While the climate and biodiversity crises demand attention — and cause more than a little anxiety — we should save some bandwidth for encouraging news, too. Every year members of the wildlife communities around us achieve feats that cast new light on the world we live in. Sometimes they expand their ranges, recover territory, or simply survive against the odds.
Often these feats are aided by human conservation work.
Last year was no exception, with high-achieving wolves, blue whales, salmon, and other animals making headlines. Their stories reflect the abundance that still surrounds us and the stubborn resilience we all share.
As we welcome 2025, let’s enjoy these hopeful stories from 2024.
Klamath Salmon Surge Back
Just weeks after the removal of four dams from California’s Klamath River, biologists spotted Chinook salmon spawning in the river’s upper reaches for the first time in a century. By November hundreds of salmon were wriggling into their historical home waters of southern Oregon, 200 river miles from the ocean.
They swam past young willows and other new growth creating riparian shelter in what had only recently been the murky bottom of a reservoir. Other species sure to benefit include coho salmon, steelhead, and lamprey, along with birds and mammals.
And people will partake in this success, too, including the Klamath Tribes and other Indigenous groups whose nutritional and cultural heritage were disrupted by the dams.
Agricultural runoff and rising water temperatures remain challenges. But Tribes, agencies, universities, and nonprofits are collaborating on monitoring and restoration projects. The fish themselves will inform continuing efforts as biologists follow them into newly reopened habitat.
The story repeats elsewhere, like on Washington’s Elwha River. In 2024, for the first time in decades, a ceremonial and subsistence fishery opened for the Lower Elwha Klallam Tribe, following a 2012 dam removal.
Eastern Herring Revival
Maine’s river herring are also thriving after dam removal in the Kennebec River region. Since 2010 the fish have flooded back to spawn in once-inaccessible streams and slow ponds. Runs that were recently nonexistent or numbered only in the hundreds now reach the millions and tens of millions of fish. After setting records in 2023 and 2024, they now hint at an abundance not seen in 200 years.
Herring once filled East Coast rivers and estuaries during their spawn and teemed in nearby ocean waters. Like salmon they’re a keystone species that moves nutrients within marine and terrestrial food chains, benefitting whales, seals, cod, bears, eagles, and other animals. Before the American Revolution, they supported New England’s earliest commercial fisheries; before that they were key to Indigenous cultures and diets.
Today’s revival, which occurs in neighboring states, too, is reinvigorating Indigenous practices and creating new cultural, economic, and local food opportunities. People are helping by removing obsolete dams and installing fish-friendly culverts along roads. Many hope it’s only the beginning, although pollution, bycatch, and overfishing remain challenges.
Wolves Keeping On
Wolf news was not all good in 2024, but the species nevertheless reclaimed habitat and showcased resilience. In December California biologists announced two new wolf packs in an apparent “population boom” in the Sierras. It makes for three new packs confirmed last year, all in an area between Lake Tahoe and Lassen Peak that has lacked wolves for a century. Statewide, at least 30 pups were born.
In Colorado, following voter-approved reintroduction, video captured three fresh pups from the Copper Creek Pack playing near their den. Shortly after, however, officials captured and relocated them following a reported livestock predation. But a few months later, a young disperser appeared south of I-70 for the first time since reintroduction.
It all reflects the often-uneven rhythm of recovery. Colorado officials regularly map wolf activity, which has now spread over a third of the state.
With Age Comes Eggs
In December Hawaiian officials announced that a 74-year-old Laysan albatross named Wisdom had laid a fresh egg at the Midway Atoll wildlife refuge. Wisdom is the world’s oldest known wild bird. She has outlived the ornithologists who first banded her in 1956 and survived decades of dangers, including fishing nets, sharks, and, increasingly, ocean plastics.
Biologists say Wisdom has laid 40 documented eggs in her lifetime and may even be older than her mid-seventies. Laysan albatrosses spend most of their time feeding on squid in the open ocean but come ashore to lay one egg per year in low-lying nests. The seabirds were once hunted for their feathers but enjoy healthy numbers today — thanks in part to generations of Wisdom’s descendants.
A New Ocelot in Town
In August biologists in southern Arizona saw an ocelot skulk past one of their remote cameras, the first such sighting in the Atascosa Highlands in 50 years. By analyzing its spots, biologists confirmed that the animal is new to the state and not “L’il Jefe,” Arizona’s only other known ocelot.
The Atascosa Highlands are hard country along the U.S.-Mexico border, with limited water and searing heat. Yet its grasslands and pinion-oak forests are an ocelot’s happy place, with plenty of rabbits and other small mammals to feed upon.
The landscape is also dominated by humans, with roads, development, poison traps, and an increasingly fortified U.S. border.
No one knows how long the latest ocelot has been in Arizona, but it likely dispersed from a small population in northern Mexico. Only about 100 ocelots survive in the United States, mostly in Texas. But glimpses of L’il Jefe and this new cat in Arizona show that the land, which benefits from restoration, still provides. For example, in late 2023 another camera 50 miles away captured images of a jaguar — only the eighth spotted in Arizona since 1996.
Rattlesnake Mega-Den
After decades of hunting pressure and persecution, you may be surprised to hear about a healthy rattlesnake population. But a Colorado landowner recently discovered a mega-den of prairie rattlesnakes that’s made headlines and become a viral online sensation. The rookery hosts hundreds of snakes in winter, who rest and shed their skin, while dozens of pregnant females use it as a birthing place in late summer.
As the largest known aggregation of prairie rattlers, researchers say the site is a “sweet spot” of climatic, geologic, and biological conditions. Rattlesnakes play key ecological roles, so watching them will be critical to understanding how the local ecosystem changes in the coming years.
You can see a rattle-cam of the den. Grade schoolers use it to observe the snakes, while hundreds of online viewers have seen predators and rodents and even witnessed the snakes lapping water from each other’s coiled bodies. (A fun fact: Each snake bears individualized scale patterns, just like the saddle patches of orcas, the spots of ocelots, and the fingerprints of humans.)
Blue Whale Group
In April boat captains reported an early arrival of migrating blue whales off the Southern California coast. Numbers swelled all spring, and by July an estimated 100 of the massive whales were present.
It’s doubly good news, indicating healthy prey populations and the possible continued recovery of a species hunted nearly to extinction a short century ago.
Meanwhile research in the Southern Ocean suggests that blue whale populations have started to recover around Antarctica. It’s hard to say for sure — physical sightings are rare in that remote region — but scientists have recorded whale songs with increasing frequency, a potential sign of an ongoing recovery. Either that, or they’re just getting louder.
Fly on, Condor
It’s crummy that this past March someone shot the only California condor known to enter Colorado since 2015. In September, without any leads, wildlife officials offered a $15,000 reward for the perp. There’s no news to date.
But like singer Dr. John, we’ll accentuate the positive on this one, as this bird’s travels suggest more hope than horror.
You see, California condor populations have expanded quite a bit lately — good news after the species nearly went extinct in the 1970s largely due to lead poisoning from ammunition, which they ingested from animal remnants left by hunters. In 1987 the last 22 surviving condors were trapped for captive breeding. Today, following years of work, the population has surged to more than 550, with roughly half in the wild in California, Arizona, Utah, and Mexico. Last year, some of the massive birds explored new territory near San Francisco — the kind of range expansion that perhaps the condor in Colorado was eyeing.
First Fishers
Also expanding their range: fishers, who are recolonizing northeastern Ohio for the first time in 200 years.
It started in 2013, when the midsize weasels moved westward from a successful reintroduction program in New York and Pennsylvania. Over 40 Ohio fishers have since been reported — two-thirds in the past three years, indicating they may be reproducing locally. Further evidence of breeding came in early 2024, when geneticists reported that a fisher killed on a road was pregnant.
While it shows the progress of conservation programs, roads will remain a tall hurdle for fishers and other species. But Ohio hosts parks, nature reserves, and even protected old-growth forests. State engineers hope to incorporate wildlife passages into roads, which could minimize the damage and speed up further recovery.
Growing Populations and Other Winners
In 2024 two noteworthy species also improved their endangered status. Apache trout, Arizona’s state fish, have recovered enough territory to graduate from the endangered species list entirely, while red-cockaded woodpeckers, now present from Virginia to Texas, were downlisted from endangered to threatened.
In another milestone, a cloned black footed ferret at the Smithsonian National Zoo in Virginia gave birth to two kits. She’s the first cloned endangered animal to give birth in the United States, bringing promise for maintaining genetic diversity in recovering species. (Many experts argue it’s much better to devote resources to preserving species in the wild before cloning becomes a last resort, but this birth did help to draw worldwide attention to these critically endangered species, which itself was a worthy feat.)
Other animals captured headlines in 2024 for just doing their thing, like the black bear who delighted rangers and visitors by swimming across Oregon’s Crater Lake to become the first bear seen on Wizard Island in decades. Or the “freakishly large” young bull moose spotted in Wyoming’s Bighorn Mountains, who local photographers described as dwarfing his 1,000-pound peers. Similarly, Colorado officials had to move “an absolute unit of a bear” weighing around 450 pounds after he holed up under someone’s deck. The well-fed animals may reflect abundant foods in their ecosystems.
On a lighter note, 2024 also saw three unique cases of leucistic animals, who are born mostly white. In Yellowstone Lakota people celebrated the rare birth of a white bison, an event connected to ancient prophecies. Along coastal British Columbia, a similarly colored killer whale delighted photographers. And a white raven in Anchorage, Alaska, garnered a dedicated online following and inspired a group of Yup’ik dancers visiting the city from western Alaska to create a new traditional-style song and dance in the bird’s honor.
These and other stories captured human imaginations last year, revealing an ancient and enduring bond between people and wildlife. They also demonstrate the resiliency and unique character of the animals who surround us, along with the potential of ecosystems. And nearly every story shows that conservation is working — and that people love seeing these success stories in the making.
