On being here: Riding the Blue Ridge Parkway

This is a sense-of-place essay I started writing before I became pregnant. It’s harder to find the time to ride now that Haydn is here.  I still ride, though hardly as many miles as when I wrote this piece. I’m posting it now, finally, out of a sense of longing for wanting to get back to this place where I once was, this groove of being so intensely aware of the Blue Ridge Parkway, and of paying attention to how it changes day-to-day and season-to-season. 

Not far down the road from my home in Asheville is a shortcut through a sparse tree line that edges Bull Mountain Road. The humble dirt trail is a bit like the magical armoire in Narnia—when I pass through it I’m transported to a different world, the otherness of the Blue Ridge Parkway’s rolling black pavement, which snakes through the Appalachian mountains. I pick it up is southwest of Mt. Mitchell, elevation 6,683 feet, and the highest point in the East.

Five summers ago, my husband and I rode the entire Blue Ridge Parkway from north to south, all 469 miles in five days. We rode for three days, took a rest day in Asheville, and then finished in Cherokee two days later. I found the descent into Asheville thrilling — the road kept unfurling down, down, down. We lost elevation by the minute. I had no idea, then, that I would one day live a few minutes from that same stretch of parkway, and that I would be blessed enough to be able to ride it everyday of the week, if I so wished.

But that’s just what happened, and after we moved to western N.C. in January of 2011, I fell into the habit  of rolling my bike out the back door by eight a.m., then winding through a series of streets for a mile and a half to the end of Bull Mountain Road where the twenty-foot-long dirt trail lies off the shoulder. The trail pops me out near mile-marker 382, which is fondly associated in these parts with the Folk Arts Center and Big Boy, an amiable, often-seen local black bear. As the skinny tires of my Orbea road bike pinball through the obstacle course of roots, I peer through the trees both ways for cars and then dart out onto the parkway. I turn north and begin to climb up to Craven Gap, then past Bull Gap, through the unlit Tanbark Ridge tunnel (forever uneasy for passing cars), past the Bull Creek overlook and up to the Lane Pinnacle overlook.

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Haydn Søren Ertl

I’m happy to announce that Haydn Søren Ertl arrived on June 9, a wide-awake and alert baby boy weighing in at 6 pounds, 6 ounces and measuring 19.5 inches long! Both Haydn and I are healthy and doing great. He came three days before his due date and I had a (mostly) natural birth, with no pain medicine. I say “mostly” because I needed to be induced with pitocin, something I was not at all happy about. But with a little help from my husband and doula we made it through the labor without any other medications (just a lot of apple juice!).

Haydn, one hour old.

Haydn, ten days old.

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Gravidus

Gravid. Enciente. Carrying. Heavy. Expecting. With child. Pregnant.

All of these words describe… me. But my favorite colorful phrase was when a bartender at the barbecue joint down the street said I looked like I was “smuggling basketballs.” Yes, basketballs — plural. (No, I’m not having twins.) And that was two months ago. Now that I’m within two weeks of my due date, a neighbor who saw me out walking this week said I looked like a “bean pole with a watermelon stuffed up [my] shirt.” Um… thanks?

I’m not sure that anything could have prepared me for the many changes of pregnancy and becoming a mother. But then again I’m a human, and a tad neurotic at times… and as such I tend to overthink things.

Wild animals don’t have these hang-ups. They simply procreate. (Sometimes I wish I was a wild animal, to escape all the overthinking I tend to do. But then I take a hot bath, and I thank the universe I’m human enough to enjoy such a simple pleasure.)

April and May are the months when most red wolves birth their litters. The females spend time searching out a den site where they bring their pups into the world. These are often subteranean holes they excavate from a slope or embankment. A hill in the woods is nice, but they’ll make do with a canal bank in a farmer’s field too. Their classic subteranean formation has a short entry, then a right turn into the den chamber. Other dens are simple pockets in the earth, encircled by brush. Still others are above-ground “bowl” formations, simple shallow depressions scraped out of the earth — usually in scrub or forest so dense that the vegetation itself is a barrier to other animals finding or encountering the delicate, blind puppies. I would have loved to take a trip down to the red wolf recovery area to visit the biologists and perhaps tag along as they spent time in April and May walking-in on the red wolf dens to document this year’s puppy crop. Sadly, my swollen belly precludes den crawling this season. My own nesting instincts kicked in about two weeks ago, when I finally had the energy and motivation to transform my office, shared with my husband, into the baby’s nursery. Aren’t nurseries really just dens of the human sort? Like the female breeding wolves, I’ll spend the next couple of whiles holed up in this newly done-over room with my baby, when it comes, feeding it and protecting it until it’s big and strong enough to be taken out into the world. With this in mind, I can identify in a way with the red wolf’s instinct to create a space she feels safe and protected within.

But the gestational period I’ve been through is nearly 4.5 times as long as a red wolf’s. I’ve no idea how much first-time red wolf mothers learn, but for me the learning curve has been vertical: learning about the physical changes of pregnancy that are common to all women, as well as the inner changes that are unique to each woman. Here are some things I’ve learned:

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Wildlife Services: A true DISservice to wildlife

Wildlife Services sounds like a benign name, right? Yet this little-known government agency in the Department of Agriculture provides the farthest thing from a “service” to wildlife that you could possibly imagine. Don’t be confused… I’m not talking about the Fish and Wildlife Service, which is the Department of Interior agency tasked with recovering endangered species and monitoring all kinds of wildlife. Wildlife Services is diametrically opposed to the FWS. It’s a radically different shadow agency tasked with killing millions of animals each year. I’m not kidding — millions of animals that bear feathers, fur, and teeth. Unfortunately, the bulk of Wildlife Service’s efforts have historically gone into killing predators such as wolves, coyotes and foxes, usually at the behest of the livestock industry which benefits from having fewer wild carnivores on the landscape. And even more unfortunately, they often kill many more species than their intended targets.

Starting last week, the Sacremento Bee published a three-part investigative series on Wildlife Services that was written by veteran environmental reporter Tom Knudson. (Part I, Part II, Part III) According to the Knight Science Journalism Tracker, it took Knudson one year to report and write the stories. They detail an agency out of step with science, and out of sync with modern times. For a truly disturbing inforgraphic, check out this one which details all the animals which Wildlife Services killed on purpose, and by mistake, between 2006 and 2010. (And think, this is only what was reported as by-catch… their trappers and agents have a long history of not always reporting nontarget kills, so these numbers are likely the lowest possible estimates.)

Shortly after the series ran, WildEarth Guardians announced they were suing Wildlife Services… which makes me think they were holding off on their NOI to sue until after Knudson ran his stories so they could use them as leverage for public opinion. (Kind of sneaky, but also exactly what I would have advised them to do if I was running their PR dept.)

As most readers of Wild Muse know, I’m intensely interested in predator ecology and predator conservation. With all that is now known about the importance of predators in our ecosystems, it’s sickening to think that a government agency is working to “control” them through lethal means. Even worse that this is occuring despite evidence that Wildlife Service’s own methods aren’t working (see Knudson’s articles for more on that).

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My year in books

My dream writing and reading studio. (Wiki Commons)

In 2011, one of my New Year’s resolutions was to read more books. As a writer, I love to read. (It actually borders on a compulsion… a former journalism professor termed people like me “cereal box readers” because we read everything around us, even cereal boxes.) But I’d noticed the year before that the bulk of my reading was in the form of magazine articles and online news. I’d drifted away from books, reading just 14 titles in 2010. So last year I made a list of books I wanted to read, and I set aside time to actually sink into them. A few were for research related to my own book, but the bulk were simply ones I felt pulled to.

Last year, I finally made peace with the fact that there are certain books I want to like, usually because they cover a subject I’m interested in, but that’s its okay to not like them at all. Sometimes I think this discrepancy comes about from misleading marketing (it’s positioned as a certain type of book, and maybe the author wanted it to be that type of book, but maybe it’s not really that type at all), but sometimes it’s simply that I expected more out of the story. Maybe I’m just becoming a more discerning reader. I learned the books that I became the most involved with are ones that use a true narrative structure. They don’t simply cover a topic in depth, or report on things related to it; rather, they cover a topic in depth using an actual narrative system that transforms the topic into a beautiful story.

My three favorites from last year’s reading list all achieved this. They are, in no particular order, Shell Games (Craig Welch) for its exciting narrative exposing wildlife smuggling in the Pacific Northwest; The Tiger (John Vaillant) for its gripping true tale of a Siberian tiger which stalked and killed a hunter who had previously injured it deep in Russia’s far western forests; and The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks (Rebecca Skloot), for its skillful and humanistic protrayal of how HeLa cells came to be.

1. The Immortal Life of Henrietta Lacks, Rebecca Skloot
2. Dare County: A brief history, David Stick
3. River of Lakes, Bill Belleville
4. Life in the Treetops, Meg Lowman
5. Wolfer, Carter Niemeyer
6. The Lost Wolves of Japan, Brett Walker
7. Writing Tools: 50 Essential Strategies for a Writer, Roy Peter Clark
8. The Control of Nature, John McPhee
9. The Species Seekers, Richard Coniff
10. Shell Games, by Craig Welch 
11. A History of Hunting in the Great Smoky Mountains, by Bob Plott
12. Another Country, by Christopher Camuto
13. Changes in the Land, by William Cronon
14. The Hunger Games, Suzanne Collins
15. My Mother’s Lover, by David Dobbs
16. Re-Wilding The World, by Caroline Fraser 
17. The Pine Barrens, by John McPhee
18. Out, Out, by Kim MacQueen
19. How to be Alone, by Jonathan Franzen
20. The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival, John Vaillant
21. Merchants of Doubt, by Naomi Orenski
22. The Wolf in the Parlor, Jon Franklin
23. Following the Last Wild Wolves, by Ian MacAllister
24. Pilgrim in the Land of Alligators, Jeff Klinkenberg
25. Manatee Insanity, by Craig Pittman

If you have any science or nature related titles to suggest that you think I may enjoy, please feel free to name some titles in the comments. I have about eight books on my reading list for 2012 so far, but I’ll be looking for another few dozen to put in my queue.

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Wild Muse is on indefinite hiatus

Breeding red wolf female of the Northern Pack, released after the batteries on her telemetry collar were replaced in January 2011. Somewhere west of Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, North Carolina. Photo by DeLene Beeland.

There is a season for everything, I’ve heard, and right now it is the season for losing myself in writing and research. I’m in the thick of things with my book and there never seems to be time left over to devote to anything else. (The book I’m working on is a story about native wolves of the East, Canis rufus, also known as red wolves.) Hopefully late in 2011 I’ll pick back up with blogging. Until then, thanks for reading and make use of Wild Muse’s archives.

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Upcoming: A long break

British Columbia (c) 2011 DeLene Beeland

In July of 2009, I started Wild Muse on a complete lark. It was a slow week with freelance work. Before I knew it, I’d signed up and published my first post. It was about my anguish over songbirds flying into my sliding glass doors located just beyond my seed feeder. Within a short span of time, I stumbled into science blogging and later got on board with ResearchBlogging.org. But my posts have never been solely recaps of science papers. I also occassionaly write personal posts, publish short excerpts from my in-progress book, and travel photos I’ve taken (I’m the sort of gal who comes home from a trip with 500 pictures of trees, rivers and landscapes and two of people…).

Unfortunately, I’m not too sure I can keep Wild Muse up, at least not for the foreseeable future in 2011.

Since last fall, it’s been an extreme — and I mean extreme — hardship to find the time to post regularly. My time is in constant competition between paying work, writing my first book, and living the rest of my life (which, lately, encompassed moving — the house was not ready, so we spent weeks cleaning and fixing things– planning my wedding, rehearsal dinner and brunch, getting married, litigation over a horrific car accident last July, and helping my husband to get his new business off the ground). Each day, I barely have time to issue a few tweets, much less spend a few hours blogging.

The frustrating part is that I see ideas for blog posts everywhere. After our wedding, I planned on writing a post about the sustainable choices we built into our vendor selections. (We bought some of the flowers from a local gardener who sells wildflowers by the bucket, the caterer used locally-farmed rainbow trout and locally-grown vegetables, and the outdoor venue was located on a 50-acre conservation easement on a 500-acre working farm in the Appalachian foothills which raises Polled Herefords, chickens, goats, llamas and grows alfalfa hay.) I also planned on writing a post on the active broad-wing hawk nest I found down the street where we’ve regularly spotted three nearly-adult chicks hanging out on the nest’s rim on warm days. Then there was the post I planned on large mammal diversity in the Blue Ridge Parkway park, which lays about a five minute bike ride from my back door. (There are black bears, smaller than those found at the N.C. coast here, and bobcats, but much fewer deer than compared to the Piedmont and cougars were extirpated long ago.)

The rub is that while I want to blog, now that the post-wedding dust has settled, I realize that I’m much too behind on book progress. I’m trying to write one chapter per month, and I’m three weeks behind on completing chapter eight. (Which is likely the hardest chapter of the whole book because it covers different theories on the origins of red wolves.) I was also supposed to start writing for Carolina Public Press this month, but I’ve had to put that off for another month as well.

This year, I set a goal for myself to read more. A lot more. Particularly books. If I’m going to build a career as a science writer, I need to improve my writing craft. So I set out on a journey to study other writers’ work and analyze their methods. Since January, I’ve read 14 non-fiction books. The ones that I liked the best, I’ve reviewed here on Wild Muse. There are two more I will review soon: The Species Seekers, by Richard Conniff, and Shell Games, by Craig Welch. After I get those reviews up, there is a strong likelihood that I will put Wild Muse on hiatus indefinitely. Or at least until  my book manuscript is in the mail to the publisher at the year’s end.

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Till we meet again…

View from the meadow where we'll be married.

The poems and readings are selected, the cake and wine are paid for, the dress fits and the flower order is confirmed. By this time next Saturday, I’ll be a married lady. With the wedding — and our relatives and friends — nearly upon us, I’ll likely not have time to post anthing new until after mid-May. (Frankly, it’s been a struggle to post new material the past few months with all the pre-wedding planning!) Until then, many thanks to all who read Wild Muse and to those who tweet links to it.

Much belated thanks are also due to Ed Yong of NERS for selecting my post on Ethiopian Forest Churches for his first set of “tip jar” stories, which are basically science blog posts he recognizes as “science writing I’d pay for,” (a.k.a. posts written for free that were of the type he’d be willing to lay out some dollars for.) I was given about $25 through his tip jar, which I re-donated to the pot for future blog post picks. (He splits the money donated for these posts between the blog posts’ authors.) Thanks, Ed.

Till we meet again…

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Evolution: it’s a carnival

Skull detail of Etruridelphis giulii, an extinct dolphin from the Pliocene. (Photo: Wikimedia Commons, by Luca Oddone)

Interested in evolution? Make sure to check out the 35th Carnival of Evolution, this time hosted by Lab Rat.

My favorite post highligted this month was published at the EEB & Flow, it’s a little on the ecology-wonky side, but fascinating nonetheless. It looks at a paper that describes how ecological interactionas and competition among plants fosters the evolution of niches. Great food for thought.

That’s all. Run along now.

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Print stories I liked…

Somewhere in early January, I decided to devote a lot more time to reading in 2011 than I had in 2010. This year, I have print subscriptions to The Atlantic, National Geographic, Conservation Magazine, Columbia Journalism Review and The New Yorker. (Used to also have Science News, EARTH magazine, and Blue Ridge Country, but I let those lapse this year). These are a few articles I’ve read in the past few weeks that I found particularly interesting (not all are science stories):

Enter the Anthropocene - Age of Man: by Elizabeth Kolbert, National Geographic; This is part of their “7 Billion” series which explores what our planet will be like with a population of seven billion people. Kolbert is a veteran journalist and staff writer for the The New Yorker who also authored “Field Notes From a Catastrophe,” a book that stitches together stories from her years of reporting on climate change. In this NG article, she explores an idea that geologists have been wrestling with for about a decade, that humankind has so changed the face of the planet that future geologists and stratigraphers will encounter the distinct signature of our age — and that they should name a new epoch after this sharp change: the Anthropocene.

Taming the Wild: by Evan Ratliff, National Geographic; This is a fascinating article that explores the back-story behind what’s known to some researchers as the Trut Fox Study, or the Belyaev-Trut Fox Study. Basically, researchers in Siberia were interested in how dogs became domesticated from wolves. But they lacked the ability to do moleular studies under their Communist government, so they got creative with a breeding experiment using foxes (perfect experimental models, because these canids have never been successfully domesticated). By doing nothing more than selecting for a foxes disposition toward people (either freindly or aggressive), they managed to create freindly, even cuddly, foxes over just a few generations. They also demonstrated likely genetic connections between behavioral traits that were selected for and expressed phenotypic traits like coat patterns and curled tails. 

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