Every animal here is in trouble. Every story here ends well.

Hi, I am an African wild dog and my name is Mina. I live in a pack with my mother, my father, me, and my two sisters (Melinie and Elle), and ten other wild dogs. Our leader is a female dog named Aliana. We are always hiding and running. We sometimes have to starve! We are losing our food because the animals we hunt are losing their habitat. We are carnivores, which means we eat meat. We hunt animals like antelopes and wildebeests. We don't see many packs in Africa. Hunters come and kill some of the packs, or the packs lose their habitat. Mama always tells me that we have to believe in ourselves and keep going. We are one of the only species that cares for the old, the sick, and the injured, because for us family is family. There are only about 6,600 wild dogs left in the wild. If we go extinct, then there will be no dog left with only four toes on its front feet! Every other dog has five, so we are one of a kind. We live for about 10 or 11 years and weigh from 44 to 66 pounds! We are only found in Africa. We live in packs with an average of 10 members. One litter can have as many as 16 puppies! The pups get to eat before the alpha. We also are not picky eaters. We eat almost anything! We are in competition for food with lions because we both eat just about the same things. We are one of the most endangered animals in the world!

There are only about 6,600 wild dogs like me left. To tell the truth, I am really scared. What if a hunter got my pack? What if we could not find enough food and we starved to death? What if we caught one of the bad diseases? I want some miracle to save us! Mama says we have to be our own miracle. Mama is always correct. One day we were walking through the woods when I saw something shiny. "Stop!" I barked. Everyone stopped, and I told them to avoid the trap. They all listened, and then we heard barking and voices, and then a buzzing sound filled the air along with the smell of cut wood. We ran fast down the stretch of forest around the city. We hurried to find another safe forest before it got dark. We finally reached another forest, but it was dark outside, so we would have to make a temporary den. Mama told me and my two sisters that we had to take care of one another while they were gone. So we huddled together and cuddled while Mama and Papa scouted with the rest of the pack. We were starting to get restless, and since we were all bored, we just talked. The adults came back, and they found a patch of grass, and then they made the den. We cuddled up and slept. In two weeks we would leave this pack and start our own great packs! I want to be a pack leader, but Mama says it is hard work, so I have to try hard. Aliana teaches us how to hunt in the morning, and I am the best!

Aliana says I will be the best pack member ever, and I smile. She also pulls me aside and tells me I might become the pack leader. "Ding, help!" Aliana cries out. "I am stuck!" I jump up to see what's wrong, and I see that it is only a net, so I bite the net to save her. I am glad she is okay. We hurry back to the camp, where my siblings ask if I am okay. I just nod. I think about how close that was! "Dinner!" Aliana's voice rings through the trees. We bolt off in search of food, and we split up at the bend. Then, around a tree, I spot a wildebeest! I smile. Aliana will be proud. I bark to the pack, which comes, and we chase our prey. Finally the wildebeest gets tired and slows down, letting us catch up. We capture our prey and feast! Aliana is very proud of me.

We then hear voices. We all expect to hear the buzz of the saw, but this time we hear something different, something worse. "Bam, bam, bam!" The bullets are big and black, flying over our heads. We run. The hunters chase our pack, aiming at us. Aliana barks and tells some of us to slack behind and go under their legs and run. She tells the rest of them to slack behind but go around them. We thankfully escape. The hunters are close on our tails, literally! We go into a cave, and they pass by. We run the other way, and finally we reach home. I am more scared than ever. We go to bed, but tonight I wake up. I crawl over to Mama and Papa and snuggle in between them. I sleep peacefully for the rest of the night. In the morning we dart around our den and hide, waiting for breakfast to visit us, but none comes. "We won't get breakfast today," announces Aliana. "Awww," we all cry.

"Well," says Mama, "the hunters are killing all of them!" She continues, "We won't survive long like this." Mama looks worried. I cuddle closer to her. She goes on, "This forest has no food. I think..." She does not look happy about what she is going to say. "I think we have to..." She trails off. I know she cannot finish the sentence, but before I can finish it for her, Aliana does. "Leave," she says. I know.

We left the den, but shortly after, we heard voices. "Not again!" my two sisters and I whined, and we rolled on the ground. "Get up and stop whining," Mama ordered. "Get up and run, get up and hide." She sounded mad, but not at us. She was mad at the hunters. "Wait," I said. "They don't want us. They want some other animal called a painted hunter. We are not painted, and no animal here is painted, so we should help them." I started to trot off, but Mama grabbed my tail. "No," she said. "We are the painted hunters." "We just have two names," added Papa. "Plus," agreed Mama, "humans have no mercy on us. To them we don't look cute at all." But they say all dogs are cute! My siblings are cute! "Come, my darling," said Aliana. "Your mother is right. Let me tell you a secret. Only alpha dogs have puppies, but your mother acted so much like a mother to you that she let you call her Mom." "Oh," I said. "She loves me a lot, and I don't want to leave my pack and start my own pack." "You must," Aliana replied. "Let's join the others." We ran with the pack, and we marked our territory, and we slept in the den. I crawled once again in between Mama and Papa. This time, though, Mama sat up and curled around me, snuggling me tight. "Good night, Mina," she whispered softly into my ear. "You are my adorable."

My pack lived until the very end, and so did Aliana's. But what about our whole species? This next part makes me wag my tail. In a place called Gorongosa, in Mozambique, there were no wild dogs at all for a very long time. Then people brought fourteen of us back, and after that a few more packs to keep them company, and everybody had so many puppies that in a few years there were more than a hundred, and now there are around three hundred! People have brought us back to Majete and Liwonde in Malawi too, and to reserves in South Africa. In Botswana and Zimbabwe and Zambia and Namibia there are still big packs running free, and the biggest group of us anywhere lives in a place in Tanzania called Selous, and there are people who help farmers keep their cows safe so that nobody has a reason to hurt us. So we are still here, and we do not have to disappear. Mama says we have to be our own miracle, and she is always correct. You can be one of our miracles too. Will you help save our species?

Every one of us crowded around Evelyn. Evelyn smiled at me, but I saw the pain in her eyes. Our gatherers came back and gave Evelyn her food, which was mostly fruit. My mom stayed close to Evelyn, trying to ease the pain. We knew Evelyn was strong, as she was one of our leaders, but we were still worried. My best hope was that it would be over soon, but for now, we would have to get her everything she needed.

Okay, let's backtrack a little. My name is Eliana. I am a bonobo. I live with my troop, which has 12 members, almost 13, I hope (Evelyn, me, and my mother included). I live in the Central Congolian tropical forests. It is really beautiful there, and there are still parts that are beautiful. Humans are cutting down the forest's trees. They are also killing bonobos. They are capturing some, killing others for bushmeat, and taking away our forests, which means less food. This is a risk we face every day, but nothing terrible has happened to my troop yet. For now, we are okay, and we are doing everything we can to survive and help each other thrive.

Now, back from where we left off. I had been waiting by Evelyn's side the whole day, so I wandered away from the group when I heard a commotion. I ran back to Evelyn's side, and there in front of me was Evelyn, and in her arms was a baby girl! My mom was next to Evelyn, looking relieved and cheerful. Since my mom joined the troop, Evelyn and my mom had been close. Evelyn always looked after my mom, and while Evelyn was in labor, my mom looked after her. Everyone was happy, and we started to build the nest for tonight, and just as we finished, we heard the noise. "Bam, bam, bam!" Gunfire. Humans were shooting at us.

Big black bullets fell around us. One nearly got Mom's tail, and another nearly got Evelyn's newborn baby! Evelyn put the baby on her back, and the troop ran away as fast as we could. Finally we lost them, and we arrived in a small clearing. No one was killed, and some were injured, though not too badly. In other troops it had been worse, and their members had been killed and captured. We tended to the wounded as we always did, and we started to relax. Parents played with their little ones while older kids rolled around and played tag, not unlike humans, I might add. I wish humans would see that we are really similar to them, and that we have feelings, and that we care about the family and friends they are taking away from us. Come to think of it, I had not seen another troop in a while. Troops were dying out quickly, from habitat loss to starvation to poachers, and I was scared that soon there would be no bonobos left. Would humans care when we were gone?

I got up and walked over to Evelyn. She was murmuring softly to her baby bonobo. "Colletta, that's your name. It means people of victory. You will be a victor. You will be safe."

Slowly we went back to the nest we had made earlier. It would be safe now. Humans scarcely camped near our forests. We were relieved to find our nest okay, save for the stray bullets littering the floor. For dinner, though we were tired and afraid, we scavenged as much as we could, but the trees to the north were gone, and it was getting dark, so no one wanted to risk setting off a trap. We climbed into the nest and fell asleep to our parents breathing.

I woke up to the sound of the adults talking, and to loud footsteps down below. The adults woke the rest of the troop up, and we climbed out of the tree. The sun was just beginning to rise, and I could hear the crickets chirping. We climbed down the tree fast, helping each other, and we darted into the forest, and then we hid and watched as the two-legged beasts known as humans sawed down our tree and the three more trees around it. We turned and walked away deeper into the forest, and I thought that we would need a miracle to save our kind.

I found something out later, though, and it changed how I felt: the miracle already started, and humans are the ones doing it. Not far from my forest there is a place called the Bonobo Peace Forest, which is a whole network of reserves that the Congolese people in the villages look after themselves, and it keeps a huge amount of forest safe for bonobos. One of those places is called Kokolopori. The Bongando people were protecting it before their country made it official in 2009, and they take care of it. There is even a sanctuary near Kinshasa called Lola ya Bonobo, where humans take in bonobos who lost their families, and they teach them how to be bonobos again, and then they let them go free in a forest called Ekolo ya Bonobo. Some of those bonobos have had babies out in the wild. Babies! So the miracle is real, and it is made out of people. Will you be one of them?

I wake up. I am inside a little weird ball thing. I start to chew on it and finally escape. I am hungry, so I eat the weird thing. "Take that, whatever you are," I squeak. I look down at myself. I am a caterpillar. I am full. I don't know what I am doing, but slowly I spin a pad of silk, attach it to my hind legs, and then, you won't believe this, I walk out of my own skin. I eat the skin, of course. I don't want anyone to see it. Then I slowly start munching on the milkweed that I had been sitting on top of. Milkweed is good. Life is amazing. "I need a name. Something to call me," I squeak. I keep eating and thinking, and finally I decide. "Anika! I want to be named Anika. It's a pretty unique name, and I like it very much. It's my name now!" I smile to myself. I slowly crawl to the next leaf and nibble on it. That's when I see it. To the north of me are milkweed plants behind a fence. They are far enough away that I am safe, but I can see that a weird creature is spraying something on the plants, and that's when I realize the truth.

The stuff that they are spraying? If a caterpillar eats that milkweed, it will die. You can tell by the way the plants look, wrong, and by how there are caterpillars there, unmoving, just there. "It is going to be okay, Anika. Just watch which milkweed you eat, and you will be okay," I squeak to myself.

So my life goes on, and I stick to my milkweed plant. Every day I do the same thing. I would be bored, but I keep myself entertained by telling myself jokes and talking to myself. I do the weird thing where I step out of my skin five times, and each time I am bigger! I like doing fun things! Finally, on the 18th day, I sing to myself, "I eat, then I sleep, then it goes on repeat." I take a bite of the leaf and keep singing, "But today that's all going to change, hooray!" I climb off my host plant, sad to let it go, but then I remember that it will be safer. "I am going to do something fun," I sing. I find another milkweed plant, check if it is safe by looking around for the giant, and then try the leaf. It tastes as good as ever! I climb up to a nice sturdy leaf, and then I slowly attach my back legs to the leaf and curl into a kind of J shape with my body.

One week later.

I shake in my chrysalis, and out I go. I am hanging on the clear thing I was just inside. I unfurl my wings. "Am I still Anika? Or someone else? Well, I like Anika, so I think I will stick with her," I chirp. I smile. I know one thing for sure. I have wings! Beautiful orange wings with black veins and white spots. "I butterfly!" I chirp. "Get it? Because I better fly, I butterfly!" Yes, I am definitely Anika. I even still talk to myself. I just look different. I let my wings get ready, and then I take off, flying through the morning air with the wind rustling the trees. I am not the only one. There are more of us. I hear one of them talking about migrating. I think I might go with them. I want to migrate to Mexico! Days pass, and I drink the sweet nectar from all kinds of plants, being careful not to eat or drink anything around the human hideout. Others are not so lucky, and it is not their fault, it is the humans'. There are few of us left by the time we migrate. I learn the name of what they are spraying, pesticides and chemicals, and these are the things killing my kind. I worry a lot about our safety, but I keep talking to myself and telling jokes. I visit my host plant once or twice for the fun of it, but other than that, I don't really think much about my past. I have lots of fun in the day, flitting from flower to flower, but rarely communicating with other butterflies. On the final day of the trip we set off for Mexico. We flew early, and it took two months in all, but it was a wonderful experience, until I heard two butterflies behind me talking, saying it was a shame. They said that people count us by measuring how much forest we cover when we all pile onto the trees in Mexico for the winter, because nobody could ever count every single butterfly. In the winter of 1996 we covered a little over 18 hectares of forest. In the winter of 2013 we covered only 0.67 hectares. They also said that the monarchs who spend the winter in California instead of Mexico used to be in the millions back in the 1980s, and that in one very bad year people counted fewer than 2,000 of them, and that the counts there are still terribly low. That is not all the monarchs on Earth, but it still made my wings feel heavy.

Think about it. When was the last time you saw a monarch butterfly? When was the last time you saw a monarch butterfly in the wild? For a whole day I thought all of us would be gone soon. Then those same two butterflies told me the rest of the story, and the rest of the story is better than I expected. The year after that terrible California count, people there counted more than 200,000 of us. From fewer than 2,000 to more than 200,000, in one year! It did not stay that high, and the California counts since have been some of the lowest ever, so I will not tell you that part is fixed. But in Mexico we have been climbing. The last winter measured was the biggest in years, almost 3 hectares of forest full of butterflies, which is more than three times the winter before last. We are not safe yet, and our numbers go up and down the way a butterfly does, but we can come back, and we have done it before. My name is Anika, and I am telling you, all of you kids out there: plant milkweed, keep the poison away from it, and we will keep coming back to you.

The sun on my back was warm, and the grass was swishing around me while I watched the sun. "Willa, Willa, Willa!" my little sister Ellie called. "Come in the water." Ellie is 2 years old, and I am 4 years old. We live in a herd of 6 elephants: me, Ellie, Mamma, Aunt, my cousin Milla (3 years older than me), and Grandma. We live on a beautiful grassland. I fill my trunk up with water and spray it over me, and then, after the herd is done, we go to the field and graze. I eat mostly grass and some leaves. Suddenly we hear a sound, and then big machines appear, destroying the land and plowing the grass. Mamma and Aunt look frightened and Milla looks shocked, but Grandma? Grandma is furious, and she takes action, telling us all to run. Ellie grabs a bunch of grass and puts it in her mouth, and then we all run fast. Finally we stop near a pond of fresh water with grass around it.

"Everything is okay," Mamma says, averting her eyes. "Look, it is time for bed. Let us sleep." Milla picks up some grass and puts it in her mouth. Ellie does the same. So do I, thinking about the horrid things that ruined the land. Those things scared my mother, and nothing ever scares my mother. I had never seen anything like them, so I try to piece together what they were. Finally I close my eyes, but all I dream of are those machines tearing apart the land, getting rid of the beautiful plants.

I wake up before the sun. My herd and I graze. No one mentions yesterday, but I can tell it is on everyone's mind. We eat a lot, then get water, then keep eating. My sister is not cheerful, and Milla is not playfully teasing her, or talking, or even making anyone smile. We don't talk much, and we do everything like usual, but it feels weird. Finally, when I can't stand it anymore, I am about to ask, but then Ellie looks so upset already that I don't know if I should. I know one thing, though. If something is trying to get rid of us, it is making a mistake. We help the grasslands grow by eating seeds and then dropping them off somewhere else. Without us there would be fewer plants, which means fewer other plant eaters, which means no predators, because the predators would not have food, which means nothing that eats the predators would survive either. In the end, everything would go extinct.

I keep eating grass, and I eat some bark too. Then I hear something fly past my ear. My mom is horrified. We all run as fast as we can, through the pond and into a clump of trees. Whatever is shooting at us is not trying to kill us. They are trying to sedate us! We run fast as they chase us, and we finally get away. We find some water and drink, and then whoever is chasing us finds us and starts shooting at us again. We finally get a safe distance away and find somewhere safe. We stand on alert for a bit, then relax, knowing that they are gone for sure. We look around and see that we are in a nice clearing with a pond and grass. It feels like a mirage after what we have just been through, but I am grateful nonetheless.

"What were those things?" Ellie asks quietly. Milla cuddles close to Ellie, and then Grandma lies down. We all come really close to her, not expecting to hear an answer, and she begins to tell us everything. About humans. About how the males' tusks are wanted, and how our skin is wanted. About how they put elephants in a box and make them do tricks, and about how humans are taking all the land and farming on it. She tells us about how they capture the ones who try to take food from the land that was once ours. She tells us how there are only half of us left compared to when her grandmother was young. Then she says to us, "The humans, they can take our lives, they can take our families, they can take our homes, but not without a fight."

And then Grandma tells us the other half, the half I was not expecting. She says that in a place called India, where about half of all wild Asian elephants live, the humans made a plan called Project Elephant, and now there are 33 whole Elephant Reserves that are meant for us. She says they are stitching our old paths back together, the corridors, so that a herd can walk from one forest to another without ever crossing a farm. She says that the humans in India named us their National Heritage Animal, which means we belong to everybody, and everybody has to look after us. She says that in Thailand elephants do not have to drag logs around anymore. And she says that in a park in Nepal called Bardia, there were once only about two of us, and now there are more than a hundred.

So I want to tell you: where the fields were full of us, there are now empty grounds. Where there used to be grasslands and ponds, there are now farms with sharp wire around them. The earth has warned you again and again, and I will not act like it hasn't. It is not too late, though, because some of you are already fighting for us, and it is already working. So fight with them. Fight to save the earth, fight to save our home, fight to save your home, fight to save us. If all of us fight together we can fix this mistake, and the best part is, we have already started.

Hello. My name is Pudding, and I am a parrot who weighs as much as a house cat.

I bet you just made a face. Everybody does. When people hear the word parrot they think of a skinny colorful bird sitting on a pirate's shoulder saying rude things. I am mossy green and speckled and round, and I have a flat face with whiskers on it, like an owl who just got bad news. The biggest boy kakapos weigh four kilograms. That is nine pounds. That is one whole cat, and not a small one.

Also I cannot fly. Not one inch. I am the only parrot on the entire Earth who can't. Here is what I do instead. I climb all the way up a giant tree, which takes approximately forever, and then I jump off with my wings spread out and float down like a fuzzy green parachute. My friends call this flying. It is not flying. It is falling, but on purpose.

You know what else is weird about me? I smell. Not bad! I smell sweet and dusty at the same time, sort of like a flower that has been living inside an old sock. My feathers match the ferns so well that birds who hunt with their eyes go right past me, and when something scary comes, my big plan is to freeze. Totally still. Like a statue of a fern. This works great on birds. It works terribly on cats and stoats, because they hunt with their noses, and remember, I smell like a flower in a sock.

Here is my favorite part of being me. When it is time to find a girlfriend, I dig a bowl in the dirt, sit in it, blow myself up like a balloon, and go BOOM. Then I do it again. For eight hours. Every night. For two or three months. Girl kakapos hear me and walk kilometers through the forest to come find me, and I do not have to move at all. I am a very loud vending machine.

We only do all this when the rimu tree makes a big pile of berries, which is every two to four years. Yes. A tree is in charge of my love life. Nobody asked me.

I might live to be ninety, so I have time. And things are going great! In 1995 there were only 51 kakapos left in the whole world. Now there are more than 236 of us on the official list, and the number goes up every few weeks as this year's chicks get old enough to count, because this year was the biggest baby season anybody has ever counted: 80 nests, 256 eggs, 106 chicks hatched, and 91 of them made it all the way to fledging. The first chick born after four years with no babies got named Tiwhiri-A1. And in 2023 ten of my brothers moved to a fenced mountain sanctuary on mainland New Zealand, where no kakapo had lived for almost forty years. Seven of them kept climbing the fence like absolute legends, so they got sent back south, but three are still up there with rangers bringing them snacks, and two of them, Taeatanga and Tautahi, have been booming their hearts out. That is the first booming heard on the mainland in more than a hundred years.

So keep booming, boys. Somebody is walking kilometers to find you.

Hi. My name is Tito, and I am a baby forever.

Most salamanders start out underwater with feathery gills and then they grow up, lose the gills, and crawl onto land to go be boring. Not me. I keep my baby body my whole entire life and I stay underwater the whole time. I am basically a tadpole who never got the message.

Those pink feathery branches on my head are not a fancy hairstyle. Those are my gills. I also have real lungs, AND I can breathe through my skin, so I have three ways to breathe. Three! You have one. I don't know what I'm getting ready for.

Here is my best trick, and honestly it is a really good trick. If something bites my leg off, I grow a new one in about a month, with no scar at all. I can regrow my tail. I can regrow parts of my heart, my spinal cord, and even my brain. You can take the same leg off me over and over and I will just keep making legs. Scientists stare at me a LOT. I understand why.

I also smile all the time. I can't stop, my mouth is just shaped that way, and I don't have eyelids so I can't even blink at you. That is why I look happy and slightly creepy in every single picture. I have tiny little stub teeth but I don't really chew. I open my mouth and slurp my food in like a vacuum cleaner. It's not polite. It is extremely fast.

Wild axolotls like me are dark speckly brown and black. The bright pink ones you see in videos live in tanks. I got named after Xolotl, the Aztec god of fire and lightning, who turned himself into a salamander to hide, which is exactly what I would do. I'm also printed on the Mexican 50-peso bill, so people carry me around in their pockets without even knowing it.

Now the sad bit. I live in exactly one place on this planet: the canals of Lake Xochimilco in southern Mexico City. The water got dirty, and somebody put carp and tilapia in it, and those fish eat our eggs. Scientists think there might be somewhere between 50 and 1,000 of us wild. They honestly aren't sure. A big search of 115 spots did not spot a single one of us, and the only way they knew we were still there was by testing the water for little traces of our skin. That makes my stomach hurt.

But wait, because it gets better! Scientists at a university called UNAM took 18 axolotls born in captivity, gave them tiny radio backpacks, and let them go into wetlands they had cleaned up. They checked twice a day for 40 days, and all 18 lived. Every single one! The ones they caught again had gotten fatter, which means they were catching their own food like proper axolotls.

Even better, the farmers there, called chinamperos, who grow vegetables on floating gardens the way people did way back in Aztec times, built 21 safe pools for us with filters made of wood, gravel and plants. The filters clean the water and keep the big fish out. The water got clearer, their crops grew better, and the little native fish came back.

So yes, I'm still smiling. And this time not only because of my face.

Hi. I'm Noodle. Please keep your voice down, I was sleeping.

I sleep twenty-one hours a day. Twenty-one! And I spend about ninety percent of my whole life underground in a dark tunnel. Some animals climb mountains. I have a nap schedule.

I'm the only kind of ferret that actually comes from America, and I live out on the big flat prairies in the west. I'm only about nineteen to twenty-four inches long counting my tail, and I weigh less than a house cat. I have a black mask across my eyes, black feet, and a black tip on my tail, so I look like I put on a robber costume and then got tired halfway through.

Now let's talk about my house. I did not build it. I have never dug anything in my life. I move into a tunnel that a prairie dog dug, and then, um, I also eat the prairie dogs. They're about ninety percent of my whole diet and I go through more than a hundred of them in one year. I know! I know. I'm the landlord AND I eat the tenants. Please don't tell them I told you.

Here's another weird thing about me. My eyes glow bright green in a flashlight. Scientists find us at night by driving across the prairie with spotlights, looking for two little green dots floating in the dark. That's how they count us. Two green dots. Floating. In the dark. If you didn't know what we were you would move away and never come back.

Our babies are called kits and their eyes stay shut until they're thirty-seven days old. When we're happy we bark and chatter and make a chuckling sound, and we do a dance where we hop all over the place with our mouths hanging wide open. It looks completely ridiculous. I do it anyway.

Okay, now the scary part. People thought we were all gone. Twice! Scientists said the black-footed ferret was extinct. Then on September 26th, 1981, a ranch dog named Shep killed a strange animal near Meeteetse, Wyoming, and the ranchers looked at it and it was one of us. A dog found my entire species. By 1987 there were only 18 of us left anywhere, so scientists took every single one into captivity, and only 7 of those ever had babies.

Those 7 ferrets have around 9,000 grandkids and great-grandkids now. People have let us go at more than 30 different places, and about 300 of us are living wild at the dozen or so spots that stuck. Before we get released we go to boot camp in a practice pen so we learn how to hunt. In 2020 scientists even made a clone named Elizabeth Ann using frozen cells from a wild ferret named Willa, who died back in the 1980s. Elizabeth Ann isn't alive anymore, and neither is a second clone named Noreen, but they proved it could be done. A third clone named Antonia had real live babies of her own, named Sibert and Red Cloud, and then more kits after that.

Seven ferrets and one nosy dog. That's all it took to save us. Okay. Nap time.

My name is Rufo, and I have a beard.

I like to start there, because people always expect a wild cat to be huge and terrifying, and then they meet me. I weigh about eleven kilograms, which is roughly half of what my enormous cousin the Eurasian lynx weighs. I have long skinny legs, a small head, leopard spots, and a short stubby tail that looks like somebody dipped the end of it in black paint. My ears have dramatic black tufts sticking straight up off the tips. And around my face I have a ruff of long hair hanging down like a real beard, so basically I look like a very serious old man who got shrunk and then covered in spots.

I live in southern Spain and southern Portugal, in Mediterranean scrubland, which sounds boring but isn't. It is dry sunny hills full of tough little bushes and cork oak trees, with grassy clearings in between where the rabbits come out to eat. There are only four kinds of lynx in the entire world, and I am the rarest one, which people say to me like it is a compliment.

Now I have to explain the rabbit situation, because if I am being honest, my whole life is the rabbit situation. Over ninety percent of what I eat is European rabbit. Not mostly rabbit. Pretty much only rabbit. A grown lynx eats about one rabbit a day, and a mother with kittens needs three, which means she spends her entire life running late for dinner. Other cats eat whatever wanders past them. I have a menu with one item on it and I refuse to apologize for that.

You can probably guess the problem. When the rabbits get a disease, and rabbits get diseases fairly often, I do not have a backup plan. That is the thing about being fussy. It works great right up until it doesn't, and then the whole species is in trouble at the same time.

In 2002 there were fewer than a hundred of us left alive, in two patches of Spain so far apart that the lynx in one patch could never reach the lynx in the other. Portugal had zero. None at all. If you had asked anybody back then, they would have quietly told you we were finished.

Then in 2005 the first cubs were born in a breeding program, to a mother named Saliega who had been rescued herself when she was only a month old. I think about that a lot, honestly. A rescued kitten grew up and started the comeback. Since 2010, more than 400 lynx have been carried out into the hills in boxes and let go. In June 2024 the scientists who keep the official lists moved us off Endangered and down to Vulnerable, and they called it the greatest recovery any cat species has ever had.

Here is where we are now. There are 2,663 of us, 2,269 in Spain and 394 in Portugal, with 542 mothers and 952 cubs born in a single year. In 2005 we had 449 square kilometers of land to live in. By 2022 that had grown to over 3,300, and we have spread further since.

That is a lot of room for one small cat with a beard and a one item menu. I fully intend to use all of it.

My name is Pipoca and I have better hair than you do. I'm sorry. It's just true.

I am a golden lion tamarin, which means I am a very small monkey with a very big mane. My fur is bright orange gold, like a sunset that is showing off, and around my dark bare face I have a thick mane exactly like a lion has, except a lion weighs about two hundred kilograms and I weigh half of one. My body is roughly the length of a ruler and my tail is even longer than my body. So really I am a squirrel who wandered into a costume shop and never left.

I live in Brazil, in the Atlantic Forest in the state of Rio de Janeiro, only about a hundred kilometers from downtown Rio. Over there they have skyscrapers and beaches and traffic, and over here there is me, hanging upside down off a branch. I am awake in the daytime, which I think makes me much easier to like. Most endangered animals in books are nocturnal and mysterious. I am out at lunchtime being loud.

My fingers are long and skinny, and instead of flat nails like yours, mine are shaped like little claws, so I can grip bark and run straight up a tree trunk. I poke my fingers into cracks in the bark and down into bromeliad plants, which hold rainwater in the middle, and I fish out insects and sometimes a small lizard. It is exactly like a claw machine at the arcade, except I am extremely good at it.

At night I sleep in a hole in a tree, and I have one rule about that: almost never the same hole two nights in a row. If a predator learns your address, that is the end of the story.

My mum had twins, because we almost always have twins. Here is my favorite part. My dad carried us. Both of us, all day, on his back, through the trees, and my big brother took turns too. Dad only handed us over to Mum when it was time to eat, and then he took us straight back. I have never in my life seen a more exhausted monkey. He never complained. Well. He complained a little.

In the 1970s there were fewer than 200 of us left, and our forest had been cut down to about two percent of what it used to be. Two percent. Then on the 31st of May in 1984, a family of eight tamarins who had been born at a wildlife park in Ohio, in the United States, were released into a reserve near Rio. Over the next sixteen years, 146 zoo-born tamarins came here, with more than 40 zoos across North America and Europe helping out. More than half of all the wild golden lion tamarins alive today, over 2,500 of them, are descended from monkeys who were born in zoos.

Then yellow fever swept up through Brazil and reached our forest, and it killed about a third of us. Before it there were about 3,700 of us; after it, only 2,516. Those were two very quiet years in the forest. We came back anyway. A census finished in early 2023 counted about 4,800 of us, which is more than there were before we got sick.

And in 2020, after years of people arguing about it, Brazil opened the first bridge of its kind in the country over the BR-101 highway. It is an overpass planted with real native trees, so a tamarin can cross a motorway without ever touching the ground.

A bridge. Made out of forest. For monkeys. Sometimes people are amazing.

Hello. My name is Bao, and I am smiling at you, but not on purpose.

My mouth curves up at the corners and it stays that way whether I am happy, bored, or thinking about lunch. People on the boats call us the smiling angels of the Yangtze, which is a lovely nickname, and I have decided to earn it even though the truth is that my face just does that by itself.

I am a porpoise, and I live in a river. That sounds normal until you find out I am the only porpoise on the entire planet who lives in fresh water. Every other member of my family is out in the ocean being salty. Porpoises as a family are something like 25 million years old, but my branch only moved into this river from the sea around the last Ice Age, which still means we were here long before the cargo ships and the bridges and the cities on both banks. We were here before pretty much everything.

I also have no fin on my back. None at all. Where other porpoises have a fin, I have a low bumpy ridge of skin, like a little road of goosebumps. That is why we are called finless, which I think we can all agree is not the most creative name anybody has ever come up with.

The Yangtze is packed with mud and silt, so the water is brown and you genuinely cannot see anything in it, which makes my eyes close to useless. Instead I see with sound. I fire out clicks and listen to how they bounce back, and from the echoes I can tell where the fish are, where the riverbed is, and where that enormous ship is. I am basically shouting into the dark and reading the answer.

I am not quite two meters long and weigh about as much as a really big dog, around seventy kilograms. Mothers carry a calf for a whole year and only ever have one baby at a time, so every single calf matters an enormous amount.

I have to tell you about my neighbor. The baiji was a river dolphin who lived here with us. In 2006 scientists searched the whole river for six weeks, the entire thing, and did not find a single one. So now I am the last mammal left in the Yangtze. I try not to think about that too much.

In the early 1990s there were about 2,700 of us. By 2017 there were 1,012, and everybody could see where that line was heading.

Then China did something huge. On the 1st of January 2021 the government banned fishing across the whole Yangtze basin for ten years. More than 111,000 fishing boats came off the water and 231,000 fishers were helped into new jobs, because you cannot simply tell people to stop working and then walk away. In 2022 the survey counted 1,249 porpoises, which was the first increase anybody had ever recorded. The 2025 survey, announced in January 2026, counted 1,426. A study published in February 2026 found that the ban stopped about seventy years of decline in the river, that fish numbers have doubled, and that 43 more kinds of fish were recorded than could be found before the ban.

Back in the early 1990s, scientists moved five porpoises into an old cut-off bend of the river called Tian-e-Zhou. It worked, which had never happened before with any whale, dolphin or porpoise anywhere on Earth, and porpoises born there have been released back into the main river.

We are still critically endangered, and I am not going to act like we aren't. For the first time in my family's very long history in this river, though, there are more of us than there were the last time somebody counted. I will take it. And I will keep smiling, since I can't really stop.

The first thing anyone ever learned about me was my nose.

Above my nostrils there is a pattern of wrinkles that belongs to no other gorilla alive. It works like a fingerprint, except it sits in the middle of my face where everybody can see it. Researchers sit at the edge of our clearing with notebooks and draw it, line by line, and then photograph it to be certain. Somewhere in an office at the bottom of the mountain there is a page with my nose sketched on it and my name written underneath. Bahati. Group of eleven. Virunga.

I did not ask to be written down. For a long time I resented it, the way anyone resents being watched while they eat. I feel differently now. The animals nobody counts are the animals nobody notices are missing.

I am a silverback. The hair across my back has gone the color of wet stone, I weigh about 170 kilograms, and when I stand up and start walking, eleven gorillas stand up and walk with me. I decide where we feed and where we sleep. I decide which slope we cross and which one carries too much human smell to be worth it. My daughter is four and follows closest of all, usually by hanging off my forearm while I am trying to look like someone worth following.

We live higher up than any gorillas on Earth, climbing the volcano slopes to about 3,800 meters, where the mornings are cold enough that mist beads on our fur. Our coats grew thick to answer that cold. We eat leaves and stems and green shoots, and we eat an astonishing quantity of them, which is why most of my day is spent sitting in wet vegetation, chewing, thinking about very little.

Every evening I build a nest, and every evening it is a new one. I bend branches inward, fold leaves over them, and press down until I have a bowl shaped like my own body. In the morning I climb out and never use it again. My whole life is a trail of beds behind me that I will not sleep in twice. Researchers follow that trail to count us, so even the things I abandon are evidence that I was here.

The danger up here was never meant for us, which somehow makes it worse. People set wire snares in the forest to catch antelope, and a wire cannot tell the difference between an antelope's leg and my nephew's hand. More than seven of every ten of us are used to being near humans now, and being used to humans means catching what humans carry. We share about 98 percent of our DNA with them. A cough that would keep a child home from school for two days can move through my family like fire.

Then something happened that I did not expect. When my nephew was caught, people came up the mountain on foot to help him. They are called the Gorilla Doctors, and they walk into the forest and cut snares off wild gorillas with their own hands. No other wild ape population on Earth gets regular medical care. I stood over them the entire time, close enough to be a serious problem, and they kept working anyway.

In the early 1980s there were around 250 mountain gorillas left in these volcanoes. In 2010 there were about 480. By 2016 there were 604, the highest number ever recorded here, and Bwindi, one forest over, held 459 in 2018. That made roughly 1,063 of us at the last full counts, and a new count began in 2025 that everyone expects to come back higher. In 2018 the people who keep such lists moved us from Critically Endangered down to Endangered. We are still endangered. But we are the only great ape whose numbers are climbing, and there is not one of us in any zoo anywhere. Every mountain gorilla alive is wild.

It took patrols pulling snares out of the undergrowth, doctors climbing volcanoes, and money from tourist permits going back to the families who live along the forest edge for schools and clean water. My daughter is four. She will not carry her first infant until she is about ten, and after that she will raise only one at a time, each for nearly four years. That is how slowly we rebuild.

So keep drawing my nose. I intend to be on the list the next time they count.

My name is Juno, and I cannot say it out loud.

Condors have no voice box. Not a small one or a weak one. None at all. I can hiss, I can grunt, and I can produce a wheeze that sounds like a door that needs oiling. That is my entire vocabulary. Every other bird in California wakes up and sings about it. I wake up and make a noise like a deflating tire.

So we talk with our faces instead. The skin on my head is bare, which people assume is ugly and is actually practical, because feathers on a head that spends its time inside a dead deer would be a disaster. That bare skin flushes color when I feel something. Pink when I am calm. Orange when I am interested. Red when another condor is standing on my meal and needs to leave. My whole mood is printed on my head in real time, which is either honest or humiliating depending on the day.

I am the largest land bird in North America. My wings stretch about nine and a half feet across, wider than most cars are long, and I weigh around twenty pounds. On a good day I can cover more than 150 miles, riding the thermals up to fifteen thousand feet and barely flapping. From that height the highways look like scratches. I can live sixty years or more, which means I have time to be patient, and I raise one chick at a time, usually only every other year, which means I have to be.

My family has been here since the Ice Age. My ancestors ate mammoths and giant ground sloths, and their bones are still coming out of the La Brea Tar Pits in Los Angeles. We watched the mammoths go. We did not think we would be next.

What almost finished us is not dramatic. It is a fragment of lead the size of a grain of rice. Hunters leave carcasses in the hills, and if the bullet was lead, it shatters into pieces too small to see. We eat them. Between 1992 and 2025 lead killed at least 161 of us, which is half of every condor death with a known cause. There is nothing to fight and nothing to fly away from. It is just a thing that gets swallowed. There is also microtrash, bottle caps and glass fragments that parents mistake for bone chips and carry home to their chicks.

By 1982 there were twenty-two California condors left alive on Earth. Twenty-two. In 1987 biologists decided to catch every single wild condor and bring them all into captivity, because the alternative was watching the last ones die one by one. The final free-flying condor was a male called AC-9, taken on April 19, 1987. For five years after that, the sky over California had no condors in it at all. Not one. My grandmother remembered nothing of the wild because there was no wild left to remember.

Then in 1992 they started putting us back.

By the end of 2025 there were 392 of us flying free and 607 in total. Fifty-four captive pairs laid 67 eggs that year, 46 birds were released, and 16 chicks fledged out in the open on their own, raised entirely by wild parents. California banned lead ammunition for all hunting statewide on July 1, 2019. When bird flu killed 21 of us in one terrible outbreak, they started vaccinating condors before releasing them, and there have been no disease deaths in the two years since. Wild deaths dropped from 58 that outbreak year to 22 two years later.

I wear a numbered tag on my wing and carry a transmitter on my back. Somewhere a biologist knows exactly where I am and what I had for lunch. I used to find that undignified.

I do not anymore, because of the Yurok. Their people have called us prey-go-neesh for longer than California has been called California, and they hold us sacred. In 2003 they made a promise to bring us home to their territory in the north, and it took nineteen years, and in 2022 they released the first condors over that land. Eight birds. By the end of 2025 that flock had grown to twenty-five.

I have no voice. But there are people down there who have been saying my name for a very long time, and they never stopped.

Before the sun clears the ridge, my father starts singing, and the whole mountain listens.

His song has at least three separate parts, and he never rushes them. When he reaches the right moment my mother comes in over the top of him with her great call, a long rising note that climbs and climbs and then breaks open. It travels for kilometers through the wet trees. I have been learning to sing since I was small, and I am still not good at it, which my mother finds hilarious.

My name is Jin. I was born pale, almost cream colored, the way every Hainan gibbon is born. Then I turned black, and I stayed black for years, and I assumed that was simply who I was. Now the gold is coming in across my shoulders and my back, because I am female and grown, and females turn gold. My brother will be black for the rest of his life. I keep catching my own arm in the light and being startled by it, like meeting somebody new.

We live in the treetops and we do not come down. Not for water, not for fruit, not for curiosity. I have never once put my hand on the forest floor. We travel by swinging arm over arm underneath the branches, which is called brachiation, and when it is going well it does not feel like effort at all. It feels like falling forward on purpose and being caught every time.

There are six of us in my family, which is unusual. Most gibbon species live in pairs, but Hainan gibbons usually live as one male, two females and their children. Six of us on one mountain, in about sixteen square kilometers of rainforest, and that is the whole world.

The strangest thing about being us is this. Nobody counts us by looking. They count us by listening. Forty or fifty people hike up into our territory and camp for about five days, and every morning before dawn they sit in the dark with their heads tilted, writing down which songs come from which direction. That is the survey. That is how anyone knows we exist. Gibbons in different places even sing with different regional accents, so our voices tell people where we are from.

In July 2014 a typhoon called Rammasun came across the island and tore the mountain open. Landslides ripped gaps through the forest up to thirty meters wide. One of them cut straight across the route my aunt's family used every single day, a gully averaging fifteen meters across, and for creatures who never touch the ground, a gap is a wall. They could see the trees on the other side. They could not reach them.

In 2015 people came with mountaineering rope. Tree climbers from Hong Kong strung a pair of rope bridges across the gully, the first canopy bridges of their kind in China, and hung a camera on them to see what would happen. Nothing happened. For a hundred and seventy-six days, nothing happened. Gibbons are cautious and the rope was strange and my aunt's family simply refused.

Then one of them crossed. And then another. They started using it more and more, and eventually every member of that group had gone over the 15.8 meter span except the adult male, who never did. Some of them walked it upright like a tightrope, holding a second rope above their heads as a handrail, which I am told looked ridiculous and worked perfectly.

In the 1950s there were over 2,000 of us spread across twelve counties. By the 1970s there were fewer than ten. When the first proper survey was done in 2003 they found thirteen gibbons in two families, and that was every Hainan gibbon on Earth. Today there are about forty-two of us in seven family groups. We are still the rarest primate alive, rarer than the panda or the tiger or any great ape.

People have planted more than 80,000 seedlings from 51 native tree species across 150 hectares, and the ones they put in a decade ago are finally bearing fruit that we can eat. And in February 2026 scientists studying our DNA found something nobody expected. Even though there are so few of us, our genetic load is surprisingly low, probably because our species squeezed through a bottleneck in the last ice age and then spread out for thousands of years afterward.

In plain language, we have been rare before, and our ancestors left us built for it.

So tomorrow, before light, I will sit next to my father and try again to get the ending right. Somewhere below us, somebody is awake in the dark with a notebook, waiting to hear us.

It takes me about ten minutes to build a nest, and I can do it now without thinking, which is the whole point of this story.

I choose a fork high in the canopy, bend the living branches inward until they lock against each other, then weave smaller ones across the top and line the middle with leaves. If the sky looks heavy I add a roof. Every night a fresh one, because a nest holds the weather and the insects of the day it was built and is no good to anyone by morning. My son watched me do it from my hip for the first two years of his life. Lately he has started making his own, badly, three branches and an air of enormous satisfaction, and I let him sleep in mine anyway.

I should not know how to do this. That is the part people do not understand about me.

I do not remember my mother's face. I remember the sound the air rifle made, and I remember being carried by hands that were the wrong size and the wrong temperature, and then I remember a crate. Orangutan infants are worth money as pets, and the only way to take one is to kill the mother first, because she will not let go. Mine did not let go. I was probably two years old. Female orangutans give birth only once every eight or nine years, one of the slowest rates of any mammal alive, so when a mother is shot the loss is not one life. It is every life she would have raised for the next thirty years.

The people at the rescue center had to teach me things my mother would have taught me. Not tricks. The actual business of being an orangutan. How to tell which fruit is ripe by weight. How to fold a leaf into a glove so you can grip a spiky durian or push through a branch full of thorns. How to strip a stick down and work it into a hole in a trunk to fish out termites and ants and honey. There was a woman there who came every morning and stood at the bottom of a training tree with her arms folded, and when I refused to climb, which was often, she would say the same word. Naik. Climb. She never sounded impatient. She just kept saying it until I did.

I was released in 2018, at a place called Jantho, a pine forest reserve in Aceh where there had been no orangutans for a very long time. They opened the crate and stepped back and nobody explained anything to me. I went up the nearest trunk out of habit and sat there until dark, and then I realized nobody was going to bring me food, and nobody was going to come back for me, and nobody ever did. That was the gift. I understood that later.

The first nest I built on my own fell apart under me at two in the morning and dropped me into the branches below. The second one held.

There is a lot to learn about a forest when you are the first of your kind to live in it. I learned which ridge catches the wind and which valley floods. I learned that my arms span more than two meters from fingertip to fingertip, wider than I am tall, and that this is not clumsiness but design, because we are the largest tree-dwelling animals on Earth and we are meant to move hand over hand through the canopy rather than walk beneath it. I learned to listen for the long call of a flanged male, that low roaring sound that carries more than a mile and tells you exactly how much space you should give him.

We are the only great apes in Asia. The gorillas, the chimpanzees and the bonobos are all African. There are just three orangutan species, and one of them, the Tapanuli, was only recognized as separate in 2017. We share about 97 percent of our DNA with humans, which people bring up often, usually as though it were a compliment to us.

One morning in May, a field team confirmed that I had a healthy male infant. He was born in the forest, to a mother who was born in the forest, raised in a cage, and then given the forest back. He is the tenth confirmed birth to a released orangutan at Jantho, which does not sound like many until you remember how long we take. A few months after him, a female named Wenda had a daughter, and that made eleven.

I will not pretend the news is good everywhere. There are about 11,694 Sumatran orangutans left, and that number has fallen by roughly a fifth since 2011. Nearly all of us, around 10,519, live inside the Leuser Ecosystem, 2.6 million hectares of forest across Aceh and North Sumatra, the last place on Earth where orangutans, tigers, rhinos and elephants still share the same trees. About nine out of every ten of my species depend on one forest.

The same study found something worth holding onto, though. The decline happened even though forest loss had genuinely slowed, which means the cutting is easing and the population is simply lagging behind, the way anything must when its mothers only give birth once a decade. Meanwhile the rescue program has pulled more than 500 orangutans out of crates and cages and returned over 330 of them to two completely new wild populations, here and at Bukit Tigapuluh.

My son does not know any of this. He knows that the top of a nest goes on last, and that if he asks with enough persistence I will let him ruin mine. He learned that from me, and I learned it from a woman standing at the bottom of a tree saying climb.

There is no photograph of me taken by a person standing in front of me. Not one. Every picture of my kind that exists in the world was taken by a machine strapped to a tree, triggering in the dark while nobody was there.

I prefer it that way. I am not shy exactly, but I am solitary and I am careful, and I have arranged my entire life around not being met. I walk the same mud paths at the same hours. I eat from more than three hundred different plant species, so I am never forced to be predictable about food. I lie in wallows until the mud dries gray on my back and I look like part of the riverbank, which is the highest compliment I can pay myself.

My skin folds over itself in overlapping plates, so people who have seen me say I look armored. I have no horn at all, only a low bump where one might have been, because most females do not grow them. Even the males here carry horns under twenty-five centimeters, the smallest of any rhino alive. The men with rifles have never seemed to care about that distinction.

There are things about us nobody knows and may never know. No Javan rhino has ever been born in captivity, because no Javan rhino has ever lived in captivity. There is not one of us in any zoo on this planet today. So nobody has been able to sit with a pregnant female and record how long she carries her calf. Scientists guess at our lifespan, thirty to forty years, and they guess at the length of a pregnancy, and they write the guesses down carefully and label them as guesses. Almost everything humans understand about me, they learned from footprints, from dung, and from photographs I did not know I was posing for.

We used to be everywhere. Our range once covered nearly all of Southeast Asia, from India through Burma and Thailand and Vietnam and down across the islands. Vietnam had a few left when I was young. In 2010 a poacher shot the last one, and after that this peninsula on the far western tip of Java was the only place in the world where a Javan rhino could stand. Roughly twelve hundred square kilometers of rainforest and mud and freshwater, with a live volcano called Anak Krakatau smoking out at sea. I have felt the ground move under me more than once. It is not the volcano I am afraid of.

In 2023 the rangers began noticing that camera traps were vanishing from the forest. A camera would be there in the spring and gone by the summer, the strap cut. At the same time I stopped crossing paths with rhinos I had known for years. I do not seek company, so it took me longer than it should have to understand what the absence meant. The forest was not quiet. It was emptier.

In May 2024 the police announced what they had found. A poaching syndicate had confessed to killing twenty-six of us between 2019 and 2023. Twenty-six. Roughly a third of every Javan rhino that existed. Thirteen poachers and traders were arrested, and the man who organized it, Sunendi, was sentenced to twelve years in prison. Our official count had peaked at seventy-six in 2022. There are about fifty of us now.

I want to be honest about that, because I think there is a version of my story that skips it, and that version is worth nothing.

Here is what I hold onto instead. In 1967 there were about twenty-five Javan rhinos left in this park. Twenty-five, in the whole world, and everybody who studied us assumed they were watching the end. We climbed back out of that. It took decades and it was not graceful, but it happened once, which means it is a thing that can happen.

The park now runs thirty-five clusters of camera traps, a hundred and forty cameras in total, and they are watched far more closely than they used to be. At least five calves have been born in the last two years, three of them confirmed in a single spring. Every one of them was discovered by a machine on a tree, because there is no other way to find us.

One night in January, at seventeen minutes past ten, I walked a path I have walked a thousand times and something clicked in the dark. My son was beside me, four months old, close against my flank, and he startled and then decided it did not matter. I did not slow down. I have never once slowed down for a camera.

Days later the Ministry announced what the image showed. A female they believed to be Arum, with a calf under five months old.

They know my name. They know his face now too. Let them count him.

For most of the last century, people called my family monkey-eating eagles. It was a good name in the way that a rumor is a good story, and like most rumors it was mostly wrong. Eventually somebody looked properly at what we actually eat and the name was dropped, though our scientific name still means ape-eater, so the misunderstanding is preserved in Latin forever.

What I eat is flying lemurs, mostly. Also squirrels and fruit bats and rats, monitor lizards, snakes, hornbills, and owls. I have eaten other birds of prey. I mention this not to boast but because it explains something about how much forest one of me requires. A single pair can need thousands of hectares of mature mountain rainforest. You cannot fit an eagle into a woodlot.

My wings measure over two meters across and carry more surface area than any other eagle's on Earth, which some people use to argue that I am the largest eagle in the world. When something interests me I raise the long shaggy feathers at the back of my head, and they lift into a mane. I am on the currency of my country. Children learn my picture before they learn my range.

I hatched in a tree on Mindanao and I do not remember it. What I remember begins with hands. Poachers took me out of the nest as a chick, and I was small enough that I could not have flown from them if I had understood I should. I was rescued, and then I lived for years among people who fed me and measured me and wrote things down about me.

I want to be precise about this, because it gets confused. I was not made in a cage. I was only kept in one. There are Philippine eagles who were bred in captivity, and they are remarkable and their story is not mine. I was hatched wild, taken, and eventually given back. My keepers described me as fiercely wild, which they meant as an assessment and I took as a compliment.

In March 2025 they moved three of us to Leyte, an island where eagles had been lost. Not thinned. Lost. Two had already gone before us, Carlito and Uswag, released at Burauen the year before, and they were the first Philippine eagles ever reintroduced anywhere in the country. Uswag drowned at sea about a month after his release, which is the part of this story people tend not to repeat. They kept me for half a year in an aviary at the forest's edge, letting me learn the shape of the ridges through wire. Then one morning, near the end of September, somebody opened the door and stood aside.

Here is what nobody tells you about being released onto an island your species has vanished from. There is no one to learn from. On Mindanao an eagle grows up inside a map that other eagles drew, knowing which ridge holds the thermals and which valley the flying lemurs favor at dusk. On Leyte I inherited nothing. I flew over a forest that had no memory of me in it and I had to make every mistake myself, in order, out loud.

We mate for life, and the whole business of raising young takes two years. Both parents feed a single chick for roughly twenty months, which is slower than most large mammals manage. We can live thirty to sixty years, so there is time, but the arithmetic is unforgiving. Every eagle shot out of a tree with an air gun or caught in a nylon snare costs the species two years of work that had already been done.

There are Filipinos who have spent their whole careers on that arithmetic. The Philippine Eagle Foundation has been breeding eagles since 1992, when a chick named Pag-asa, which means hope, became the first Philippine eagle ever bred in captivity. Recently they announced their thirty-second, a chick named Bayani, meaning hero. Thirty-two eagles in thirty-four years. Nobody in that building is in a hurry, because hurrying is not an option available to them.

And on Mount Apo, more than two hundred Indigenous and upland community members work as Forest Guards. They patrol the mountain, they have removed over two hundred traps, and they have planted eleven thousand native trees grown in nurseries they run themselves. Those trees are not for them. Trees that size are for whoever is flying in sixty years.

Nobody can agree on how many of us are left. The estimates run from about 180 mature individuals up to 784, and the scientists arguing about it are not being careless. We are simply very difficult to count in mountain rainforest, and I have made my living out of being difficult to see.

Earlier this year a camera caught me at the edge of a river in Leyte, standing in the shallows and drinking. The biologists were delighted. They said it proved I had adapted to living wild.

I was thirsty. That is all it was, from where I stood.

I understand what they meant by it, though, and I have thought about it since. That river ran through this island for a long time without a single eagle bending over it. Four of us are flying this island now, out of the five who were given the chance, and there is a plan for sixteen, six breeding pairs eventually, and a recent study mapped more than ten thousand hectares of forest here that would suit us, most of it far enough from towns to be genuinely safe. Which means that somewhere on this island there is very likely a female working out the same ridges I am, making the same mistakes in a different order.

I have a name I did not choose and a river I did not know existed. In a year or two, if I am careful, I will have something better. I will have someone to call to.