A heartfelt initiative supporting Palestinian birdwatchers — especially in Gaza and the West Bank — who continue to document wildlife despite the toughest of circumstances. Through their lens, we glimpse both the fragile beauty and the deep resilience of life in a region often overlooked.Visit → birdersofpalestine.com
By purchasing prints or postcards, or simply spreading the word, you help sustain these dedicated bird-lovers and keep their vision — and their birds — in flight.
This interactive map from EuroBirdPortal.org shows the migration and distribution of Bohemian Waxwings (BOMGAR) over the last 52 weeks.Counts: The map displays estimated numbers of waxwings across Sweden and Europe.
Week-by-week migration: Slide through the weeks to see how these striking birds move south from their northern breeding grounds.
Hotspots: Areas with larger numbers are highlighted in brighter colors, showing where waxwings are most concentrated.
Interactive: You can zoom in, pan across regions, and explore migration patterns in detail.
EuroBirdPortal.org aggregates data from multiple European bird monitoring networks, making it one of the most comprehensive tools for tracking migratory birds.
Watch the map to see how the Bohemian Waxwing travels through Sweden throughout the year, and explore how migration patterns can vary annually!
Our encounter with a white reindeer on Ratan Island in Västerbotten County is a poignant reminder of the deep connection between the Sámi people and their land.
The white reindeer was likely leucitic, a condition resulting from a genetic mutation that causes a partial loss of pigmentation. Unlike albinism, which affects all pigments and results in red or pink eyes, leucism allows animals to retain normal eye color.
The 1952 Finnish film The White Reindeer (Valkoinen peura) is a haunting folk horror tale set in the snowbound landscapes of Finland. Directed by Erik Blomberg and co-written with his wife, Mirjami Kuosmanen—who also stars in the lead role—the film delves into themes of isolation, desire, and the supernatural. It draws heavily from pre-Christian Finnish mythology and Sámi shamanistic traditions, portraying the transformation of a young woman into a white reindeer vampire after seeking magical assistance to rekindle her husband's affections.
However, it is important to acknowledge that The White Reindeer reflects the colonial attitudes prevalent at the time. The portrayal of the Sámi as mystical and otherworldly continues a pattern of exoticization and marginalisation of Indigenous cultures, which was common in Nordic cinema. Like many films of the era, it presents Sámi traditions in broad strokes rather than in nuanced detail.
Sámi people were rarely involved in the filmmaking process, so the story was shaped largely by Finnish filmmakers’ perspectives and folklore interpretations rather than by Sámi voices themselves. This results in a portrayal that mixes authentic cultural elements with cinematic fantasy, reflecting both fascination with and exoticization of Sámi life in mid-20th-century Nordic cinema.
Our encounter with a white reindeer on Ratan Island also reminds us that the Sámi’s connection to the land is not just history or myth—it is lived reality. The Sámi continue to face challenges to their land rights and cultural preservation, often from state-backed development projects. Agreements between Sámi reindeer herders and commercial developers in Sweden have been found to be generally harmful, leading to land dispossession, obstructed migration routes, and cultural loss (theguardian.com).
These contemporary struggles echo the colonial attitudes reflected in The White Reindeer. While the film draws on Sámi myths and traditions, it does so through a Finnish cinematic lens that often exoticizes and marginalizes Sámi culture. This pattern of representation continues in modern media and policy, where Sámi voices are frequently sidelined.
As Gabriel Kuhn notes in Liberating Sápmi: Indigenous Resistance in Europe’s Far North, the Sámi have shown incredible resilience, defending their identity and territories and retaining an important social and ecological voice—even if many, progressives and leftists included, refuse to listen. This ongoing resistance is mirrored in the haunting narrative of The White Reindeer, where the Sámi-inspired figure of the white reindeer moves between worlds—symbolically asserting presence, power, and autonomy despite forces that would control or silence it.
The openVertebrate project, oVert for short, is an initiative to provide free, digital 3D vertebrate anatomy models and data to researchers, educators, students and the public.
Over several years, the oVert team will CT scan 20,000 fluid-preserved specimens from U.S. museum collections, producing high-resolution anatomical data for more than 80 percent of vertebrate genera.
CT scanning is a nondestructive technology that reveals a specimen inside and out — its skeleton, muscles, circulatory and nervous systems, internal organs, parasites, eggs and stomach contents.
Our work to decode communication of other species builds on the extraordinary advances we are seeing in AI being applied to human language, which we are extending to the non-human world. It also builds off many decades of bioacoustics and behavioral ecology research which has already uncovered complex communication systems in other species.
The machine learning models we are building are also supporting and deepening ongoing research into the behavior of other species and advancing conservation efforts on the ground today.
All our work is inspired by current challenges being faced in conservation biology. It is also all publicly accessible, helping to ensure researchers no longer need to reinvent the wheel for each project, and can focus precious resources on ensuring we have forward momentum as we seek to listen, to understand and, ultimately, to protect.
Icarusstands for International Cooperation for Animal Research Using Space. Scientists taking part in the Icarus-initiative are working together to study the behavior of animals.
Scientists want to use Icarus to find out more about the life of animals on earth: the migratory routes they take and their living conditions. These findings will aid behavioural research, species protection and research into the paths taken in the spread of infectious diseases. The information should even help to predict ecological changes and natural disasters.'
In the process, the Icarus researchers will attach mini-transmitters to a variety of animal species. These transmitters then send their measurement data to a receiver station in space. The receiver station in turn transmits the data to a ground station from where it is sent to the relevant teams of researchers. The results will be published in a database that will be accessible to everyone: movebank
