The stars of the 1948 film Bill and Coo were birds. That’s not to say these these birds stole the show by upstaging their human costars—the birds were the show. The movie’s running time is just over an hour, and except for a two-minute introduction featuring humans, the story is acted out entirely by trained birds on a set of miniatures.

Here’s how LIFE described the production in its July 28, 1947 issue:

The pictures on these pages from Republic’s new movie Bill and Coo are tokens of the gloomy contention of the producer, that movie stars belonging to the species homo sapiens are washed up and the birds are ready to take over….No newcomer to strange breeds of actors, Vaudevillian Ken Murray for the last five years has been packing Hollywood’s El Capital Theater with a raucous oldtime variety show called Blackouts…When a bird trainer named brought his lovebird act around, Murray was so impressed that he dreamed up a starring vehicle for it, had miniature sets built and a lovebird story written.

The entire movie can be viewed online, and the photos taken by Peter Stackpole capture both the charm and peculiarity of the enterprise. The film is set in “Chirpendale U.S.A.,” and the location is one of the movie’s many bird-themed puns. The story is narrated by an off-screen human, but you see birds doing things like walking in and out of buildings, pushing little baby carriages and dropping letters in mailboxes. The plot revolves Bill and Coo, who love each other despite their class differences (Bill has a taxi service, Coo comes from a wealthy family), and they must fight off a malicious crow who threatens life in Chirpendale.

(Perhaps the most surprising detail about the production is that it was the only movie directed by former child actor Dean Riesner, who decades later would leave his mark on Hollywood history as one of the writers of the decidedly un-precious movie Dirty Harry. Yes, the man who directed Bill and Coo also gave us the line “Do you feel lucky? Well, do you punk?“)

On the one hand, no one is going to mistake Bill and Coo for Citizen Kane. On the other hand, it did win an honorary Academy Award, for creating a film “In which artistry and patience blended in a novel and entertaining use of the medium of motion pictures.”

It was novel indeed. In fact, when you look at the movie’s IMDB page and scroll to the heading “More Like This,” what you get are not more live-action movies but rather animated films such as Bambi. Which is another way of saying, there really are no movies like this.

Bill and Coo, the titular stars of the movie, stood on top of a trolley on the film’s set.

Peter Stackpole/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Ken Murray first encountered the birds in his vaudeville show and helped dream up the idea for featuring them in the movie that become Bill and Coo.

Peter Stackpole/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Trainer George Burton works with alligators who also played a role in the movie Bill and Coo, 1947.

Peter Stackpole/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

From the set of the bird-centric movie Bill and Coo, 1947.

Peter Stackpole/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The “wrong brothers” are celebrated in one of the many bird-related puns in the movie Bill and Coo.

Peter Stackpole/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A fire-bird slides down a pole the set of the all-bird movie Bill and Coo, 1947.

Peter Stackpole/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

From the set of the bird-centric live action movie Bill and Coo, 1947.

Peter Stackpole/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

From the set of the bird-centric movie Bill and Coo, 1947.

Peter Stackpole/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A crow played the villain in the bird-centric movie Bill and Coo, 1947.

Peter Stackpole/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Owls on the set of the bird-centric movie Bill and Coo, 1947.

Peter Stackpole/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

At the end of the movie Bill and Coo, the titular birds head off on their honeymoon in a puppy-drawn carriage, 1947.

Peter Stackpole/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The post The Oscar-Winning Movie Where the Stars Were All Birds appeared first on LIFE.

Here was the setup offered in LIFE, in an article titled “The Case of the Skating Stones”:

On a dry lake bed high in the Panamint Mountains near Death Valley sit several dozen boulders whose peculiar behavior has long been a nightmare to geologists. The boulders, which weigh up to a quarter ton, stand at the ends of long, gouged-out paths which show that they periodically respond to unknown forces and skate about on the flat earthen floor.

LIFE painted the situation as a complete mystery, mentioning disproved theories from everyday folks that attributed the stones’ movement to the lake bed tilting back and forth, or perhaps to “Russians tampering with the magnetic pole.” (This was the early days of the Cold War, mind you). LIFE ended its writeup by saying “The mystery may never be completely solved. When humans observers are about, the stones refuse to budge an inch.”

But since 1952 scientists, when not busy exploring space and inventing cell phones and so forth, did come up with a leading hypothesis, which is that the stones’ skating is likely caused by the movement of thin sheets of ice that can form there in wintertime, with high winds perhaps helping to push stones along.

Though sometimes the stones have moved for reasons that are all too explicable—such as in 2013, when some stones were stolen. A park spokesman expressed both disappointment and confusion at the theft, saying “They don’t seem to understand that outside the Racetrack, these stones have no value.” Other visitors have damaged the site by taking the “Racetrack” name literally and driving their cars on it.

Sometimes human behavior is a mystery all its own.

The “sailing stones” of the Racetrack Playa in Death Valley, California, 1952.

Loomis Dean/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The “sailing stones” of the Racetrack Playa in Death Valley, California, 1952.

Loomis Dean/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

LIFE’s 1952 story on the sailing stones of Racetrack Playa in Death Valley included this photo of stone-like objects described as “burro droppings” that had likely been moved by the same forces as the stones.

Loomis Dean/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The sailing stones of the Racetrack Playa in Death Valley, California, 1952.

Loomis Dean/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

This three-quarter-ton stone left its mark after moving across a dry lake bed in Death Valley, 1952.

Loomis Dean/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

“Sailing stones” left tracks as they drifted across Racetrack Playa in Death Valley, California, 1952.

Loomis Dean/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A small stone left these intricate tracks on the Racetrack Playa in Death Valley, California, 1952.

Loomis Dean/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

LIFE’s 1952 story on the Racetrack Playa described this photo as being from a “ghost experiment,” guessing that an amateur scientist had tied up the rock to keep it from moving, but over time the rope had eventually rotted away.

Loomis Dean/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The post Stones on the Run: A Death Valley Spectacle appeared first on LIFE.

The basis of that claim? In 1869 a Boston preacher named William H.H. Murray published his popular book Adventures in the Wilderness, or Camp-Life in the Adirondacks, which was a mix of fiction and travel brochure touting the wonders of outdoor life in Lake George. And readers started coming there for getaways, inspired by the idea that the wilds of nature were to be enjoyed rather than merely navigated or avoided. According to an article in Smithsonian about Lake George, the people who ventured there that first summer didn’t enjoy it much because they were often unprepared for outdoor life and the weather that year was unusually cold and rainy. (Sounds like a classic vacation). But in subsequent years the weather was better and Lake George flourished as a tourist destination.

That history may help explain why LIFE photographer Nina Leen went to Lake George in 1941 to photograph a young couple enjoying a weekend in nature. The pictures are indeed stunning, particularly the one titled “Private Island,” which shows the couple sitting together on a small outcropping in the middle of a placid lake. The photo makes Lake George look like a kind of Eden. (It should be noted that the same spot looks more ordinary in other photos taken by Leen— the rock the couple is sitting on is just a few steps from the shore—but as every amateur photographer knows, when crafting that perfect vacation photo, angles are everything).

LIFE never ran Leen’s story on Lake George—one imagines it might have been bumped for news about the gathering storm that was World War II. So we don’t know much about the young man and woman in the photos: their ages, occupations, marital status, or where they arrived from. That’s fine. Their anonymity allows them become a symbolic Adam and Eve, making their way back for a couple days in paradise.

A young couple vacationing at Lake George, New York.

Nina Leen/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A young couple vacationing at Lake George, New York, 1941.

Nina Leen/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A couple vacationing at Lake George, New York, 1941.

Nina Leen/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A young couple enjoyed a Lake George vacation in a Nina Leen photo entitled “Private Island,” 1941.

Nina Leen/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A couple vacationing at Lake George, New York, 1941.

Nina Leen/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A couple vacationing at Lake George, New York, 1941.

Nina Leen/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A couple vacationing at Lake George, New York, 1941.

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A couple vacationing at Lake George, New York, 1941.

Nina Leen/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A couple vacationing at Lake George, New York, 1941.

Nina Leen/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A couple vacationing at Lake George, New York, 1941.

Nina Leen/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A couple vacationing at Lake George, New York, 1941.

Nina Leen/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A couple vacationing at Lake George, New York, 1941.

Nina Leen/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A couple vacationing at Lake George, New York, 1941.

Nina Leen/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A couple vacationing at Lake George, New York, 1941.

Nina Leen/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A couple vacationing at Lake George, New York, 1941.

Nina Leen/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A couple vacationing at Lake George, New York, 1941.

Nina Leen/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A couple vacationing at Lake George, New York, 1941.

Nina Leen/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The post The Original Vacation Spot appeared first on LIFE.

The first bird I fell in love with—my “spark bird”—was soaring in the northeastern Florida sky one May many years ago, its pointed wings spread gracefully and its deeply forked tail gently twisting to guide its curving flight. The black-and-white coloration was distinctive, and I rushed to a local used bookstore for what would become the first of many field guides on my shelves. A few flips of the pages, and I knew I’d seen a swallow-tailed kite, an elegant raptor that is a summer visitor to Florida and the southeastern United States. 

Tens of millions of birders have had similar encounters with their own spark bird. In the United States alone, more than 45 million people are bird watchers. Roughly $4 billion is spent annually on birdseed and foods such as suet, nuts, and nectar, while another $2 billion is spent on binoculars, spotting scopes, and other equipment. Birds are the focus of conservation programs and citizen science projects such as the Great Backyard Bird Count; art projects like the Audubon Mural Project in New York City, which highlights 314 bird species; and movies like Happy Feet (about penguins) and The Big Year (about a birding competition). 

That so many people love birds may be partly because there’s a bird for everyone. The more than 10,000 known bird species come in an extraordinary variety, and they can be found—almost literally—everywhere. 

Birds thrive in all habitats, from fierce roadrunners in rocky deserts to colorful toucans in tropical jungles. You don’t need to live next to a wildlife refuge or nature preserve to enjoy a multitude of bird species—even the busiest cities are home to swallows and sparrows, hawks nesting on skyscrapers, ducks in park ponds, and hummingbirds in flower beds. Taking a trip to the beach? Watch for sandpipers running from the waves, pelicans floating on the water, and gulls flocking on the dunes. In rural areas, there might be quail, magpies, and wild turkeys at the edges of farm fields, while suburban yards can be flush with thrushes, warblers, and buntings. Wherever we are, birds provide us with an active, living connection to nature.

Birds’ often vibrant colors can distinguish a species in a beautiful way. The brilliant red of the northern cardinal stands out against winter snows, while the bright hue of the blue jay is a bold splash of color among the leaves. Birds come in every color, and some—like the painted bunting, with his blue head, lime-green back, and rich red chest—are a rainbow all by themselves.

The varied hues have a purpose. Brighter colors can help birds attract stronger mates—as a general but not ironclad rule, the more colorful of the species are the males, with female birds often more muted, more demure, in their coloring. In other cases, a mottled pattern provides camouflage to protect nesting birds, and some birds, such as the northern pygmy owl, even have false “eyespots” on the back of their head to fool potential predators.

The sight of birds in flight suggests a sense of freedom—from the awesome dive of a peregrine falcon to the swooping curves of a barn swallow, or even the quick flitting of a house wren. The long-distance migrations of birds, flying hundreds or even thousands of miles between their summer and winter habitats, highlight their endurance and perseverance, as well as a kind of navigational intelligence. Birds rely on landmarks and stars to guide their journeys. 

There’s a variety in how they fly as well. Consider the hours-long flights of albatrosses out at sea as they soar on air currents; the frantic, adrenaline-inducing flights of pheasants scattering from predators; or the flittering flights of foraging warblers navigating the high trees without hitting a single branch.

And of course, there’s their songs. Chirps, whistles, coos, and warbles are as familiar as the somewhat less melodious screeches, squawks, hoots, and quacks. Some birds, such as mockingbirds, thrashers, and catbirds, are outstanding mimics and imitate not only other birds but also other animals—as well as car alarms and ring tones. 

Birds sing to attract mates and to defend their territory, with more complex songs indicating better health and greater experience to lure the very best mates or defend larger territories. Other songs and calls communicate information about food or predators, and while in flight, flocks of birds often call to one another to maintain proper spacing with their airborne neighbors. 

The reasons why humans appreciate birds are almost as diverse as birds themselves. The bill of a roseate spoonbill, the hovering of a hummingbird, the gleam of an eagle’s eye, the trill of a nightingale in the gloaming: Maybe one of those birds is your spark bird, long since catalogued or quite literally just up around the bend.

Here is a selection of photos from LIFE’s new special edition exploring the beauty of birds, Birds: The World’s Most Remarkable Creatures.

phototrip/iStock/Getty Images

The secretary bird, native to Africa and found south of the Sahara desert, stands about four feet tall.

Mark Newman/The Image Bank/Getty Images

A red- billed blue magpie can use its wedge-shaped beak to open shells.

eiffel/500px/Getty Images

The wild flamingo owes its distinctive hue to a diet that includes that includes shrimp and algae, which contain carotenoids that, when metabolized, create those fiery-colored feathers.

Jonathan Ross/iStock/Getty Images

During migration, snow geese travel in large flocks and stick to fairly narrow routes that provide winds to follow, good visibility, and precipitation-free periods.

Spondylolithesis/iStock/Getty Images

The king vulture is more colorful than other vultures and, unlike other colorful birds, it is bald, which is believed to help prevent disease-laden animal remains from festering in dense plumage.

miroslav_1/iStock/Getty Images

Lapwings often build their nests in rough or broken ground to help camouflage the eggs.

Andrew Linscott/E+/Getty Images

Known for their smarts, blue jays can mimic the calls of hawks to let other jays know a hawk is nearby.

GummyBone/iStock/Getty Images

Mandarin duck males In spring and early summer have elaborate, colorful plumage. Females are a little less eye-catching, with gray feathers and a muted bill. After the mating season, the males’ feathers molt to brown and gray as well.

Vicki Jauron, Babylon and Beyond Photography/Moment/Getty Images

In the vast landscape of Mongolia’s Altai Mountains, ancient Kazakh hunters on horseback used eagles to track their prey. The tradition was passed down through generations. Today, the practice has become a source of tourism revenue from visitors who pay to see the famed birds in action.

Timothy Allen/Stone/Getty Images

The post Birds: The World’s Most Remarkable Creatures appeared first on LIFE.

One morning, some years ago when I was living in New York City, I gathered Kaya into an old blue shawl and carried him eight blocks to the animal clinic to be put to sleep. He had been my cat since I was in the ninth grade. I named him after the Bob Marley album. “Nineteen years is a long time for a domestic short hair,” the vet said, stroking him.

Kaya still had a little life in him at the end. On the walk over to the clinic he batted at my chin from inside his wrap. I talked to him matter-of-factly, telling him about a recent CNN/New York Times poll that had voted him one of the seven best cats in the Northeast. I often told him things like this over the years: my version of coochy-coochy-coo.

Kaya always tolerated the stuff about the polls, though he must have known he wasn’t all that. Not compared to his brother Korduroy, anyway. Korduroy did things you’d tell people about. He would stand in the road near the STOP sign, for example, and when a car pulled up, he’d jump on the hood and peer into the windshield. Kaya would watch this impassively, and he also looked on when Korduroy engaged in elaborate play-fighting games with the neighbor’s German shepherd. Next to Korduroy, a skilled small-game hunter who knocked on our front door by putting a paw into the mail-slot, Kaya seemed a simpleton.

He was docile and deliberate and he purred a lot. He didn’t much go for killing things but he got into sudden, spirited battles with ball-point pens and dangling extension cords. He had white mittens on his front paws, white knee-length stockings on his hind legs, and soft snowy fur around his muzzle, neck, and breast. Otherwise he was cloaked in a hodgepodge of blacks and browns. He had wide, yellow-green eyes. He lay down a lot.

Among me and my immediate family we’ve had maybe a dozen cats over the years—not including the eight kittens that once roamed my parents’ house after Palaleela had her litter—and there is no question that in matters of decency and kindness Kaya was the best of the lot. He let Korduroy eat first. He put up with two-year-olds who tugged his tail. He kept you company. Many cats are keen to human suffering, but none was keener than Kaya. When someone was sad, Kaya always came around. “Mow,” he’d say, and look up at you.

Kaya appreciated good, simple things: being brushed with a fine comb, warm chicken scraps, a scratch behind the ears, weekends on the Cape, a place to sleep at the foot of the bed. How often do we celebrate the life of a cat?

Maybe it was because he didn’t know any tricks that in the last few years of his life, Kaya began to talk. He mewed incessantly. His most common issuance was a loud, plaintive wail that sounded more like a human baby than any animal I’ve heard. “Dude, you’ve got a kid over there?” friends would say during phone conversations. My professional acquaintances knew him too. I’d be interviewing someone, and when Kaya’s voice filled the phone lines I’d sense the person on the other end ignoring it uncomfortably. “I know,” I’d say to Kaya afterward, “it can be hard to be a cat.”

Kaya delivered other sounds besides that trademark yowl. He had a two-beat high-pitched me-ow for when he was playing happily or anticipating food. He gave a short, chirplike mew as a greeting when he walked into a room. His long trilling mew meant he wanted to go out. A low, guttural “reowwl” said he was encountering another cat. An airy half-mew, half-yawn meant he was waking up, and Kaya’s odd, unnerving series of yips told you he sensed a thunderstorm on its way. Whatever Kaya’s agenda, the only sure way to quiet him was to take him onto your lap.

The mewing became a backdrop to my life that did not fade until the very end. When I made the appointment at the clinic, Kaya had been sick for several weeks. Thyroid condition. He slept nearly all the time and he couldn’t keep his medicine down. He stopped jumping up onto the bed at night. He kept to a corner of the apartment, venturing out every few hours to stare into his water dish and take a few half-hearted laps. When his mewing died down, a strange silence settled upon the apartment. Around that time he stopped eating.

It got to me, of course. I tried to tempt him with his favorite foods. Friends came over to tell Kaya good-bye. The night before we went to the clinic I was sitting on the couch—quiet, glum, and staring off. I guess Kaya could tell I was in a rotten way. I looked down when I felt him rubbing weakly against my shins. He peered up at me. “Mow,” he said, and then he slumped back over to the corner to rest.

The next morning I carried him in the crook of my arm. I talked to him as if nothing were wrong. At the clinic I set him on a table in a small greenish room and stroked him until I could feel a faint purr in his breast. The vet was there too, and Kaya, with what seemed like great effort, gave a final, soft meow.

His life was gentle, I tell people, and you could have learned from him.

The special issue Cats: Companions in Life is available for purchase here.

Yevgen Romanenko/Moment/Shutterstock

Kittens can sleep up to 20 hours a day, but this one woke all the way up to smile for the camera.

jdross75/Shutterstock

This fluffy cat was in a playful mood; feline personalities begin to emerge at around five weeks, which is when they begin to be weaned.

Evdoha_spb/Shutterstock

Ancient Egyptians honored cats by preserving them as mummies.

Daniel Simon/Gamma-Rapho/Shutterstock

A Bengal cat named Tobysden Pyrrha posed for a studio portrait after participating in the 2018 GCCF Supreme Cat Show in Birmingham, England.

Shirlaine Forrest/WireImage/Shutterstock

This boy, a Dutch billiards prodigy, fed cream to his cat in 1953.

Nat Farbman/The LIFE Picture Collection © Meredith Corporation

Brownie drank milk straight from the cow as Blackie waited his turn at a dairy farm in Fresno, Calif., in 1953.

Nat Farbman The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

It looks like this dog, cat and mouse were considering acting out the food chain, but this was in fact a friendly gathering of the household pets of the Lyng family in Denmark, 1955.

Jytte Bjerregaard Muller/The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

This Siamese cat escaped up a pole in Carlsbad, N.M. in 1962, and hoped the cocker spaniel in pursuit would obey the sign.

Bettmann/Shutterstock

Sometimes cats and dogs do get along.

Chris Swanda/EyeEm/Shutterstock

Diana wrote in her diary at the desk in her sitting room in Kensington Palace.

DenisNata/Shutterstock

Oscar, a hospice cat, who had an uncanny knack for predicting when nursing home patients were going to die, walked past an activity room at the Steere House Nursing and Rehabilitation Center in Providence, R.I. David Dosa profiled Oscar in his 2011 book, “Making Rounds With Oscar: The Extraordinary Gift of an Ordinary Cat.

Stew Milne/AP/REX/Shutterstock

Scarlett the cat, whose eyes were singed shut after saving her kittens during a building fire, snuggled with her new owner, writer Karen Wellen in 1997; Scarlett’s eyes healed.

Taro Yamasaki/The LIFE Images Collection/Shutterstock

The post Cats: Companions in Life appeared first on LIFE.

Caribou were once plentiful in pine tree state, during the early years of the United States, but then because of hunting and disease destroyed the population around the turn of the century.

But in 1963, Maine attempted to restore its population, by working out a trade with Newfoundland. They swung a wildlife swap. Maine sent Canada 320 grouse, and Newfoundland agreed to hand over 24 caribou. These weren’t just any 24 caribou, either. Six were males, but eighteen of group were pregnant females. With all those young ones on the way, the LIFE story about this plan sounded a hopeful note: “Maine hopes its herd will be multiplied come spring.”

The process took some effort.

Caribou being prepared for their journey.

Photo by Fritz Goro.

Caribou being flown to Maine.

Photo by Fritz Goro.

The Caribou were brought to Mount Katahdin in Maine’s Baxter State Park.

Photo by Fritz Goro.

In Maine but before being released into the wild, the caribou attracted the curious.

Photo by Fritz Goro.

The caribou were penned before released so they could be tagged and given penicillin shots.

Photo by Fritz Goro.

Did all these effort succeed? Not really. A recent report on Maine’s state website looked back on the 1963 effort, and Matthew LaRoche, Superintendent of the Allagash Wilderness Waterway, wrote of the caribou of the class of ’63: “They dispersed after three or four years and were never seen again.” Maine again tried to bring in caribou from Newfoundland in 1993, but failed once more. The second time around the caribou—a dozen of them were this time—were fitted with radio collars, which means that the defeat was a little more detailed: “They all died or migrated out of the area.”

Caribou didn’t last in Maine, experts believe, because their habitat changed. Old growth forests had been cut down and replaced with new growth forests, and the younger trees didn’t produce the kind of lichen that are a staple of the caribou diet. Also, the whitetail deer population had increased, and those deer which carry a brainworm that doesn’t affect deer but is deadly to moose or caribou. While it is speculated that a caribou replenishment might have succeeded with a bigger initial herd—maybe closer to 100—that’s a big and expensive project. So if caribou are to come back to Maine anytime soon, no one will be buying them a ticket.

The post When Maine Got Its Caribou Back appeared first on LIFE.