a gray wolf walking in a river

10 good-news stories for wildlife in 2020

From ‘Tiger King’ prosecutions to new pangolin protections, not everything in 2020 has been doom and gloom.

In November, Colorado voters approved a measure to reintroduce gray wolves, hunted to extinction in the state more than 50 years ago.

Photograph by Ronan Donovan, National Geographic

No one would deny that 2020 has been exceptionally tough. The coronavirus has killed more than a million people worldwide, indelibly changing families and communities. In many ways, animals haven’t fared well, either: The Chinese government promoted bear bile as a coronavirus treatment, poaching surged as COVID-19 lockdowns brought ecotourism to a standstill, and captive wildlife—including tigers at the Bronx Zoo and mink in Denmark fur farms—tested positive for the virus. (To help protect humans from a variant of the coronavirus found in mink, the Danish government ordered the country’s more than 15 million mink living on fur farms to be killed. They weren’t buried deeply enough, however, and as the bodies decomposed, “zombie” mink

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