There’s a new postal stamp that will raise money for wildlife conservation, created by the Oklahoma City Zoo and the U.S. Postal Service.

The special semipostal stamps cost 55 cents each, 11 cents more than a regular stamp, and are available for purchase now, according to the postal service. The extra cost of the stamps will support efforts to save endangered animals such as apes, elephants, rhinos, tigers and turtles through the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service.

Endangered Species II by Rs.Beswick on Flickr.

Endangered Species I by Rs.Beswick on Flickr.

Endangered Species-Least Terns by William Dalton on Flickr.

The Least Tern is on the United States Endangered Species List. Pictured are two fighting over a nesting site. Their nests are little more than small cavities in the sand where they lay two or three eggs. Their numbers are down due to loss of habitat and predations of their nest and young.

Mr. Knights, of WildAid, said that if the decimation of shark populations continued, all the money in the world would not provide shark fins for diners. “This is unsustainable,” he said, “and the question is, do you end it now or do you wait until there are no sharks left?”

Not to be confused with this one!

Interesting review of Demon Fish, a book that attempts to explain the importance of shark conservation.

More than 73 million sharks are killed each year by fishermen who hack off their fins to sell as a coveted ingredient for soup. As many as 90 percent of sharks in the world’s open oceans have disappeared.

Captain Paul Watson of Sea Shepherd Conservation Society and the TLC show Whale Wars officially endorsed the social game, MyConservationPark. Through a partnership with Sea Shepherd, developer Good World Games will donate 15% of earnings to the Sea Shepherd Conservation Society.

A green turtle in Akumal, Mexico. He looks a little leery, no?

I love hearing good news, don’t you?

The three main drivers of these comebacks and colonisations are legal action, habitat creation and climate change. Changes in the law have reduced both deliberate and unwitting pollution; with the banning of the agricultural chemical DDT in the early 1980s coming just in time to save the peregrine which, as a predator at the very top of the food chain, was especially vulnerable.

Persecution has also been reduced, both by legal means and by changes in attitudes. A handful of misguided landowners and gamekeepers continue to target birds of prey, mistakenly blaming them for everything from the reduction in numbers of red grouse to the decline in our songbirds. But as the regular presence of buzzards, kites and sparrowhawks in our skies shows, the shotgun has fallen out of favour in much of Britain. Meanwhile, my own part of the country, the Somerset Levels, is rapidly turning into the best place in Britain to see a range of long-legged waterbirds.