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.

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

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.

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.

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.

A 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.

Red wolf story in the KSJ Tracker

A female red wolf at Alligator River National Wildlife Refuge, N.C. (© 2010 DeLene Beeland)

At least a few times  a week I click on the Knight Science Journalism Tracker to peruse the world’s science news. The KSJ Tracker not only tracks science stories, which outlets are publishing them and who writes them, but it also offers critiques and sometimes the back-story of where an article originated from. I was surprised today when I clicked on it and saw my own story from the Charlotte Observer among Monday’s cull. (Thanks Charlie, for listing it!) All in all, I’m really surprised by the response to this story (Observer link here) which covered the 12th “wolf pup fostering” event in the Red Wolf Recovery Program. This is only the second story I’ve ever used first-person in, and I felt a little odd about that. But Tyler Dukes assured me on twitter that even though he also abhors writing in the first person, he’s not bothered by it when he reads it in other people’s features. So far I’ve received about a dozen emails from people across North Carolina who were excited to read the story, or wanted to share with me their experiences learning about red wolves, naming a middle school after the red wolf, sketching wolves, and even expressing concern for the female wolf whose pups were used for the fostering. On the one hand, I’m really excited that people not only read the newspaper but that they take the time to write to the journalist to share or ask questions. On the other hand, I wish I’d had twice as much space to write about all the other things I’ve learned about red wolves and their conservation so far — but that is what the book is for, right?