The continuing saga of the penguins of Warrnambool is beyond cute, especially the part about the Maremma pups that are being trained to take over the job when Oddie's generation retires. Treehugger loves the story. So does the Warrambool Standard, NPR, and an assortment of dog blogs. "Sheepdogs have proved such perfect guardians for a colony of fairy penguins on a small south-coast Australian island that conservationists are confident the caring canines can be recruited to safeguard other endangered animals," reported the Earth Times.

We couldn't help but notice, however, the worrisome aspects of the two stories, and here is where our good-news quest veered toward the brambles. Climate change, manmade pollution, and overfishing are all suspected of driving the Magellanic penguins from their range, and the colony of fairy penguins is beset by foxes, an invasive species introduced to Australia by Europeans in the mid-nineteenth century for the purposes of fox-hunting. "The animal world is becoming worryingly out of sync," observed the BBC Green Blog in connection with the penguin airlift.

Into the pricker bushes. With one in four mammals now under threat of extinction, animal rescue types have proposed moving polar bears to Antarctica, Chinese tigers to South Africa, Norwegian beavers to Scotland (where beavers were hunted to extinction 600 years ago), and elephants to the American west. All this in an era when the prospect of transporting a few butterfly cocoons from one side of Los Angeles to the other is enough to start a fight.

"Proponents of 'assisted migration' say it's time to help animals and plants move," blurbed Boston.com in early October, within days of the Brazilian airlift: "A growing number of ecologists worry that conservation-as-usual won't be able to keep up with the predicted pace of climate change. To some of them, assisted migration is a more proactive tool for preserving nature's richness, and possibly the only hope for saving certain species. Others wonder whether it would amount to just the sort of meddling that infested the American South with kudzu and choked Northern wetlands with purple loosestrife. Scientific models are no match for the actual complexities of ecosystems, they argue, and humans have proven inartful at playing God."

We were in the farthest recesses of briar patch, and the briars were in flame, and we were musing about God and penguins and whacking at the briars with a machete, when we found this report from TimesOnline: "Welcome to rewilding, a movement that is radicalising conservation biology, turning what had been a scientific backwater into one of its most controversial areas. What the rewilders want is nothing less than the reversal of thousands of years of domestication, returning vast tracts of countryside to the way they looked thousands of years ago. They believe the best way to achieve this is by bringing back the biggest and fiercest animals of all--the elk, wolves, lynx and even bears that roamed Britain 10,000 years ago at the end of the Pleistocene era."

This is where we decided to pack it in. Next week: world happiness.

Further reading:
* Pleistocene Dreams: A radical conservation idea intrigues--and frightens--an un-wild world (Search magazine)
* Brave old world: the debate over rewilding North America with ancient animals (The Free Library)
* Moving on Assisted Migration: Experts who once disregarded it as a nutty idea are now working out the nuts and bolts of a conservation taboo: relocating species threatened by climate change (Nature)
* A Radical Step to Preserve a Species: Assisted Migration (New York Times)
* Moose to Roam Free Again in Scotland (Telegraph)
* The Aggregator: News of the week in links