A Long Time Coming…Wild Muse Bids Adieu.

Cypress trees reflected in water, Devils’ Hammock, Florida. (Photo by T. DeLene Beeland 2004)

This is the last post to appear on Wild Muse. It’s been a fun few years writing here, but things are changing and I’ve decided the time is right to mosey on along. Wild Muse was born as a science blog in the summer of 2009. I was just getting started in freelance writing and enjoyed the idea of having my own little sandbox to play around with in cyberspace. A few years later, as work responsibilities grew to encompass a book project and my personal life expanded to encompass a baby, I had much less time than ever before to blog.

A year after my son was born, Wild Muse was reborn as a science, nature, and nonfiction book review site. It was the summer of 2013. I wrote reviews sporadically, when I had time, for every second or third book that I finished. My posts became more and more spaced out. Infrequent publishing is often the death rattle of a blog, and so it was with this one. As my family continues to expand, and we prepare to welcome a second baby into our home, I’ve taken a long and reflective look at what I spend my time on, as well as what I envision my time budget to be in the near future. This reflection allowed me to see that posting to Wild Muse has begun to feel more and more like a chore, and less and less like the invigorating outlet it once was.

Not many people know that after finishing my nonfiction book on red wolves, I began working as a financial oversight coordinator in a dental practice. I’m as trained in bookkeeping as I am in beekeeping. Ditto for human resources management, dental practice operations, and small business strategic growth management. But that’s what my time has been consumed with since October 2011. It was in that month that my life pivoted, and my path forever changed: all within a few weeks time, I discovered I was pregnant, I submitted my completed book manuscript to UNC Press, and I began working for the dental practice.

My path to working in the dentistry field was wholly unplanned. It was a byproduct of my marriage to a dentist who struck out as a sole practitioner in 2011. It often feels like we’ve been fighting to keep our heads above water since then. I won’t divulge specifics, but let’s just say that every single step of the way to getting this business going has been a struggle — every week, and every month. My husband works 60-70 hours per week. I work about half that while also being the primary caregiver to our beautiful son and running our household. There is so much to unpack in those last two sentences, it humbles me knowing the meaning with which they are suffused.

(Review) A Grab Bag of Science Titles

Life has become so topsy turvy the past few months that I keep devouring titles without taking (making?) the time to write about them. While it’s satisyfing to see my stack of completed reading grow higher, it’s also a constant reminder that this working mother of a two-year-old tyrant doesn’t have enough time to write thoughtful, deep reviews of each. As an author myself, I know how much time, effort, and middle-of-the-night anxiety attacks is channeled into creating a published book, so I feel an obligation of sorts — throbbing with a deep vein of empathy — to give the following books praise and recognition.

To get through the lastet tomes, this post will do something new. Instead of writing an in-depth review for each, I’ve summarized the works in a few paragraphs. I’ve tried to keep things simple and sweet. Enjoy! Hopefully you’ll find some science reading inspiration for your New Year!

Relicts of A Beautiful Sea: Survival, Extinction, and Conservation in a Desert World

Relicts Of A Beautiful Sea, by Christopher Norment

This is a beautiful, sensitive, and intellectual book about the fragility of water-bound desert species in the Inyo Mountains of Death Valley. The illustrations and cover make it aesthetic enough to be mistaken for a decorative coffee-table book, but this work is filled with detailed and poignant insight from a working biologist who observes the land and its inhabitants with a poet’s sensibilities. Author Christopher Norment easily imparts facts and knowledge of the desert environs and its most precarious inhabitants, but he cloaks these tidbits in sensitive, literary language which makes his work a delight to read.

While many naturalists are drawn to the desert to study its diverse plants, birds, herps, and insects, its amazing water-bound inhabitants often go overlooked. In Relicts of A Beautiful Sea, Norment explores the habitat and habits of one rare salamander, four pupfish, and a toad — all of which persist in a precarious desert environment. (The species are: the Inyo Mountain slender salamander, the Owens pupfish, Salt Creek and Cottonball Marsh pupfish, Devil’s Hole ppupfish, and the black toad.) Deserts are defined by their lack of water, and yet the water-loving species he writes of have persisted across millenia and long spans of geological time. They are holdovers from another, wetter time; a time when the current desert floor was the submerged bed of an inland freshwater lake 600 feet deep and 80 miles long, a lake which spread from the Panamint to Funeral Mountains.

Norment uses the rarity of these organisms to pivot away from an ecologist’s view of speices abundance and distribution and wade into a philosophical landscape where he ponders whether these animals can teach us something about loneliness, the tenacity of life, and trascendence.

(Review) Searching for Pekpek: Cassowaries and Conservation in the New Guinea Rainforest, by Andrew Mack

Cover of Searching for Pekpek, by Andrew Mack

Searching for Pekpek is a moving story about a rainforest biologist who pioneered studies in parts of Papua New Guinea which were too remote and rugged for most biologists to bother visiting. But Andrew Mack’s risks paid off in big rewards: not only in the research he produced, but in the vision of conservation he came to embrace and inspire.

Pekpek is a term the semi-nomadic Pawai’ia people use to describe the substance scientists refer to as “scat,” (more commonly known as feces). Go ahead, giggle. It’s okay, really. But if you’re unfamiliar with scatology, know this: these little packets of biological refuse are rife with revelatory information. They can help uncover things like an animal’s diet composition, the role of animals in dispersing seeds, and even hormone profiles and health conditions — and for this reason, biologists often go to great lengths to collect freshly deposited scats.

But let’s get back the Pawai’ia of Papua New Guinea… this people group occupies tribal lands within the area Mack focused his studies, which was largely centered on Crater Mountain Wildlife Management Area. This conserved area is located roughly south of Goroka in central Papua New Guinea (which is the eastern half of the island of New Guinea — notably, the world’s second largest island). It’s an area of mature rainforest characterized by rivers, waterfalls, gorges, and rugged slopes coated in mud the likes of which most North Americans have never experienced. Mack wished to study cassowary scat in particular because these large forest birds, tall as a person, eat the fruits of rainforest trees and then disperse the tree’s seeds elsewhere. But where? And to what advantage to the tree? By studying where cassowaries ate individual fruits, which he painstakingly tagged with uniqie identifiers, where the birds eventually expelled the seeds, and where seedlings eventually grew Mack planned to answer questions about the evolutionary advantage to rainforest trees of producing fruits which depend upon these lumbering birds — seemingly left over from the age of dinosaurs — for dispersal. 

An open letter to the NC Hunt & Fish forum

This is an open letter to the NC Hunt & Fish forum* which contains a thread on red wolves. For some time now, posters have quoted and excerpted materials from my book, The Secret World of Red Wolves, to uphold their perception that the red wolf reintroduction program in northeastern North Carolina ought to be shut down. This is a cynical political ploy, as the central thesis of the book is that red wolves are unique, are native to the Southeast, and are so rare in the wild that extreme measures are necessary to conserve them.

Speaking of rare, I’m preemptively turning off comments for this post — something I’ve never even thought about doing previously. The reason behind this decsion lies in the uncivil, and at times aggressive and bullying, tone which is often taken on this forum thread, and which is sure to spill over here. This letter is intended to communicate my thoughts on the misrepresentations of my work — and my character —  on the forum. I do not wish for this post to become a place where anti-red wolf and pro-red wolf supporters lob firebombs at each other, as has played out in other online spaces.

Libel on the NC Hunt & Fish forum?

It has been personally and professionally disconcerting to see my writing misconstrued, misrepresented and quoted out of context on this forum. But most galling, poster “BR549” recently insinuated that I was dismissed from the Red Wolf Coalition Board of Directors because the group was displeased with my book, which (supposedly) the Board has only just now come to realize supports the position of shutting down the Red Wolf Reintroduction Program. (Post #1574)

Both suppositions are flatly untrue.

This claim is false, uninformed, and in my opinion it is libelous. It defames my character by insinuating my professional writing and research were poor, and that I lost my position on the RWC Board due to their displeasure with the outcomes of my book. Neither accusation is true; both are groundless; and both are intended to harm and degrade me, and my work, personally.

Although I’ve let slide for months the sometimes atrocious misquotes and misinterpretations of my writing on this forum, I can not let slide misrepresentations of my character. The poster rather narcissistically claims that since they alone have “connected all the dots” of facts represented in the book, that somehow they have made the RWC Board see the light and understand that my book undermines the red wolf program and supports the anti-red wolf crusaders. This is absurd. What the Board sees is that someone is misconstruing my work to misappropriate it for their own uses. And while none of us can control that, we can call out the egregious personal accusations made by poster BR549.

This forum is publicly available. It is indexed by Google. It’s users ought to be made fully aware that what they post there is governed by laws covering libel.

For the poster in question to make the above assumptions based solely on the appearance and disappearance of my name from the RWC website reminds me of Plato’s allegory of the cave. It’s impossible to discern true knowledge when one only casts their gaze upon shadows of reality.

Grave Lessons: Efforts to understand human decomposition lead anthropologists to Western Carolina

 

Students at Western Carolina University excavate a mock grave containing a cow skull to learn the techniques of excavating clandestine human graves. (Photo by Ashley Evans, WCU)

This was my favorite article to report and write in the past two years. Seriously, it was that interesting. I first learned of the Forensic Osteological Research Station (FOReSt) at Western Carolina University in Cullowhee while reading Cat Warren’s amazing book, What the Dog Knows: The Science and Wonder of Working Dogs. Though it was only a small scene in which she and her cadaver-sniffing dog trained at the FOReSt site, I dog-eared the page and knew that I wanted to write a story about this amazing facility where the dead are studied as they decompose. Here’s the story, which first appeared Sept. 1 in The Observer (Charlotte)  with 650+ Facebook likes and counting! and the News & Observer (Raleigh):

When people die, Cheryl Johnston’s work begins. A forensic anthropologist at Western Carolina University, Johnston oversees one of our nation’s six human decomposition facilities. On a mountain slope near WCU’s main campus, recently deceased donors are respectfully, but intentionally, laid to rest on the sun-dappled forest floor. Over a year’s time, their bodies are exposed to light, rain, humidity, heat, cold, wind and wildlife. Beneath stands of mature tulip poplar, locust, oak and walnut trees they decompose until nothing remains but bone.

Medical students routinely dissect cadavers to master human anatomy and develop skills to help the living. But people are less likely to know that forensic anthropology students, and professionals, need to study human decomposition processes to interpret and solve real-life scenarios involving recovery of human remains. From murders to mishaps, forensic anthropologists unravel how a person died and what happened to their remains after death.

Something fishy is brewing in Red Wolf Country: Will the red wolf program survive?

UPDATE #1: When I wrote this last week, I thought the review undwerway was a formal 5-Year Review (which is required periodically for endangered species programs) and it’s legally required that public notices for these are to be published in the Federal Register. However, this morning (9/2) I was informed by the Red Wolf Recovery Program assistant coordinator that it’s not a 5-Year Review; it’s a special review that was requested by the State of NC Wildlife Resources Commission, and then later requested by the NC Farm Bureau, and the NC Sportsmen’s Caucus. I’m not clear where this leaves things legally in terms of public notification requirements — although a lawyer involved in the recent red wolf/coyote hunting lawsuit against the State of NC told me she believes the FWS was legally obligated to announce the review in the Federal Register but that they hadn’t in order to (from her perspective) better fly under the radar and make the program dissappear overnight.

UPDATE #2: The assistant coordinator apparently had no knowledge that the FWS intended to issue their press release the Friday before a national Holiday, or that they were going to hold a press teleconference that afternoon. (I couldn’t call in due to previously scheduled appointments — which is probably exactly what the SE Regional Office of the FWS was counting on for most media members the Friday afternoon before Labor Day weekend.) I find it triply suspicious that the regional FWS office failed to notify the Red Wolf Recovery program in advance of its intention to issue a press release and hold a press conference. (My earlier posting for Update #2 was based on a statement I misunderstood — the asst. coordinator clarified by email that she did know of the press release in advance, but not of the press teleconference. My apologies for disseminating incorrect information.)

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Red wolf puppies (FWS/Ryan Nordsven)

For a few weeks now, I’ve been suspecting that something awfully fishy is going on in Red Wolf Country. I can’t escape the premonition that higher-ups in the Fish and Wildlife Service are positioning their pawns to kill or significantly alter the red wolf reintroduction program. Three years have passed since I finished writing my book on red wolves, and it’s been one year since it was published. But so much has changed since then I can only shake my head in disbelief. All the hope I held onto when completing the book is wavering.

Red wolves are globally endangered, and though a captive population exists in some 40-plus breeding facilities across the U.S., the planet’s only wild red wolves, a mere 90 or so, inhabit 1.7 million acres on a spit of coastal swamp and forest known as the Albemarle Peninsula. The first reintroduced red wolves were released into Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge on September 14, 1987. Nearly 27 years later, the FWS appears to be coming under intense pressure from anti-wolf advocates to shut down the red wolf program entirely.

On Friday, August 29, the FWS Southeast Regional Office issued a press release announcing the beginning of a 60-day review of the program and asking for public input. There’s information at the bottom of this post about how to submit comments. But first, there are a few importat things to note about what’s happened, and what hasn’t… taken together, something very fishy is brewing on the horizon:

NC’s Natural Treasures: 50 Years of Staying Wild

My husband and I, backpacking in the Birkhead Moutnains Wilderness (NC) in 2009.

My story on wilderness, below, ran in the Charlotte Observer last Monday. I wanted to commemorate the 50th anniversary of the Wilderness Act, which is upcoming on September 3, 2014 and I’m lucky enough that my editor indulged me.

Wilderness as a place is something that I’m both attracted to and intimidated by. The side of me which shuns living in a city and wishes I had a closer relationship with the natural world loves the idea of visiting wilderness. (And this from a gal who lives on several wooded acres — in the company of several black bears, coyotes, bats, flying squirrels, moths as big as my palm, and copperhead snakes —  and who can only see her closest neighbors when the leaves drop each winter.) But my attraction to actually visiting wilderness depends upon what kind of wilderness it is, and where it’s located.

The first time I stood on tundra in Denali, Alaska and watched as melting hail and sleet soaked through my cotton hiking pants, I knew I was in over my head. Never before had I stepped on ground that wasn’t solid… in Denali, each footfall sunk six inches or more, into a spongey mass of moss and freezing bog water. Sometimes, as in Denali, I’m admittedly intimidated by vast unknown landscapes devoid of marked trails, designated campgrounds, or treated drinking water. What if I get lost? What if I can’t find water? What if I encounter a rogue bear/hungry mountain lion/crazed wolverine? 

At the heart of these fears, some of which aren’t even rational, is my true fear: What if I can’t take care of myself in the woods? But this is also the same fear that attracts me to protected parks, forests, refuges and wilderness areas in the first place. To improve my skills, and to prove to myself that I can. It’s why I love going, and why I keep going returning. 

What do you enjoy about wildlerness as a place to visit, or as a construct of the mind? 

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America was forged by taming and civilizing a vast wilderness that stretched from sea to shinning sea. Yet in ecological terms, “taming” and “civilizing” involved widespread biological degradation, species extinction, habitat conversion, dammed rivers, logged forests, plowed-over prairies and the spread of nonnative or invasive organisms on a massive scale.

A growing concern that wild lands might disappear all together led to the birth of the National Wilderness Preservation System five decades ago this Sept. 3, with the passage of the federal Wilderness Act. The system began with a mere 9 million acres but has grown to 110 million acres. More acres are added every year.

These preserved lands exist in 758 different wilderness areas within 44 states. North Carolina is fortunate to have 12 different wilderness areas from the mountains to the coast. Two of this dozen were in the original batch of 54 wilderness areas created in 1964: Shining Rock and Linville Gorge wildernesses.

In lobbying for the creation of a wilderness system, famed American novelist and environmentalist Wallace Stegner wrote: “We need wilderness preserved … because it was the challenge against which our character as a people was formed.”

Today, 4 of every 5 Americans live in cities or urbanized areas, but many still seek out wilderness to be alone in a natural landscape and taste that character-forming challenge.

(Review) Global Weirdness, by Climate Central

Cover of Global Weirdness

I picked up Global Weirdness on a whim while browsing at my local bookstore, Malaprops, in Asheville, NC. Which is oddly apropos, because this bookstore is a mere half mile away from the National Climatic Data Center, a NOAA entity tasked with the lofty responsibility of being our nation’s weather-data keeper. (The NCDC preserves climate and weather records, and monitors and assesses weather and climate globally. Not a small job.) Ever since moving to Asheville 2-1/2 years ago, I’ve wanted to write a climate-related story or two that involves the NCDC. But I’ve felt thwarted by my lack of expertise on climate change (where to start?); and as the scientific field snowballed I began to feel a bit left behind in understanding what it’s all about.

This book provided the perfect gateway for learning the basics of the science behind climate change. It’s authored by writers and researchers of Climate Central, which is one of the most reliable sources of information for communicating climate issues. The book’s back cover promised that it would  “summarize the facts behind climate change … in clear language.” It fulfilled that promise, to the Nth degree. A good dose of that accessiblity is due to the involvement of one of the lead authors, Mike Lemonick. I’ve known of Lemonick’s work for awhile through my involvement with the NASW, and I’ve previsouly read many of his articles. He’s a veteran science writer and I could see his fingerprints and hear his writing voice thoughout the entire book. (Go here for a series of video interviews with him about making Global Weirdness.) 

Dogged Detection: How dogs help locate human remains

Author Cat Warren and Solo, photo courtesty of D.L. Anderson.

This is a Q&A with author Cat Warren that I wrote last month, it ran in the Charlotte Observer on April 20. (Shared with the News & Observer on the same day.) I’m reposting it on Wild Muse. Selfishly, I loved having the chance to interview Warren because I had recently read her book, What the Dog Knows: The Science and Wonder of Working Dogs (Simon and Schuster 2013) and could not put it down. I was enthralled to learn more about her work with dogs that detect human remains, and she didn’t disappoint!  – TDB

Cadaver dogs have been searching the recent mudslide in Oso, Wash., to recover victims’ remains. But how do dogs sniff out the perfume of death? N.C. State associate English professor Cat Warren authored “What the Dog Knows: The Science and Wonder of Working Dogs,” a 2013 book (Simon & Schuster; $26.99) about her experience working with a cadaver dog, law enforcement and forensics experts. (Questions and answers have been edited.)

Q. What compounds are cadaver dogs sniffing out?

A. There are any number of volatile compounds that make up human remains. You want a dog who is trained to recognize a whole range of scents related to death, whether it’s coming from dried bones or the recently dead. Dogs exposed to this range in training have no trouble. The dog is trained to trek back and forth until it picks up the edge of a scent, then it tries to get to the spot where that scent is most concentrated. The dog’s body language changes, and the dog’s handler knows when the dog is “in scent”; they see the dog slow down, concentrate, and work its nose really hard. But the dog should also have a trained final indication, an alert. For both my dogs, Solo and Coda, they lie down.

Q. How do the dogs filter out carcasses of wild animals at a search site?

(Review) Stand Up That Mountain, by Jay Erskine Leutze

Stand Up That Mountain (Cover)

For the past year or so I’ve struggled with a sense of helplessness about the environmental calamities we face now and in the future. Extinctions. Pollution. Biological invasions. Over hunting. Desertification. Dying rivers. Mountain top removal. Climate destabilization. The list goes on.

There are days, weeks even, when the only way I can muddle through is to wrap all of it up and push it aside. In short, I feel beat. Helpless, even. The part of me who wants to change the world rails against the part of me that knows I can’t actually change the Big Picture Things that desperately need it: I can’t save the red wolf, or halt the seas from rising, any more than I can prevent the lowly but numerous wooly adelgids from sucking the life out of all the hemlock trees in western North Carolina, until they too disappear.

It was amid this puddle of dark thinking that I began reading Stand Up That Mountain: The Battle to Save One Small Community in the Wilderness Along the Appalachian Trail. Originally I picked this book up because it’s an environmental story of regional interest to me — I live but a few counties southwest of the mountains where the story unfolds. But from the first page, Leutze’s writing sang and I knew this was a very special piece of work to be savored and studied.

Stand Up That Mountain is a true story, but it’s written as if it were a novel. It has a set of heroes who pit themselves David-and-Goliath fashion against a good-ole-boy villain and his minions to rescue their town from surefire environmental destruction. But Leutze doesn’t let any of his characters fall prey to trope or caricature: they are all complicated, real, flawed people who he portrays in all their strengths, frailties, quirks, and commonalities.