Animal News: New Hummingbird, More Pronghorns, New Species in Antarctica

The Sonoran Pronghorn, North America's fastest land animal, has been brought back from the bring of extinction. Five years after drought whittled the deer-like animal's population to a handful, pushing it to the brink of extinction, its numbers are back above 100.

Warming threatens migratory birds.Disoriented by erratic weather, birds are changing migration habits and routes to adjust to warmer winters, disappearing feeding grounds and shrinking wetlands, a migration expert says. Failure to adapt risks extinction. Birds face starvation when they arrive too early or too late to find their normal diet of insects, plankton or fish. In the north, some birds have stopped migrating altogether, leaving them at risk when the next cold winter strikes.

Rare, soft-shelled turtle found in abundance at previously unknown nesting site. "We thought it might be almost gone, but found it in abundance in this one pristine stretch of the Mekong, making the area the world's most important site for saving this particular species," David Emmett, a CI wildlife biologist, said in the statement. Previously, this rare turtle was thought to be on the brink of extinction.

More than 700 previously unknown species have been discovered in the lightless depths of Anarctica waters. Most of the new life forms discovered were isopods, a vast order of crustaceans ranging in size from microscopic to nearly 30 centimetres (10-inches) long. Of 674 species cataloged, more than 80 percent had never been previously identified. The expeditions also turned up 160 species of snail-like gastropods and bivalves, along with 76 types of sponges, 17 of them new to science.