Wild Hope

Millions of birds pass through our yards during their bi-annual migrations, but they face an invisible killer along the way: glass windows. In the US alone, an estimated one billion birds die each year when they collide with windows. Now, two organizations help pave the way to a bird-friendly future.

The Northwestern Band of the Shoshone Nation has been landless ever since they suffered the worst massacre in U.S. history in 1863. Over 150 years later, the Tribe has purchased their ancestral homeland with a vision to return it back to nature.

Sea otters are back, and their return is restoring an entire ecosystem. Marine ecologists Brent Hughes and Kat Beheshti reveal how seagrass planting efforts in Monterey Bay, along with a healthy population of crab-eating otters, have transformed and stabilized this important ecosystem.

First Nation tribes are reviving their cultural and spiritual connection to buffalo by rebuilding a herd that once shared their land. By reigniting traditional land management practices like prescribed fire, the Osage support the herd as it continues to grow, which in turn, restores natural balance that helps the entire prairie ecosystem thrive.

Residents of a small village off the coast of Iceland share their island with the largest colony of Atlantic Puffins. But when newly fledged young puffins confuse the town's artificial lights for moonlight and fail to find their way to sea, the town gets their schoolchildren to help collect and rehab the "pufflings"--and then toss the young birds off seaside cliffs!

In South Africa, at Hluhluwe-iMfolozi Park, the rate of poaching has reached a breaking point, with more than 300 killed in just one year. The park has decided to step in and take drastic measures, undertaking their largest dehorning mission to date, aiming to dehorn over 1000 rhinos in a single operation.

As a deadly fungal disease sweeps across North America, wiping out millions of bats, scientists are pioneering a bold new strategy to protect these special creatures, conducting field trials of an innovative vaccine, racing to bolster bat populations before white-nose syndrome wipes them out.

As Detroit's population declined and nature reclaimed the city's vacant spaces, wild carnivores like coyotes, raccoons, and skunks are now returning and making themselves at home. Ecologist Nyeema Harris studies how these opportunistic predators and scavengers are adapting to urban life, uncovering practical ways for humans and wildlife to live together peacefully.

In Singapore, architects and city designers have long strived to create a green utopia--but recent innovations have started to make that vision possible, leaning more into building with native biodiversity at the forefront of urban design.

Around the world, rural communities often have to choose between protecting the neighboring forests that help sustain them or cutting them down to grow crops or harvest wood to generate income. But on the island of Zanzibar, some are farming a crop that helps keep the tropical ecosystem intact: butterflies.

With the Iberian lynx near extinction, biologist Rodrigo Serra and his team are leading a bold conservation mission to reintroduce this iconic predator to the wild, risking it all to restore balance to the ecosystem.

In Indonesia, shark fishing has been a long-standing economic driver in fishing villages--but a recent shift to ecotourism is hoping to provide a new incentive for fishermen to become stewards of marine wildlife.