“A moving story of abandonment, love, and survival against the odds.”—Dr. Jane Goodall The heartbreaking and ultimately hopeful story of an abandoned polar bear cub named Nora and the humans working tirelessly to save her and her species, whose uncertain future in the accelerating climate crisis is closely tied to our own Six days after giving birth, a polar bear named Aurora got up and walked away from her den at the Columbus Zoo, leaving her tiny squealing cub to fend for herself. Hours later, Aurora still hadn’t returned. The cub was furless and blind, and with her temperature dropping dangerously, the zookeepers entrusted with her care felt they had no choice: They would have to raise one of the most dangerous predators in the world by hand. Over the next few weeks, a group of veterinarians and zookeepers worked around the clock to save the cub, whom they called Nora. Humans rarely get as close to a polar bear as Nora’s keepers got to their fuzzy charge. But the two species have long been intertwined. Three decades before Nora’s birth, her father, Nanuq, was orphaned when an Inupiat hunter killed his mother, leaving Nanuq to be sent to a zoo. That hunter, Gene Agnaboogok, now faces some of the same threats as the wild bears near his Alaskan village of Wales, on the westernmost tip of the North American continent. As sea ice diminishes and temperatures creep up year after year, Agnaboogok and the polar bears—and everyone and everything else living in the far north—are being forced to adapt. Not all of them will succeed. Sweeping and tender, The Loneliest Polar Bear explores the fraught relationship humans have with the natural world, the exploitative and sinister causes of the environmental mess we find ourselves in, and how the fate of polar bears is not theirs alone.

Mannal case histories. Insectivora. Chiroptera. Rodentia. Cetacea. Carnivora. Pinnipedia. Artidactyla.

Bear! Is a fascinating volume which will grip the interest and fire the imagination of both the seasoned outdoorsman and the one who must enjoy the thrills of big-game hunting from his arm-chair reading. The true, breath-taking field encounters between man and bear, which liberally appear throughout the books’ pages, will capture and excite the reader, young or old. Certainly to the big-game hunter—whether he takes to the wooded hills after his black bear, to the remote crags and high basins after his grizzly, to the Coastal regions after his brown bear, or to the Eskimo-land after his great white polar bear—this volume with its wealth of how-to information will prove invaluable reading. But beyond this, Bear! is a revealing story of North America’s Bears. It delves deeply into their habitat, their wondrous cycle of living, and their natural place in the scheme of wildlife. This book traces those basic behavior changes which have been forced upon our country’s great ursines through man’s westward movement, his contact with them, and his gradual driving of them to the last wilderness and sanctuaries for survival. Lastly, Bear! is a documentary of a noble animal’s long struggle, in the minds and actions of men, to rise from the lowly status of a pest to that of a grand big-game animal. Bear! by Clyde Ormond, the renowned outdoorsman, is the result of thirty years of observation, study, hunting, and evaluation of a priceless but little known species. It is “must” ready for any sportsman.

Bell strokes toll out the death of an unknown man, and summon Lord Wimsey to East Anglia to solve the mystery.

On a rainy day in May 1988, a lowland gorilla named Willie B. stepped outdoors for the first time in twenty-seven years, into a new landscape immersion exhibit. Born in Africa, Willie B. had been captured by an animal collector and sold to a zoo. During the decades he spent in a cage, zoos stopped collecting animals from the wild and Americans changed the ways they wished to view animals in the zoo. Zoos developed new displays to simulate landscapes like the Amazon River basin and African forests. Exhibits similar to animals' natural habitats began to replace old-fashioned animal houses. But such displays are only the most recent effort of zoos to present their audiences with an authentic experience of nature. Since the first zoological park opened in the United States in Philadelphia in 1874, zoos have promised their visitors a journey into the natural world. And for more than a century they have been popular places for education and recreation: every year more than 130 million Americans go to zoos to look at the animals and enjoy a day outdoors. The first book-length history of American zoos, Animal Attractions examines the meaning of nature in the city by looking at the ways zoos have assembled and displayed their animal collections. Situated literally and culturally in the American middle landscape, zoos are concrete expressions of longstanding tensions between wildness and civilization, science and popular culture, education and entertainment. In their efforts to promote nature appreciation, they reveal much about how our culture envisions the natural world and the human place in it and how these ideas have changed.