New Madagascar mine worries locals and lemurs; plus, banjo frogs and whistling ducks in Australia

Our first guest for this edition of the Mongabay Newscast is Eddie Carver, a Mongabay contributor based in Madagascar who recently reported about a troubled company that is hoping to mine rare earth elements in Madagascar’s Ampasindava peninsula, to make electronic gadgets. This is a highly biodiverse region that is home to numerous endangered lemur species, some of which live nowhere else on Earth.

Then we speak with Jo Wood, an Environmental Water Project Officer in Victoria, Australia. In this Field Notes segment, Wood plays for us the calls of a number of indicator species like whistling ducks and "pobblebonks" (also called "banjo frogs") which appear when her team floods their dried up wetland home -- this audio evidence helps her assess the overall success of the "rewetting program" and the health of the wetlands ecosystem.

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