Every June, Lou Perrotti packs his bags for Nantucket, a small island off the coast of Massachusetts known as a summer beach destination.

He isn’t going for the beaches. He’s going for the beetles.

Over the past 25 years, Perrotti, the director of conservation for the Roger Williams Park Zoo in Providence, Rhode Island, has worked with partners to release thousands of American burying beetles on Nantucket in an effort to reestablish a self-sustaining population of the species on the eastern edge its range.

Once widely distributed as far west as Montana, the beetles’ numbers plummeted in the 20th century…

Saving a disappearing wood turtle population in New Jersey required recruiting more turtles, and more partners

On a spring night in 2007, Kurt Buhlmann sat on an overturned five-gallon bucket with a headlamp and a pair of binoculars, looking for wood turtles emerging from a streambank and clambering toward an adjacent farm field to nest.

When he spied one of the rare reptiles, he would intercept it, carry it to the other side of a stream — onto Great Swamp National Wildlife Refuge property — and place it on a low mound of dirt he and refuge staff had built…

If a cerulean warbler sings in a forest, and nobody is around to hear it, does it make a sound?

Thanks to a collaborative effort led by the American Bird Conservancy, the Indiana University of Pennsylvania, and the University of Pittsburgh to deploy hundreds of audio recording units in Pennsylvania forests, we know the answer is yes.

But that’s not the question the researchers are trying to answer.

“Our goal is to manage these forests to create healthy, structurally diverse habitats that meet the needs of both at-risk and common bird species,” explained Jeffery Larkin, the Eastern Forest Bird Habitat…

For many people, the spectacle of the pink super moon last week was a welcome sign of spring — the word “pink” in the name is a reference to wildflower blooms that correspond with the April full moon.

For the Partnership for the Delaware Estuary, the super moon was a sign of something else: the extreme low tides needed to install an experimental green-infrastructure project in the Schuylkill River in Southwest Philadelphia.

The project, supported in part by the Delaware Watershed Conservation Fund, might be the first to pilot creating a living shoreline that includes beds of freshwater mussels —…

She first heard it while reading a book. Not that book. “The Serengeti Shall Not Die” by Bernard and Michael Grzmek, who in 1959 sounded the alarm about the dramatic loss of wildlife in the East African plains known for iconic species like lion, wildebeest, elephant, and giraffe.

After completing her undergraduate coursework, she answered the call.

“I sold everything I owned, and bought a plane ticket to Kenya,” said Jean Brennan, the conservation science and climate adaptation coordinator for the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Science Applications program in the North Atlantic-Appalachian region. …

By the end of April, many home gardeners have started tomato, lettuce, and pepper plants in pots on windowsills in hopes of feeding themselves in late summer. Ela Carpenter will have started hundreds of wild indigo plants in hopes of feeding butterflies.

Not on her windowsill, in a greenhouse at Masonville Cove, a Baltimore-based Urban Wildlife Refuge Partnership — sites where the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, the community, and partners have come together to promote conservation.

Masonville Cove was one of the first Urban Wildlife Refuge Partnerships established when the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service started the program in…

On warm, windless days in late spring, small brown butterflies flit among yellow wildflowers blooming around earthen mounds within a secured perimeter on Cape Cod. Until 1999, those mounds held shooting targets for soldiers in training.

“In just 20 years, we’ve transformed an old rifle range into a flagship conservation area for a whole suite of species, including the frosted elfin butterfly,” said Jake McCumber, Natural Resources and Training Lands Manager for the Massachusetts Army National Guard.

Today, the retired portion of the range at the National Guard’s Camp Edwards is a prime example of pine barrens, a rare habitat…

The Nature Place, an environmental education center and the headquarters of the conservation organization Berks Nature, sits on the outskirts of Reading, Pennsylvania, a city of 88,000.

But Kim Murphy wants it to feel like the heart of the community.

“We are committed to working with all of Reading’s populations and schools to meet their needs,” said Murphy, president of Berks Nature. The challenge? “We’re not fully versed in how best to do so.”

In Reading, more than 30 percent of residents are living in poverty, and the majority are from racial and ethnic groups that have historically been excluded…