Animal Friends
The fish and game department wants to save us from our pets.
It’s easy to see why Su Lin became a big zoo attraction. In newsreel footage, the panda clowns amicably in a basket, then chews on her keeper’s arms and grabs at his legs like an oversized cat.
It was one of the weekends when my wife announces, out of the blue, that she is miserable, and except for our son, our marriage, essentially, is a disaster. I was building a chicken coop. …
I stop Faulkner, ask what a maggot feels like when he holds it in his hand. "If it’s a blowfly maggot and it’s alive, it feels pretty sturdy. They’re resilient. They are soft. They’re not warm.”
You are merely tolerated. They do not need you. You love them anyway.
For Cookie, Cha-Cha, Cindy, Mary, Carol, Jean, Nita, and pregnant Connie, the San Diego Zoological Society’s first Asian elephant mother-to-be, it was just another elephant day at the San Diego Wild Animal Park. Soon after …
Apparently the horse thieves drive as far as they can down the rough dirt roads south of Anza, then ride into Coyote Creek on horseback. “They go in and rope the young foals.”
Not long ago the state of California failed to take advantage of an opportunity it may not have again until after the next ice age: the chance to reintroduce grizzly bears to this overcivilized and …
Shortly after dawn on a chilly desert morning, Bill Engler, 44-old fish farmer-entrepreneur, and Victor Wade, his 45-year-old French-Canadian partner, are standing in their pole-barn fish hatchery trying to figure out how to measure a …
Jehl complains that this is where the environmental movement has gone wrong. “We get so terribly concerned with little dickey birds and snail darters and we lose sight of the big picture.”
Just across the Colorado River from Blythe, less than a mile into Arizona, there’s a big corrugated tin shed at the end of a dusty gravel road. It looks like some kind of deserted warehouse, …
Though not a picky creature, the tarantula likes to eat crickets, especially Jerusalem crickets. Once it has captured its dinner, it will take a long time to feed. “What they do is excrete a digestive enzyme….”
Sometimes you can see them only from a distance (bring your binoculars); or sometimes a gnu or an eland will be standing just by the track as your little train goes by.
A twisting Jane ends at the bottom of the hill, and nearly an acre of the hill, and nearly an acre of dormant brown grass stretches to the water's edge. Ducks create trails in the …