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. The effort made in vain is unavoidable in some rescue work. 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.

Rock climbing is not an easy sport. It requires not only physical strength, but also complete mental concentration. But don’t tell 20-year-old Sasha diGuilian that. This fearless girl who has been controlling the sport ever since she entered this field, is just getting warmed up.

The youngster says that she began climbing even before she could walk. As a baby, she was constantly escaping from her bed and as a young child always leading her friends to the nearest rocks or hills. Then at the age of seven she attended her brother’s birthday party at a local rock climbing gym and knew she had found her gift for rock climbing.

Soon after, she joined the local center in her home town of Alexandria, Virginia and began climbing — first once a week, then twice and soon, almost every day. Her moment came at the age of nine when she won her first climbing competition by taking part in an event that she hadn’t even known, until she went to the gym for her normal climbing routine(常规). Her competitive nature and love for the sport immediately reached the peak and she began training seriously, but this time outside the gym — climbing real mountains.

As a youngster, she won the Junior Continental Championships from 2004 to 2010. Then, as soon as she was old enough, she went on to win the Pan American Championship, the US National Championship and in 2011, at just 18 years of age, was crowned Female Overall World Champion in Arco, Italy .

She is also the youngest woman to have completed a 5.14d graded climb. It is something that even most experienced climbers fear to try, because a small slip could result in a severe injury or even death.

A small town in southwest Britain is banning plastic bags in an attempt to help the environment and cut waste — a step that environmentalists believe is a first for Europe.

Shopkeepers in Modbury, population 1,500, agreed to stop handing out disposable plastic bags to customers on Saturday. They said paper sacks and cloth carrier bags would be offered instead.

Last month, San Francisco became the first U. S. city to ban plastic grocery bags. Internationally, laws to discourage the use of plastic bags have been passed in parts of South Africa and Ireland, where governments either tax shoppers who use them or fine companies that hand them out. Bangladesh already prohibits them, and so do at least 30 remote Alaskan villages.

Modbury, about 225 miles southwest of London, has also declared a bag amnesty (宽限期), allowing local people to hand in plastic bags that have piled up at home. They will be sent for recycling.

The Modbury ban was the idea of Rebecca Hosking, who saw the effect of bags on marine life while working in the Pacific as a wildlife camerawoman. She said response in the town so far had been “really positive”.

“Modbury is quite an old-fashioned town and a lot of people have wicker baskets to go out shopping anyway,” Hosking told Sky News Television.

The Worldwatch Institute, an environmental research agency, states that 100 billion plastic bags are thrown away each year in the United States alone. More than 500 billion are used yearly around the world.

When Susan Greenstein Prescott was a high school senior, her English teacher, Fred DiMeo, gave her a terrifying task: recite (背诵) a poem in front of the whole class.

“I had a stutter (口吃). I’d be trying to get a word out that might begin with ‘D’ or ‘TH’” Susan said. The thought of getting up in front of her classmates and stuttering through the poem was too much to bear. Susan went home and told her mom how scared she was. Her mom agreed to write a note asking for her to be excused from doing the work in front of the whole class. When the day of the recitation came, Susan recited the poem one-on-one to Fred. Once she was done, he said something she’d never heard before: he liked listening to her voice.

For the first time, Susan considered the possibility that public speaking didn’t have to be a source of trepidation. “I think in his mind he wanted me to understand I have nothing to be afraid of,” she said. After college, Susan landed a job as a corporate trainer. The new position made her realize how big an impact Fred had had on her confidence. “I stand up in front of people and I speak. I do it all the time, and if I do stutter once in a while, no big deal,” she said.

Susan recently found a way to contact her former teacher, and plans on sending him a letter expressing her appreciation. “He truly is an unsung hero,” she said. “I don’t know where I would’ve gone if I felt like I had to keep my voice quiet because I was afraid of embarrassing myself. I’d like to give him my thanks for that kindness.”

When my father was celebrating a milestone (里程碑) birthday, I pulled together a surprised gift that he would never forget.

On his 60th birthday , I had a fun idea: What if I could get the memories people had of him, put each one into an envelope (信封) — 60 in total — and have him open them, one by one, on his birthday? So I wrote an e-mail to family and friends, explaining my idea.

I sent the e-mail and waited. And then the replies started coming in and I was very, very astonished. There were so many memories, and they were all so lovely. They came from the 50s, 60s, 70s, from every decade (十年) between now and the day my dad was born. They came from my mother, my siblings, my grandma, my dad’s friends from high school, his sister, my dad’s first boss, a colleague at his first job, from people who hadn’t seen my dad in40 years, from people I myself hadn’t even informed. They typed them and handwrote them. They mailed them and e-mailed them.

The night before Dad’s birthday, my sister and I stayed up late to put the mails into envelopes.

The next morning, after breakfast and presents and cake, we gave the pile of envelopes to him. “Just one more thing for you,” we said.

It took him a long time to open them and read. Each one was a brief ticket to another time, a leap (跳跃) backward over years and decades. There was a lot of laughter and a few tears in his face.

I was kind of sad when the project of the memories about my father was over because it was great fun to collect these memories.

I used to chase happiness a lot when I began to work. I would run after different experiences-goals, achievements and success, because I was quite sure that once I caught up with them, happiness would be with me. It was during that period that I learned happiness was a very fast runner.

Later, I tried to sneak up on happiness. I thought if I didn’t care too little or too much but just enough, it wouldn’t see me coming and then I could catch it.

It turned out that happiness is similar to owls, for both of them have 360-degree vision and extremely sharp hearing. Finally, I decided to sit still, very quietly, until happiness forgot I was there, let down its guard and got close to me. This, surprisingly, worked better than either of the other two ways.

After reading a passage in Time, I think I know the reason. Apparently, for Americans, the chase of happiness is just linked to achieving individual goals which is different from that in other cultures. In many cultures, happiness is considered as a social phenomenon that happens most readily when it is shared. But our society puts the responsibility for catching happiness on each individual’s shoulders -a heavy burden indeed.

On Facebook, there are a lot of unbelievably happy people doing amazing happiness—producing things every day. However, most of the time, no one is really that happy all the time behind the scenes.

I also like what a famous business man told Time reporter Mandy Oaklander, “A happy life doesn’t consist of happy moments but every moment of the day.”

Now you know how to get happiness, don’t you?