In 1855, Charles Darwin took up a new hobby. He started raising pigeons.

In the garden of his country estate, Darwin built a dovecote. He filled it with birds he bought in London from pigeon breeders. He favored the fanciest breeds — pouters, carriers, barbs, fantails, short-faced tumblers and many more.

“The diversity of the breeds is something astonishing,” he wrote a few years later in “On the Origin of Species” — a work greatly informed by his experiments with the birds.

Continue reading “Pigeons Get a New Look” →

In November, a team of biologists journeyed to Maria Island, three miles off the Australian island state of Tasmania, taking with them 15 plastic cylinders. They loaded the cylinders into S.U.V.’s, drove them to an abandoned farm and scattered them in the fields.

Before long 15 Tasmanian devils emerged from the containers, becoming the first ever to inhabit the island.

“All indications are that they’re doing very well,” Phil Wise, a government wildlife biologist who leads the project, said of the devils — fierce-looking, doglike marsupials that have become an endangered species on the much larger island for which they are named.

Continue reading “Raising Devils in Seclusion” →