I was about twelve when wolves became an obsession. There were none anywhere near where I lived; the animals I knew inhabited distant latitudes, boreal forests, tundra and mountain country that I encountered through maps, photographs, books and film. I learnt where different populations lived, how they hunted and raised their young, how packs behaved, and how wolves differed across their range. I wanted to travel north one day and study them.
I borrowed wolf books from libraries and bought them when I could. A National Geographic film about wolves became one of those things I was enormously excited to bring home and watch, because the animals I had known mostly through photographs and print were suddenly moving and behaving in front of me. A little later, I spent what seemed then an extravagant amount of money on two large professional photographs of wolves from a photographic shop. For a time, they hung on my bedroom wall.
The animal I found in those books bore little resemblance to the one humans had constructed in stories. We had made the wolf ravenous and treacherous, the creature at the door or concealed beneath sheep's clothing, the big bad wolf waiting beyond the path. The biological animal was far more interesting: intelligent, social, capable of close relationships and co-operative hunting, communicating in ways that researchers are still working to understand.
The howl was part of what made wolves so compelling. It is a long-range communication signal, used in territorial defence and to maintain cohesion between animals separated across large areas. A study published in 2016 analysed more than 2,000 howls from thirteen canid species and subspecies and found distinct patterns in their vocalisations; other research has explored the possibility of identifying individual wolves acoustically. A sound that can seem almost theatrical to human ears is carrying information.
We have given that sound meanings of our own. The howl has become shorthand for wildness, liberation, instinct, the release of whatever civilisation has required us to contain. There is an irony in this, because wolves are profoundly social animals. Their howl is not simply the cry of a solitary creature escaping constraint. It can be a means of reaching others.
At roughly the same age that I was learning about wolves, I was also discovering how many animals were in danger of disappearing. Extinction was difficult to comprehend because of its finality. A species could survive climatic upheavals and thousands upon thousands of generations, then encounter a particular combination of hunting, habitat destruction, introduced species or human expansion and cease to exist anywhere at all. I worried that animals I was learning about might disappear before I ever had the opportunity to encounter them.
Conservation offered another possibility. Habitat could be protected. Hunting and trade could be restricted. Nests and breeding populations could be guarded. Captive populations could preserve species reduced to precariously small numbers, while restoration and reintroduction offered the possibility of returning animals to places from which they had vanished.
As the years passed, other things occupied my attention. My interest in animals did not disappear, but I stopped following conservation with the intensity I had as a child. I knew that other people had continued: scientists, conservation organisations, rangers, wildlife authorities and communities living beside the animals themselves. Laws and international agreements existed because earlier destruction had forced us to recognise that protection could not always be left to chance. I did not imagine that endangered species had somehow become safe. I did assume that certain principles, once established at such cost, would be difficult to discard.
In July 2026, the United States government finalised several changes to the regulations implementing the Endangered Species Act. One rescinded the regulatory definition of “harm”, which had included significant habitat modification when it actually killed or injured protected wildlife by impairing essential behaviours such as breeding, feeding or sheltering. The administration argues that the previous interpretation extended the law beyond the meaning intended by Congress and imposed unjustified burdens on landowners and businesses. Conservation organisations contest that interpretation and have challenged the change in court, arguing that an animal cannot meaningfully be protected if destruction of the habitat on which it depends is excluded from the regulation. The rule is due to take effect on 14 September 2026.
Some accounts circulating online made the changes sound broader than they are. Endangered animals had not simply become lawful targets throughout the United States, and the distinction is important. The less sensational reality was troubling enough: protections created through decades of scientific research, political argument and conservation work could still be rewritten. Wolves returned to my attention with that discovery, along with a question I had not seriously asked for years: what had happened to the conservation work I once followed so closely?
Looking for an answer produced a much stranger picture than the one that had prompted the search. The losses were there, but so were recoveries that had been unfolding largely beyond my awareness.
In Serbia, eastern imperial eagles have just had their most successful breeding season since systematic protection began. In 2017, only one breeding pair remained in the country. This year conservationists monitored 29 territorial pairs, 27 of which began nesting; sixteen pairs bred successfully and 25 chicks were recorded. Behind those compact figures lie months spent searching for territories, monitoring nests and recording breeding activity. Several young eagles have also been fitted with satellite transmitters, allowing researchers to follow what happens after they leave the nest.
Nine years is a remarkably short interval in which to move from a single known breeding pair to 29 territorial pairs. It does not mean that Serbia's imperial eagles are secure, but it demonstrates what sustained protection can do while public attention is occupied elsewhere.
The Indian grey hornbill presents another kind of recovery. The species disappeared locally from Gujarat's Gir National Park and Sanctuary sometime between 1950 and 1960. Beginning in 2021, conservationists returned 28 birds to the landscape, followed by another twelve in 2023. Several males carried transmitters so that researchers could study their movements, habitat use and nesting behaviour. The crucial test was not whether released birds could remain alive for a few months, but whether they could settle, form pairs and breed. They did. Researchers recorded one breeding pair during the initial year and three in the following year, with four breeding pairs observed during the study.
The scimitar-horned oryx had come still closer to extinction. Once widespread across the Sahel, it disappeared from the wild and was formally classified as Extinct in the Wild in 2000. Animals survived in captivity, however, and reintroductions into Chad's Ouadi Rimé-Ouadi Achim reserve began in 2016. By 2023, the wild population had reached roughly 600, and the IUCN reclassified the species as Endangered. Ordinarily, endangered is a word that signals how much might still be lost. For the oryx, it also records the existence of wild animals where there had been none.
Zimbabwe's black rhinos show how long such work can take. When poaching devastated populations in the Zambezi Valley during the late twentieth century, conservationists moved surviving rhinos from vulnerable areas in an effort to preserve them. Matusadona National Park eventually lost its population as well, with the last rhino recorded there in 2016. In 2026, seventeen black rhinos were returned to the park, including descendants of animals removed during those earlier rescue operations. Their arrival was the outcome of nearly four decades of conservation involving government agencies, conservation organisations, private landowners and successive generations of people responsible for keeping those bloodlines alive.
The timescale changes the meaning of the intervention. Protecting an animal today can preserve choices for people who may not yet have been born. The people who moved rhinos during the poaching crisis could not know whether descendants of those animals would ever return to Matusadona, what the park would look like decades later, whether political support or funding would survive, or whether conditions would ever permit a return. Their immediate task was to keep enough animals alive so that extinction did not make every future decision on their behalf.
At sea, one of the world's most endangered large whales has produced another cautious sign of improvement. Approximately 380 North Atlantic right whales remain, including only about seventy reproductively active females. Entanglement in fishing gear and collisions with vessels continue to threaten them, and an unusual mortality event that began in 2017 has affected more than a fifth of the population. Yet researchers identified 23 calves during the 2026 calving season, the highest number since 2009. Thirteen returning mothers had also shortened the unusually long intervals between births observed in recent years, bringing them closer to the three-to-four-year interval associated with healthier reproduction.
Kazakhstan is attempting something more audacious. Tigers disappeared from the country more than seventy years ago, and the Caspian tiger that once inhabited Central Asia is extinct. That animal cannot be recovered. Genetic research has shown, however, that the Caspian and surviving Amur tiger were extremely closely related. After years spent restoring habitat and prey in the Ile-Balkhash region, Kazakhstan released a female Amur tiger into the reserve on 31 July 2026 as part of a programme intended eventually to establish a wild population there.
Her name is Ümit, meaning hope. It is a detail almost too perfectly suited to the story, but her name should not be allowed to make the programme sound simpler than it is. One tiger is not a restored population. Years will pass before anyone can know whether the attempt succeeds, and the extinction of the Caspian tiger remains irreversible. Ümit's presence represents something narrower and more tangible: after more than seventy years without a wild tiger, there is a tiger moving through that landscape again.
I had gone looking because a political story had reached me. The imperial eagles were already breeding in Serbia. Hornbills had already begun nesting in Gir. Conservationists had been preserving rhino lineages for decades. None of these things began when I noticed them.
That observation brings conservation surprisingly close to questions of attention. Politics is exceptionally good at attracting it. Governments announce decisions, opponents attack them, news organisations report the dispute, social media circulates the most provocative versions, and an argument occurring thousands of kilometres away can reach us within minutes. Conservation frequently operates at a different tempo: a nest checked again, another breeding season recorded, a ranger returning to the same ground, a population counted for the twentieth consecutive year, a captive breeding programme maintained long after the emergency that created it has disappeared from public conversation.
Extinction can occur more quietly. Three Australian mammals were assessed for the IUCN Red List for the first time in 2025 and entered it already classified as Extinct. In July 2026, taxonomic work resulted in five newly recognised Australian marsupials also being confirmed as Extinct; none had been reported for at least sixty years. The animals did not disappear when their classifications were published. The formal record had finally caught up with absences that were already decades old.
Other absences are harder to measure. Large mammals and birds can be counted, photographed by camera traps, followed with transmitters and recognised by people who have known them for generations. Vast numbers of invertebrates, fungi and plants receive nothing like the same attention, and some species may disappear before science has described them adequately enough to record the loss.
Conservation has its own vocabulary for this imbalance. Charismatic megafauna is the wonderfully candid term used for large animals with an unusual capacity to command human affection and attention: wolves, elephants, whales, great apes, tigers and rhinos are familiar examples. Related to it is the idea of the flagship species, an animal used to represent a conservation campaign, a threatened habitat or sometimes a much wider ecological cause. Their appeal can be enormously useful. Protecting a tiger, for example, may also protect the forest it inhabits and innumerable less celebrated organisms living there. Yet the terminology acknowledges an uncomfortable fact about us: human concern is not distributed equally across the living world. A beetle, mollusc, frog, plant or fungus may be no less threatened because it is harder to photograph beautifully, turn into a cultural symbol or place at the centre of a conservation appeal.
The imbalance has a curious consequence at the other extreme. Some charismatic animals have become so abundant in human culture that their familiarity can disguise their scarcity in nature. Lions, elephants, giraffes and tigers appear on toys, advertisements, clothing, logos, films and children's books. Researchers have described these representations as a kind of “virtual population”: an abundance of cultural animals existing alongside dwindling populations of the biological ones. We can encounter an animal almost everywhere and still fail to notice that the animal itself is disappearing.
The July 2026 IUCN assessment captured this history particularly well. Five newly recognised Australian marsupials were confirmed extinct. The same update reported that another Australian marsupial, the numbat, had improved from Endangered to Near Threatened after decades of predator control, captive breeding, translocations and protected populations. Its numbers had fallen to about 300 in the late 1970s; the current estimate is between 2,000 and 3,000. The numbat remains conservation-dependent, but without that sustained intervention its history might have joined those of the five species listed beside it.
Recovery and extinction can therefore be occurring at the same time, even appearing in the same conservation report. Looking only for catastrophe produces an incomplete account of the living world; searching only for success would be equally misleading. Widening our attention does not alter what is happening. It alters how much of what is happening becomes available to us.
The word saved begins to look inadequate under those conditions. It implies an ending: danger followed by intervention followed by safety. Biological recovery rarely respects such neat stages. Serbia's eagles still require protection. A successful right-whale breeding season does not remove fishing gear or ships from their path. The oryx exists in the wild again, but the pressures that destroyed its former populations have not vanished. Matusadona's rhinos are there because people protected their ancestors decades ago, and whether their descendants remain there will depend upon decisions made after the excitement of their return has faded.
Law is one of those decisions. It can determine whether habitat is protected, whether an animal may be killed, what happens when wildlife conflicts with agriculture or development, and which obligations a government accepts towards a threatened population. The biology of recovery may require decades while the legislation surrounding it can change within a political term.
The difficulty becomes greater when an animal moves through more than one jurisdiction. A migrating bird may depend upon habitats governed by several countries before completing a single journey. Whales pass through national waters and the open ocean. A wolf can cross a political boundary without any biological event occurring at the line, while the law governing what may happen to that wolf can change immediately.
Humans tend to describe wildlife conflict from the position of our present boundaries. A wolf enters a farm. An elephant enters a settlement. A predator encroaches upon human territory. Those conflicts are real, and people living alongside large or dangerous animals can bear costs that distant admirers of wildlife do not. Yet the language can obscure the longer history of the place: forests cleared for agriculture, roads laid across habitat, migration routes interrupted, settlements expanded and wild populations compressed into what remained.
Wolves evolved a long-distance call in landscapes larger than many of the fragments in which we now ask them to live.
Years after that childhood fascination, I encountered the wolf in another context through Clarissa Pinkola Estés's Women Who Run with the Wolves, and through it questions about mythology, psychology, instinct and the human interior. The symbolic wolf was again being asked to carry human meanings, as wolves have been made to do for centuries.
The biological animal complicates one of our favourite meanings. We have taken the howl as an emblem of freedom and release, although the animal producing it is often communicating with others. At the same time, we have reduced and divided the territories across which those calls evolved to travel. We made the wolf's voice a symbol of our own freedom while restricting the freedom of the creature that makes it.
Conservation eventually asks questions that cannot be answered by biology alone. What are we prepared to share the world with? What do we consider valuable enough to inconvenience ourselves for? Can we recognise another creature's claim to continued existence when living alongside it carries a cost? When our behaviour is responsible for a population's decline, are we capable of changing that behaviour for as long as recovery requires?
The cases gathered here resist a simple verdict. They include animals that disappeared with scarcely any public awareness and others whose return required extraordinary concentrations of human attention. They include legislation capable of being weakened and conservation programmes maintained across generations. They include five species whose extinction was formally recognised only after decades of absence, alongside another species in the same IUCN assessment whose prospects improved because people continued working on its recovery.
Ümit's name means hope, but hope is not what prepared Ile-Balkhash for a tiger. People did that. Nor did hope return rhinos to Matusadona, produce Serbia's eagle chicks or bring the scimitar-horned oryx back into the wild. Those outcomes required knowledge, money, legislation, restraint, physical labour and people willing to continue after much of the rest of the world had stopped paying attention.
When I first learnt about extinction, I imagined it through animals I knew enough to fear losing. I understand now that many disappearances occur beyond the limits of that attention. There are creatures I never learnt about, absences I never noticed, and species whose names entered the record of extinction only when there was nothing living left to attach them to.
The howl offers a different image, not because nature has arranged itself conveniently into a metaphor for us, but because of what the sound actually does. It carries information across space. An animal can be beyond another wolf's sight and still make its presence known.
Conservation can also send consequences far beyond the moment in which an action is taken. A rhino protected during a poaching crisis can have descendants returned decades later. A nest guarded this year can contribute to a population counted by somebody else in twenty years. Animals kept alive after their species disappears from the wild can produce descendants that eventually live beyond captivity. None of the people beginning such work can know exactly how far its effects will travel.
Extinction has its terrible silences, including those that fall before we have learnt to listen for them. A living world, however diminished, can still make itself heard. The question is whether we are paying attention while there is still time to answer.
Sources and further reading
Research on long-range canid vocal communication, based on more than 2,000 howls from thirteen canid species and subspecies.
Kershenbaum et al. Disentangling canid howls across multiple species and subspecies. Behavioural Processes, 2016.Read the study →The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service final rule rescinding the regulatory definition of “harm” under the Endangered Species Act.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Rescinding the Definition of “Harm” Under the Endangered Species Act. 2026.Read the final rule →Reporting on Serbia's 2026 eastern imperial eagle breeding season: 29 territorial pairs and 25 chicks, compared with one breeding pair in 2017.
Bird Protection and Study Society of Serbia / Serbian Times. The best year in the last 10. 2026.Read the report →Peer-reviewed research documenting the reintroduction, movements and breeding of Indian grey hornbills in Gir.
Reintroduction of Indian Grey Hornbills in Gir, India.Read the study →Background on the scimitar-horned oryx reintroduction programme and the return of a wild population in Chad.
Sahara Conservation. Scimitar-horned oryx.Read about the programme →Updates from Matusadona National Park on the 2026 return of black rhinos and the longer conservation work that made the reintroduction possible.
African Parks. Matusadona National Park news and conservation updates.Read the updates →NOAA's account of the 2026 North Atlantic right-whale calving season, including 23 calves and current population estimates.
NOAA Fisheries. By the Numbers: 2026 North Atlantic Right Whale Calving Season.Read the report →Reporting on the release of Ümit, an Amur tiger, in Kazakhstan's Ile-Balkhash reserve in July 2026.
The Guardian. Tiger released into Kazakhstan more than 70 years after disappearance from the country. 2026.Read the report →The IUCN update recording five newly recognised Australian marsupial extinctions alongside the improved status of the numbat.
IUCN. Desert frog, deep-sea molluscs and remarkable species at risk: IUCN Red List update. July 2026.Read the update →The 2025 Red List update in which three Australian mammals entered the Red List already classified as Extinct.
IUCN. Arctic seals threatened by climate change as birds decline globally: IUCN Red List. 2025.Read the update →Research on iconic wildlife and the paradoxical “virtual populations” created by the abundance of threatened animals in culture, branding and media.
Courchamp et al. The paradoxical extinction of the most charismatic animals. PLOS Biology, 2018.Read the study →A public-domain recording of wolves howling, originally produced by the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.
U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service. Wolf howls.Listen on Wikimedia Commons →The public-domain hero photograph used for this essay.
Neal Herbert / National Park Service. Howling wolf, Blacktail Deer Plateau. Yellowstone National Park, 2015.View the image →