Environment/Wildlife

Two isolated mountain lion populations in Southern California’s Santa Ana and Santa Monica Mountains are at risk of local extinction, perhaps as soon as within 50 years, according to a study published in the journal Ecological Applications. 

Many people set up hummingbird feeders in their yards to nurture and watch these high-energy pollinators. But could the sugar water they provide be impacting these tiny feathered friends?

Products marketed to kill rodents are instead threatening the lives of the wildlife that eat them as poisons travel up the food chain.

In an increasingly crowded world where people and animals come into ever-closer contact, the lines that separate us – physical, biological, ecological, behavioral – are essentially gone. So, the future of conservation will be initiatives that address the entire ecosystem – a ‘One Health’ approach.

The combination of ocean warming and an infectious wasting disease has devastated populations of large sunflower sea stars once abundant along the West Coast of North America in just a few years, according to a study co-led by the University of California, Davis, and Cornell University published Jan. 30 in the journal Science Advances.

SeaDoc Society is a nonprofit born out of the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine. It's trying to form a new medical database to diagnose and treat individual, ailing orcas. The project is being modeled after a personalized veterinary approach used on critically endangered mountain gorillas in Africa.

Wildlife veterinarians at the Hummingbird Health and Conservation Program in the UC Davis School of Veterinary Medicine recently published a study describing a new system to track hummingbirds visiting feeders in urban gardens. Feeder behavior offers clues about hummingbird health, and disease transmission.

A young female bear whose paws were badly burned in the Carr Fire was successfully released back to her natural habitat this week.

The National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration has opened an investigation into hundreds of seal deaths this summer. Nearly 600 harbor and gray seals stranded on beaches from Maine down to Massachusetts.

Congratulations to Dr. Marcela “Marcy” Uhart, director of the Karen C. Drayer Wildlife Health Center’s Latin America Program. She received the Wildlife Disease Association's 2018 Distinguished Service Award.

Rocky Mountain spotted fever is already dangerous, and the new carrier is more likely to bite people than the ticks that usually spread it, the team of U.S. and Mexican researchers said.

A black bear cub that was severely burned when a wildfire roared through her habitat in Northern California is receiving a fishy treatment that officials and veterinarians hope will heal her quickly so she can be released back into the wild.

State wildlife officers and a UC Davis veterinarian have again used fish skins and other novel forms of pain management to treat a wild animal: a bear cub injured in the Carr Fire.

A young black bear whose paws were burned raw in the Carr Fire is recuperating with special care from a wildlife veterinary team. On Monday, an eight-member team including Dr. Deana Clifford and Dr. Jamie Peyton of the UC Davis Veterinary Medical Teaching Hospital spent nearly six hours preparing for the operation and sewing tilapia skin onto the bear's four paws. One benefit of the fish skin — which doesn't smell fishy — is that it contains collagen that aids in healing.