Wildlife

Oldest Known Bird Hatches a New Chick

The world's oldest known wild bird just became a mother again.

The 63-year-old Laysan albatross named Wisdom was spotted taking care of her newborn earlier this month on the Midway Atoll National Wildlife Refuge, according to the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Biologists banded Wisdom in 1956 as she incubated an egg and have been following her ever since. The tough old bird has hatched a new chick for the past seven years in a row and has likely raised more than 30 chicks in her lifetime. She also survived a 2011 tsunami, which claimed 2,000 of her fellow adult albatrosses and about 110,000 chicks in the Midway wildlife refuge, an island habitat in the middle of the North Pacific.

Baby River Turtles Hatch by the Thousands in Brazil

More than 200,000 baby turtles recently crawled out of their shells and swarmed sandy riverbanks in the interior of Brazil.

The mass hatching is an annual event for Great South American river turtles. Every time the dry season rolls around in the the Purus River basin in western Brazil, thousands of newborns emerge in one of the largest known mass hatchings for the species (Podocnemis expansa), according to the Wildlife Conservation Society.

Scientists with WCS and the Chico Mendes Institute for Biodiversity Conservation were on hand for the recent mass hatching in November 2013 in Brazil's Abufari Biological Reserve. The team counted about 210,000 baby river turtles in total and rounded up 15,000 of those young creatures for a "mark and recapture" program.

By keeping tabs on marked turtles, scientists can estimate their population, monitor their travel and track their survival rates in the years to come.