Florida’s Congressional lawmakers are pushing for approval of a Fish and Wildlife Service rule that would list nine kinds of large constrictor snakes as an “injurious species.”

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Florida Looks for Curbs on Some Snake Species

Nature groups say ministers are failing to keep their wildlife pledges, claiming just two out of 16 made by the government have been honoured.

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Ministers ‘fail on green pledges’

The Interior Department has struck an agreement with a liberal conservation group to decide within six years whether 251 imperiled species deserve to be placed on the endangered species list, Interior officials announced Tuesday. The settlement between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and WildEarth Guardians delivers at least a partial truce in the long-standing battle between left-leaning environmental groups and Fish and Wildlife Service officials, who have consistently said that they lack the resources to add all the species that deserve protection to the federal endangered species list . Read full article > >

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Interior strikes deal with conservation groups on endangered species listings

BOISE, Idaho — A federal judge has denied a proposed settlement agreement between the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service and 10 conservation groups that would have lifted endangered species protections for wolves in Montana and Idaho.

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Federal judge blocks deal between environmental groups, government on protections for wolves

The federal Fish and Wildlife Service places seven birds found almost entirely in Brazil on the endangered species list.

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Green: 7 Brazilian Birds on U.S. Endangered List

A stunning silhouette of active leafcutter ants in Costa Rica wins the Wildlife Photographer of the Year award.

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Ants in action takes photo award

The first pink-footed geese of the season have arrived at the Montrose Basin Wildlife Reserve in Angus.

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Pink-footed geese fly to Scotland

This article titled “Obama administration accused of helping BP hide the oil in the Gulf” was written by Suzanne Goldenberg, US environment correspondent, for guardian.co.uk on Friday 17th September 2010 09.00 UTC

The Obama administration is facing two new charges of suppressing information about the BP oil spill.

Independent scientists, environmental organisations and local groups in the Gulf have repeatedly accused government agencies of helping BP to under-estimate the amount of oil that spewed out of its well and play down its effects on marine life.

The emergency phase of the spill may now be all but over: administration officials say the well could be permanently sealed by Sunday. But the Obama administration still faces a big trust gap over its handling of the spill, with environmentalists and scientists growing more vocal about their suspicions that the US public is being spun.

Now here are two more challenges: from the National Wildlife Federation, which suggests the US Fish and Wildlife Service is playing fast and loose with figures in its estimates of sea birds killed by the spill and from the Public Employees for Environmental Responsibility, which says the government is deliberately withholding information about the spill.

The NWF did succeed in prising numbers for birds killed or injured in the spill from the US Fish and Wildlife under a freedom of information request.

Conservation groups had been pushing officials to provide a breakdown of the types of birds caught up in the spill: brown pelicans, laughing gulls, northern gannets.

But the numbers which FWS handed over on Wednesday, 10 days after an original deadline had passed, turned out to be 40% lower than the rolling tally posted each day on the Deepwater Horizon Response website.

The FWS report listed only 4,676 affected birds up to 14 September, while the latest FWS figures on the Deepwater Horizon response site on the same date listed 7,996 birds.

On further scrutiny, it turns out the FWS tally was not up to date. But the low number left an impression that the FWS was trying to play down the effects of the spill on wildlife.

“I don’t have a problem with releasing partial data,” said Doug Inkley, a senior scientist for the NWF. “What concerns me is that they represented it as complete.” He went on:

“I think both BP and the federal government have had a very strong resistance to giving out information. We saw that at the beginning when the government continued to release the information that the flow rate was only 5,000 barrels per day and everyone in the world knew it was much more than that.”

It’s become a familiar charge over the past five months, and it extends across several government agencies. In early August, the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Agency (NOAA) released a report suggesting that about 75% of the oil was gone from the Gulf. A closer look revealed that even by NOAA’s own accounting half of the oil was still in the environment – though diluted and dispersed. NOAA later backed away from the report.

On Thursday, Peer accused the US Geological Survey of hiding hundreds of pages of reports and internal memos related to the work of a group of technical experts who were charged with producing an authoritative estimate of the flow rate from BP’s ruptured well. Peer’s director, Jeff Ruch, said in a statement:

“Our concern is that the administration took, and is still taking, steps to falsely minimise public perception about the extent and severity of the BP spill.”

It’s widely accepted that it will take months if not years before scientists and environmental organisations are able to produce a true picture of the effects of the BP spill. But as new evidence continues to come in, independent scientists seem to be saying that it’s getting harder and harder to trust the government to come up with the facts. As Inkley put it:

“Whenever we see reports, if there is a bias one direction or another there is always an under-representation of the damages or potential damages.”

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