Michael Di Paola

The air in Yellowstone National Park is chilly at the crack of dawn, even in August. If you want to see a wolf, you get up early and shiver.

The 200-year-old house was empty when I arrived on a recent Friday afternoon. Other guests trickled in after dark, and like me, they were here for the quaint lodging, morning yoga under the pine trees and a workshop on vegan smoothies.

In the basement of the South Carolina Aquarium in Charleston, I watched a diamondback terrapin that had been badly dinged by a car receive cutting- edge laser therapy.

In Tampa’s Lowry Park Zoo, several sick manatees languidly swam in large circular pools, the recovery rooms of the zoo’s Manatee Hospital.

The swan was found in March, grounded and very ill, in a Brooklyn parking lot.

Willie Wonka, a 20-year-old mixture of Arab, Shetland, Haflinger and Morgan, came to Blue Rider Stables in 1997 with a thyroid condition and other ailments.

Kimberly Wasserman was 21 when her 3-month-old son began to have trouble breathing. Terrified, she brought him to the emergency room and agonized while the infant struggled under an oxygen mask.

In the 1990s, Saddam Hussein diverted the flow of the Euphrates and Tigris rivers, then drained and burned the marshes of southern Iraq.

In one corner sat a house built with 300 used aluminum cat-food cans, each stuffed with insulation. Another was made from discarded foam panels, wood and other found materials. It looked like Swiss cheese but accommodated as many as three cats.

Before you see the turtles at the Cayman Turtle Farm on Grand Cayman, you hear them.

At the Woodstock Farm Animal Sanctuary in upstate New York, a rooster’s eyes were closed by infection while another was missing tail feathers. Yet both looked healthy and strutted around the coop.

Well before Sandy wreaked havoc on the Atlantic coast, a smaller storm raised concern at the Wolf Conservation Center in South Salem, New York.