BBC Wildlife – February 2026

Summary

A curious Vancouver Island marmot named Mya fronts BBC Wildlife Magazine February 2026 (Issue 02, Vol 44), anchoring a recovery story that has lifted Canada's rarest mammal from fewer than 30 wild individuals in 2003 to 427 across 33 colonies by November 2025.

Editor Paul McGuinness opens with a childhood memory of Alpine marmots, which sets up the Ryan Tidman cover feature on the Vancouver Island marmot and the Marmot Recovery Foundation's helicopter-and-radio-telemetry operation in Strathcona Provincial Park. The rest of the issue runs on comeback stories: Graeme Green reports how South Africa's cheetah metapopulation grew from 217 animals on 41 reserves in 2011 to 455 across 67 by the end of 2023, while Daniel Allen travels to Sweden's Göta River, where 100 juvenile Atlantic sturgeon were released in 2024 after museum specimens proved the river was once a spawning ground.

A harder-edged special report by James Fair asks whether GM gene drives can save Hawaii's honeycreepers — 39 of 56 species extinct, 11 of the remaining 17 threatened by avian malaria — and gives sceptics at Pollinis and Save Our Seeds real space to argue. Karine Aigner, Wildlife Photographer of the Year 2022, contributes a 10-page harpy eagle portfolio from Mato Grosso, Brazil, including the detail that a harpy's 12cm rear talon outsizes a grizzly bear's claw.

Regulars hold their usual weight: Ben Hoare lists seven February encounters from otters to water rails, Mike Dilger pinpoints five North American sites to witness snow goose blizzards (1.2 million birds counted in one Missouri flock in February 2023), and Ben Garrod makes a persuasive, slightly rambling case that humpback songs of up to 22 hours qualify as music. The Q&A explains why female common frogs play dead to escape mating balls, and the species guide profiles the egg-laying, four-headed-penis-equipped echidna.

—————

Content Guide

▸ Cover Story

p.70 · Marmot country

Photographer Ryan Tidman documents the Marmot Recovery Foundation's effort to save the Vancouver Island marmot, found nowhere else on Earth. Numbers fell below 30 in 2003; the November 2025 count reached 427 wild marmots in 33 colonies plus 120 in breeding programmes. The feature explains the ecological trap of clear-cut logging, where isolated marmots fall to cougars that can take several a day. Since 2003 more than 750 captive-bred marmots have been released from den boxes and tracked by radio telemetry. Executive director Adam Taylor is blunt that this is a managed recovery — stop the intervention and the population would likely crash again.

▸ Features

p.40 · Beak and claw

A 10-page portfolio of harpy eagles in Mato Grosso, Brazil, shot by Karine Aigner from a 30m platform. Concrete details stack up: females reach 9kg, nests hold up to 300 branches, pairs stay together up to 30 years, and vision eight times sharper than ours. Aigner shows harpies breeding on the edge of deforested cattle land, needing only one tall tree and enough monkeys, sloths and tamanduas. Her practical tip for finding them: skip the canopy scan and look for feathers and droppings on the ground.

p.50 · Running free

Graeme Green tracks South Africa's cheetah metapopulation project — a translocation network across 70-plus reserves that mimics natural gene flow blocked by post-1994 fencing. Key numbers: roughly 6,500-7,100 wild cheetahs remain globally, and South Africa's managed population more than doubled between 2011 and 2023. The piece explains 'sentinel sites' — scent-marked trees that convince a released cheetah an area is worth staying in — and the risks of darting such stress-sensitive cats. Zoo-born animals like Nairo, moved from Howletts in Kent, now have 15-plus descendants. The honest caveat: South Africa is running out of release space.

p.62 · Return of the king

Daniel Allen reports on the first Atlantic sturgeon to swim Sweden's Göta River in over a century. The breakthrough came in 2016, when three juveniles caught in the mid-1800s turned up in the Gothenburg museum basement — young sturgeon cannot survive saltwater, proving the fish once hatched there. Since then 240 captive-reared fish and 2,000 fry have been released, tracked by acoustic transmitters; after a year, 28 per cent remained in the river. With breeding age not reached until 14-15 years, patience is the operative word. A sidebar covers parallel brown trout restoration in the north.

p.58 · Songs of the living world

Ben Garrod, professor of evolutionary biology at the University of East Anglia, asks whether musicality exists beyond humans. Best facts: the 12mm fish Danionella cerebrum drums on its swim bladder at 140 decibels — louder than most rock gigs — and humpback whales sing songs from 30 minutes to 22 hours without breaking theme order. Composer Emily Doolittle's blackbird transcriptions bridge the science. The final stretch drifts into pond 'underwater techno' and plant acoustics, so treat the last third as provocation rather than evidence.

▸ Conservation & News

p.16 · The race to rescue a species

James Fair weighs GM gene drives against avian malaria, which is wiping out Hawaii's honeycreepers — 39 of 56 species already extinct, 11 of the remaining 17 threatened. Keele University's Tim Harvey-Samuel is engineering Culex mosquitoes that cannot transmit the parasite; a competing Wolbachia approach is already releasing sterile males. Fair gives equal time to opponents, including Save Our Seeds' Franziska Achterberg, who dismisses Colossal's 'dire wolf' as an engineered grey wolf. The IUCN's new synthetic biology framework, passed after a failed moratorium, is the practical reference point for how these decisions will actually be made.

p.8 · Wild Times

The news section leads with moss spores surviving 283 days in space, which may explain how bryophytes colonised land 500 million years ago. Other items: narwhals caught on underwater cameras, a newly described lion roar, and Sir David Attenborough's Wild London series heading into the urban jungle. The lead photograph of female white-faced darters — a dragonfly now declining in the UK and confined to the Scottish Highlands plus a handful of English sites — doubles as a field ID reference. Skim it, but don't skip the moss item.

p.20 · Wild February

Ben Hoare picks seven encounters for the month ahead, each with usable field guidance. Coastal otters fish best on a rising tide; whooper swans bugle on WWT reserves and can be told from Bewick's swans by beak pattern; a February cold snap pushes secretive water rails into the open at ice-free mud. The darker detail: yew arils attract thrushes and hawfinches but the seeds and leaves are toxic to humans. Use it as a diary planner — every entry tells you where and when to look.

▸ Regulars

p.30 · Mike Dilger's wildlife spectacles

Dilger profiles snow goose migration — 'a whiteout of wings' along four North American flyways — and lists the five best places to catch it: Reifel Sanctuary in British Columbia, Nebraska's Platte River (up to 500,000 geese by mid-March), Loess Bluffs in Missouri (1.2 million counted in one February 2023 flock), Pennsylvania's Middle Creek and Maryland's Blackwater. Timing advice is specific: go at dusk when the birds return to roost, or just after sunrise when they leave to feed. The 'blue genes' sidebar explains the two colour morphs.

p.34 · Nick Baker's hidden world

Baker turns to Welwitschia, the Namib desert plant he describes as a living fossil with a taproot that can penetrate 30m through desert soils. A single specimen survives centuries of harsh conditions, sheltering a bug of the same name. Read it alongside the photo captions for the design details that let it harvest moisture in one of the driest places on Earth.

p.79 · Q&A

The strongest Q&A run in recent memory. Helen Pilcher explains thanatosis: opossums secrete a rotting-flesh-smelling fluid while catatonic, and female common frogs play dead for up to two hours to escape drowning in mating balls — her closing advice on grizzly encounters included. Molly Helfend's piece on chromatic ecology covers why more than half the world's reefs have severely bleached in two decades and why urban great tit nestlings grow duller plumage. Also: giraffe blood pressure runs at 200-250mmHg because long legs evolved before long necks.

p.86 · Species guide: the echidna

Jo Price's fact-file covers all four echidna species, including Sir David's long-beaked echidna, confined to a 20km² area of Indonesia and Critically Endangered. Standouts: males form 'trains' of ten-plus suitors, the four-headed penis alternates pairs of heads between matings, and the puggle hatches from a leathery egg after about 10 days. Conservation status splits sharply — the short-beaked echidna is Least Concern while hunting with trained dogs pushes all three long-beaked species toward extinction. A useful sidebar separates them from porcupines and hedgehogs.

p.98 · Tales from the bush

Kayak guide Chuck Graham, a 24-year veteran of California's Channel Islands, capsizes in the surf off San Miguel Island's Point Bennett — home to some 100,000 pinnipeds in shark-rich waters. Swimming 45m back to his boat, he finds dozens of young northern fur seals flanking him 'like a protective escort'. It is a short, well-told adventure piece with real numbers attached (50km off Santa Barbara, pups born June-July), and a reminder that wildlife encounters sometimes go both ways.

—————

Editor's Take

This is a strong comeback-themed issue that earns its optimism with numbers rather than sentiment — the marmot count of 427, the cheetah population doubling, 240 sturgeon in the Göta — and Tidman's cover feature plus Aigner's harpy portfolio justify the cover price on photography alone. The GM special report is the issue's spine: Fair resists cheerleading, and the IUCN framework detail makes it useful long after February. The weaknesses are real but tolerable: Garrod's music essay runs 30 per cent too long for its evidence, the travel-adjacent ad load (HX, Hurtigruten, Trailfinders, Naturetrek) is heavy even for a February issue, and the news section leans on quirk over substance. Buy it for the marmot story and the Hawaii gene-drive debate; that pairing alone justifies Essential status for anyone following conservation rather than just admiring pictures.

Strengths
• Every recovery story is quantified with dated population counts
• Karine Aigner's 10-page harpy eagle portfolio with field-level captioning
• GM special report gives sceptics genuine space, not token quotes

Weaknesses
• Garrod's music feature overruns its evidence by a wide margin
• Heavy travel and optics advertising interrupts feature flow

Verdict: Essential — Cover feature, photography and the gene-drive report each justify the newsstand price.