It wasn’t all bad
■■ When 9-year-old Reese Osterberg’s house burned down in California’s Creek Fire, she lost not only her home but her prized baseball-card collection. Fellow collector Kevin Ashford took up a fire department call for donations for the young baseball player and two friends who also lost their homes. Reese had spent three years amassing her 100-card hoard. Ashford replaced it with a bigger one, giving away all of his 25,000 cards to the three kids. A bonus: Ashford’s cache included Osterberg’s favorite player, S.F. Giants catcher Buster Posey.
■■ A group of tenacious women completed the journey of a lifetime, walking in the footsteps of Harriet Tubman along the Underground Railroad. Linda Harris, 65, organized the odyssey after re-reading a book given to her by her father, Runaway Slave: The Story of Harriet Tubman, which chronicled Tubman’s missions leading dozens of slaves to freedom through secret passageways. She gathered a group of eight women in the D.C. area, ages 38 to 65, previously strangers, and they traversed 116 miles from Cambridge, Md., to Kennett Square, Pa., mapping out Tubman’s route as precisely as possible. When they reached the end, Harris said, “We all started crying.”
■■ Once on the brink of extinction, the Iberian lynx has made a remarkable comeback over the past two decades across Spain and Portugal. In 2002, there were only 94 of these cats left in the wild, partly because of a Franco-era campaign to wipe out creatures considered “vermin.” Now, the lynx population has increased to 855, thanks to the work of the Andalusian, Spanish, and Portuguese governments and conservation NGOs, and the cat has been reintroduced in Portugal, where it was previously extinct. “The lynx is a jewel and a thing of beauty to behold,” said Ramón Pérez de Ayala of the World Wildlife Fund.