No, not cats eating bats. Or bats spreading rabies to cats. Rather, my two most recent articles tell two very different stories about of these different groups of mammals.

The first article appears in the April issue of The Observer of Jefferson County. Wind energy is supposed to be green; a clean alternative to fossil fuels such as coal, oil and natural gas. But as The Observer editor David Lillard notes in his opening editorial, there’s no free lunch when it comes to energy. Wind farms popping up along the Allegheny Front in West Virginia, Maryland and Pennsylvania are killing large numbers of bats – including endangered species – at the same time deadly white nose syndrome is wiping out bat colonies in the eastern half of the U.S. Are we trading one set of environmental problems for another? Read my April feature here.

The second article tells the story of the Asiatic cheetah, a subspecies that once roamed throughout much of the Middle East and into eastern India, genetically distinct from African cheetahs. Today, less than 70 individuals remain, all of them in eastern Iran. My article for Earth Touch News Network shows how Asiatic cheetahs have become an icon, and an inspiration, for wildlife conservation in Iran. You can read it here.

Photo by Mohammad Farhadinia, Iranian Cheetah Society
Photo by Mohammad Farhadinia, Iranian Cheetah Society