Video: Following the Ichetucknee

Following on the heels of my last post about fond memories floating and swimming in the Ichetucknee River, an old hometown friend sent me this video to share. He produced it to show the holistic and interconnected nature of urban runoff and how pollution ends up in Florida’s numerous creeks, sinks, streams, and rivers. Groundwater flows from place to place as sheetflow and percolates through topsoil here, but once it penetrates down far enough it reaches an immense undergound limestone aquifer. The aquifer links countless waterways (which can appear as either separate or connected on a map). For pollution, accessing the aquifer is akin to taking the subway– or a bullet train — across town.

Florida’s Springs and Sun-Dappled Summer Memories

Springs Series painting, by Margaret Tolbert

This morning I was driving down our mountain through a 45-degree misty rain when I heard a familiar name float from the radio — Ichetucknee Springs State Park. A story on NPR about alternate spring break destinations in Florida had somehow landed in the sun-dappled summer memories of my childhood. Instantly, I was transported from the cold spring mountain rain of Asheville, N.C. to a refreshing, sunny subtropical river of my youth. I grew up a little bit southeast of the Ichetucknee River in northcentral Florida. The park was always a favorite destination for tubing during the summer when I was in high school. My friends and I would take turns floating along with a snorkel and mask while gazing at the bottom in the 72-degree waters, then clambering into a tube to warm up and sunbathe like lizards before slipping beneath the water’s surface once more. 

Later, when I was in college and began swimming laps to train for triathlons, friends invited me to swim the river. I thought they were nuts. The Ichetucknee is spring fed and is known for a swift, steady current which whisks tubers along at a fairly fast clip, faster than an average person strides. We would swim upriver, getting a good workout, going not only against the current but against a throng of tubers waving their beer cans at us in disbelief. I was more of a runner than a swimmer, and the only way I could keep up with them was to wear fins. After a mile or more we’d turn around and bolt back to the dock with the current amplifying the power of each stroke. I imagined that’s what swimming must feel like for Olympians.

The Ichetucknee River is so clear that a snorkeler can easily see the bottom five to ten feet below, though some sections are even shallower. It’s been almost seven years since I swam the river, but one memory that stands out from all others is the emerald green river grass undulating hypnotically in the strong current, conjuring fantasies of a mermaid’s algae-covered hair. Then I noticed a flash of orange and red. My mind spun in a state of cognitive dissonance until it slowly registered that a brightly colored crawfish was perched atop the flat-bladed grasses, its antennae waved in the current, and one claw was half-raised. It looked as if it were shaking its fist at us intruders. It was a reminder of the loveliness and fragility of the creatures that live in the Ichetucknee. 

Florida artist Margaret Tolbert has painted Florida’s springs for many years. Her painter’s eye for color have documented changes to the quality of the water in springs across Florida over time. Almost exactly three years ago I wrote this article on a book she produced called Aquiferious. It’s a visual feast, filled with her paintings of springs, but also essays by conservationists, naturalists and scientists about what makes Florida’s springs so unique. I’m reposting the article today because of NPR’s story:

Florida springs painter finds conservation “inescapable”

Springs Series depicting bubbles, by Margaret Tolbert

Margaret Tolbert’s experience of Florida’s springs changed dramatically the day she donned a mask and plunked her face below the water’s lens-like surface. She says she felt like Alice, crossing through the looking glass into an alter world, where nothing was as it seemed. Up until then, springs were something Tolbert was aware of — they were often in the background at family picnics when she was growing up — but she’d never experienced them.

That first swim birthed a creative channel in her that is still fueling her paintings of Florida’s springs nearly two and a half decades later. Today, she has an impressive art portfolio inspired by places that sometimes only local Floridians know intimately. Rainbow Springs, Peacock Springs, Fanning Springs, Gilchrist Blue, Manatee Springs, Juniper Springs, Wakulla Springs, Ichetucknee Springs, Fern Hammock, Telford Springs, Wekiva Springs, Volusia Blue Springs, Cyprus Springs and Rock Springs Run — to name just a few. With the colors and light of specific springs in mind, Tolbert’s swiped and twirled her brushes over an array of large and small canvasses that have found homes in private collections, art museums and institutions all over the world.

“I’m always attracted, as an artist, to weird visual experiences,” Tolbert says. At Gilchrist Blue, she is entranced by medallions of light floating in the water, and the way the surface bends light waves to make swimming bodies look like contorted pretzels. She loves slipping below the surface, which she calls a “lens,” and staring into the springs’ dramatic caverns. At Juniper Springs, it’s the sand boils that catch her eye. At Rainbow Springs, it’s the enormous discharge power that stimulates her senses.

Tweeting for red wolves

Captive red wolf, (c) FWS Red Wolf Recovery Program

Last week I had an interesting Twitter conversation with a young woman from the western Great Lakes area, Christine Wickham. I knew from our previous exchanges that she’s highly interested in gray wolf conservation, and that she’s been pretty upset by the sanctioned wolf hunts in her home state of Michigan. So I wasn’t too surprised when she replied to a tweet that I sent out that read, “Disappointing that national conversation on wolf conservation has yet to include the crisis red wolves face.” She replied to me wanting to know why this is, and I told her I’ve been contemplating this exact question for the past four or more years.

Why is it that red wolves are so unloved and unsupported by conservationists? Jan DeBlieu put it best when she wrote:

If wolves are animals of savage and demonic qualities, as myth and folklore portray them, then red wolves have been doubly damned. They are despised, on the one hand, by people who think of wolves as bloodthirsty and sinister, yet they are often overlooked by those who might be expected to rush to their defense. (Meant to Be Wild, 1993)

This quote spoke to me on so many different levels, that I placed it at the beginning of Part I of my book, The Secret World of Red Wolves. Christine’s question embodies the reaction most people have when they first learn of red wolves and their tragic conservation story. So I tweeted a few of my ideas as to why Canis rufus remains so underserved by the conservation community, and so abused by governmental policies that should be protecting them from extinction. Without further ado, here are my tweets:

(1) People get confused because of their ability to hybridize with coyotes, think they are not a “real” species.

(2) Because of this confusion over species status, conservation groups and leaders have lost interest.

(3) Conservation groups’ loss of interest in them leads to loss of exposure/education to the general public.

(4) Some believe bc of the hybridization issues, they can never be recovered, that they are “too far gone.” Too much trouble.

(5) Fish and Wildlife Service, at higher levels, has historically underplayed the program because of fear of failure.

(6) They don’t fit our cultural idea of what a wolf should be: they are smaller, not as aggressive = less charismatic.

(7) State of NC has never embraced the program, has even worked against it, so very little political will to recover them.

(8) ESA listing status was conferred to provide flexibility in recovery, but has produced weak state and federal protections

(Review) Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures

Cover of Animal Wise

If you’ve ever gazed at your dog, cat, parrot or pet fish and wondered, What are you thinking? What are you feeling? then Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures is just the book for you. A few centuries ago, scientists scoffed at the idea of animals harboring the ability to think much less feel emotions. Some conceived of them, along Descartesian philosophical lines, as not much more than preprogrammed flesh-covered robots which enacted different behavioral routines in response to specific stimuli.

In Animal Wise, Morell expertly tells a tale of how mainstream science learned to ask the right questions in order to study animal emotions and the ability of different species to think, plan, and problem solve, as well as their ability to feel emotions. Although early in the book she discards the idea that there are lower and higher orders of animals, she chose to arrange  the book chapters in order from animals that have comparatively simplistic brain anatomy to animals with increasing complexity. As a result, the  reader moves through the labs and field sites of scientists studying ants, to those of fish, birds, rats, elephants, dolphins, chimpanzees, gorillas, dogs, and wolves. Among a few other behavioral oddities, we learn that ants intentionally teach their fellow nestmates; rats laugh when tickled — and will even seek someone out for a festive bout of sensory joy; not every “mooooo” is the same — cows have linguistic differences akin to our regional dialects; confined dolphins can develop crushes on their trainers and attempt to elicit sex; and elephants sometimes visit and linger over the bones of their departed herd members.

On being a Good Reader

Can you read and ride a bike?

In March I began reviewing nonfiction science and nature books here on Wild Muse. There were a couple of reasons this came about. First, after experimenting with blogging for several years, I’d grown a little bored with the model of writing a post about a published science paper. Second, my life shifted in ways that precluded being able to do even that when, within the span of a few months, I finished my first book and became a new mother. Suddenly, my time was too limited and too fractured to write regularly in a meaningful way. It was not just my blog suffering from neglect, it was my professional writing too.

Slowly I learned to be okay with the fact that I’m a Writer who is not currently writing. At first, it felt like my identity had been stripped away. If I wasn’t writing, then who was I? What was I doing with my time? Could I still say I was a writer? In addition to being a full-time mom to a rambunctious toddler, I continued to help my husband get his business off the ground; I found new depths of meaning in each of these roles. But a part of me still groped blindly in the dark for something to hold onto from my writerly life: I keened for time and mental space to write again and was repeatedly frustrated when this absurd venture turned into something akin to Waiting for Godot. I’ve been a cyclist for long enough to know I was simply spinning my wheels, doing nought but going through the motions. And so I settled down, and I listened to the Reader Yin of my Writer Yang, the part of me who yearned to be a Reader again. I became comfortable with putting my writing away for the time being; I imagine this scene as a wild bird released from a rattan cage that I watch as it careens out of my window . . . and I must trust it will come home to roost again. Someday. I then learned to curl up with a book whenever the opportunity arose. 

Wild Muse’s top Christmas book picks

Shopping for books for a wildlife lover, tree-hugger, naturalist, or conservationist in your gift-giving circle? Here are a few titles to titilate their reading sensibilities:

Love, Life and Elephants, by Dame Daphne Sheldrick (2013). Sheldrick helped to pioneer husbandry methods for raising orphaned elephants so young that they were still dependent upon their mother’s milk. But she also cared for numerous other kinds of injured and orphaned wildlife in her time at Tsavo National Park. Although this book is heavy in the early parts with Sheldrick’s family history of settling in Kenya as British homesteaders in the first half of the 20th century, the story is laced throughout with observations of wildlife and interactions with individual animal oprhans, including: wild giraffes, hyenas, rhinoceros, raptors of all kinds, elusive kudu, gazelles, lions, leopards, oryx, ostriches and — of course — elephants.

Animal Wise: The Thoughts and Emotions of Our Fellow Creatures, by Virginia Morrel (2013). This books takes readers on an unforgettable jaunt through major recent changes in how scientists understand the intelligence of animals ranging from ants to fish, birds, dolphins and dogs. Morrel is an accomplished science writer and deftly unpacks research findings for her readers while touring research labs and meeting with scientists across the world.

The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival, by John Vaillant (2010). Can a tiger hold a vendetta against a person? This is a central question in Vaillant’s book, and he’s written a haunting tale you won’t soon forget. It’s based on true events that transpired in Russia’s Far East in the late 1990s. The truth of the events portrayed in this book will stalk your conscience until you are forced to confront several revelations: that tigers may possess an intelligence which allows for pre-meditated action, that tigers may have emotions and act upon them, that tigers may have the emotive and cognitive capacities to possess grudges and enact vendettas, and that most humans who don’t live with wild tigers tend to downplay and discredit these possibilities.

(Review) Collared: Politics and Personalities in Oregon’s Wolf Country

Cover of COLLARED, by Aimee Lyn Eaton (OSU Press 2013)

No matter where people and wolves share the same landscape, conflict inevitably arises. Sometimes the conflicts are based in reality; sometimes they are not. Few animals other than wolves are able to consistently elicit in us deep emotional and political responses — responses that polarize us as stakeholders in their well-being, or polarize us as community members.

When wolves were reintroduced to the Northern Rocky Mountains in 1996, from two source populations released in Yellowstone National Park and in central Idaho, it was with the understanding that they would eventually tread beyond these places and reclaim lands long lost to them. Oregon was predicted to be one of the first states to receive dispersing wolves seeking new home ranges and hunting grounds. Livestock ranchers in Oregon braced for these events with trepidation. In the spring of 1999, the first wandering wolf crossed the Snake River and into Oregon’s Hells Canyon Wilderness — the young female yearling’s arrival occured about seven years earlier than predicted. That was all it took to wake Oregonians to the possibility of wolves in their midst.

Aimee Lyn Eaton’s new book, Collared: Politics and Personalities in Oregon’s Wolf Country, takes a fine-scaled in-depth look at the political process of Oregon’s preparations for receiving gray wolves. But she also puts stakeholders in her cross-hairs and reports on the multiplicity of perspectives held by biologists, ranchers, rural citizens and conservationists.

(Review) Love, Life, and Elephants: An African Love Story, by Dame Daphne Sheldrick

Love, Life and Elephants: An African Love Story

There aren’t many autobiographies which hold the power to lock horns with my attention and hold it captive for days on end until the last page is turned. But this one did. Perhaps this is because I tend to be more interested in reading about wildlife and nature than people, and perhaps this is because Love, Life and Elephants contains a series of deeply gripping emotional tales of the personal lives of rescued and orphaned wild animals in Kenya’s famous Tsavo-East National Park.

Sheldrick is best known for her work caring for orphaned elephants. She helped pioneer husbandry methods to nurse motherless milk-dependent elephant calves to survival. Prior to her work these newly born mammals faced a near certain death once their mothers were lost. But Sheldrick’s memoir is about much more than this singular achievement. It’s a history of her British family homesteading in Kenya at a point in time when the Crown was encouraging colonization there; and their subsequent feeling of abandonment and cultural isolation when the British government ultimately pulled out of Kenya.

Her family felt torn between two countries: culturally they were English, but they had poured years of time and energy into carving productive farms and ranchland from the Kenyan soil. Sheldrick wrote: “Labelled the White Tribe of Africa, we were rapidly losing our stake in the country we viewed as home and could never be truly British again, due to long isolation in Africa. Nor could we be truly African either, because of our colour and culture.” Though Sheldrick viewed herself as an Englishwoman living in Kenya, she knew she could never return to Great Britain; and in this way she felt keenly the isolation and abandonment that her many wild orphans experienced, the singular sense of being on your own. Maybe it was this shared sentiment that led her to become a deeply nurturing and loving surrogate mother to so many motherless wild animals.

Guest Post: Meera Lee Sethi, author of Mountainfit

Meera Lee Sethi. Birding in Sweden.

Dear Reader: Prepare for a literary treat. Today I am excited to bring to you a guest post by one of my favorite science and nature writers, Meera Lee Sethi. Sethi self-published a book last year called Mountainfit, which I reviewed here, about time she spent birding in Sweden. And yet, it was about so much more. And this is the main thing I love about Sethi’s work, an essay on any certain topic illuminates not only it but layers of many other things. 

Since publishing Mountainfit, Sethi’s work has turned heads, including a few at CCLaP Publshing which picked it up and is now publishing and distributing hard cover versions. Meera also blogs at the Coyot.es network, where you can find her words at Dispersal Range. This post is the first of her blog book tour, so you’ll be able to find more of her beautiful writing elsewhere over the following days and weeks.  And now, here’s Meera Lee Sethi, with a glimpse of some thoughts from Sweden. – TDB

Sphagna

It was like the surface of the moon, people say, meaning strange. Meaning wild. I didn’t think about it much before that summer—so much of my life spent walking on concrete, on asphalt, on soil made smooth by human hands—but the surface of the earth can be all those things, too. The planet has many different skins. In a small zip-lock bag inside an envelope inside a box, I keep a little piece of one of them.

There are well over 130 species of Sphagnum known to science. About three dozen of those are found in Sweden alone, a country whose surface area is about one quarter peat bog. In the wetland tundra surrounding the observatory where I began writing Mountainfit I might, for example, have been tramping over the tightly clustered branches and tiny toothed leaves of Sphagnum fuscum, or balticum, or magellanicum.

It is this last I have with me, a keepsake mailed to me by a sweet friend months after I left. Its yellow fascicles and tiny, deep pink leaves are dry and disarticulated now, but once they were part of a vast, interconnected mantle. 

(Review) How Animals Grieve, by Barbara J. King

Have you ever witnessed a pet or captive animal grieve? How did you know what it was feeling?

In order to feel grief, one must also feel love. Most likely, you just read that sentence and thought it so uncontroversial as to be absurd. But now imagine that the “one” under discussion is a… goat? How about a chicken, or a cat? Now, what do you think about that statement?

In her book, How Animals Grieve, anthropologist and author Barbara J. King explores a multitude of anecdotes about animals that appear, to human eyes, to experience what we know as grief. Cats who keen for recently deceased siblings. Goats who search frantically for missing goat-friends. Horses who encircle the exact patch of land where their herd mate was buried in a pasture. An emotionally insecure elephant who leaves her beloved security object, a tire, on the body of her beloved dog companion. These intriguing stories, and many more, form the core of King’s exploration of how individual animals grieve over lost relatives and companions.

It’s deeply telling that King, who is a practicing anthropologist at the College of William and Mary, titled her book How Animals Grieve (emphasis mine), rather than asking: Do Animals Grieve? From the beginning, it’s clear she believes some animals experience grief, in ways that are different from how we understand grief to be, though still recognizably within the realm of sadness, depression, and a deep awareness of the loss of something or someone near and dear.

Scientists typically caution against interpreting animal behaviors within the suite of our human behaviors and emotions. Anthropomorphism, as it’s called, is viewed as a big no-no. Biologists and experimental animal behaviorists tend to view anthropomorphism as folksy, unprofessional  and even flat-out wrong. But recently, a case is being made that the scientific community has gone too far in disallowing themselves to interpret animal emotions in relation to our own. (After all, if you go back far enough, we evolved from a common animal ancestor.) King writes, “The skpetics have a point: rather than accept uncritically the existence of animal grief, or animal love, or any other complex emotion in non-human animals, we should first weigh other, simpler explanations.” This is exactly what King does throughout the book as she recounts anecdotes of how surviving animals behaved after losing a sibling or close companion;