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Hope Ryden, Wildlife Protector and Photographer, Dies at 87

In “Lily Pond: Four Years With a Family of Beavers” (1989), she described beavers’ sociable dam-building, kit-rearing and playful shoving matches, observed in Harriman State Park in Rockland County, N.Y.

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Ms. Ryden wrote two dozen books on wildlife, including “America’s Last Wild Horses” (1970).

Credit
Lyons Press

“Like Japanese wrestlers, the contenders would square off, grip one another’s loose ruff with their black satiny hands, and then drive forward with all their might until the stronger one propelled the weaker backward into deep water,” Ms. Ryden wrote.

“Breast-to-breast, cheek-to-cheek, heads tilted skyward, eyes rolled upward so that only membranes showed,” she continued, “their resemblance to samurai warriors was uncanny, both in bodily shape and in the martial strategies they employed. They inflicted no wounds; theirs was a contest of strength, not an outlet for vengeance.”

Hope Elaine Ryden was born on Aug. 1, 1929, in St. Paul, Minn. Her father, E. E. Ryden, was a Lutheran minister who helped unify four denominations to form the Lutheran Church of America. Her mother, the former Agnes Johnson, was an organist and pianist.

In addition to her brother, she is survived by her husband, John Miller.

After earning a bachelor’s degree in 1951 from the University of Iowa, she was a fashion model in addition to her work as a flight attendant. In 1958, she was a crew member aboard Pan Am’s inaugural trans-Atlantic jet passenger flight.

Ms. Ryden spent more than 25 years as a writer, director and producer of documentary films, beginning with Drew Associates and also working for ABC News.

Among her first documentaries was “Jane” (1962), which profiled the actress Jane Fonda at 25 as she prepared for her starring role in “The Fun Couple” on Broadway. The show flopped, but the documentary, produced by Ms. Ryden and directed by D. A. Pennebaker, became a classic of fly-on-the-wall filmmaking.

In 1965, she and her production team, including the cinematographer Abbot Mills, immersed themselves in the lives of Richard and Mildred Loving, the Virginia couple who challenged the state’s law against interracial marriage.

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Ms. Ryden’s devotion to animal rights often extended to creatures that had been spurned as varmints by sheep ranchers, pet owners and backyard gardeners.

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Penguin Random House

Ms. Loving, a black woman, and Mr. Loving, a white man, had been sentenced to a year in prison for violating an anti-miscegenation statute that was still valid in Virginia and two dozen other states. In 1967, the United States Supreme Court declared the Virginia law unconstitutional, voiding all race-based restrictions on marriage.

Ms. Ryden’s footage was not immediately screened publicly, but was incorporated into “The Loving Story,” an Emmy Award-winning documentary released in 2011, in which she also appeared.

Her other documentaries included one that followed two Peace Corps nurses in Malaya and another on a Boston man who saved some 9,000 animals in Suriname from starvation or drowning.

She devoted her later years to animal-rights advocacy, passionately objecting to the treatment of wild horses as livestock to be slaughtered wantonly.

In addition to her books, Ms. Ryden wrote for National Geographic, Audubon, Smithsonian and The New York Times Magazine.

Her commitment to animal rights earned her a place in the pantheon of scientific adventurers embraced admiringly by Kay Redfield Jamison, a psychiatrist and author, in her book “Exuberance: The Passion for Life” (2004).

Ms. Ryden’s devotion to the cause often extended to creatures that had been spurned as varmints by sheep ranchers, pet owners and backyard gardeners.

The resurgence of the Eastern coyote, for example, reminded her of “a sunflower that has penetrated a cement sidewalk,” she once wrote, adding that “the event suggests that man’s strangulation grip on nature may not yet be fatal.”

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