On a typical day, off the coast of a small Brazilian island, Joao Pereira de Souza, who was a fisherman, headed out fishing. He was sad to find a lot of oil on the water. Staring at the waves with the oily shine, he decided it was not a good day to fish. But walking along the beach that day, he found a struggling penguin(企鹅), covered with oil and going to die because of hunger.

Pereira took the penguin home, gently cleaned it and spent the next week nursing it back to health. He named it Dindim, a Portuguese word meaning “ice pop”.

Dindim is a Magellanic penguin, a species known for living in the seas of South America. In order to breed(繁殖), he must return to Patagonia, 8,000 kilometers from Pereira’s home. Pereira took Dindim back to the ocean and taught him how to swim again. Soon, it was time for Dindim to return to life in the wild. Pereira watched Dindim swim away, believing it would be the last time to see him.

But the next June, Dindim returned. The two shared a gentle mouth-to-nose greeting (问候), and Dindim stayed for a month, swimming around Pereira’s house. The time to leave arrived, and Pereira thought this surely would be the last time he would see Dindim. But 11 months later, the penguin returned again.

Pereira was unsure whether the returning penguin year after year was the same one. He put a tracking device on Dindim. To his surprise, it was Pereira’s Dindim, returning year after year, for more than a decade.

Pereira and Dindim share a friendship that bridges human life and the natural world.

Listening to birds and water can lower stress and improve mood, study finds. Researchers have long known there are benefits from being in nature. Living around trees can help you live longer. Walking in the woods is good for your mood. Being near water can have positive effects on your well-being.

A new study finds that natural sounds offer health benefits too. There is plenty of evidence that spending time in natural areas is good for our health — but typically this research is done from a visual perspective, but we are curious what the role is of sounds we hear in these spaces.

Some examples they found reported in those studies included decreased pain, lowered stress, improved mood, and better cognitive (认知的) function. With these results in hand, they then listened to audio recordings from 251 sites in 68 national parks across the United States.

The sites with the most natural sounds and the lowest man-made sounds were located in Alaska, Hawaii, and the Pacific Northwest and were far from urban areas. Only three locations with high natural sounds and low noise pollution were within 100 kilometers (62 miles) of urban areas.

However, despite human-made noises being heard most of the time at sites in urban locations, birds were still heard about 60% of the time and geophysical sounds like wind and rain heard about 19% of the time.

Not all natural sounds deliver the same benefits, the researchers found. For example, they discovered that the sounds of water had the largest impact on improving positive emotions and health outcomes, while bird sounds ease stress and annoyance. And the sounds of both birds and water were heard more than 23% of the time in the national park recording sites.

Interestingly, there was also some evidence that natural sounds have benefits over silence. There was also evidence that more different types of natural sounds — more types of birds singing rather than just one type of bird— have benefits over fewer sounds.