The Secret World of Red Wolves

Yesterday I came home from the Science Writers 2012 conference in Raleigh, N.C. feeling very good about seeing many old and new friends. Despite dealing with the travails of traveling as a nursing mom without her baby, it was an awesome trip. But even more awesome awesomesauce was awaiting me at home. Lurking in the middle of my stack of mail was the new UNC Press catalog for their spring/summer book releases—and gracing the cover is a large, handsome red wolf, a nice nod to the upcoming release of my book, The Secret World of Red Wolves next April! (Click here to download a partial PDF of the catalog and read more about the book.)

I am thrilled the press chose a photo from my book to put on the cover of their catalog! It is a wonderful gesture to their faith in the importance of this book, and it is also a welcome bit of positive news for the red wolf which is currently plagued by the fallout of a decision by the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission to allow the night spotlighting of coyotes throughout the state, even within the endangered red wolf’s five-county recovery area. For this, they are being sued. (I first wrote about the threat of this change to the state hunting regulations for the Scientific American Guest Blog, and for the Charlotte Observer, and I’ll be writing more about it elsewhere in the coming month.)

The photo on the catalog cover is also the photo for my book cover, which will look like this:

Now, is that a nice cover or what? I love the way they framed the wolf’s gaze with the title.

But back to the catalog. This is the first step in marketing my book, and that makes me very excited because I actually finished writing the book in November of 2011. At the time, I had no idea that it would take more than a year for the project to transform into a saleable hardback form! (In fact, the process took so long, I actually went through pregnancy and birth and now have a beautiful baby boy! Some people have commented that it must feel pretty good to have a book and a baby both “born” within the same year. It does feel good, though also a tad overwhelming as I try to regain my foothold with writing now that my life is re-centering around another human being.) Because of my recent inauguration into motherhood, I’ve not been blogging much the past few months, but I hope to rectify that situation in the months to come. Goodness knows there is so much to write about with recent developments for the worse for red wolves.

The Best Science Writing Online: 2012

It’s here! The Best Science Writing Online: 2012 is now available in paperback. Many thanks to guest editor Jennifer Ouellette and series editor Bora Zivkovic for putting together an awesome edition. This series used to be self-published on Lulu.com as  the indie anthology The Open Laboratory, but it was picked up last year by Farrar, Straus and Giroux/Scientific American. This year’s edition has some stellar science writing names in it: old hands like Carl Zimmer , John Rennie, David Dobbs, Steve Silberman,  Maryn McKenna, Deborah Blum, and Maggie Koerth-Baker have pieces, and some of the best science bloggers like Ed Yong, Christy Wilcox, Miriam Goldstein, Chris Rowan, Brian Switek and more. It also has many new voices who are claiming their own place among the upper echelons of science writers. I’m honored to have an article in this year’s edition, my essay on Ethiopia’s “church forests” which was originally a guest post for the PLoS blog network; I think this makes my third time being selected and each year it is an honor. I’ve not had time to really dig into the book yet (I have a three-and-a-half month old son who is a on a nursing strike, so my hands are full!) but I can’t wait to read every chapter! You can purchase your copy here. (Bloggers with works in the book do not recieve compensation from the sales.)

Are wolves really all that?

Gray wolves chasing an elk.

Have conservation scientists become carried away, touting the ecological benefits of wolves where there are perhaps — dare I say it? — not as many as we believe there to be? Perhaps some people in the media, and even some in science, have gotten carried away with the ecological changes that wolves are actually capable of mediating, says globally-renowned wolf biologist L. David Mech in his most recent paper “Is science in danger of sanctifying the wolf?”

Ever since the reintroduction of gray wolves to Yellowstone National Park, and by extension the Northern Rocky Mountain ecoregion, the role of apex predators in regulating trophic cascades has been an issue of great debate. Among the first to publish a correlation between a return of aspen and willow recruitment to stands where they’d been long absent, at the same time that wolves were reintroduced, were a pair of researchers from Oregon State University, Ripple and Beschta. They promulgated an idea dubbed the ecology of fear which postulated that the presence of wolves caused a behavioral shift in elk, leading them to graze less often in open riparian corridors where they were more likely to be attacked by wolves. Their warier behavior, and shift in browsing pressure, led to a rebound in the aspen and willow growth. It’s become a familiar, almost calcified narrative, and one that many wildlife proponents have embraced (myself included).

But in his newest paper, Mech reviews the literature both supporting and refuting wolves as the mechanism of a behaviorally-modulated trophic cascade in Yellowstone. He asserts that other factors may be at play in stimulating the willows and aspen to regrow, and that they at least deserve more serious discussion. Mech seems to feel that some conservation scientists have become so myopically focused on wolves as the mechanism of ecological change that we tend to view as positive that they are unwilling or unable to look beyond wolves for alternative or contributing factors.

I have to admit, if this paper had been written by someone other than Mech, I’d probably have not have paid as much attention to it. This is because I find myself wanting to believe the wolf-as-ecological-mediator narrative. I freely admit, I’m biased in this regard. But the fact that a wolf biologist as learned and experienced as Mech produced this definitely caught my eye.

Book Review: The Wolverine Way, by Douglas Chadwick

The Wolverine Way, by Douglas Chadwick

Wolverines are badass animals. That’s probably why Marvel Comics made a character based on them. But unfortunately, we know more about the comic character than the real deal! Myth tells us that these animals are enormous gluttons, so much so that their latinized name is Gulo gulo, which means glutton glutton. I suppose the double name speaks to the intensity of glutton they were once thought to be.

Wolverines are a modest sized animal that can weigh anywhere from 15 to 70 pounds, with most being in the 30-50 pound range. They have the lithe muscular bodies of young black bear cubs, but with the wide digging-ready paws of a badger. Their heads look like a mashup of a Tasmanian devil with a mongoose. They have enormous strength that allows them to gallop for hours on end through deep snow fields, swim through freezing streams and rivers, and haul their bulk up nearly vertical cliff faces. And did I mention their skulls harbor bone-crushing teeth? Well, they do, and they make good use of them, gobbling up bones from carrion and fresh kills alike to process the fatty, nutritious marrow that many other animals can’t access.

Despite their obvious badassery, wolverines have remained one of the most understudied mammalian predators on the continent.

A few years ago, a multi-year project to study the life history details of these animals was undertaken at Glacier National Park, where a small population of the animals still remain. The study provided the perfect vehicle for Douglas Chadwick, who volunteered on the project, to write a book about these amazing but largely unknown carnivores.

In The Wolverine Way Chadwick narrates the time he spent as a volunteer on the Glacier project. His voice offers a mix of wonder and humility with just the right amount of swagger. But that last element stems almost solely from what we learn of wolverines: how they can scale sheer rock and ice mountain faces in times that make the most ardent mountaineers green with envy; how they can roam twenty or more miles across rugged topography in a single day, treating mountain slopes as if they were flat; how they can go head-to-head with grizzlies to stake a carcass as their own; and how they can munch bones like so many stale breadsticks to carry them between meaty meals.

Chadwick’s engaging, at times poetic, writing and reflections of the natural world are what elevates this book from a mere documentation of a project to an insightful tome into what I can only call the mindset of a wolverine. Check out this video trailer to see what I’m talking about:

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.

Poland’s wolves trot across key wildlife overpasses

Critically endangered Central European wolves have learned to use wildlife overpasses that span the major A4 autostrada in western Poland. The first hard evidence of regular overpass use by three separate wolf packs was recently documented by Dr. Robert W. Mysłajek of the Association for Nature, ‘Wolf.’ a Polish organization, and Dr. Sabina Nowak. The pair plan to formally announce their findings at the upcoming IENE 2012 International Conference in Potsdam-Berlin, Germany. {1}

This video, supplied by Mysłajek, clearly shows several wolves loping and trotting across the wildlife overpass, while the sound of vehicular engines ebb and flow in the distance:

The wolves appear to be using the overpasses during the cover of night and the light of day. A highway as large as the A4 is a major obstacle for the movement of predators such as Poland’s wolves, bears and lynx, as well as other wildlife. Which is why it is exciting that these particular wolves are using these particular overpasses.

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: