Frans Lanting • World View

Not much is known about the ancient people who lived around 5,000 years ago in the American Southwest, but they left haunting expressions of themselves and their spirit world as rock paintings scattered throughout the secluded canyons of the Colorado Plateau.

When I first traveled to the Falkland Islands in the mid-1980s, I encountered very few other visitors. I was able to roam alone and marvel at the islands’ abundant wildlife. When I returned a few years ago, great changes had taken place.

In the mountains of central Mexico, monarch butterflies gather each winter in one of the most dazzling displays of mass movement in the animal world. Many millions of them migrate there from across North America to escape the cold before traveling north again in the spring.

In the neotropics, nocturnal bats fill many of the niches occupied by birds by day. But where birds use their superb sense of sight, bats exploit their specialized sense of hearing to find prey. They produce high-frequency clicking sounds and listen with finely tuned ears for the echoes—then strike.

The way we see color today is shaped by events from 35 million years ago, when some nocturnal primates shifted to a diurnal lifestyle, and began to seek out leaves and fruits by day instead of insects and other prey by night.

Much of what we know about wild chimps comes from studies of forest communities in equatorial Africa, but now a group of savanna chimps living at the edge of this apes’ range in northwest Africa is making us rethink the nature of our closest cousins.