At Black Beauty Ranch, titles like “caregiver” and “maintenance technician” don’t do the people who hold them justice, and they don’t capture the dozens of unique tasks the team carries out every day: figuring out how to get pine sap off a goat’s horn (rub it with peanut oil), learning how to “drag”...

Flying back and forth over Cape Cod Bay, a survey plane spotted a half dozen of the world’s rarest creatures: North Atlantic right whales. Such sightings are good news. The species hovers near extinction—by one estimate, fewer than 360 remain. Each time researchers locate a whale, they take pictures...