Announcing “Friends of the Red Wolf!”

Red beauties.

After completing my recent book on red wolves, I began to set up a Friends of the Red Wolf  group to support the conservation of Canis rufus in the wild. Working in cooperation with the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s Red Wolf Recovery Program, the Friends group will focus on augmenting conservation efforts in the Red Wolf Recovery Area in North Carolina. Our main function is to raise funds which will be used to execute projects and purchase field supplies needed by the red wolf recovery program.

Red wolves are critically endagered, and some consider them to be among the most endangered canids on the planet. A network of forty-one captive breeding facilities across the U.S. work to safeguard the species from extinction while the FWS works to restore a population of about 100 wild red wolves in northeastern North Carolina. My book on red wolves traces their modern reintroduction and management as well as what is known of their past history in the eastern United States. Some of the modern reintroduction challenges include managing them to prevent hybridization with wild coyotes, mitigating disruptions to packs due to human-caused red wolf deaths, and changes to their habitat cause by sea level rise due to climate change. (All of these issues are explored in depth in my book.)

Another recent threat to red wolves came about last year when the state of North Carolina allowed open-season daylight hunting of coyotes to be extended to night. Red wolves are mostly nocturnal, and they appear visually similar to coyotes (although adults are larger), so by allowing the night hunting of coyotes the state’s newly proposed hunting regulation potentially places red wolves at risk of being shot in cases of mistaken identity. An injunction was placed on the night hunting rule, although a permanent change to the hunting regulations remains a possibility.

You can visit the website for the new Friends of the Red Wolf group and find photos of red wolves and a blog post explaining a little bit more background about the formation of the Friends group. If you feel so inclined, there is also a page explaining how to make a donation.

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.

Book writing: lessons learned (Part II)

Image from Wiki Commons

Last November, when I sent my book manuscript off to my editor at the University of North Carolina Press, I heaved a sigh of relief that that was finally done. After more than two and a half years, I’d fostered my idea for a book into an actual book manuscript. Waiting for his feedback, I felt like a kid anticipating Christmas morning! It was, of course, an immense relief to hear that his first reading was positive with only a few minor and completely right-on suggestions for sharpening both my craft and the tale at hand. (I think it’s safe to say my book will be the most complete history of red wolves that has ever been published. Visit these links for other posts I’ve written about the book and lessons learned.) But I didn’t get only his feedback… about four months later I found myself in possession of three different external reviewers’ comments. The press had asked a literary expert and two scientific experts to review my manuscript. I was then given a few months to incorporate their comments into the final draft.

… And that is what I’ve been up to for past eight weeks! At first it was incredibly difficult to drag my mind back into the depths of the red wolf’s story. I chiseled away at the easy edits first, things that required only word changes, or sentence- or paragraph-level tinkering. That helped me get back into the groove of the writing and the story arc. When there was nothing small left to twiddle with or smooth over, it was time for the heavy editing. I made a checklist of the more substantial edits and figured out a game plan for how to attack them.

Nighttime coyote hunting could harm federally-endangered red wolves

A shorter version of this story was published in the Charlotte Observer Sci-Tech pages on April 9, 2012. If you would like to submit comments to the N.C. Wildlife Resources Commission about their proposal to allow the nighttime hunting of coyotes then please visit this page and click the online form link for proposal W1. The comment period is open until April 16, 2012.

Captive male red wolf. Photo courtesy of Ryan Nordsven/USFWS

Since 1993 it’s been legal to shoot coyotes during daylight hours throughout North Carolina, but a new rule proposed by the Wildlife Resources Commission would expand statewide coyote hunting opportunities to include nighttime. The new rule would allow the use of artificial lights to blind coyotes after dark where hunting is currently legal. There would be no season, no bag limit, and no permit required.

Opponents to the rule say it unnecessarily places federally-listed red wolves at risk of being shot by mistake because they appear physically similar to coyotes. Red wolves range in weight from 55 -75 pounds while coyotes are usually 35 to 40 pounds, according to the Red Wolf Recovery Program Coordinator David Rabon.

“We have suffered a number of problems during daylight hours with mistaken identity, and hunting at night is only going to add to that,” Rabon said. On average, six to eight red wolves are killed each year in cases where the shooter believed they were taking a coyote but instead shot a red wolf. Red wolves are most active at night.

Because coyotes and red wolves will hybridize under certain conditions, the Fish and Wildlife Service has sterilized coyotes in the five-county red wolf recovery area since about 2000 to prevent interspecies breeding. Rabon said the program is currently monitoring about 40 sterilized coyotes in Dare, Hyde, Tyrrell, Washington and Beaufort counties. These coyotes and all known red wolves wear radio collars, which might add to the identity confusion. Rabon fears the rule change would harm his program’s hybridization management if sterilized coyotes are shot, and he questions what WRC is trying to achieve in terms of wildlife management.

Book writing: lessons learned (Part I)

Like the young red wolf pup shown here, I had a lot to learn. (Photo courtesy of the Red Wolf Recovery Program, FWS. Here, Ryan Nordsven takes a blood sample from a red wolf pup, a routine procedure to test for genetic purity.)

As promised in my last post, I’ve pulled together some of the “lessons” I learned about the process of writing a non-fiction book while writing my first one, The Secret World of Red Wolves: A true story of North America’s other wolf. The process of writing a book is surely as different for every writer as the fingerprints inscribed on our digits. What follows below is a list of things I learned along the way, over the two year process it took to bring my project from an idea to a finished manuscript. (The focus of this post is on the actual writing, structure, and organization issues I encountered—not how to write or sell a book proposal.) I don’t expect that what I’ve shared here will make sense to everyone, but if you’re a writer who is struggling to tackle a big project then perhaps some granule of this discussion will help you to tackle your own project in a new, productive way.

Approaching the writing: Knowing enough to know where and how to start

I planned for my book to be somehwere around 87,000 words (it topped out at 95,000), but before embarking on this project I’d never written anything longer than 4,000 words. Which might explain why I started out with lots of questions about how to organize and approach a writing project more than twenty-one times larger than anything I’d ever done. Seeking guidance, I asked two non-fiction authors I know (who had published multiple books each) how they had managed to break down the massive amount of work involved in writing multiple chapters. They are both journalists, and each told me that they simply treated each chapter like an in-depth article, and then stitched all the “articles” together. That sounded like a manageable way to tame what seemed like an unruly mess of ideas in my head, so that’s how I tried to conceive of my chapters. I stared at my draft table of contents and thought, This will be easy! I’ll just write seven or eight “articles” about these ideas. 

After bungling around for a few months and feeling stuck each time I tried to write the first “article,” I realized that their method didn’t work for me. I couldn’t conceive of the chapters as isolated articles linked by the theme of the book. I could only see the continuity between the chapters I’d outlined, although I couldn’t yet clearly envision the narrative path I wanted a reader to take through the story. I knew I wanted to plant seeds in the first chapter that would be cultivated and tended to in later chapters, but this was hard to do in the sense of writing an article. I realized with a sinking feeling that in biting off writing the first chapter, I first had to have a much firmer understanding of the whole book — the whole story — before I could understand where it began.

What followed was three or four months of intensive research and interviewing, more notes than I knew how to handle, a mind jammed full of red wolf facts, and a dozen or more stacks of research papers and documents carefully grouped by topic on my desk. I felt adrift and anchorless in those months. I often awoke at 3 a.m. with a hard, cold fear in my belly from knowing that after four months of “working on the book” I still had yet to finish a single chapter.

My first book: The Secret World of Red Wolves

Captive male red wolf at Sandy Ridge facility, near Columbia, North Carolina. (Photo courtesy of Ryan Nordsven, red wolf biologist with USFWS)

It’s been exactly six months since I posted on Wild Muse. What have I been up to since then? I finished my first non-fiction book! (No, really! It’s done!) It’s tentatively titled The Secret World of Red Wolves: A True Story of North America’s Other Wolf. Writing this book is a singular accomplishment in my life. If you’ve read this blog, you’re probably familiar with the book’s topic. But if you’re not familiar, then here’s a quick recap: it’s a story of the red wolf, Canis rufus, which is a predator that used to live throughout the central and southeastern United States. It’s a contested species, and its taxonomy has been elusive. Some people don’t believe it’s a wolf at all. Others believe it opens a window to a lineage of wolves that evolved solely in North America. If you’re opening another browser tab to look it up on Wikipedia, take the entry with a grain of salt, it needs improvement and the sections on its taxonomy and origins appear to be largely authored by the camp of people who disbelieve the animal is a distinct entity, without much coverage of opposing views. In the book, I cover the full spectrum of these views, in the context of how our understanding of these animals has changed as science uncovers new clues to their past origins.

Oddly, a modern detailed treatment of the red wolf’s whole story has not been told all in one place before for a general audience. The idea for this book came to me after I moved to North Carolina in late 2008. The Old North State is home to the only wild population of red wolves in the world. They have been reintroduced to the eastern part of the state, in a coastal area known locally as the Albemarle peninsula. When I moved, I knew from my previous research on Mexican gray wolves that a red wolf program was underway in North Carolina, but that was about the extent of my knowledge. In my literature review of Mexican wolves, I’d also bumped up against several papers on red wolves for which I read the abstracts but didn’t have time to read more. I filed them away for investigation at a later time, but they left me with the lingering impression that there was something controversial about the red wolf’s origins and our current understanding of its genetics.

When I finally had some free time, I searched for an in-depth non-academic book to learn about red wolves, but I was surprised I could not find a current one. The most recent one for general audiences is actually a section of a book from 1993— and believe me, a lot has transpired since then. Other recent books were written for children, or were fairly superficial and did not address any of the evolutionary origin or genetic debates that I knew had cropped up about red wolves since the mid-1990s. Writings that addessed the red wolf’s genetics and taxonomy were relegated to academic chapters within other works, and scientific papers. Without truly understanding what I was getting myself into, I began to form the idea that perhaps I should write a current book about red wolves. Afterall, I love learning about predator ecology and conservation. What could go wrong? (Well, for one thing, I didn’t know how to write a book!)

After a few months of research, I wrote a book proposal and sent it to a few university presses. The University of North Carolina Press accepted it in November of 2009.

What does a positive-incentive carnivore compensation program look like?

Mexican gray wolf, photo by Joel Sartore.

It was October 2007, and I was half-living out of my car while circumnavigating the 6,845-square mile Mexican gray wolf reintroduction area straddling New Mexico and Arizona. I was interviewing stakeholders in the wolf reintroduction project for my master’s thesis. Short on cash, I was camping out and couch-surfing for the two months my project spanned. In late October, I found myself leaving an interview near Alpine, Arizona racing against a setting sun. I had to find a camp site — quickly. The map indicated camping spots about 10 miles down the highway at a place called Luna Lake. When I arrived, the last rays were filtering through the woods, and I discovered a steel swing-gate closing off the camp sites. They were closed for winter, a sign said. (A few days earlier, I’d camped at Big Lake and the first snow of the season piled up on my tent, dumping about two soft inches that night.) With nowhere else to go, I pulled my car onto an off-road vehicle trail near the closed camping area and set up my tent just off the road. Falling asleep, I heard the woods alive with birds and insects calling out their songs.

I awoke a few hours later to a distinct howling. It trailed off to the west of me, and was answered by another howl to the south. Sitting up in my sleeping bag, I dared myself to believe these sounds were emanating from endangered Mexican gray wolves. The howls were forlorn and skipped across octaves, their range seemed musical and foreign. For two or three minutes, the animals howled back and forth from the west and the south. Then a third animal began howling with the second to the south. The two wolves’ howls twined around each other, starting low and simple and climbing upwards in pitch into a complex duet of crescendos ending in a long flat cry. I drifted back to sleep, hoping that it was Canis lupus baileyi roaming in the night. The animal’s howls woke me up three more times that night, each time the three seemed a little closer together, until all their cries sounded off from the south. The last time I heard them, they sounded much more distant as if traveling away from me.

Earlier that day, a biologist had told me that perspectives about Mexican gray wolf reintroduction varied so widely that, as he explained it, two people could be camping in the woods and hear a wolf howl. To one person, it would be the most magical, mystical experience  they ever had. To the other, they’d be up all night, clutching a weapon, terrified they were about to be eaten.

I fall in to the mystical and magical experiential category this biologist described. Though to me, the “magic” was simply hearing a set of endangered large predators doing their thing in the singing wilderness, and the hope that stemmed from their presence that maybe someday they’d be back in ecologically effective numbers.

The million dollar question, of course, is how to get their numbers up into the realm of ecological effectiveness. When dealing with the social obstacles raised by people affected by wolf reintroductions (and the presence of other large predators likely to be targeted for conservation, like grizzlies, wolverines and mountain lions), one line of discussion that often comes up is that of incentives.

What incentives can we devise to spark people’s interest in conserving large carnivores — especially people who might otherwise be opposed to their presence, reintroduction or recovery?

Red wolf deaths alarm officials

This post was originally reported for OnEarth magazine’s blog, it appeared there first on Dec. 16, 2010.

Red wolf panting; image by Barron Crawford.

“Another day, another dead wolf — actually, make that two.”

The digital characters glared at me from my phone message center. I sucked in my breath involuntarily. It was Tuesday, November 16, and it was a bleak day for the Red Wolf Recovery Program.

The message was sent by a biologist I’ve interviewed over the past year for a book on the natural history of Canis rufus. Red wolves are federally protected and they are an entirely separate species from gray wolves, which are known to scientists as Canis lupus.

So far this year, four red wolves have died from unlawful gunshot wounds, and a few additional cases are under active investigation for apparent illegal take. On average, six to eight red wolves have died by gunshot annually in the past three years. The Fish and Wildlife Service biologists working to recover red wolves say 2010 is shaping up to be above average.

Red wolves are shot when hunters or gun-wielding people in the recovery area mistake them for their more common cousin, the coyote (Canis latrans), and then pull the trigger. (At least, the shooters claim they mistook them.) It’s legal to shoot coyotes anywhere and anytime in North Carolina, including the red wolf recovery range.

“We’re really not sure if some hunters are mistaking the red wolves for coyotes and shooting them, or if they are targeting red wolves,” says Ryan Nordsven, a biological technician with the recovery program. “In all likelihood, it may be a combination of both.”

My first taste of trapping

A red wolf in captivity near Columbia, N.C. (c) 2010 DeLene Beeland

I spent this week shadowing some red wolf biologists in eastern N.C., gathering material for the book project I’m working on. Trapping season has just begun for them, and they are trying to catch red wolves who have radio collars or GPS collars with batteries that are about to fail. When the batteries are old, they begin transmitting a double-beep signal instead of a single-beep signal. The biologists call the double-beep “recovery mode” because it tells them that they better catch the animal it belongs to and swap out a new collar on it. When they lay out traps, they have to check them every 24 hours. This means they are working every day, even Saturdays and Sundays, during trapping season, which lasts pretty much right up to the end of January or February. They use rubber-jaw leg-hold traps, which are supposedly safer than other types, but pressure wounds can still result. Trapping these imperiled animals may make some people uncomfortable, but it’s a necessary step to ensure continuous monitoring of the wild population. Without the monitoring, the program would be in jeopardy. When the population gets larger, perhaps they won’t need to monitor all of them so closely.

Warren Parker, in tribute

I was deeply saddened today to learn that Warren Parker, the first director of the national red wolf reintroduction program, passed away on August 25 at age 76. The Asheville Citizen Times has a brief obituary online here. I met Warren this past February when I drove to Asheville to hear him give a public talk, and later I interviewed him in April for my book project. I found him to be a kind gentleman, with a deep love for wildlife. He was modest and funny, and while his memory was fuzzy on a few items he seemed to be in good health. He was looking forward to traveling out West to work on a prairie dog conservation project, when I met him. I hope he got to make that trip. I hope to be able to capture a part of his history in my book, but I’m very, very saddened to know he won’t be here to read it when it’s finished.