A spring freeze and a dry summer left Colorado’s black bears short on food. Now 70-year-old Nanci Limbach and her tiny team in Silt are fattening up more than 30 orphaned and underweight cubs, with donated peaches, apples and even carved Halloween pumpkins.
Musician Cash Jacobs, who has stage 3 breast cancer, posted a video asking Miley Cyrus to shave her head before chemo. She didn’t meet her idol at the first Hollywood Bowl show. Then Cyrus flew her back for the second one and picked up the clippers herself.
Rascal, an American Bully, spent more than 300 days at the Humane Society of Northeast Georgia, becoming its longest-stay resident. When a new dad finally adopted him, he brought a step stool from home to help Rascal into the car, and millions of viewers fell in love.
Ebro Ahmed, 27, was kicking a soccer ball outside his family’s St. Paul corner store when a school bus rolled by with its door open and the driver in a medical emergency. He sprinted, jumped aboard and stopped it in under 15 seconds. Days later, Superman showed up with a $1,000 check.
Orphaned baby elephants Kaikai and Bungalu spun around, flapped their ears and trumpeted with joy when their favorite keeper, Joseph, came back to Sheldrick Wildlife Trust’s Kaluku unit. Here is how one lost her mother as a newborn and the other survived lions, hunger and a storm alone.
Ocean Silva, 21, flew from Boston to Honolulu to give his mother Lisa one of his kidneys so she would not have to wait years on a donor list. Two decades earlier, she had prayed beside his hospital bed when he nearly died as a newborn. After surgery, doctors said the kidney worked immediately.
Four cats were found shaking, soaking wet and covered in fleas inside a mesh tunnel left out in heavy rain in Asbury Park, New Jersey. The Monmouth County SPCA nursed Morticia, Delilah, Matisse and Autumn back to health, and less than two weeks later all four were adopted.
Seven-year-old Isabella Myers was handed a mysterious box in her Greensboro school office. Inside was a golden lamp, a nod to the Aladdin movie she loves watching with her mom. She rubbed it and wished for her mom to come back. Seconds later, her Air Force mom walked in.
A mother orangutan named Gadis and her baby, Garis, were rescued in the middle of the night in Kandan Village, Central Kalimantan, after a rope suspected to be a pig snare was found wrapped around both her wrists. Both are now in care.
Graham Stockwell was born nearly four months early, weighing one pound and nine ounces. Days after he finally came home, Florence firefighters helped save his life. On his fourth birthday, his family brought him to see the fire trucks and found the same crew waiting.