About All About Wildlife

A wildlife magazine, still going

All About Wildlife has been online since 2009. The magazine was founded by Paul Guernsey — a wildlife journalist, book author, and lifelong outdoorsman based in Maine — who set out to publish something that didn’t yet exist on the web: a serious, readable wildlife title for people who actually like animals. At its peak the site reached more than 100,000 readers a month, and the catalogue Paul built is the spine our editorial team still works from today.

Paul stepped back from day-to-day editing several years ago. Under new ownership the title is now run by a small editorial team that picked up where he left off. We kept the brand, kept the archive, and kept the focus: endangered species, animal behaviour, marine life, birds, and the conservation stories nobody else seems to be covering. Everything you read here is written by humans who care about wildlife — not a content farm — and we credit our writers on every post.

What we cover

Our beat is wild animals and the people working to keep them alive. That breaks down into a handful of recurring pillars:

  • Endangered species — IUCN Red List updates, ESA listings, recovery stories, and the politics that decide which species get help and which don’t.
  • Marine wildlife — whales, dolphins, sharks, sea turtles, reefs. The ocean accounts for most of the planet by area and most of the conservation news that doesn’t make the front page.
  • Birds — songbirds, raptors, parrots, seabirds. We have a long-standing strength in birds, including a deep set of pieces on toucans, mynahs, and other tropical species we know well.
  • Regional wildlife — African, Asian, American, Australian, Amazonian. Animals are local; conservation is local; a tiger story in India and a wolf story in Yellowstone are different stories with different stakes.
  • Animal behaviour — how animals hunt, communicate, mate, and survive. The “how do jaguars hunt” kind of question that people actually type into a search bar.
  • New species and extinct wildlife — the species that have just been described, and the species that won’t come back. Both ends of the same story.

Who we are

We’re a small team of writers and editors who all came to wildlife the long way around — through field guiding, biology, photography, or animal-rescue work. None of us trained as journalists first. We think that’s a feature, not a bug.

Liam Trent — Managing editor

Liam edits the magazine and writes most of our endangered-species coverage. Before joining the team he worked as a zookeeper in Adelaide and Melbourne and spent a couple of seasons as a research assistant on a wild dog project in southern Africa. He’s the person who sweats over taxonomy, double-checks IUCN status, and pushes us to publish the boring middle of a story rather than just the dramatic top.

Priya Mahato — Marine wildlife

Priya covers oceans for us. Marine biology background, dive-certified, and the team member most likely to send a 4 a.m. message because a new whale stranding report just dropped. She handles whales, dolphins, sharks, sea turtles, reef ecology, and anything else with gills or flippers. She’s also the reason we write about the Vaquita more than is strictly reasonable for a 10-individual species — but somebody should.

Theo Hartwell — Birds & primates

Theo runs the bird beat and the rainforest mammals beat. He came in as a wildlife photographer and never left; if there’s a high-res image of a chimp or a macaw on the site, the byline almost always reads Theo. He handles toucans, mynahs, mousebirds, parrots, raptors, and great-ape coverage, and he’s our resident fact-checker for anything with feathers.

Esme Ridgway — Conservation policy & staff writer

Esme is our policy reporter. She tracks the Endangered Species Act, CITES decisions, and the slower-moving stories that don’t make headlines but actually decide outcomes — funding, listings, lawsuits, agency changes. She also handles a lot of our animal-behaviour and explainer pieces, where her job is to make the science readable without dumbing it down.

How we work

Everything on the site is written, edited, and published by a person — not generated by a language model and not paid-placement copy from third-party “guest contributors.” We have made this mistake before, like a lot of older sites, and we’ve since stopped accepting unpaid guest posts entirely. If a post has been updated since publication, we say so at the top.

We publish on a roughly weekly cadence rather than chasing daily volume. A long, well-checked piece on a single species is more useful — and more honest about how slow conservation work really is — than three thin posts written to a SEO checklist.

For sources, we lean on primary scientific literature where possible, then on established conservation institutions: the IUCN Red List, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service, CITES decisions, and field reports from groups like Smithsonian Magazine‘s science coverage. We link out to the original work when we cite it, because that’s the deal.

Editorial standards

A few things we promise readers:

  • Every species claim is checked against current IUCN Red List status at time of writing.
  • Every quote is sourced. Every photograph is licensed or original.
  • Affiliate disclosure goes at the top of any commercial post — never buried.
  • We will publish corrections in-line, not silently.
  • If a post is more than three years old and the underlying science has moved, we update it rather than leaving an out-of-date stub up.

If you spot something we’ve got wrong — a species name, a population estimate, a misidentified animal in a photograph — please tell us. Our contact page goes straight to the editorial inbox.

The archive

Some of the pieces on the site are nearly as old as the site itself. Posts from 2009–2012 — Paul’s original wildlife reporting — sit alongside newer work; we’ve kept them because they’re still good, and because the conservation arc only really makes sense if you can see how a species was doing fifteen years ago. Where a story has changed materially (the Florida panther, the southern white rhino, the Amur leopard) we add an updated companion post rather than rewriting the original.

You’ll also find category pages for each of our pillars — Endangered Species, Marine Wildlife, Birds, and the regional sections — which are the easiest way to dig in.

Saying hello

We’re happy to hear from readers, researchers, photographers with field images we might use, and conservation organisations with stories worth telling. We’re less happy to hear from SEO link-trade pitches and AI content vendors. Please use the contact form; we read everything that comes in, even if we can’t reply to all of it.

Thanks for reading.

— The All About Wildlife editorial team

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