I work with Volunteers for Wildlife, a rescue and education organization at Bailey Arboretum in Locust Valley. Trying to help injured, displaced or sick creatures can be heartbreaking; survival is never certain. However, when it works, it is simply beautiful.

I got a rescue call from a woman in Muttontown. She had found a young owl(猫头鹰) on the ground. When I arrived, I saw a 2-to 3-week-old owl. It had already been placed in a carrier for safety.

I examined the chick(雏鸟) and it seemed fine. If I could locate the nest, I might have been able to put it back, but no luck. My next work was to construct a nest and anchor it in a tree.

The homeowner was very helpful. A wire basket was found. I put some pine branches into the basket to make this nest safe and comfortable. I placed the chick in the nest, and it quickly calmed down.

Now all that was needed were the parents, but they were absent. I gave the homeowner a recording of the hunger screams of owl chicks. These advertise the presence of chicks to adults; they might also encourage our chick to start calling as well. I gave the owner as much information as possible and headed home to see what news the night might bring.

A nervous night to be sure, but sometimes the spirits of nature smile on us all! The homeowner called to say that the parents had responded to the recordings. I drove over and saw the chick in the nest looking healthy and active. And it was accompanied in the nest by the greatest sight of all — LUNCH! The parents had done their duty and would probably continue to do so.

Rewilding is a form of conservation and ecological restoration that aims to improve biodiversity and ecosystem health by restoring natural processes. Rewilding offers a lot of ecological, social, and economic benefits. However, it also has been highly criticized by conservation scientists regarding whether rewilding is good for species in the first place.

The first benefit comes with its definition: Rewilding helps to reduce the mass extinction of species by giving nature the opportunity to reestablish its natural processes and biodiversity. As human activity is currently damaging ecosystems at a great rate, rewilding helps to lessen this impact. Additionally, rewilded ecosystems help to slow climate change as they increase carbon storage and carbon removal from the atmosphere.

Rewilding also helps to protect against natural disasters such as soil erosion (侵蚀), flood risk, and forest fires. For example, rewilded trees help to delay the rate at which rainwater reaches the forest floor and the tree roots act as channels to draw rainwater underground, thus preventing flooding.

The main criticism of rewilding is that there are many uncertainties associated with it. It is not always fully known if extinct species will do well if placed back in a previous environment. This is especially the case with Pleistocene (更新世) rewilding, as species are reintroduced to ecosystems where they have been missing for thousands of years. Uncertainties exist around where these species will settle down, what they will eat, how they will reproduce, etc. Additionally, it is not always clear how other species will react to a reintroduced species.

An example of a failed rewilding attempt was at Oostvaadersplassen in the Netherlands. Wild-living cattle, horses, and red deer were brought to this reserve. However, the animals were left to starve and up to 30% of the animals died over winter periods due to lack of food.

It was always very cold on that lake shore in the night, but we had plenty of blankets and were warm enough. We never moved a muscle all night, but waked at early dawn in the original positions, and got up at once, thoroughly refreshed. There is no end of medicine in such an experience. That morning we could have defeated ten such people as we were the day before—sick ones at any rate. But the world is slow, and people will go to “water cures” and “movement cures” and to foreign lands for health. Three months of camp life on Lake Tahoe would bring back Egyptian mummy to life, and give him a healthy appetite. I do not mean the oldest and driest mummies, of course, but fresher ones. The air up there in the clouds is very pure and fine. And why shouldn’t it be? —it is the same the angels breathe. I think that hardly any amount of tiredness can be gathered together that a man cannot sleep off in one night on the sand by its side. Not under a roof, but under the sky; it seldom or never rains there in the summertime. I know a man who went there to die. But he made a failure of it. He was a skeleton (骨瘦如柴的人) when he came, and could barely stand. He had no appetite, and did nothing but read tracts (小册子) and reflect on the future. Three months later he was sleeping out of doors regularly, eating all he could hold, three times a day, and hunting game over the mountains three thousand feet high for fun. And he was a skeleton no longer, but weighed part of a ton. This is no fancy sketch, but the truth. His disease was consumption. I confidently recommend his experience to other skeletons.

—Mark Twain