【推荐1】Living in a city can be stressful. But some people in Bogota, Columbia have found a place to help ease stress and get a peaceful break from busy life. The place is a protected park for hummingbirds (蜂鸟) .

The park sits at the top of Monserrate Hill, east of the city, in a place known as the Paramuno corridor. The area contains a forest that has turned into a peaceful place for both people and birds. As the hummingbirds fly from flower to flower, some people study the animals through binoculars. Others take pictures with cameras or phones. “Sometimes it doesn’t seem real because we are close to a city of eight million citizens who produce noise every day,” said Camilo Cantor, a caretaker in the park. His job is to mix water and sugar that is put in bird feeders along a 300-meter path. Cantor explains, “You can hear noise from the city, the generation of pollution and aggressiveness.” But, he adds, the park is a special place, like an oasis. It is a place where people can go to release stress and forget about the pressures of city life.

Visitors to the park can see between 25 to 35 different species of birds, Cantor said. Ten years ago, the hill was completely deforested, meaning there were not any trees left on it. But workers began to replant local trees and flowers to bring the forest back to life. Presently, there are 115 species of birds, including 18 kinds of hummingbirds and some migratory (迁移的) species. Hummingbirds are only found on the American continent and Columbia is home to many different kinds.

【推荐2】The white rhinoceros (白犀牛) is near-threatened due to massive illegal hunting; the mountain gorilla is classed as endangered due to great habitat destruction. If no action is taken, these amazing creatures will undoubtedly be extinct before the end of the century. But scientists are working hard to stop this with some pretty cool drone (无人机) tech.

One of the biggest dangers to endangered animals in the modern day comes from illegal hunting, which claims the lives of hundreds of white rhinos every year. While regular patrols (巡逻队) can drive hunters away from certain areas, hunters are often well-armed and unafraid to fire upon those hoping to protect the rhinos. This is where drones come in. If researchers and patrols work in these areas, there would be a real danger of coming into contact with the hunters. By having drones collect data, movement patterns and numbers of animals, researchers and patrols can get away from such dangers.

Drones can also be sent into the skies above difficult-to-reach areas to get data that would otherwise be tough to collect. For example, mountain gorillas are usually found in deep jungle, and organizing an exploration can be expensive and demanding. Researchers can send drones over the forest to gather data about the habitat of the animals, and even take high quality images. This information can be priceless when it comes to an on-foot exploration, as researchers can get up-to-date information. In this situation, human-led surveys will still offer better results, but drones can play a huge part.

The downside presently is the cost, which can run into tens, if not thousands, of dollars. However, drone tech is still becoming a more favorable choice in the fight against wildlife extinction.

【推荐3】Technology usually keeps us away from nature. But now it is offering us an opportunity to listen to non-humans in powerful ways, connecting us again to the natural world.

Around the animal kingdom, there are sounds hard for us to decipher. Elephants, for example, communicate with each other using infra-sound (次声波), a sound frequently far below our human hearing range. Coral in the ocean also communicates with each other through sound waves. This is a shocking fact as coral doesn’t have any ears! So scientists have placed listening devices in these environments to pick up sounds humans are normally unable to detect.

After the sounds are recorded, AI (人工智能) is then able to determine their meaning. There are now whole databases of whale songs and honeybee dances. One day this information may be turned into “a zoological version of google translate”. One animal language is that of the elephant. Elephants have a different signal for honeybee, which is a threat, and a different signal for human. Moreover, they range between threatening humans and non-threatening humans.

And this technology is more powerful than that. For example, bees use dances to communicate with their peers where to go in search of nectar (花蜜). A research team in Germany, therefore, insert the bee language from AI database system into a robot bee, allowing the robot to create a dance routine that can tell the bees which direction to move. Whereas in the past, language creation had been limited to mainly apes (类人猿), with many examples of chimpanzees having been taught sign language to communicate with humans. This new technology now allows humans to socialize with different animals throughout the animal kingdom.

【推荐3】The two rescuers knew they were in trouble when they found that they had to stay at the airport on the night before Thanksgiving with a grounded plane and 30 turtles（海龟）. Regnante and her husband, Tingley, were part of a volunteer effort to save hundreds of sea turtles that were washed up close to death on the beaches of Massachusetts.

The couple urgently needed to find temperature-controlled accommodation for the endangered sea turtles. They were in the rescuer race to save the smallest sea turtles in the world, at a little over 2 feet long, and they had been found with very low temperatures. Every year, hundreds of the turtles follow warm ocean currents north from their hatching sites in the Gulf of Mexico, become trapped in the cold Atlantic and are then rescued from Cape Cod by volunteers, who take them to wildlife centres along warmer coastlines.

Regnante is a volunteer with Turtles Fly Too, a charity that provides air transport for the stricken turtles. On Wednesday, she took off with the turtles from near Boston in a plane piloted by her husband. They were bound for New Orleans but storms forced them to change course and refuel twice. Then, at Chattanooga, Tennessee, a stone damaged the propeller. "It was just one thing after another," Regnante told The New York Times. "I just kind of wanted to say, "Guys, it's going to be OK'."

For turtles, being out of the water and in transit for a long period was stressful. Luckily, A happy ending was delivered. Two heated trucks were sent nearby, where the turtles spent the night. On Thanksgiving morning, Regnante and Tingley drove them to a handover point in Alabama from where the turtles were taken to their new home.

"Turtles Fly Too does whatever it takes to make the mission happen," Leslie, president of the charity, said. "When challenges arise, we'll be quick to make adjustments."