|
|||
|
Five good things · Three minutes
|
|||
|
honeyletter is on iPhone and Android
|
|||
| |||
|
KINDNESS • Good News Network
Strangers stopped their cars one by one to free the owlScott thought it was a dead hawk. Sharon asked him to back up.
A great horned owl tangled in a barbed wire fence near Spearfish, South Dakota, was freed last week by a group of strangers who stopped their cars one by one to help. Sharon and Scott Jacobs spotted it while driving past private land. Scott thought it was a dead hawk. Sharon asked him to back up, walked toward the lump of feathers, and found it very much alive. They needed a bag for the owl's head and gloves for its talons. Scott had the bag. A passing driver named Brandon had the gloves, then produced the wire cutters nobody else had brought. The landowner's daughter arrived, called her father, and got the go-ahead to cut the bird loose. A veterinarian removed two steel barbs and said the owl would fly again. "Everybody's goal was to get this beautiful creature taken care of," Sharon told Cowboy State Daily. Black Hills Raptor Center plans to release it where it was found. Sharon intends to be there. Read the full story → | |||
| |||
|
NATURE • Optimist Daily
12,000 neighbors signed up to water Berlin's street treesThe city's crews cannot keep up. So the neighbors picked up watering cans.
Berlin has roughly a million street trees, and 12,000 people have now signed up to help water them. A free app called Gie\u00df den Kiez, German for "water your neighborhood," maps more than 900,000 trees and calculates each one's needs based on age, species and recent rainfall. Volunteers log their waterings, see when a tree last got a drink, and locate the nearest public pump. On June 27, when Berlin hit an all-time high of 39.9 degrees Celsius, people poured 8,000 liters over the city's trees in a single day. Anna Mehrl\u00e4nder, who has led the project for over a year, expected people to care. She did not expect this. "I was really surprised at just how deeply people care about trees," she says, "for many people it's almost like caring for a pet." Amanda Gl\u00e4ser-Bligh carries 20 liters up and down her stairs each week for a linden she named Linda. Passersby stop and stare. Then they ask, and then they look up at the tree a little differently. Read the full story → | |||
| |||
|
PROGRESS • Reasons to be Cheerful
Her survey brought 35 percent more students back to lunchShe asked 4,000 classmates what was wrong. Someone actually listened.
Leslie Gomez Rivera skipped lunch rather than eat in the cafeteria at Midwood High in Brooklyn. She preferred the library, where she could talk with friends even if that meant eating nothing. Then she heard about Youth Food Advocates, a New York City program that trains students to research school food and push for changes. At 16, Rivera built a survey and circulated it across her 4,000-student school. About 100 answered. The verdict was more complicated than "bad." Popcorn chicken was a hit. So was fruit. Students also wanted the foods they ate at home. Rivera brought the findings to the cafeteria manager, who was surprised a student had arrived with organized feedback. "At the end of the day, this is what you guys are eating," he told her. The redesigned cafeteria reopened to full use. By December 2025, more than 200 cafeterias had been renovated, and participation rose 35 percent at redesigned high schools. Rivera's younger siblings now eat there. They find lunch more enjoyable. Read the full story → | |||
| |||
|
KINDNESS • Sunny Skyz
A note defending a 16-year-old drew hundreds of thousands of fans.They braced for backlash. The internet showed up with cones instead.
A 25-cent price difference set off an angry customer at Coldstuff Ice Cream in Blackstone, Massachusetts, and the 16-year-old behind the counter took the brunt of it. So the owners, Dave Forgit and his brother Kevin Miller, posted a blunt note on Facebook. "They are children," Forgit wrote. "This job, for most of them, is their first. They are going to make mistakes." He added that it could all be fixed with a smile. "It's ice cream for crying out loud. Grow up and act your age." The brothers braced for backlash. Instead the post drew hundreds of thousands of likes and thousands of shares, many from adults who remembered their own first jobs. One commenter wished they'd had a boss who had their back as a teenage screw-up. Customers started showing up just to buy a cone in support. Miller described a worker looking at him with puppy-dog eyes, asking if they'd really messed up that badly. His answer: "No, this is ice cream."
| |||
| |||
|
KINDNESS • GreaterGood
She called the shelter. The kitten followed her inside.She called the shelter to find the owner. The kitten had other plans.
A black kitten chose a stranger on a sidewalk in Fort Dodge, Iowa, and then declined every opportunity to leave. The woman, who submitted her story as Kayla, came home from work to find the kitten sitting on her walkway, watching her. When she got within two feet, the cat leapt into her arms and started purring. Kayla set her down and went inside to call a shelter about a missing kitten. By the time she finished, she looked down to find the kitten had followed her in. No one had reported the cat missing. A vet confirmed she had no microchip and no signs of disease, then offered a diagnosis of a different kind. "A cute little black kitty adopted you," the vet said. The kitten had made her decision on the sidewalk and simply waited for the paperwork to catch up. Read the full story → | |||
|
|
|||
|
THE HONEYMAP
Sweet news is everywhere, if you know where to look.
honeyletter+ is open — the whole map, the button whenever you need it, no sponsors ever. Get the whole map →
|
|||
|
With love, The Editor
|
|||
|
A small privacy note: our updated privacy policy takes effect October 23. Two things are new. The app now sends anonymous crash reports (no name, no email, nothing you've written) so we can fix bugs. And your jar stays on your phone; we never see it. Questions? Just reply to this email.
|
|||
|
honeyletter
|
