As majestic as they are powerful, and as timeless as they are current, bears continue to captivate. Speaking of Bears is not your average collection of stories. Rather, it is the history, compiled from interviews with more than 100 individuals, of how Yosemite, Sequoia, and Kings Canyon National Parks, all in California's Sierra Nevada, created a human-bear problem so bad that there were eventually over 2,000 incidents in a single year. It then describes the pivotal moments during which park employees used trial and error, conducted research, invented devices, collaborated with other parks, and found funding to get the crisis back under control. Speaking of Bears is for bear lovers, national park buffs, historians, wildlife managers, biologists, and anyone who wants to know the who, what, where, when, and why of what once was a serious human-bear problem, and the path these parks took to correct it. Although these Sierran parks had some of the worst black bear problems in the country, hosted much of the research, and invented the bulk of the technological solutions, they were not the only ones. For that reason, intertwining stories from several other parks including Yellowstone, the Great Smoky Mountains, and Banff-Canada are included. For anyone seeking solutions to human-wildlife conflicts throughout the world, the lessons-learned are invaluable and widely applicable.

Cesar Millan Doesn't Live Here is a collection of stories that are snapshots into the daily life of Michelle and Jason. Stories include Aurora knocking a king size bed off its frame with her head, Porter's harrowing experience with Frosty the Snowman, the basic decorating rule of never picking out paint while angry, and other events that remind us that sometimes our horoscopes to stay in bed are good advice.

When American explorers crossed the Texas Panhandle, they dubbed it part of the ""Great American Desert."" A ""sea of grass,"" the llano appeared empty, flat, and barely habitable. Contemporary developments - cell phone towers, oil rigs, and wind turbines - have only added to this stereotype. Yet in this lyrical ecomemoir, Shelley Armitage charts a unique rediscovery of the largely unknown land, a journey at once deeply personal and far-reaching in its exploration of the connections between memory, spirit, and place. Armitage begins her narrative with the intention to walk the llano from her family farm thirty meandering miles along the Middle Alamosa Creek to the Canadian River. Along the way, she seeks the connection between her father and one of the area's first settlers, Ysabel Gurule, who built his dugout on the banks of the Canadian. Armitage, who grew up nearby in the small town of Vega, finds this act of walking inseparable from the act of listening and writing. ""What does the land say to us?"" she asks as she witnesses human alterations to the landscape - perhaps most catastrophic the continued drainage of the land's most precious resource, the Ogallala Aquifer. Yet the llano's wonders persist: dynamic mesas and canyons, vast flora and fauna, diverse wildlife, rich histories. Armitage recovers the voices of ancient, Native, and Hispano peoples, their stories interwoven with her own: her father's legacy, her mother's decline, a brother's love. The llano holds not only the beauty of ecological surprises but a renewed realization of kinship in a world ever changing. Reminiscent of the work of Terry Tempest Williams and John McPhee, Walking the Llano is both a celebration of an oft-overlooked region and a soaring testimony to the power of the landscape to draw us into greater understanding of ourselves and others by experiencing a deeper connection with the places we inhabit.

Secrets of an Ageless Journey (1997) the journey begins once again when a sixteen year old girl, Sarah, ventures into the mysteries surrounding her grandfather and the family ancestral ranch. While visiting her cousins on the ranch she discovers an old journal written over eighty years before. The journal becomes the focus of her quest for discovering a mysterious influence that is about the family; and in some way guiding her. (1915) the journal takes Sarah back to one summer in the life of her great grandfather, Joseph, and his twin sister, Ida Belle as they experience a similar ancestral stirring in their lives. A great grandmother comes to visit the twins, involving them in a mystery that has haunted her and the clan. It is through the grandmother that the premise of an invisible force and invisible world exist and was essential to the culture and heritage of an American Indian nation.

It was the pathetic mews of a hungry mother cat, scrounging in a dumpster to feed her kittens that first caught Bob and Kathy Rude's attention. They found the hungry cat and several more hungry felines while helping out at the family restaurant one summer. The chance meeting between the hungry strays and two government computer programmers led to the creation of Rude Ranch Animal Rescue, one of the United States' hardest working No-Kill Animal Sanctuaries. Read on to meet these original Rude Cats and find what can go right and wrong when you try to help a few stray animals and inadvertently start an animal sanctuary.

This memoir describes the challenges a young man faces in achieving his dream of becoming a veterinarian. Even a period of homelessness and limited resources do not interfere with his commitment to achieve success. And this is only the beginning Soon he is faced with the challenges of working in the jungles of Panama, facing the ravages of a roaming black jaguar and the defenses of a native village against the entrance of man or beast. Then, how about Haiti, where the Tonton Macoute militias believe in instant justice, rarely valuing life, or Columbia, where the drug lords have absolute rule. As if that isn't enough, consider working in the African continent, along the tales surrounding the first shipment of Charolais cattle to the United States or the many facets of working with the wild mustangs in Colorado. Each exciting adventure is told with suspense, drama, and humor Enjoy