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:

(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;

(Review) Big, Wild, and Connected, Part 1: From the Florida Peninsula to the Coastal Plain, by John Davis

What does the East look like to a dispersing panther? What obstacles might they face?

What does the American East look like to a panther that seeks to paw its way from southern Florida up into Canada? How do wide-ranging quadrupeds like black bears find safe crossings where interstates and highways lace their habitat? What does the southeastern U.S. look like to a red wolf wishing to reclaim its former haunts?

In Big, Wild, and Connected adventurer and author John Davis sets out to answer these questions, and to see if there is still a chance to create a continuous wildlife corridor spanning the North American East. This e-book, a part of of the Island Press e-essentials series, transports readers along a human-powered 7,500 mile journey over ten months in 2011 of hiking, cycling and paddling from the southernmost tip of Florida to Gaspe Peninsula, Quebec in maritime Canada. Called TrekEast, Davis and his partner organization, The Wildlands Network, did a fabulous job promoting the adventure with social media; and you can still visit this online map to explore Davis’s journey and click on starred “trail stories” which link to blog posts that (as the name suggests) record anecdotes along the route.

Davis, a former board member of The Wildlands Network, wanted to draw awareness to the need for an Eastern Wildway — an eastern parallel to the more widely known Western Wildway, which seeks to connect a corridor for wildlife from Mexico to Canada along the spine of the Rockies. An eastern continent-scaled wildlife corridor was first proposed by Dave Foreman in Rewilding North America (2004), and Davis wanted to find out if Foreman’s vision for such an ambitious wildway was still feasible — or if it was too late. Big, Wild and Connected is the three-part story of Davis’s awareness-raising campaign for this unrealized corridor vision. (Each of the  three parts is sold as a separate e-book.)

(Review) Birthright: People and Nature in the Modern World, by Stephen Kellert

Where do you find everyday nature?

After reading about the sometimes ragged, sometimes technical, and always human-influenced future of wild nature and conservation strategies  in Rambunctious Garden (Emma Marris), I decided to dwell a little in the aftermath of her book and reflect on the idea of what nature means to people. Whereas Marris’s book focused on what conservation efforts might look like in the future, it didn’t step into the fuzzier realm of why nature is important to people personally, culturally, spiritually, psychologically or otherwise. Enter Yale University professor of forestry and environmental studies Stephen Kellert. His book, Birthright: People and Nature in the Modern World promised to examine “why human beings need to connect with nature and what is lost when they are disconnected from the natural world.” I thought the two would be interesting to read back-to-back, to let their ideas bump into one another in my head—and I was right.

Kellert argues that human health and well-being are indelibly linked to nature, and that having a connection with nature is an essential birthright of being human. Whereas Marris dove deep into the idea of what qualifies as “nature,” “natural,” and “wilderness,” Kellert spends little time on this (birds in the backyard will do), and instead focuses on the characteristics of our interactions with nature. He believes that our intellectual and emotional capacities, even our ability to find meaning in life, hinge on our relationship with nature. And in a world where people increasingly live indoors, with less direct experience of nature, he believes that we are losing vital elements of ourselves: our health, our intellect, our capacities for affection and reason.

Along with E.O. Wilson, Kellert was a developer of the biophilia concept. He writes that it’s a complex process, involving not just a “love of life,” but also a framework that describes how we “attach meaning to and derive benefit from the natural world.” Attraction, reason, aversion, expolitation, affection, dominion, spirituality and symbolism form the warp and weft of this framework, according to Kellert and Wilson’s theory. These categories also form the structure for Birthright, with each one becoming a chapter unto itself.

(Review) Zoobiquity: The Astonishing Connections Between Human and Animal Health

When I was little, our family had a white and caramel-spotted cat named Bumble. In her golden years she developed a “hot spot” on her hip. Bumble licked this one particular wound so repeatedly, and so fiercely, that she abraded her hair in a section the size of a half dollar. The exposed skin eventually became inflamed and began to ooze. Still, Bumble licked. And nibbled. And bit. Her eyes took on a trance-like look as she worked on her hot spot; sometimes she would dig in with her canines so hard, and with such deep focus, that she would comically topple herself over.

It never occurred to me, until reading Zoobiquity: The Astonishing Connections Between Human and Animal Health, that the parallel human malady to Bumble’s affliction might be self-injuring behaviors such as cutting, burning, or bruising oneself on purpose. Grooming behaviors in many animals—such as licking in cats, feather preening in birds, and louse picking in primates—has a calming effect because, the authors write, “It releases opiates into our bloodstreams… decreases our blood pressure… and slows our breathing.” (It can also foster social structures in some animal groups, such as primates and even fish.) But in some individuals, the biochemical processes that create this calming effect go a little haywire, and the animals get a dose of feel-good even when their behaviors cross over from benign grooming to painful activities. Hence, the connection between Bumble chewing on her spot and a teenager dragging a razor shallowly across her inner thigh; what should yield pain instead produces pleasure.

As much as we attempt to divide ourselves from the rest of the animal kingdom, the truth is that members of Homo sapiens are, well, animals. So it shouldn’t raise eyebrows to learn that humans and animals share many common—and not so common—ailments, such as heart anomalies and cancers. In Zoobiquity, authors Barbara Natterson-Horowitz and Kathryn Bowers dig deeply into these commonalities. But they don’t simply search for similar diseases and afflictions shared by man and beast, they also explore and explain the possible evolutionary underpinnings of these links.

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.

(Review) The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian’s Hunt for Sustenance, by Tovar Cerulli

Where’s the groundhog?

Twenty-three years ago, I ceased eating meat. Over time, I’ve gone through incarnations of eating seafood and not eating seafood (currently it’s on the menu); but I freely admit that I’ve never given as much thought to the why of my pisco-lacto-vegetarianism as has the gifted writer, (and thoughtful eater), Tovar Cerulli.

In The Mindful Carnivore: A Vegetarian’s Hunt for Sustenance (Pegasus Books, 2012), Cerulli beautifully chronicles his philosophical approach to eating and living. The book follows his journey from eschewing not only flesh but all animal products—such as milk and honey—to becoming, improbably, a hunter of deer in New England’s woods.

Rest assured, his journey is far from a navel-gazing or vain adventure. In his writing, Cerulli interweaves literary influences and meditations that span from Buddhism to animal-rights ethics to farming to hunting. It’s an approach that augments the threads of his personal life narrative with a broader connection to the link between the ethics of how animals (both wild and domestic) are treated in our normal channels of food production—even the organic farming of vegetables.

The vast array of sources Cerulli draws upon reveal his deep interest in pursuing “mindful” eating, and exposes his driving mission to seek out the “right” way to live. I interpreted this “right path,” in his view, to be one of minimal impact to the natural world, but also one that yields a healthy diet and a deep personal connection to food and how it is produced.

One of the things I most appreciated about Cerulli’s book is the honesty he demonstrates in anecdote after anecdote when explaining how his thoughts and attitudes toward food, and animals in particular, have changed over time.