ABOUT

Welcome to All About Wildlife.com, your online source for news, information and updates about the world’s wildlife, wildlife habitat and endangered species. I am a lifelong journalist and editor who has written extensively about wildlife and wildlife issues, and this online magazine is the result of a dream I’ve had since even before there was an internet. That dream has always been to not only regularly publish articles about the world’s wildlife and the environments on which wildlife depends, but to draw the vital connections among all the facts behind those articles, thereby helping my readers to make sense of the vast array of environmental challenges faced by our planet. One of the reasons this is important is because, when it comes to such issues as the degradation of our air and water, the destruction of our life-giving forests, rivers and wilderness areas, climate change and the spread of toxins and artificial chemicals into everything we eat, drink, breathe or touch, wildlife truly is the canary in the coal mine. Every problem faced by every one of the world’s endangered or threatened species is shared by numerous species all over the world–and if we humans don’t yet face that same problem, or don’t yet realize that we face it, we soon will. We are, after all, just one more species on this very finite planet.

However, having issued that familiar environmental warning about the future of humankind, I would like to emphatically add that it’s not all about us. Far from it. I believe that wildlife has the right to be on this planet for reasons that don’t have, and should not have, anything to do with us. Each species was created by nature to fulfill a specific role in in an elegant, mysterious and delightfully complicated plan. Wildlife deserves a place on this planet for no other reason than that it is the ultimate expression of nature’s creativity.

I’ve been interested in wildlife and wild animals for as long as I can remember. An early influence was Ernest Thompson Seton’s book, Wild Animals I have Known, a Christmas gift from my maternal grandparents from which I learned that each species owns a specific set of of behaviors and carries on a defined set of relationships with the other species in its immediate environment. But I first began to think about wild creatures in a truly scientific way after reading George Schaller’s 1966 book, The Year of the Gorilla. In fact, Schaller was such a huge influence on me that, not only did I become a lifelong fan of the mountain gorilla, but if I had not so badly wanted to be a writer, I think I would probably have ended up as a field biologist.

Since becoming an adult, I’ve held just about every type of journalism job available, from newspaper reporter to foreign correspondent to travel writer to magazine editor. In each of my jobs I attempted, usually with some success, to work wildlife into the picture whenever possible. One of my first published wildlife articles back in the 1980’s was a piece I wrote for the Associated Press on the arrival of Africanized (“killer”) honeybees into Venezuela. Another, for Sports Afield Magazine, had to do with fishing for piranhas in Brazil’s vast Pantanal swampland. Since then, I’ve written about everything from hyacinth macaws to grizzly bears and, in search of wildlife stories, I’ve traveled to such diverse places as Kenya, Alaska, the Peruvian Amazon, Russia’s remote Kamchatka Peninsula, New Zealand and the English countryside.

But from now on, with the launch of All About Wildlife.com, my wildlife reporting will no longer take place only when I can fit it in. It will be a regular adventure, and I’m delighted to be undertaking it.

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Paul Guernsey–Editor & Publisher