Fennec fox, Tunisia

We don’t really know much of the biology of Vulpes zerda, the Fennec fox, although it gets promptly recognised by everyone for its cuteness and its incredibly large ears, which help this species to locate food among the sand dunes and radiate heat. It is the quintessential desert animal, whose range covers almost the entire North of Africa and the whole Sahara…

 

Appennine Chamois, Italy

This was the uncompromising way in which the Apennine chamois (Rupicapra pyrenaica ornata), a distinct subspecies of the Pyrenean one, was described at the beginning of the 20th century from the mountains of the Abruzzo National Park in Central Italy, where, miraculously, it had escaped extinction. Very little was known about the life and behaviour of this symbol of Apennine wild nature, perfectly adapted to live in a world of sheer rock walls and steep slopes, and able to survive both the capriciousness of the mountain climate and ambushes of bears, wolves and eagles…

Time for Wolves, Italy

Admired and respected as example of freedom, intelligence and social cohesion; hated, demonised and relentlessly persecuted – the wolf has always elicited a mix of contradictory emotions in us. Despite being one of the most charismatic and studied species in the world, we still know too little about the “real” wolf, worried as we are chasing so many other imaginary wolves. Certainly the renowned elusiveness of these animals makes them puzzling subjects to observe. Only with great patience one can hope to get a glimpse of their private life…

Polymita snails, Cuba

Church forests, Ethiopia

Once 40 percent of Ethiopia was covered in lush forests, but over the past 50 years these have dropped to only 4.2 percent of its entire surface. In the north of the Country and especially along the shores of Lake Tana (since 2015, a UNESCO Man and Biosphere Reserve) a myriad of fragments of the original Afromontane dry forest have survived until today as sacred groves surrounding each of the about 30.000 orthodox churches of the Region...

The Secret of the Giants, Italy

In 2017 UNESCO has included the forests of the Abruzzo National Park of Central Italy in the transnational World Heritage site of the “Primeval Beech Forests of the Carpathians and other Regions of Europe”. This important recognition underlines the relevance of these marvelous mountain woods for the preservation of evolutionary processes and ecological dynamics of the species Fagus sylvatica in the Mediterranean basin…