Wild Wins, Vol. 8
“Wild Wins, Vol. 8” highlights seven species recoveries, emphasizing long-term conservation efforts.
This is the good news edition. Not because the bad news stopped (it did not) but because the documented wins from the past several months deserve the same rigor we apply to everything else here. Endangered Species Day fell on May 15 this year. We do not wait for one designated Friday to report species recoveries, but May 2026 gave us enough verified data to justify a full accounting, so here it is: seven wins, sourced to primary government and scientific records, with enough context to understand what they actually mean.
The pattern across all of them: the results on the ground came from decades of unglamorous work. Habitat restoration projects that nobody photographed. Permit frameworks negotiated over twenty years. State-level biologists counting fish in streams.
That is the conservation that actually works.
MARINE & FRESHWATER
WIN 01
North Atlantic Right Whales Had Their Best Calving Season in Nearly Two Decades
The 2025-2026 North Atlantic right whale calving season closed with 23 confirmed mother-calf pairs, the highest count in close to twenty years and more than double the 11 pairs recorded the previous season. NOAA Fisheries confirmed the season as the most productive since 2009.
Every individual in this population matters in a way that is not rhetorical. Current estimates put the total North Atlantic right whale population at approximately 380 animals. Twenty-three calves represents a meaningful fraction of what the species needs simply to maintain itself. Researchers have estimated the population requires at least 50 calves per year to recover and grow.
Researchers at the Anderson Cabot Center noted that 18 of this year’s mothers had given birth within the last six years, significantly shorter calving intervals than the near-decade gaps that had been observed in previous years. One female, cataloged as Ghost (#1515), is close to 50 years old and gave birth to her ninth known calf. Another, Mirror (#4617), gave birth to her first calf at age 10, observed off Crescent Beach, Florida in March.
The data points in a hopeful direction while leaving room for honest assessment. The population remains critically endangered. Ship strikes and entanglement in fishing gear continue to kill right whales. The southeastern calving grounds themselves are shifting northward as ocean temperatures increase. Twenty-three calves in a season is evidence that the population can still produce young at meaningful rates, which is not nothing.
WHY IT MATTERS
Right whale calving numbers are one of the most direct indicators of whether the species has any realistic path to recovery. Two back-to-back improved seasons suggest the population may be stabilizing after years of steep decline. The question is whether vessel speed regulations, fishing gear modifications, and habitat protections will hold against ongoing pressures.
WHAT TO WATCH NEXT
Whether mortality rates during the first year hold at or below historical averages. Last year’s pup survival will define whether 2025-2026 calves make it to reproductive age.
WIN 02
30,000 Coho Salmon Return to Mendocino Coast, Double the Prior Record
During the 2024-2025 spawning season, monitoring teams estimated that more than 30,000 endangered Central California Coast coho salmon returned to Mendocino Coast rivers. That number is double the previous season’s record of 15,000 (itself already a record) and represents a roughly ten-fold increase from earlier in the decade when as few as 3,000 fish returned annually.
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife called the results “monumental.” NOAA Fisheries said monitoring teams were seeing numbers they never expected to see in their careers. The Ten Mile and Noyo rivers exceeded recovery targets set for ESA delisting consideration.
The returns are more than a single-season data point. Coho were documented in Usal Creek for the first time since 2014 and in the Gualala River watershed for the first time in twenty years. In December 2025, juvenile coho were confirmed in a Russian River tributary, natural reproduction in the upper basin for the first time in over thirty years. Fish reproducing naturally in habitat they had abandoned is a different kind of evidence than fish showing up at a release site.
NOAA has funded more than 100 restoration projects on the Mendocino Coast since 2000. The work involved reconnecting spawning streams to mainstem rivers and large-scale habitat reconstruction, including at the Parker Ten Mile Ranch where 8,000 dump truck loads of dirt were removed to create functional floodplains. Marine survival rates also improved markedly: one monitoring station recorded 8 percent survival versus the typical 2 percent or less.
WHY IT MATTERS
Central California Coast coho have been at the edge of functional extinction for most of the past two decades. These numbers are the first credible evidence that the species can come back at population scale, not just survive but recolonize habitat. The Russian River juvenile confirmation is especially significant because it documents self-sustaining reproduction, not stocking.
WHAT TO WATCH NEXT
Whether early observations from the 2025-2026 monitoring season confirm a third consecutive strong year. Also: whether the Ten Mile and Noyo river results hold through formal ESA delisting review criteria.
WIN 03
The Topeka Shiner Is Moving Back In
The federally endangered Topeka shiner, a small, inconspicuous fish native to Midwest prairie streams, has been recolonizing restored oxbow wetlands across Iowa, and the pattern is consistent enough that U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service staff are calling it a real biological signal.
Since 2001, the USFWS Partners for Fish and Wildlife Program, Iowa Soybean Association, The Nature Conservancy, and partner organizations have restored more than 200 oxbow wetlands across Iowa. The Topeka shiner requires calm, off-channel habitat, exactly the type of feature that gets eliminated when streams are channelized and floodplains drained. In many of the restored oxbows, shiners have been documented recolonizing without direct stocking.
USFWS noted in May 2026 that habitat restoration is only one step in the recovery process; the agency still needs self-sustaining populations documented across the species’ historic range before delisting criteria are met. But fish finding and using restored habitat on their own is meaningful. It means the habitat work is functional, not just present.
WHY IT MATTERS
The Topeka shiner story documents a pattern that applies across dozens of listed freshwater species: habitat restoration followed by natural recolonization, without ongoing stocking programs. If the trend holds across Iowa, it provides a replicable model for other stream fish facing similar pressures from agricultural drainage and stream channelization.
WHAT TO WATCH NEXT
Whether population surveys in 2026 and 2027 document sufficient self-sustaining populations across the species’ historic range to advance toward delisting review under the ESA.
SPECIES RECOVERY
WIN 04
Wood Stork Removed From the Endangered Species List After 40 Years
The U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service officially removed the Southeast U.S. distinct population segment of the wood stork from the federal list of endangered and threatened wildlife, effective March 12, 2026. The delisting followed 40 years of ESA protection and represents one of the more complete recovery arcs in the Act’s history.
When the wood stork was listed in 1984, the breeding population had fallen to approximately 6,040 nesting pairs, down from an estimated 20,000 pairs in the 1930s. The decline was driven primarily by habitat loss: wood storks are highly specialized wetland hunters, and as shallow foraging wetlands disappeared across the Southeast, the birds followed. The listing triggered federal protections across the Everglades, Big Cypress, and other southeastern wetland systems.
The 2026 breeding population is estimated at 10,000 to 14,000 nesting pairs across approximately 100 colony sites, more than double the population at the time of listing. The species has also expanded its range northward into South Carolina and North Carolina, adapting to new nesting habitats including coastal salt marshes and floodplain forests.
A 10-year post-delisting monitoring plan is in place. The Migratory Bird Treaty Act and Clean Water Act continue to provide protections for the species and its wetland habitats. The wood stork is not without ongoing risk; wetland loss continues across its range, and the regulatory future of wetland protections is unsettled. But the numbers document 40 years of ESA doing what it was designed to do.
WHY IT MATTERS
The wood stork delisting is one of the few cases where the full arc of ESA recovery can be traced clearly: population in decline, federal protection triggered, habitat restoration and wetland conservation over decades, population doubles, species no longer meets listing criteria. That arc matters as evidence about what the ESA produces when it is allowed to function.
WHAT TO WATCH NEXT
Whether post-delisting monitoring reveals any population softening as federal wetland protections face continued regulatory pressure. The 10-year monitoring plan is the safeguard; whether it gets adequately resourced is worth watching.
WIN 05
Colorado’s Wolves Are Producing Pups. Four Packs. Fourteen Born Last Spring.
Colorado Parks and Wildlife released its third annual gray wolf report in May 2026, covering April 2025 through March 2026. The minimum confirmed population as of that period was 32 wolves: 18 adults and 14 pups, all born in spring 2025. Four established packs are documented across the state.
The pup recruitment is the genuinely good news here. Fourteen wild-born pups from four packs means that the reintroduced wolves found each other, paired, and reproduced on Colorado terrain. That is the biological behavior the reintroduction program is trying to establish, and it is happening.
The full picture is more complicated, and the program’s own leadership said so. CPW wolf conservation program manager Eric Odell announced his retirement at the May commission meeting and described the program as being at an “inflection point” aka population growth and pup recruitment trending in the right direction, but high adult mortality creating real uncertainty. Colorado failed to secure a third batch of wolves from other states or tribes. The estimated adult survival rate of 61 percent is below the 70 percent benchmark CPW uses as a review trigger.
Whether the 2026 pup cohort survives and the packs hold will determine whether Colorado’s wolf population can become self-sustaining without additional reintroductions. The program is neither failing nor succeeding clearly. It is at the stage where the outcome is genuinely undetermined.
WHY IT MATTERS
Colorado voter-approved wolf reintroduction is one of the most closely watched reintroduction programs in the country. The four-pack, 14-pup baseline is real progress. The adult mortality rate and federal scrutiny from the current administration are real constraints. Honest accounting of both is the only useful framing.
WHAT TO WATCH NEXT
Spring 2026 denning season results, whether the four packs produced additional pups, and whether CPW can identify a new program manager with the political support to navigate federal and state pressures simultaneously.
WIN 06
California Now Has 12 Wolf Packs. That Was Not Possible a Decade Ago.
The California Department of Fish and Wildlife released its 2025 annual gray wolf report confirming 12 documented packs in the state. A decade ago, California had none; the species had been absent for roughly 90 years before the first documented wolf crossed in from Oregon in 2011.
The 12 packs range from the Cascades in Siskiyou County to the Sierra Nevada in Lassen and Plumas counties. Multiple packs are being tracked through genetic analysis and camera traps rather than GPS collars, because the animals established themselves faster than collaring programs could keep up. The Long Valley pack in the eastern Sierra was confirmed through genetic sampling in a September 2025 investigation, with at least two wolves continuing to be recorded into 2026.
California’s wolf recovery has proceeded entirely through natural dispersal from Idaho and Oregon, without any reintroduction program. The contrast with Colorado’s state-managed reintroduction is instructive: both approaches are producing wolves on the landscape, through completely different mechanisms, in states with significantly different political contexts.
WHY IT MATTERS
Twelve packs established through natural dispersal represents a species-level function returning to California ecosystems on its own timeline. No state program managed it. No reintroduction budget funded it. Wolves walked in and stayed. The question is whether state management frameworks catch up to what the wolves are already doing on the ground.
WHAT TO WATCH NEXT
Whether any of the uncollared packs in the Sierra Nevada can be confirmed as breeding populations, and whether California’s management plan update process keeps pace with a faster-expanding population than the original plan anticipated.
INTERNATIONAL & OCEAN
WIN 07
The High Seas Treaty Entered Into Force. Two Thirds of the Ocean Finally Has Legal Protection.
On January 17, 2026, the High Seas Treaty officially entered into force, becoming binding international law after nearly two decades of negotiations and 61 country ratifications. The treaty applies to the roughly 64 percent of the world’s ocean that lies outside any single country’s jurisdiction, international waters that had never had a comprehensive legal protection framework.
Until January 2026, no binding law governed biodiversity protection in the high seas. They could be fished, mined, and traversed without any required environmental review process. The treaty changes that architecture. It establishes a framework for creating marine protected areas on the high seas, a legal mechanism that did not previously exist, and requires environmental impact assessments for activities that could harm marine ecosystems in international waters.
The treaty also creates benefit-sharing requirements for marine genetic resources discovered in international waters, and establishes capacity-building provisions to ensure developing nations can participate in ocean research and conservation rather than simply having decisions made by wealthier countries.
What the treaty does not do is automatically protect anything. The institutional machinery, the Conference of the Parties structure, the Scientific and Technical Body, the rules for establishing actual protected areas, is still being built. PrepCom 3 met in March-April 2026 to develop those operational recommendations. The first COP is slated for January 2027. The legal framework exists. What it produces in practice will depend on what governments do next.
WHY IT MATTERS
The absence of any legal protection over 64 percent of the planet’s ocean was one of the largest governance gaps in international environmental law. That gap is now closed in principle. What the treaty produces in practice (actual protected areas, enforced environmental assessments, real benefit-sharing) will take years to determine. But the foundational shift happened. Legal tools that did not exist before January 17, 2026 now exist.
WHAT TO WATCH NEXT
Whether the first Conference of the Parties in January 2027 produces meaningful commitments on high seas MPAs, and whether the United States, which has not ratified the treaty, participates in any substantive way in the governance process.
The Record
Seven wins. Three involve species that were functionally disappearing within recent memory: coho salmon at 3,000 fish, wood storks at 6,000 breeding pairs, right whales at fewer than 400 total animals. All three now show documented, measurable improvement. Two involve predator reintroduction in a country that spent most of the 20th century killing predators. One is a small prairie fish recolonizing restored floodplain on its own. One is two decades of international negotiation finally producing law.
None of these happened fast. The coho work on the Mendocino Coast started in 2000. The wood stork was listed in 1984. The High Seas Treaty negotiations began in the early 2000s. The Mexican wolf and the grizzly bear took longer still. Conservation that produces measurable results tends to be conservation that accepts that timeline.
That is not optimism. That is the record.