It was a cold winter. The wind blew all night and the snow was blinding. When morning came, my three children and I got up and made our way to the windows. As we looked out the window, we saw that the henhouse was gone. Our three hens had been blown away.

I looked at the emptiness outside. Then I saw all three chickens sat around the edge of a white bucket. How was this violent wind not blowing them into the field beyond? I quickly pulled on long snow pants and heavy winter coat, wrapped a scarf and stuck my feet into very large boots.

I shouted at the wind as it blew. I was alone, struggling in the snow. They stared out the window into the vast white sea of snow, their eyes peeled for any sign of movement. Outside I heard the sound of my boots as I braved the elements.

The snow circling around me, I steadily made my way to the soft cluck-cluck-cluck sound my hens always made. When I reached them, I saw that their little feet were holding on to the edge of the bucket, heads bent forward and away from the wind. I gently lifted each hen and put it carefully into the warm inside. Then I began the freezing walk back to the small shed directly behind our house. One by one I laid my chickens on the cold floor, and they began to cluck softly.

As I shut the shed doors, my eyes went directly to the window where my children were watching. They jumped up and down cheering, and so did I! I wasn’t some dragon slayer (屠龙者) from a fairy tale. I was simply a mom, but the look on my children’s faces told me that they thought I was a hero mom.

A new report shows that there are just 7，100 of the world's fastest land animals now left in the wild.Cheetahs(猎豹) are in trouble now.

According to the study，more than half the world's surviving cheetahs live in one population that ranges across six countries in southern Africa.Cheetahs in Asia have been nearly wiped out.It's thought that a group with fewer than 50 cheetahs lives on in Iran.

Because the cheetah is one of the widest­ranging animals，it runs across lands far outside protected areas.Some 77% of their habitat(栖息地) falls outside these protected areas.As a result，the animal struggles because these lands are increasingly being developed by farmers and the cheetah's food is decreasing because of human hunting.

In Zimbabwe，the cheetah population has fallen from around 1，200 to just 170 animals in 16 years，with the main cause being major changes in land tenure.

Researchers say that the threats facing the world's fastest animals have gone unnoticed for far too long.“Given the secret nature of the cheetah，it has been difficult to gather hard information on them.” said Dr. Sarah Durant，the report's leader.“Our findings show that the large space requirements for cheetahs and various threats faced by them in the wild mean that they are likely to be in danger of dying out.”

Another of the big concerns about cheetahs has been the illegal trafficking(非法交易) of young cheetahs.The young cats can fetch up to $10，000 on the black market.Some 1，200 young cheetahs are known to have been trafficked out of Africa over the past 10 years but around 85% of them died during the journey.

If the cheetah is to survive long term，then urgent efforts must be made to solve the question of protected areas and ranges.

Canada has reintroduced some bisons (北美野牛) to the country’s oldest national park in Banff, Alberta, officials said on Monday, more than 130 years after the North American animal last appeared on the eastern slopes of the Canadian Rockies.

The protection team moved a group of 16 bisons into enclosed grassland in Banff National Park in the west of the province last week. The group will stay under observation in the Panther Valley until next summer, when the animals will be released into the full 1,189 sq km reintroduction zone in the park’s eastern valleys.

Parks Canada said bisons were once main grazers (plant-eaters) and that bringing them back would recover their missing role in Banffs ecosystem. “This would be one of only four bison groups in North America that would be fully interacting with their predators (meat-eaters) and shaping the ecosystem as they did over a hundred years ago,” said Karsten Heuer, the bison reintroduction project manager. Those predators will include wolves and bears native to the park.

Ten pregnant female bisons and six young bulls were disease-tested before being driven 400 km across Alberta by truck. Since the Panther Valley is not easy to reach by road, officials attached the containers by a long line to a plane and flew them in one at a time for the last 25 km.

Vast bison groups of up to 30 million animals once lived freely across North America. The animal was nearly hunted to extinction, and park keepers estimate bisons have not grazed in Banff National Park since before it was set up in 1885.