Good news

After a decade-long campaign, New South Wales has passed legislation creating the Great Koala National Park - adding more than 176,000 hectares of state forest to existing reserves to form a protected area of over 475,000 hectares on the Mid North Coast.

It will safeguard an estimated 12,000 koalas and 36,000 greater gliders, and ends native-forest logging across the area. With koalas at risk of extinction in the wild in the state, Premier Chris Minns said the park ‘is about turning that around’.

The Bangka slow loris - one of the world’s only venomous primates - has been confirmed alive in Indonesia, nearly a century after it was last recorded.

Feared extinct and known only from specimens collected in the early 1930s, it was rediscovered through the records of a wildlife rescue centre on Bangka Island, which documented more than 90 of the animals over the past decade and returned most to the forest.

Habitat loss from tin mining and oil palm remains a threat, and researchers now hope to survey how many survive in the wild.

Working the Scottish shoreline at low tide, a black Labrador called Sgiath has been named Animal of the Year at the International Fund for Animal Welfare’s awards.

The six-year-old, trained by marine ecologist Dr Texa Sim, sniffs out the carpet sea squirt - an invasive species that smothers native marine life and costs millions to control - pinpointing colonies hidden among the seaweed.

Thought to be the UK’s first sea squirt-detecting dog, she is also a trained mountain rescue dog. ‘She’s a natural,’ says Sim.

Backpack, also known as Bear 89, has been crowned champion of Fat Bear Week, the annual celebration of the brown bears fattening up for winter at Alaska’s Katmai National Park.

Beyond the contest, rangers reported more cubs at Brooks Camp than they have seen in years - a sign of a thriving ecosystem. The bears are a keystone species, carrying salmon far inland and spreading the nutrients that nourish Katmai’s forests.

‘A new generation of fat bears is taking shape,’ said park superintendent Mark Sturm.

Scientists have described a new species of wild cat in Bolivia - the first new cat species identified in more than a century. Known locally as the ‘tilcayo’ and now named Leopardus tilcayo, the small, spotted feline lives in the Yungas cloud forests near La Paz. A genetic study published in Current Biology found it had long been lumped in with the oncilla, or little spotted cat, but is in fact a distinct species - a reminder of how much biodiversity is still waiting to be understood.

Norway has designated its largest-ever marine protected area, safeguarding a stretch of Arctic sea roughly the size of 260,000 football pitches. The Andfjorden reserve, off Andøy, Harstad and Senja, protects cold-water coral reefs, kelp forests and sponge beds that provide spawning and nursery grounds for fish and support sperm whales and seabirds. It will be overseen by a dedicated board that includes Sámi representatives, and lifts the share of protected waters off mainland Norway from around 4.8% to 6%.

After a 200-year absence, wild Przewalski’s horses have been born on the Kazakh steppe. Two foals arrived in late August at the Altyn Dala reserve in central Kazakhstan - the first wild births of the species there in two centuries. Their parents were among the horses returned since 2024 under the ‘Return of the Wild Horses’ programme, which aims to establish a free-roaming herd of around 40 by 2029. Conservationists say the foals show the horses are adapting well to their new landscape.

On the banks of the Aguarico River in the Ecuadorian Amazon, a group of Indigenous Siekopai women known as the Tari Nomiowa’i - ‘turtle women’ - are helping a threatened river turtle recover. Blending ancestral knowledge with a data-collection app, they locate and protect the nests of the yellow-spotted Amazon river turtle, incubate the eggs away from predators and pollution, and rear the hatchlings. Over the latest season they released 208 young turtles into the river, involving local schoolchildren in the effort.

On the cliffs near Dancing Ledge in Purbeck, Dorset, a puffin chick has fledged for the first time in 30 years - a milestone for the last remaining puffin colony on mainland England’s south coast. The colony had struggled for years to raise young, prompting the National Trust to install motion-sensor cameras to find out why. After a season of adults courting, nesting and carrying fish to the cliffs, volunteers who had monitored the site for 15 weeks confirmed the young ‘puffling’, offering hope for the colony’s future.

Atlantic bluefin tuna have returned to the waters off Yorkshire for the first time in around 60 years. Once the target of a famous 1930s big-game fishery off Scarborough and Whitby, the giant fish disappeared from the North Sea by the 1960s as overfishing and the collapse of herring stocks took their toll. Decades of tighter international management have since allowed the species to recover, and University of Exeter scientists have now tagged five bluefin off Whitby to track their movements and inform conservation.