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The following is adapted from LIFE’s new special issue on bears, available at newsstands and online:

Globally, bear populations are plummeting, with several species designated as endangered or vulnerable to extinction. But in many parts of North America, people are seeing more bears than ever. Since the 1970s, American bears in the lower 48 states have been expanding their territories, and enthusiasts need not travel into dense forests to spot a black bear or grizzly. Many can just look into their backyards. In the early ’70s, there were fewer than 100 black bears in New Jersey; today there are about 3,000 and they have been found in every county in the Garden State. 

Over the past several decades, Americans have been cutting down more forests and developing commercial properties on lands that have long belonged to bears. With less space to roam, bears are becoming our new next-door neighbors, taking dips in swimming pools, lounging in hammocks, and rifling through garden sheds. Their hijinks, often caught on camera, attract millions of views on social media and portray bears as approachable and playful. But they are still predators, whose tolerance of humans has its limits. “The victim wasn’t off walking in the woods,” Charlie Rose reported in a 2014 CBS News program about a woman in Florida mauled by a bear. “She was attacked in her own suburban yard.” She survived, with 10 stitches and 30 staples to the head.

Since 1960, Florida’s human population has increased from 5 million to more than 22 million. To accommodate this surge, 7 million acres of forest and wetlands have been destroyed for new homes. So it might have been the woman’s backyard, but to the bear, it was also his.

If you find yourself in bear country, which today could be deep in Yosemite or just off New Jersey’s Garden State Parkway, there’s plenty of advice to avoid conflicts. If you encounter a bear, dispensing a canister of bear spray at the animal is more effective than any air horn or sound. While you’re urged to carry it in certain national parks, the product could be dangerous if not used according to its directions. In 2022, the Oklahoma Department of Wildlife Conservation tweeted: “Listen, bear spray DOES NOT work like bug spray. We would like to not have to say that again.”

Most bears will avoid humans if they hear them coming, but if a bear has noticed you, the U.S. National Park Service provides some general tips: Stand still and identify yourself as a human by talking calmly and slowly waving your arms, so the bear doesn’t mistake you for a prey animal. “It may come closer or stand on its hind legs to get a better look or smell,” notes the park service’s website. “A standing bear is usually curious, not threatening.” 

Hike and travel in groups, as a collection of people are usually noisier—and smellier—than a lone person. A bear is more likely to notice your group and stay away. And remember that bears get more confident and linger when human food is involved. Keep your fare away and hidden; otherwise it could encourage a bear. If the bear is stationary, move away slowly and sideways. This movement allows you to keep an eye on the bear while avoiding tripping. Plus, moving sideways is non-threatening to bears.

Ultimately, stay calm and remember that most bears don’t want to attack you—they just want to be left alone. A bear woofing, yawning, growling, or snapping their jaws may just be bluffing their way out of a potential encounter. Continue to talk to the bear in low tones, keeping it calm until it leaves. Wild animals are dangerous and can be enjoyed from a distance, and hopefully that distance will widen after decades of encroachment on each other’s turf. And those who live on the periphery of their habitats know that the beauty of bears is worth protecting.

Here is a selection of images from LIFE’s new special issue on bears.

Alatom/Getty Images

Teddy Roosevelt’s act of kindness toward a bear during a 1902 hunt was the seed what would become known as the “teddy bear.”

Getty Images

Brown bears are the most widely distributed bear species in the world, and are found in northern North America, Europe and Asia.

Mari Perry/500px/Getty Images

Brown bear cubs, after being protected by their mother early in life, often briefly stay with their littermates before going on to lead independent lives.

Getty Images

When salmon migrate upriver, bears gather for a hearty meal.

© Gerald and Buff Corsi / Focus on Nature/Getty Images/iStockphoto

For polar bears, climate change is threatening their way of life.

© PAUL SOUDERS | WORLDFOTO/Getty Images

The koalas of Australia look like bears but are in fact marsupials.

B.S.P.I./Corbis Documentary/Getty Images

Bears’ teeth are similar to humans, with broad, flat molars that can be used to grind food.

Irena Anna Sowinska/Getty Images

The post Bears: Strong, Wise, and Increasingly Among Us appeared first on LIFE.

It is, without question, one of the most famous, most frequently reproduced animal photographs ever made. But photographer Hansel Mieth‘s own attitude toward her 1938 portrait of a sodden rhesus monkey hunched in the water off of Puerto Rico was, to put it bluntly, conflicted. In fact, the German-born Mieth (1909-1998) memorably called the creature in the picture “the monkey on my back.”

As Mieth explained in a 1993 interview with John Loengard, published in his book, LIFE Photographers: What They Saw, she made the photograph while covering a Harvard Medical School primate study on tiny Cayo Santiago, off the east coast of Puerto Rico:

One afternoon all the doctors were away [Mieth told Loengard], and a little kid came running to me and said, “A monkey’s in the water.”

I came down, and that monkey was really going hell-bent for something. . . . I threw my Rolleiflex on my back and swam out. Finally, I was facing the monkey. I don’t think he liked me, but he sat on that coral reef, and I took about a dozen shots.

When she got back to New York, Mieth learned that the joke around the LIFE offices was that she’d produced a striking portrait of Henry Luce, the founder and publisher of TIME, LIFE, Fortune and other magazines: evidently, some of her colleagues felt that the rhesus in the water looked like their boss. When asked by Loengard, six decades later, if she felt the portrait did resemble Luce, Mieth was diplomatic.

I didn’t see Luce that much. He had lots of other things to do rather than talk with photographers. . . . But I suppose it does, in a way. It all depends on what kind of mood you are in. To me it looks like the monkey’s depicting the state of the world at the time. It was dark and somber and angry. There were a lot of dark clouds swirling around. I heard from many people that they were scared when they looked at it.

Today, the monkey on Mieth’s back still commands our gaze, inviting us perhaps challenging us to project our own fears, anxieties and speculations on to a picture, and a primate, that never gets old.

FINAL NOTE: While a half-dozen lesser pictures from the assignment in Puerto Rico were published in the Jan. 2, 1939, issue of LIFE, Mieth’s now-iconic monkey photo appeared a few weeks later, in the Jan. 16 issue accompanied by the caption, “A misogynist seeks solitude in the Caribbean off Puerto Rico.”

According to the magazine, a primatologist explained that “the chatter of innumerable female monkeys had impelled this neurotic bachelor to seek escape from the din” by fleeing the jungle and making his way into the waves.

Seventy-five years later, that particular theory about how and why the rhesus was out there in the water still sounds as reasonable as any other.

Ben Cosgrove is the Editor of LIFE.com

A rhesus monkey in Puerto Rico, 1938.

Hansel Mieth—The LIFE Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A baby rhesus monkey climbed on the chest of Michael Tomlin, a primatologist who cared for a rhesus colony in Humacao, Puerto Rico, 1938.

Hansel Mieth/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

This photo, which ran at a full page in LIFE in 1939, was labelled “Rhesus: Life Size” to show readers how small the monkeys were.

Hansel Mieth/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A rhesus monkey ate a flower in Humacao, Puerto Rico, 1939

Hansel Mieth/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

A rhesus monkey searched for food in Cayo Santiago, Humacao, Puerto Rico, 1938.

Hansel Mieth/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

Rhesus monkeys searched for food on Cayo Santiago, Humacao, Puerto Rico, 1938.

Hansel Mieth/Life Picture Collection/Shutterstock

The post Behind the Picture: Hansel Mieth’s Wet, Unhappy Monkey appeared first on LIFE.

The following is from LIFE’s new special issue Apes: Their Remarkable World, available at newsstands and online:

Two rangers quietly sat on a platform 25 feet up in a tree with a large pile of bananas and red buckets filled with milk. As I watched, a dozen orangutans quickly climbed and swung over to grab the fruit and stick their heads in the buckets for a drink. The orange-haired apes then lounged around, undisturbed by the humans alongside them. 

Half a mile further into Borneo’s Kabili-Sepilok rainforest it was much less hectic. The air felt humid. I could smell the earth and hear the droning sound of cicadas filling the forest as I avoided the leeches dropping from above. Up ahead I spied another feeding platform. The rangers there sat alone as they scanned the trees but saw no signs of orangutans eager to eat. One of the men bellowed out an apelike long call to announce their presence. Soon a single female with an infant gripping its fur lowered from the canopy above. She snatched some fruit and quickly disappeared back into the jungle. 

The Sepilok Orangutan Rehabilitation Centre near Sandakan, Malaysia, serves as a temporary home for the apes. Infants rescued from habitats destroyed by logging and orphans whose mothers have been killed by poachers are treated and cared for, their beseeching hands reaching out to anyone who enters the nursery. “It’s difficult when the orangutans come in very young,” Reynard Gondipon, the center’s veterinarian, told me as he showed me through the facility. “I urge the rangers to hug them every now and then.” As they grow, the orangutans are moved out onto the grounds of the 9,000-acre center. There these naturally solitary creatures live alongside others as they learn the lore of forest life: how to climb, build nests, search for food, survive. Slowly, like the mother and child who disappeared into the canopy, they embrace the wilds. Once it is determined that they can fend for themselves, Sepilok’s staff transport them into the forest far away from humanity. 

I have long been fascinated by our closest living relatives and our linked ancient ancestry. In the early 1980s I was thrilled to hear presentations by all three of the primatologists known as the Trimates—Jane Goodall, Dian Fossey, and Biruté Galdikas—when they were in New York to discuss their studies of chimpanzees, gorillas, and orangutans. I recall Fossey mentioning a visit to the American Museum of Natural History’s Akeley Hall of African Mammals. While there, she stopped in front of the mountain gorilla diorama. The creatures behind the plate glass had been shot in 1921 by naturalist Carl Akeley during an expedition he led for the museum. Akeley soon after convinced the Belgian government—which controlled the land where those gorillas once lived—to create a national park to protect the apes. Fossey spoke of how she mourned the taxidermic creatures forever frozen in the case yet appreciated Akeley’s and the museum’s efforts to study and save those still in the wild. Of course, Fossey would die only a few years later as she herself fought to protect gorillas in the remote rainforests of Rwanda’s Virunga mountains. 

The work Fossey, Galdikas, and Goodall dedicated their lives to is not for the faint of heart. Galdikas recently described to me the hardships she endured studying Borneo’s orangutans: “You are sitting in the swamp. It is so primeval. You couldn’t stand the buzzing of the mosquitos, the buzzing of the other insects, the horseflies that bite you. They really hurt, just a sharp hurt. And of course, the leeches.” But she also experienced true joy observing the magnificent animals, recalling how on Christmas Day 1971 at the start of her time doing her research she watched a mother and its child emerge from its tree nest. Galdikas called the sight “the best Christmas present.” 

Humans and the great apes (chimpanzees, bonobos, gorillas, and orangutans) and smaller apes (gibbons) share a common past. Our species diverged millions of years ago and evolved. Earth’s human population was about 1 million in 10,000 BCE, and 3 billion when Goodall arrived in Tanzania in 1960. There are now 8 billion people on earth. While the human population has exploded, that is not the case for apes. In 1900 there were more than 1 million chimpanzees in the wild. At most, a third of that number now exist. Orangutans have dropped from 300,000 to roughly 100,000. 

Many more will perish, as the human population is expected to reach 10 billion by 2100. Apes’ numbers have been decimated, as they lose their habitats to deforestation and their lives to poachers. While there are laws to protect these species, trafficking is highly profitable. Each year, thousands of young apes are captured, with baby gorillas being offered for more than half a million dollars on social media sites like WhatsApp. 

There are, though, hopeful signs for some ape populations as they and their habitats are being protected. The mountain gorillas in Uganda’s Bwindi Impenetrable Forest have seen their numbers increase from 254 in 1981 to more than 1,000 today, due to intense conservation practices and ecotourism. 

To preserve their habitats, governments and organizations have trained locals to manage the forests. This creates jobs and encourages communities to protect what they have. The Dian Fossey Gorilla Fund has trackers who monitor daily the largest of the apes where Fossey set up camp back in 1967. “These guys are the front line of conservation,” says Tara Stoinski, president of the fund. “They are the reason that these animals are still on the planet. These mountains are cold, they’re wet, and they are tracking up to 13,000 feet 365 days a year. They are true conservation heroes.”

Galdikas’ Camp Leakey and her Orangutan Care Center and Quarantine facility in the Indonesian village of Pasir Panjang 700 miles southwest of Sandakan similarly cares for and rewilds apes. And the new 117,000 acre Ekolo ya Bonobo, created by Claudine André in rainforests in the northwest of the Democratic Republic of Congo, has become home to freed bonobos. There are fewer than 2,500 Javan silvery gibbons left in the wild, and the Aspinall Foundation in conjunction with the Indonesian government has successfully reintroduced two dozen into protected areas. 

Such work is an uphill and often dangerous battle. Legions of researchers, scientists, and volunteers have devoted their lives to watching over, studying, and protecting our magnificent relatives. As the great primatologist George Schaller wrote of the gorillas in National Geographic in 1995, which holds true for all the great and smaller apes, “We have a common past, but only humans have been given the mental power to worry about their fate.”

Enjoy this selection of photos from LIFE’s new special issue Apes: Their Remarkable World.

Nick Ledger/Alamy; (background) Gudkov Andrey/Shutterstock

A chimpanzee mother and her baby at the Conkouati-Douli National Park in the Republic of Congo.

Gudkov Andrey/Shutterstock

As it is with human children, chimpanzees like to have fun. Playtime is an important developmental activity and can lead to breathy laughter. Three-year-old Gizmo and his 8-year-old brother Gimli enjoyed a bit of roughhousing at Tanzania’s Gombe Stream National Park.

Anup Shah/Stone/Getty

The bonobo is often mistaken for a chimpanzee, but it smaller and slimmer.

Gudkov Andrey/Shutterstock

Gorillas are the largest living primates.

P. Wegner/imageBROKER/Shutterstock

Orangutans like these have the most intense mother-child relationship of any primate besides humans.

Freder/E+/Getty

The Siamang Gibbon makes sounds that can be heard two miles away.

Steve Clancy Photography/Moment/Getty

A lar gibbon and its child swing through the forest canopy.

Kittipong Chotitana/Shutterstock

The post Apes: Their Remarkable World appeared first on LIFE.

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