Wild ones : a sometimes dismaying, weirdly reassuring story about looking at people looking at animals in America / Jon Mooallem

Includes bibliographical references and index

Introduction: The woman who counted fish -- Part One. Bears -- Part Two Butterflies -- Part Three. Birds -- Epilogue: The man who carried fish.

Wild Ones is a tour through our environmental moment and the eccentric cultural history of people and wild animals in America. In America, Wild Ones discovers, wildlife has always inhabited the terrain of our imagination as much as the actual land. The journey is framed by the stories of three modern-day endangered species: the polar bear, victimized by climate change and ogled by tourists outside a remote northern town; the little-known Lange's metalmark butterfly, foundering on a shred of industrialized land near San Francisco; and the whooping crane as it's led on a months-long migration by costumed men in ultralight airplanes. The wilderness that Wild Ones navigates is a scrappy, disorderly place where amateur conservationists do grueling, sometimes preposterous-looking work; where a marketer maneuvers to control the polar bear's image