The water at a bird refuge in Santa Barbara, California has turned a startling shade of pink.

Officials say it may look pretty, but it's a sign of an unhealthy ecosystem.

Warmer temperatures have allowed purple sulfur bacteria to reproduce more frequently.

Officials believe a lack of rain may also be to blame.

Six residents were injured when thousands of bees swept through an Arizona neighborhood, firefighters said - including a three-year-old boy who was stung up to 100 times.

When rescue crews arrived on scene in Gilbert, a small town to the southeast of Phoenix, the huge swarm made it difficult for them to get to the injured, Deputy Chief Michael Connor of the Gilbert Fire Department told NBC News.

The three-year-old was stung anywhere between 75 and 100 times and had been "rushed to hospital," he said.

A 14-year-old girl and 22-year-old woman from the same house were also hospitalized, according to NBC station KPNX.

To reach the boy and his family, firefighters had to go through the backyards of homes from one street over and the crews used ladders to make it over fences, the station reported.


A firefighter was also injured but he was treated at the scene along with two others with minor injuries, Connor said, adding that he had never seen such a big swarm, he said.

Police also made reverse 911 calls to residents in the area advising them to stay inside and close any open windows or doors, until the scene was secured.

Eventually, firefighters were able to overcome the bees using fire suppression foam, Connor said. They believe the bees had a hive in a tree on a front lawn.

Josh Bitner Jr. was playing Sunday in the waist-deep surf off Fernandina Beach when he yelled to his parents to show them a big seashell, and "something grabbed my leg and turned me around."

The 12-year-old Georgia boy screamed "shark," but his father thought he was fooling around. Then it turned him around again biting him a second time, Josh told reporters Monday at UF Health Jacksonville.

"I was going backward dragging my foot," he said. "I pushed myself out of the water until people saw I was split open, then they lifted me out of the water."

Josh was treated by paramedics for lacerations on his leg, then taken to UF Health for stitches. He is in good condition, hospital officials said.

This was the first shark bite reported in Fernandina Beach this year. But another was reported Sunday at Vilano Beach, plus two more Thursday at Jacksonville Beach and Little Talbot Island, bringing the total to seven in Northeast Florida since June.

For three travelling companions from the Prairies, Saturday's discovery was a rare find, indeed.

Merle Massie and Darcy Overland from Saskatchewan and Jodie Asselin from Alberta had just completed a conference in Summerside when they decided to go exploring.

Their adventure took them to Cape Wolfe.

"We were just walking the coastline, because the cliffs are quite nice. We thought it would be very picturesque," Overland related.

"We went down and we went, 'Well, that's a funny-looking rock,'" Massie said.

That unusual rock turned out to be a dead whale. Provincial Conservation Officer, Sandra Keough, who examined the whale on Monday, said she believes it's a minke, the third such find along a 17-kilometer stretch of West Prince beach in a month. One was found in Roseville on August 18. On Friday another one was floated off the beach in Burton and buried on a more accessible section of beach further north in the community.

A B.C. environment minister spokesperson has confirmed there were two separate bear attacks in the Revelstoke area in the past few days.

Original story follows this update

A Revlstoke man walking between the Bell Pole yard and the Smokey Bear Campground on Sunday afternoon found himself in the one situation you really don't want to be in when it comes to bears.

The man, who didn't want his name used, said he was walking with his daughter's 13-year-old black lab Midnight when he came across a bear cub on the path.

He instantly turned around to retreat, but behind him was the mother bear, and he was caught in between the two.

His daughter, Heather Hill, tells the story from here:

"Mama came out of nowhere and jumped him and pushed him from the back into a puddle," Hill said. "She just hit him like a brick. We are assuming that he probably fell with him into the puddle."

With a cougar's jaws wrapped around the head of his two-year-old daughter, Travis Nielsen selflessly did what any other parent would do.

The Tahsis, B.C. father fired a punch at the big cat and shielded his daughter, Bree, before it could do any more harm.

The terrifying scene unfolded at a property in the remote western Vancouver Island community at around 12:30 p.m. Monday.

Nielsen, his wife and their daughter were sitting in deck chairs in their backyard when suddenly, the animal pounced on the toddler from behind.

"I immediately reacted. I punched the cougar, and then I kind of shielded my daughter behind me when he let her go," he said.

The farmer claims to have bred millions of turtles over his career but has never seen one that looks quite like this

A farmer has been left in shock after a two-headed turtle was born at his farm - and claims it is the first in 30 million.

The bizarre creature hatched recently at a farm in Nanfeng County, in the Jiangxi Province of China, according to Jxnews.com

Officials say a 13ft tiger shark bit a Hawaii man's leg as he spearfished off the northern tip of the Big Island.

The state department of land and natural resources said in an early Monday press release that the 27-year-old man, from Kapaau, swam to shore after the shark attack on Sunday afternoon. His fishing companion called 911.

The man was flown by helicopter to a hospital for surgery. His condition is not immediately known.

State officials say they did not close beaches because the attack happened in an isolated area off Upolu Point. They warned people not to go into the ocean after heavy rains because muddy water can attract sharks.


Source: Associated Press

It's beautiful, it's tranquil, but you really should hear a deep symphony of lush sounds. And it's getting weirdly quiet

Brutal wildfire images too much to bear? Fatigued by non-stop news of extreme weather, record-low snowpack, emaciated polar bears, unprecedented this and fast-receding that, a natural world that appears to be going more or less insane?

Maybe you need some quiet. Get outside, sit yourself down and let nature's innate healing powers soothe your aching heart.

Sounds good, right? Sounds refreshing. Sounds... well, not quite right at all. Not anymore.

Have you heard? Or more accurately, not heard? Vicious fires and vanishing ice floes aside, there's yet another ominous sign that all is not well with the natural world: it's getting quiet out there. Too quiet.

Behold, this bit over in Outside magazine, profiling the sweet, touching life and times of 77-year-old bioacoustician and soundscape artist Bernie Kraus, author of The Great Animal Orchestra (2012), TED talker, ballet scorer, and a "pioneer in the field of soundscape ecology."

Krause, last written about on SFGate back in 2007, is a man whose passion and profession has been making field recordings of the world's "biophony" for going on 45 years, setting up his sensitive equipment in roughly the same places around the world to record nature's (normally) stunningly diverse aural symphony - all the birds, bees, beavers, wolves, babbling streams, fluttering wings, the brush of trees and the rush of rivers - truly, the very pulse and thrum of life itself.

A bird in the hand is very sad indeed

One of his most favorite spots to record? Sugarloaf Ridge State Park, in the Mayacamas Mountains, in Sonoma. It's here he discovered something very disquieting indeed: The wonderfully diverse sounds of nature are no longer changing and evolving as usual. They are actually diminishing. Thinning out. And in many cases, vanishing completely.

This is the chilling news: Bit by bit, bird by bird, species by species, gurgling brook by gushing river, the song of wild nature is, in many places, falling deathly silent. The reasons? You already know: Real estate development, mining, logging, habitat destruction, climate change, drought.

Between 2004 and 2015, the [Mayacamas] site's biophony (totality of sounds produced by living organisms) dropped in level by a factor of five. "It's a true narrative, a story telling us that something is desperately wrong," Krause says.

In short: What once was a rich, varied symphony of sound has become a far more subdued chamber orchestra, with large spaces of eerie silence where there was once a vast natural racket, signifying everything.

It's not just Sonoma. The weird hush is surely spreading, becoming more and more familiar all over the world. It's not hard to figure out why: We've successfully wiped out fully half the world's wildlife, in the just last four decades alone. Songbird populations in particular, for a variety of (mostly terrible, mostly human-caused) reasons, have been decimated all over the world. The skies just aren't as musical as they used to be. Ecosystems are sputtering, shifting violently, dying away completely, as pathways to life are being choked off.

I recently wrote about the week I spent at my family's getaway cabin in northern Idaho ("Everything is on fire and no one cares"), a normally pristine, sublime summertime experience, this year ominously altered by the sheer density and persistence of smoke from all the regional wildfires.

The light was different, the air charred and dry. But perhaps most disquieting of all, was the sound - or rather, the lack of it.

When the wind died down and the smoke really gathered in, the sky would turn a more sickly yellow. The birds seemed to stop singing entirely. The bees fell silent. The normally vibrant background cacophony of the natural world flattened out. It wasn't just eerie, it was psychically disturbing. You could feel the lack of healthy sound vibration in the air.

Of course it's not that way everywhere. Wildlife still teems and flourishes in many parts of the world where humankind's reach hasn't penetrated as fully; in some places, due to the self-same climate change, there is bizarre excess, abnormal surges in animal population, even as overall biodiversity continues to decline. There is perhaps too much sound in some areas, as nature's recoil to our abuses takes different forms - hurricanes, thunder, earthquakes.

But overall, the tonal shift is undeniable, and deeply unsettling: There is now less birdsong than at any time in human history. Fewer lions' roars, beehive hums, elephant rumbles, frog croakings, simply because we've killed off so many of them, and show no signs of slowing. One by one and species by category, the orchestra's players are exiting the stage. The concert will never be over, but at this rate, it might be a very bleak final movement indeed.

A video from the United Nations High Commissioner for Refugees (UNHCR) Facebook page has animal fans buzzing.

The footage features an interview with 17-year-old Aslan Al Hakim, who says he walked from Damascus, Syria to Greece, with his little puppy Rose in tow.

The pup seems to have held up well throughout the journey and takes in some water from a drinking glass while the young man delights in telling the interviewer that he was told he could not bring a dog across the border.