(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.

Pub Day! The Secret World of Red Wolves

I couldn’t have asked for a better cover.

It’s official—my book, The Secret World of Red Wolves: The Fight to Save North America’s Other Wolf, is out. Finally. What a trek it’s been to get to this day!

If you pick up a copy, this is what you’ll find on the inside jacket: Red wolves are shy, elusive, misunderstood predators. Until the 1800s, they were common in the longleaf pine savannas and deciduous forests of the southeastern United States. But red wolves were nearly annihilated by habitat degradation, persecution, and interbreeding with the coyote. Today, reintroduced red wolves are found only on peninsular northeastern North Carolina within less than one percent of their former historic range. In The Secret World of Red Wolves, nature writer T. DeLene Beeland shadows the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service’s pioneering program over the course of a year to craft an intimate portrait of the red wolf, its natural history, and its restoration. Her engaging portrait of this top-level predator traces the intense effort of conservation personnel to restore a species that has slipped to the verge of extinction. Beeland weaves together the voices of scientists, conservationists, and local landowners while posing larger questions about human coexistence with red wolves, our understanding of what defines this animal as a distinct species and how climate change may swamp the only place it is currently found in the wild.

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.

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.

(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:

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.

(Review) The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival, by John Vaillant

What does it take for a tiger to develop a vendetta against a human?

Can a tiger hold a vendetta against a person? This is a central question in The Tiger: A True Story of Vengeance and Survival by John Vaillant. The book holds 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 animals like tigers may possess an intelligence which allows for pre-meditated action, that animals like 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.

The story Vaillant tells in this book is based upon a series of events that took place in the far eastern Soviet taiga, which is a type of habitat that transitions between tundra and temperate forests. The bulk of the book takes place in Primorye Territory, a maritime province which harbors one of the last reservoirs of wild Siberian tigers. The opening scenes begin in December 1997 on the sliver of Russia’s eastern coast that lies between China and the Sea of Japan. A man had just been attacked and partially eaten by a tiger, about 60 miles from the logging town of Luchegorsk.

But it wasn’t just any man, and very soon the tiger’s act of killing and consuming this man takes on a chilling revelation: the tiger knew this man. The tiger, in fact, was carrying a bullet that the victim had shot into it just weeks before. Did the tiger remember that this particular hunter had shot it? Did the tiger seek out revenge?

Conserving the Everglades headwaters

A friend and colleague of mine is using his photographic and visual story-telling skills to help communicate the importance of Florida’s ranching heritage within the perspective of conservation. The video below is a taste of a larger project he’s working on with many others to conserve 150,000 acres of headwaters to the Everglades, and the ranchlands within them. The safeguarded area would create the Everglades Headwaters National Wildlife Refuge and Conservation Area. This is a unique project being pushed by some in Florida for the Fish and Wildlife Service to acquire the development rights of large ranches and other lands, while allowing the ranch owners and landowners to continue their traditional ranching or agricultural practices. By placing these lands in conservation easements, the Everglades Headwaters will be protected from further development too. (And in a state known for selling off its natural assets, this is a big deal.) These ranches aren’t used only by people and cattle — wildlife flock to them too.

My friend, photographer Carlton Ward, has been experimenting with camera traps on many of these ranches for the past few years. The result has been a series of fabulous photos of rare Florida panthers, large black bears and their cubs, bobcats and foxes. These critters travel across the ranchlands and use them as both home and a wildlife corridor. An amazing camera trap photo of Carlton’s, of a black bear exhaling a fine mist in a cool dawn, graced the cover of Audubon magazine this month, and more were printed within.

Watch this video for more information on the proposed Everglades Headwaters National Wildlife Refuge and Conservation Area. To see the Florida panther photo, and to learn more details, read this in-depth op/ed Carlton wrote for the St. Petersburg Times. More information and videos are available at NorthernEverglades.com.

(Review) The Lost Wolves of Japan, by Brett Walker

The Lost Wolves of Japan, by Brett Walker

The Lost Wolves of Japan is a first-rate academically-oriented text that combs through the natural and cultural history of wolves on the Japanese archipelago. Author Brett Walker is a professor of history at Montana State University who specializes in Japanese history; this book was published by the Univ. of Washington Press. He used historical research methodologies to frame an inquiry into what the Japanese wolf was, and what led to its extinction. If you like historical detail, this book serves it up in helping after generous helping.

Walker explores many different themes in The Lost Wolves of Japan, most of which are centered around people, culture, wolves and nature. He pokes and prods the relationships of these entitites to each other by using various historical lenses. He examines the near-myth of Japanese “oneness” with nature; the culture of the Ainu (an indigenous people group in the Japanese archipelago) and their spiritual reverence for wild wolves, and their close relationship with domesticated hunting dogs; how early Japanese naturalists classified the wolves and mountain dogs that populated their islands; the Japanese government’s quest to modernize their society through ranching during the early years of the Meiji Restoration (ca. 1868); and theories of wolf extinction.

Electrifying deterrents: wolves and fladry

Fladry in the wind. (Photo by Nathan Lance, Montana Fish, Wildlife and Parks)

Fladry has proved to be an interesting and rather low-tech tool to ward wolves away from domestic livestock in certain conditions. It consists of red flags or pennants attached to a piece of twine or thin rope at regular intervals (about 18 inches or so) and strung around a livestock corral or pen. Like all predator deterrents, it has some limitations.

For one thing, it depends upon the livestock being concentrated in one area — I’m told that it’s tough, and expensive, to string this stuff up around expansive ranges. For another, it loses its effectiveness over time as wolves become accustomed to seeing it. Part of fladry’s success, it seems, is that it’s a new object that causes wolves to become frightened of passing it. Past studies have shown that fladry can be effective in field trials for up to 60 days before wild wovles cross them (Musiani 2003).

In the race of cunning to outwit wolves, some intrepid thinkers came up with the idea of running electric current through fladry to extend its usefulness. Perhaps a little electric shock would ward wolves off for longer, the thinking went. The negative stimulus of electric current works in theory much like the electric-collar on your pooch that tests the boundaries of its yard. (Except, in the case of turbo-fladry, the goal is to keep the wolves out; whereas you want to keep your dog in, but nevermind, you catch my drift…)