that have bounced back thanks to conservation efforts. Our hope is that by sharing these uplifting stories, you might feel more hopeful that conservation efforts can make a difference and spread that positivity by sharing this episode with your friends, family, and social networks. Let's use this day to remind the world that we can, and indeed we have, made huge strides towards saving nature in many key places, and we can keep doing more if we stay committed.
And here's one more small thing you can do to help. Give this episode a like on YouTube or rate our podcast on Apple or Spotify. Doing so really helps the algorithms on those platforms, spread the show to more viewers and listeners, and that makes our work more impactful. Now with that, I'm going to bring in my cohost for today, Hayley Lawton.
All right, Hayley, welcome back to Nature Breaking. It's so good to have you again today.
Hayley Lawton: Hey Seth, thank you for having me.
Seth Larson: So, before we talk about World Wildlife Day, you know, whenever I have you, I like to start off with something a little lighter. Last time we talked about your opportunity that you had last year to meet a cheetah in the wild or to see a cheetah in the wild and I know you mentioned that cheetahs were your favorite animal.
So today I wanted to ask, which animal would you most want to see next that you haven't seen already?
Hayley Lawton: That's a hard question, but I think I would say koala bears because they're so cute. Even though I don't they may not be as cuddly as they seem, they're very cute and it would just be so cool to see them in person.
Seth Larson: Yeah, I think there, I don't know, I'm not an expert on koala bears, but my impression is always that they appear to be really cute and cuddly, but in actuality, they can be kind of grumpy, right?
Hayley Lawton: Yeah.
Seth Larson: What about you? Do you have a favorite animal?
Yeah, you know, my favorite animal going back to when I was a kid was always whales. You know, I think I had an obsession with dinosaurs when I was five or six years old, like every kid. Once I got out of the dinosaur phase, I got really interested in whales, because they're like the biggest creature that's currently still living on this planet. Blue whales are the biggest. So, I've always wanted to see one. I did get to go on a sightseeing trip off the coast of New England when I was in grade school too, you know, go out on a, a whale, whale watch trip. We saw a bunch of humpback whales.
And did you, were you able to see any of the whales breaching?
Yes, my recollection, you know, this is like 20 years ago, but I remember there were, I think, a couple adults, maybe a few adults, and I think we saw a few, I don't know if they were babies, but like adolescent whales swimming alongside as well.
So it was, it was really cool and, would love to even do that again. In fact, I might take my son on one of those trips this summer when we're in Maine. Someday I got to get out and see a blue whale, which would be extra cool.
Hayley Lawton: That would be really fun.
Seth Larson: So, we're together today because we wanted to talk about World Wildlife Day, which, when this runs, it will have been yesterday. But it's a great day for folks to just think about wildlife and to connect with nature and think about how we can come together to contribute to the conservation of different species.
So, for today, you and I both picked out two hopeful stories that we wanted to talk about, about how conservation efforts are benefiting different animals, and I wanted to let you go first. So which one did you want to talk about first, Hayley?
Hayley Lawton: So, the first animal I want to talk about are mountain gorillas. And as their name implies, mountain gorillas live in forests very high in the mountains at elevations of 8,000 to 13,000 feet. They are found in forests of the border of Rwanda, Uganda, and the Democratic Republic of Congo. And mountain gorillas are actually the only great apes that are steadily increasing their population size with over a thousand.
Seth Larson: Hmm.
Hayley Lawton: In 2018, the International Union for Conservation of Nature, or the IUCN, revised its status from critically endangered to endangered for mountain gorillas. So, that is really, really great news for mountain gorillas.
Seth Larson: Yeah, that's great. I mean, endangered people are still, you know, they're in trouble and they need our help, but moving in the right direction, at least, to get off that critically endangered list.
Hayley Lawton: Yeah, a little step up, which is really good, yeah. And this is mainly due to decades of ongoing efforts between a collaboration by the International Gorilla Conservation Program and it is made up of three international conservation organizations including WWF, Conservation International, and Fauna and Flora. Together we have joined forces with local and national partners to ensure long term survival of mountain gorillas. And one example of this is advocating best practices for mountain gorilla tourism. And what that means is just making sure that when you are visiting these apes to make sure their habitat is as clean as possible. You know, not leaving any trash in the area, because they can get sick from that. And just keep your distance when you are watching them.
Seth Larson: Oh, interesting. Yeah, that makes a lot of sense because I know there's, I'm sure there's a thriving industry of people wanting to go see these animals in the wild. And there's always that tension between, you know, people wanting to go on sort of safaris or expeditions to see species in there, in their natural habitat, but also not leaving too much of a footprint behind, that might make it harder for that species to thrive.
Alright, so I'll go next and the next animal I wanted to talk about was snow leopards. This is a species that we've talked about before on the podcast. Folks can go back and find an episode we did in 2023. It was audio only at that time. We weren't capturing videos yet, but you can go back and listen to that one if you'd like. But basically, snow leopards, they're listed as vulnerable on the IUCN red list. The total population is estimated to be somewhere between 4,000 and 6,500. They're found in twelve countries across Asia including Bhutan and China and India. And I wanted to focus in particular on Bhutan because there's a real hopeful story from that country as it pertains to snow leopards.
Basically, Bhutan has seen an increase in their snow leopard population of 40 percent between 2016 and 2023. And what that actually means in practice and hard numbers is that the population in that country jumped from 96 animals to 134. That may seem like a relatively small number in the context of, you know, 4,000 to 6,000 animals living in the wild.
But a 40 percent increase, even in a small population, means that something's going right there, and that there are lessons we can take away to apply to the populations of snow leopards in other countries to help, keep, keep those, populations recovering. So, some of the reasons for snow leopards increasing in Bhutan come down to, it's a few factors, but basically one of the most important things was accurate counting. Really understanding how many snow leopards there were to start with, so that you could have a baseline number to compare it to, so that you could see whether conservation measures were working and whether that number was growing. So, there was a really landmark snow leopard survey done in 2016, which identified those 96 animals that were living in the country at the time. And that was really foundational to sort of, you know, set a strategy going forward.
Another big thing is funding. I mean we talk about this so much when it comes to conservation projects. These things aren't free. There are people whose salaries need to be paid. There are tools that need to be purchased.
And the surveys, to identify snow leopard populations in Bhutan, those were pretty expensive. They had to deploy over 300 camera traps across the whole country. They had to collect the data from those traps and analyze them.
And WWF, is a partner in a funding initiative in Bhutan called Bhutan for Life. It's a really innovative financial agreement that brings together donors and the government in Bhutan to unleash money for conservation in exchange for meeting specific performance goals.
Bhutan also established protected areas that cover most of the snow leopard's habitat within that country. And that really minimized the threats from development and other human activities.
So, that's a really hopeful story that there's been this 40 percent increase. I think we'll hope, hopefully continue to see good results in Bhutan and other countries are starting to draw lessons from the work being done there to hopefully boost numbers around their whole, range across Asia. Hayley, one fun fact about snow leopards. Do you know what my favorite thing about them is?
Hayley Lawton: No what's your favorite thing about them?
Seth Larson: So, I love their nickname. They're, they're known as the Ghosts of the Mountain. Which is super evocative and memorable. It basically speaks of the fact that they're just really elusive and hard to find. First of all, you know, there aren't that many of them, but secondly, their coats, their white coats really blend in against the snowcapped mountain landscape that they live in.
And they're really hard to spot. So, Ghosts of the Mountain, I thought was just such a cool nickname and one of my favorites.
Hayley Lawton: It's so funny you said that. I actually just saw this on social media. I think it was either last week or a couple weeks ago. You had to try to spot the snow leopard in the snow. And each picture, it would either get further away or close up. And it was kind of hard, but I identified it with everyone. Haha
Seth Larson: Haha. Well, you've got sharp eyes. oh Um...
But yeah, no, I think for years they were like notoriously hard to photograph. And I think there was maybe 10 or 20 years ago there was a video, capturing a snow leper, a snow leopard going after its prey, that was considered this like a landmark that this, this had been captured on film.
They're, they're just very hard to find, out there in the wild. So, Hayley, you and I have each covered one species story so far. We've got two more to go. I'll let you go next, what did you want to talk about?
Hayley Lawton: Okay, so this next topic doesn't necessarily cover one specific animal, but rather several animals. You mentioned camera traps, and this story also has very cool camera traps involved. So, after the devastating bushfires that swept Australia in 2020, there were an estimate of 3 billion animals that were affected.
And so, with that, WWF-US and WWF Australia and Google, initiated a wildlife monitoring project called Eyes on Recovery. And this was created so we can have eyes on the wildlife during this process. And more than a thousand camera traps were set up across the landscape to help track the wildlife.
And with camera traps, every time an animal walks by or whenever it picks up a motion sensor, it'll take photos, but scientists don't have enough time to review each one.
It takes a lot of time out of their day, and so, that's where Wildlife Insights comes in. And this is a platform that WWF and Google and other conservation organizations set up, to help develop a better way of managing these, the camera trap data. And this is how it works. So, it uses AI to automatically filter out blank images.
Seth Larson: Hm.
Hayley Lawton: It will find the ones that contain wildlife and identify which species are in the photo. And so, even if there's a bit of a tail or like the tip of a nose, it can identify what animal it is, which is pretty cool. And Wildlife Insights is currently able to identify 1,300 different species right now. And after the fires in Australia, 150 species were detected.
Just like this greater glider you see on the screen.
Seth Larson: That's so amazing and that I can see how that would be super helpful for these scientists and project managers who are trying to go through all this data. Because sometimes those camera traps can be triggered by just like a leaf blowing by or a branch falling or something, right? That like, Yeah, like that's not information that we need. That's not helpful for what we're trying to accomplish in terms of identifying species. So, the fact that the AI can actually identify that stuff and filter out what's useful and what isn't, super, super great.
So, my last animal that I wanted to talk about that's, that's a reason for hope right now is black rhinos. And black rhinos are found throughout Africa. In the late 1800s, there were more than 100,000 of them across the continent. That number dropped to just 2,400 by the middle of the 20th century. And some of the reasons for their decline are probably exactly what you would guess. Habitat loss, you know, the places they live kind of going away or being developed. In fact, 55 percent of black rhinos have a range of their natural habitat, their range that they live in has been lost since 1970. Poaching has been another big factor. Rhino horn is sought after, in a number of illegal wildlife markets around the world. It's used as a supposed medicinal treatment for various ailments.
In point of fact, the rhino horns are, they consist of the same material that human fingernails are made of. So, there's really no medicinal value there, but there's a long-held belief that it can be helpful for various things. So, it's still really highly sought after in a number of places. So unfortunately, rhinos are still poached and killed, and their horns are cut off for that purpose. But the good news is that thanks to conservation efforts, black rhinos have actually rebounded from just that 2,400 in the middle of the 20th century to over 6,000 today. Some of the reasons for that, habitat protection and efforts to limit poaching. So basically, a majority of black rhinos now live in government protected areas, private reserves or communal lands.
In other words, places that have been protected in some form or fashion, and, and where they're safe to live and to breed and to, you know, live their lives. There's actually a great proof about the impact of human conservation efforts on the recovery of this species. It's not just us speculating and saying, you know, we're doing conservation work, so that must be why these animals are rebounding.
There was a great study that was actually published last year in the African Journal of Wildlife Research. And it estimated that without conservation efforts, the current black rhino population would be under 300, which is, you know, pushing the very edge of extinction. The same study also estimated that if we stopped all conservation efforts right now, the population of black rhinos would fall again to just 3,300 by 2032.
But if we continue with conservation efforts, then the population could potentially reach about 9,000 by 2032. So, you know, those numbers are still way short of the hundred thousand that were roaming freely in the 1800s. We probably aren't going to see that number again, but the growth of the black rhino population, I think, tells a really important story that conservation efforts have made a real difference.
And helped a species that was in severe decline not only stabilize and stop declining, but to actually increase over time. So, it's great to hear that they're doing better.
Hayley Lawton: It is, it really is. Seth, I actually had the opportunity to visit a rhino. It wasn't a black rhino. It was a white rhino, but it was very, very, very beautiful to see. And I just, I just hope that these conservation efforts continue and increase to protect them.
Seth Larson: Yeah. Was it that rhino that you saw, was that on the same trip that you got to see a cheetah last year?
Hayley Lawton: It was.
Seth Larson: And the rhino that you saw was it by itself or was it with sort of a family or a…
Hayley Lawton: There were, there were two of them, they were eating, but they were like off to the side. And that was actually the first animal I got to see on the trip, which was really cool.
Seth Larson: How far away was the, was the rhino? Because I think I would be... rhinos are one species I would be pretty nervous to see, without, you know, a really solid barrier between me and the animal.
Hayley Lawton: So, we, we were pretty far from them. We got off of the vehicle, but we had rangers with us. So…
Seth Larson: Hmm.
Hayley Lawton: Yeah, we were pretty far, but far, far enough to see them. I could see them enough with my camera and phone not to zoom.
Seth Larson: Gotcha.
Hayley Lawton: Kind of close, but not too close.
Seth Larson: Gotcha. Alright, cool. So, Hayley, you know, we can wrap this episode up in a couple minutes. I think as I said in my intro, there's lots to be stressed out about in the world right now. We all have different things we're dealing with. World Wildlife Day could be a day to reflect on, all you know, the real trouble that a lot of different species are in around the world. But I think having this conversation is a good reminder that actually a lot of these species are maybe not doing as well as they were a hundred years ago, but they're doing better than they were 20 years ago and I think that's something we can all feel good about. Do you have any reflections about World Wildlife Day that strike you or that stick with you every year when we talk about this at WWF?
Hayley Lawton: Hmm. I think the technology aspect of World Wildlife Day. So just learning more about what AI and other technology that we're using, drones, just to help track wildlife and just to check on them and see how they're doing and what we can do to help them. So, I think that's the main thing that I really enjoy about World Wildlife Day.
Seth Larson: Yeah, you know, I'm noticing a trend in our conversations because I think the last episode we recorded you talked about how excited you were about eDNA technology in, in gathering information about animals and helping our conservation work. And with the camera traps and the technology we're talking about today, I can see that you've got a real interest in that stuff. And that, it's super important and it's really making our work more efficient and giving us a capacity to do stuff that we were never able to do before, so, I'm noticing a trend.
Hayley Lawton: that's Yes, yes. It's so exciting.
Seth Larson: Totally, totally, yeah. Let's put all that technology to use, for as many good ways as we can.
Hayley Lawton: Mm hmm.
Seth Larson: All right, well Hayley, Happy World Wildlife Day, thanks for having this conversation with me and we'll catch up with you again soon.
Hayley Lawton: Yes. Happy World Wildlife Day to you too, Seth.
Seth Larson: That's a wrap for today. Thanks again to Hayley for co-hosting. You know, from gorillas to snow leopards and rhinos, there are so many positive stories in the world about how people are making a difference to wildlife. And I loved spending this time today, diving into a few of those stories about World Wildlife Day.
I hope this episode brought a little levity into your day. And if it did, please do take a moment to like this episode on YouTube and rate the show on other podcast apps. We are really grateful for your time and engagement as a listener and together let's keep building a more sustainable future.