PSA: Why You Need to Go to Glacier National Park

In 2009, I embarked on an epic solo road trip from Missouri to Colorado, Oregon, Idaho, and finally Montana. While I visited many places, got back in touch with old family and friends, and put an entire oil-change-worth of miles on my little Honda Accord, the highlight of the trip was most definitely the two days I spent in Glacier National Park.

So, here are just a few of the reasons you need to visit.

1. ANIMALS!!!

Above: Mountain goats, and a white-tailed deer in velvet (which would NOT get off the dang trail and out of my way, but whatevs, it was cool). There are also lots of wolves and bears which, alas, I did not see - though I had a close call with a grizzly bear anyway. 

It's not smart to hike in bear country alone, so I started asking random strangers if they minded me hiking a little ways behind them. Creepy? Probably. Worth the weird looks? Of course. It wasn't too difficult to find people willing to oblige me, including a cute middle-aged couple, so I gave them a 5-minute head start and then trundled off after them. 

Not two minutes later, they returned with the news that there was a mother bear with her cubs on the trail, and that we'd all better get the heck out of there. 

I hope that scary bears won't dissuade you from visiting. Buy some bear spray. Don't hike alone. Heck, even if you never leave the main road, the park is still a treat for the senses. Just be sure, when you're getting all tucked in to your tent at one of the campsites, not to go to sleep covered in peanut butter, popcorn, and candy bar wrappers.

If mammals aren't your thing, there are also tons of birds and fish and bugs and stuff. :-)

Oh and oh...also because awesome (though somewhat sad) Nature stuff like THIS happens there.

2. The most amazing scenery I have ever seen

All of these pics were taken by me on the famous Going to the Sun Road. Scary and always under construction (for good reason, as it gets ruined every winter by the weather), it takes you from the river to the Continental Divide in a few breathtaking miles of pavement.

OK, I may or may not have a thing for taking pics of my car in cool places. :-)

3. Because if you don't feel like driving to "way the heck over there in northern Montana", you can take the train right to Glacier's front door from Seattle, Milwaukee, Chicago, or Minneapolis, via the Empire Builder route.

Photos from Amtrak.com

Click here to visit Amtrak's Empire Builder website.

4. Because Glacier's glaciers are melting and you're running out of time to see them. 

True story. Click here.

Immunity Lost

If you don't know what the above plant is, I envy you. No, no, actually I hate you, because anyone who doesn't know what this is has probably never had a serious run-in with it. And that's just not fair.

I know you, you who goes about your business in the woods without having to look carefully at every single plant beside the trail, or leap back in terror whenever a leaf happens to brush against your skin, or scrub furiously with mineral oil or Tecnu as soon as you return home. I know you and I hate you.

If you haven't already figured it out, the plant I'm talking about is poison ivy. SCIENCE ALERT: Poison ivy, oak and sumac contain an oil called urushiol, a wonderful little chemical that causes a severe contact dermatitis reaction for many people. It's an oil - that means you can't just remove it with soap and water. Typically you need mineral spirits or a miraculous substance called Tecnu to remove it, and you only have a few hours after exposure to do so before the oil begins to do its devilry to your skin. After that, it can take a couple of days for a full-blown reaction to appear.

The oil's everywhere in there, folks - the leaves, the stems, the roots. It lurks in the defoliated skeletons of ivy past so that just when you think it's safe to pull it from your garden, you're at the doctor two days later with a swollen face. It stays on your clothing for months - years, even - and laughs in the face of washing machines. Oh yes; you thought you got off scot-free when you scrubbed the crap out of your skin after your hike and instantly threw your clothes in the laundry, but no, all you needed to do was put that lovely shirt on again and you're a ticking rash-bomb.

Some people don't react to it. That's me, you may think to yourself, as you swim in the oily fields of green and laugh at your suffering friends. But poison ivy will have the last laugh, because perhaps its most fiendish quality of all is that you can lose your immunity. 
---

This story starts in South Dakota, summer 2005. You may not think of the dry, mountainous Black Hills as favorable poison ivy habitat, but you'd be very wrong. When I was there working on woodpeckers between my junior and senior years of college, we had to wade through acres and acres of it nearly every day.

Poison ivy likes disturbed sites, so I'm told, and we were working in areas burned by wildfire. And the ivy loved it. If you've seen little bushes by the roadside or tendrils creeping along the base of an oak in your front yard, forget about those images and try to imagine this: a broad, endless, sparkling field of green, but except for grass, it's aaaaaaaaalll poison ivy.

At first, warned by my boss, I tried very carefully to avoid it. I had never been exposed and didn't know if I would react - and based on the stories I heard, I was not eager to experiment. However, one day, as I carried the equipment in the hot sun, trying my damnedest not to trip and fall on the half-hidden logs underneath the poison ivy, I lost my footing. I fell face-first into that crap.

And, joy of all joys, nothing happened.

I was immune. Glorious, glorious revelation.

Fast-forward to  summer 2010. I had now worked in the field of wildlife biology for 5 years, in northwestern Colorado, southern California, Yellowstone National Park, and central Missouri with untold exposure to poison ivy and nary a reaction to be had. (Granted, I got a little rash from poison OAK in California, but the stupid part of my brain chose to ignore the smart part that reminded me that, poison ivy or oak, urushiol is urushiol.) Now, I was back in Colorado, working on the lion project.

One hot day in July, my coworker Kevin and I decided to hit some points just west of Golden, in the scrubby hills right smack across from the Coors Brewery (remember, we were hiking in to data points uploaded from the lions' fancy collars). We didn't have far to hike, but the going was steep - through scrub oak and cactus, far from the shade of the trees, up a steep hillside cut in half by a deep, rocky little gulch. We were searching for a lion kill.

Most of the lion's GPS points appeared to drop right down into that little gulch. While Kevin balked at the unmistakable fronds of poison ivy trailing all over the sides and bottom, I puffed out my chest. "Never fear," I may or may not have said, "I am immune. I shall dive into the toxic depths." And did I ever.

It was everywhere. And there was no easy way to get into the gulch without touching it, so I threw all caution to the wind, sat down, and wormed my way through the stuff to slide down and land in the bottom.The scrub and the rocks twisted at my clothes and sent branches and pebbles down my pants, but I didn't care too much. Having reached my destination, I searched everywhere for sign of a lion kill, but alas, it was not to be. Just a random place the lion visited. It was difficult, but I pulled myself out of the ravine, and Kevin and I hiked back to the truck.

That was a Thursday, the end of the 4-day, 10 hours-per-day work week for us. I went home to Fort Collins, showered, did my laundry, and went about my business. Friday was wonderful; cool and sunny like a typical mild Colorado summer. Saturday, my roommates and I decided to check out the O'Dell Brewery, which produces my favorite wheat beer of all time: Easy Street.

We sat on the porch drinking our beer samplers and enjoying the day. We took pictures of each other being brew connoisseurs, and flirted with the cute boys on their Fort Collins brewery tours (there are quite a few there...breweries, as well as boys). And somewhere in there, probably between the porter and the IPA, I scratched at my arm. It had suddenly started to itch.

An hour passed. I had tried the pale ale and the amber, perhaps ordered a pint of Easy Street, and now the itch had spread to my neck. And, strangely, my back. And my face. All over my face. Increasingly worried, I urged the girls to take me home. I had no illusions. I knew exactly what was going on.

I bought Tecnu and scrubbed and scrubbed, but it was too late.

Monday morning, I showed up to work with half of my face looking and feeling like a pumpkin. I tried to cover it with my hand, but Kevin took one look at me and started laughing. I had no choice but to accompany him to the field. I remember this day so vividly; we had to ask permission from a nice old lady in order to search for a den site in a boulder field behind her property. I begged Kevin to let me stay in the car while he went to the door, but he was merciless. I'm sure the nice old lady didn't want to be rude, but she stared at me like I was some kind of zombie. And just to add to the annoyances of the day, we didn't find any kittens in the den.

As soon as we got back to town I went straight to the Urgent Care Center. Catastrophic crappy high-deductible insurance be damned, I wanted some frickin' cortisone. I got a lovely shot and a packet full of steroids.

In the end, the poison ivy rash covered me nearly from head to toe. There's a myth out there that you can spread it by scratching the rash, but that's not strictly true. If you don't remove the oil from your clothes, of course it's going to hit you again and again. But the reaction appears over different parts of your body with different timing. At first it was my arms and face, but eventually it got all over. Remember how I said the rocks had tugged at my clothes when I slid down into the ravine? Yeah. It got all over my back, all over my belt line (which itched even worse than my face), and even eventually to my legs, despite the fact that I'd been wearing long pants. I imagine this was due to residual oil from my clothes.

And the rash took forever to go away; at least a month. It was absolutely miserable.

Ever since then, I've avoided the stuff like the plague it is. I have a search image for it - an ingrained mental picture, typically used to describe predators searching for prey, that allows someone to instantly key in on the shape of something familiar. I still have minimal encounters with it from time to time (mostly because my favorite jogging park in Texas is riddled with it), but I vowed never to underestimate it again, and so far I have been rewarded for my diligence.

Indeed, I returned to South Dakota in 2011, again to work with woodpeckers, and again I was faced with the fields of poison ivy. But this time, my treatment of it was quite different. Especially in one area called the Sheridan field site, it was everywhere, and the woodpeckers seemed to love it. Almost like they knew it was my kryptonite, and all they had to do to get away from me was veer toward it. It annoyed my boss to no end that I took such pains to avoid it, but damn it, he hadn't felt what I felt. He hadn't stayed up all night with that insatiable itch that begs you to scratch and then taunts you with only seconds of relief before renewing the misery. All that summer I was afraid to touch the bottoms of my pants or my bootlaces. It was pointless to soak them in Tecnu, because the next day I'd just be ankle-deep in it again.

Well, the moral of this story, kids, is not to mess with poison ivy. You may be immune now, but I am firmly convinced that there is no more eager teacher of wisdom when it comes to the sin of complacency.

The other (unintentional) moral of the story is that Colorado has good beer.

---
SURPRISE.
If you've read to the end of this post, I shall reward you with a piece of information that may one day save your sanity.

Got an itch you just can't fix? Chiggers? Mosquito bite? Urushiol? Ditch the Calamine lotion, the hydrocortisone cream, the homeopathic remedies. Men, you may be SOL, but ladies, you probably have this most bestest of all itch cures already in your bathroom.

Catching Luna, Part Two

It was a cool, windless June morning, the day before I was supposed to hand the trapline over to the next volunteer, that I left the run-down cabin once again to meet my supervisor on the road to Indian Creek.

Wolves are "crepuscular", meaning they are most active at dawn and dusk. I checked the traps every morning and evening (before sunset, because it'd be really hard to process a wolf at night), but the evening checks were always sort of pointless. If we were going to catch a wolf, it would be in the morning; thus one of my supervisors would drive out to cruise the line with me. It's possible to handle and process a captured wolf alone, but this was not something they wanted to leave to volunteers (especially since I had never captured a wolf before).

Helen met me at the intersection and I hopped in her truck, and together we drove down the rough, rocky road to the sandy wash of Indian Creek. We had traps placed here and there along the road, which culminated in a hairpin turn to the north to reveal the meadow where the creek washed out. One of these traps had been sprung; and for a moment our hearts raced, until we saw the empty trap a few yards away. An elk had stepped in it.

Similar (not exact) trap to what we used.
Offset, padded jaws reduce injury.  

We used offset, padded foothold traps with variable tensions to select heavier animals (versus bobcats or coyotes; they wouldn't weigh enough to spring the trap if they stepped on it). They were attached to long drags, which look like anchors, designed to let the captured animal run away and take cover (versus the animal just sitting there in a trap staked into the ground, out in the open, stressing out), where the drag gets caught up in heavy vegetation. Since elk and deer have slender hooves, they don't get caught in the traps, though they can spring them.

(**I want to note that I am very aware of the controversies surrounding trapping. Responsible trappers who capture furbearers to sell furs are constantly aware of best trapping practices, which are continually revised as technology advances to increase humaneness of traps and reduce injury to wildlife and capture of non-target animals; and trapping regulations are often passed in accordance with these practices. Unfortunately, misunderstanding has resulted in bans of foothold traps in many states - including their use in nonlethal wildlife research. Cage traps do not usually work for Canids. Even foothold traps must be boiled prior to use and handled with boiled gloves to eliminate human scent. And cage traps, as humane as they sound, do not prevent injury - I've captured bobcats and mountain lions who scraped up their legs and faces trying to push through the bars. It would be great if we could learn everything we needed to know without having to capture animals at all, but at the moment, it's a necessary evil.**)

We continued on our way, deciding to re-set this trap on our way out if the rest were empty. Trap after trap passed away beside us, untouched. As had happened every morning and night during the rest of the week, when I would set out with suspense and excitement in my heart, disappointment began to settle on me again.

And then we rounded that corner. The very last trap had been pulled out of the ground. Helen jammed on the brakes. At first I couldn't see anything, so I glanced back at her for direction - and she was staring wide-eyed into the deep morning shadows in the northeast. I followed her gaze.

There, in the shade above the creek where the thick forest came down to meet it, was a Mexican wolf.

For a few moments we just stared at the wolf as she crouched about a hundred yards away, caught up in a clump of shrubs. Capturing wildlife is always exciting, and I took the few minutes of stillness to breathe deep and calm myself down. Then Helen turned to me and explained how we were going to do this.

As quietly and calmly as we could, so as not to startle the wolf further, we got out of the truck, walked around to the back, and removed the capture equipment. Helen got the sedative ready and took the catch-pole (the rod with an adjustable noose on the end), and I took the Y-pole (a rod with a Y at the end for securing the wolf's head against the ground). Slowly, we crept toward her.

Helen had done this dozens, if not hundreds, of times, but I thought she still looked nervous. She told me to stand ready with the Y-pole while she went in with the catch-pole. It soon became clear that this wolf was not going to go down easily.

Coyote capture from 2007. He's not
at all sedated (and I'm actually holding
onto his collar, not punching him
in the neck)

I had been on numerous coyote captures prior to this. With coyotes, we never even needed a sedative - Canids in general, since they are so social, are quick to identify that fighting would be useless and often cower in submission while you do whatever you need to do. (Cats are an entirely different story. They'll kill themselves trying to get away from you.) I remember walking straight up to coyotes in traps, noosing them with the catch-pole, and easily sliding a muzzle over their noses while the animal didn't so much as move. I sort of thought this wolf capture was going to be the same way.

It wasn't. That wolf snarled and snapped and wouldn't let Helen put that noose over her head. No matter what I did to distract her, she would swing those golden eyes around just in time and jerk her head away from Helen's catch-pole. That's what I remember most about her - those eyes, and the whiteness around them, in the moments when her head was pointed at me but she could feel the noose coming again.

She had been caught on a hind foot. As traumatic as it may sound to someone who hasn't done it before, foothold-trapping is remarkably humane; aside from some swelling, there is usually very little damage done to the animal's foot. However, hindfoot captures are not ideal. It's harder for a wolf to try to lunge away with a foreleg captured. As it was, between our attempts to restrain her, sometimes this wolf would take off in the other direction and pull and pull against the trap around her foot. The risk of her dislocating a hip or a knee with all that pulling worried us.

Helen tried her luck with the Y-pole, with the same results. The wolf just wasn't giving up. I think we tried for about 15-20 minutes to secure her. I don't remember how we ended up getting her head secured - if it was some new tactic of Helen's, or the wolf was just getting tired - but somehow, we finally managed it. Helen got the catch-pole around her neck and gently pushed her to the ground. I followed with the Y-pole. While I held her head down, Helen injected the sedative. Then we removed the poles and went back to the truck to wait for her to go down.

We were both thoroughly stressed out now. So far, the capture wasn't going entirely to plan. As we waited for the sedative to take effect, Helen gave me further instructions for the rest of the process.

I always liked Helen. She was definitely my favorite supervisor on that job; she was patient and friendly, but also stern and confident when the situation demanded it. With a never-ending stream of expendable volunteers appearing and disappearing from the project, it was easy for the permanent staff to stop caring much about them. It was never like that with Helen.

Now, her usual friendliness was clipped. Our mentor-mentee relationship sort of transformed into a drill sergeant-soldier situation. This was an important moment for me; up until this point I had had a reputation for being somewhat willful, my pride often overcoming good sense when I felt that it was being challenged - even with supervisors. But somehow, this time, I was able to bury it all and commit to taking Helen's orders, not challenging her, and not being hurt by her criticisms or decisions. I had wanted this experience to benefit me - I wanted to learn how to do everything, from drawing blood to taking measurements to injecting PIT tags and vaccines, and there is perhaps nothing more crushing to a learning wildlife biologist than being sent to the sideline to write down the data. But in this case, the need for expediency was well-recognized by Helen and, fortunately, by me as well.

In less than half an hour, the wolf had been collared, vaccinated, vampired, and measured. I honestly don't remember how much of this I got to do, since we were trying to get it all done so quickly, but since there were only two of us, I'm sure Helen let me do quite a bit. The wolf was a young, non-breeding female, weighing only 45 pounds. She was beautiful. Most Mexican wolves are very rusty-colored, but she was surprisingly white, only a little of the rustiness on her head. She was given the unremarkable moniker of F1115. But it meant that the Luna Pack was back on the map.

Perhaps the most remarkable part of this whole experience is what was going on in the background throughout the entire thing. From the moment we pulled up in the truck, somewhere off in the forest, we heard another wolf howling. Wolves have a variety of howls that are used for a variety of purposes - but this was bark-howling, which sounds just like it...well, sounds...and means that the wolf is stressed out. He knew that his buddy was in trouble.

It went on. And on. And on. For the entire thing. It might have contributed to F1115's anxiety as we tried to restrain her. The other wolf remained just out of sight the entire time, while his howls reverberated through the meadow. When I saw F1115 again in the other blog post, she was accompanied by a very large, rusty mate, and I feel instictively that it was him who was howling at us at her capture.

Anyway, we finally finished processing F1115 and prepared to set her loose. Helen let me hold her down while she administered the sedative reversal, and then we removed her muzzle and backed off. A few minutes later, she rose groggily to her feet, cast a last glance of loathing back at us, and took off through the forest.

Helen and I breathed a sigh of relief. It remains my first and only wolf capture, and a day I will never forget. And, as previously mentioned, this wolf was the subject of that later experience, which has been one of my favorite days ever on the job as a wildlife biologist. Also, once she was collared, we were able to locate and collar some of the rest of the members of her pack - including, I'm fairly certain, her friend (AM1155).

Hard to believe that was six years ago. And with the ongoing difficulties surrounding the Mexican Wolf reintroduction project, perhaps one of the most encouraging thoughts for me is that F1115 is still out there.

Click here for the latest Mexican wolf weekly telemetry update.

Catching Luna, Part One

One day, I caught a wolf.

This week's victim: day planner. Also,
I can evidently only draw things looking
to the left. 

All my life, I have loved wolves. I ate up wolf documentaries when I was growing up, ran around on my hands and knees pretending to be a wolf, wrote silly little fiction stories featuring talking wolves, and doodled wolves all over every spare piece of paper that ever passed beneath my nose. Even now, when I'm having an important phone conversation with a coworker or supervisor, my right hand is usually doodling a running wolf or a mysterious wolf face or a vicious snarling wolf or wolf paw prints. Or sometimes just paws. Or noses. Or eyes. Disembodied wolf heads, or headless wolf bodies (with a random Lion King portrait thrown in). Usually,  it's a mess of all of the above, like wolf eyes on wolf legs and wolf noses sitting precariously atop Simba's mane. Sometimes this occurs on very important paperwork that must then be re-printed, re-filled out, and then put away before someone else calls me and I do it all over again.

In short, I was a "Wolf Groupie": probably one of the most common trendy wildlife-groupie societies, along with polar bears and killer whales.

I suppose you could say wolves are the reason I got into wildlife biology. To summarize four years of practical and emotional education at the University of Idaho, I very quickly discovered that a) wolves, though beautiful and intelligent, are not quite the romantic spiritual beasts we Wolf Groupies made them out to be, b) it is extremely difficult to actually make a career out of studying them, and c) a very wide swath of western American society hates them. Passionately. This swath also tends to have the opinion that the only people who care about wolves are city folk who know nothing about what it's like to live with them.

Sadly, I fell into this category. My first day of college I received the nickname "Wolfgirl" from the Idaho/Alaska residents in the dorm, and it wasn't a compliment.

me with Amani at WERC

But over time, my naivete was assuaged by full immersion into a good education and the realities of Idaho culture. In 2004, I applied for an internship at the Wolf Education and Research Center in Winchester, Idaho, which I described in the previous post; and after that my interests expanded into other carnivores and even non-carnivores (gasp!) like woodpeckers, bats, and bighorn sheep. It's extremely difficult to get jobs with pointy-toothed critters because every other bright-eyed city-girl-turned-wildlife-biology-student wants them, and for many years after I graduated, I took whatever wildlife jobs I could get.

However, I still harbored this insatiable desire to work with wolves. Thus, in 2007 I gave up a high-paying, somewhat stable job with the US Geological Survey working with bobcats and coyotes in southern California to move to Alpine, Arizona and help with Mexican wolf recovery. All for $15 per day, a free room in a trailer, and the oh-so-prestigious title of "volunteer".

I described one of these experiences in this post, where I hiked in to a radio-collared wolf to see if she had any pups. This was the female of the Luna Pack. The Luna Pack had been around for a while - that is, the project personnel had always had at least one pack member collared - but when I got on the job, the collared alpha male had disappeared and nobody knew what had happened to the rest of them. We wanted to get at least one other collar out there, so we spent some time surveying the area to find "hot-spots" where we might set some traps for Luna.

And then one day, in the dry, sandy Indian Creek streambed within the old Luna territory, I found tracks.

Other volunteers visited the site every few days to check again, and sure enough, the tracks kept on appearing. About a week later a couple of my coworkers set some traps. Another volunteer named James spent the first few days on the trapline, unsuccessfully, and then it was my turn.

 They came just in time to keep me
from turning savage

For a week I lived out in the Gila Wilderness, about two hours from the nearest "town" of Mogollon (and I use the term "town" very, very loosely here; the place had a cafe that served pie, and pretty much nothing else). I stayed in a little cabin at a Forest Service campground called Willow Creek. The cabin had no running water or electricity, only leaky propane lights on the walls and a semi-functioning propane stove. To avoid the fumes I pulled a bunk bed over to an open window and tried to stick my nose out of it every night while I was sleeping.

It was pretty boring, to say the least. Occasionally a camper might show up in the nearby campground, and one of my supervisors and his wife showed up to keep me company for a day. But the for the most part, I checked the trapline every morning and every evening, and spent the rest of my time reading, walking around in the hills, and nursing the 3-hour battery life on my laptop to type or watch a video. The actual Willow Creek flowed just beyond the parking area for the cabin, and I'm not ashamed to say that it became my bath. It's the only time I've ever skinny-dipped.

Boring it might have been, but it was beautiful. Elk came through every day. I heard them bugling, and the strange call a mother elk makes to find her calf; I heard owls, and whip-poor-wills, and a great variety of other amazing birds. Maybe it was partially due to the propane, but I got some good thinking done there at Willow Creek.

But around the time I began to lose my sanity, my luck on the trap line changed.

(To be continued...)

Mistakes - Crappy First Impressions

One day, I accidentally spied on my boss while he was on the toilet.

the Visitors Center

My first job ever as a wildlife biologist in training was as an intern at the Wolf Education and Research Center near Winchester, Idaho. Back in 2004, this place still housed the remaining pack members of the Sawtooth Pack, a somewhat famous captive pack raised by photographers/filmmakers Jim and Jamie Dutcher. They spent two years with these wolves in an enclosure in the Sawtooth Mountains, making a documentary about life in a wolf pack. When the project ended, they talked with the Nez Perce tribe and got some tribal land set aside to house the wolves for the remainder of their lives.

By the time I got around to working with them, only five wolves remained: the three pups from the famous alpha pair Kamots and Chemukh (named Ayett, Motoki, and Piyip) as well as Motomo, the alpha male, and an ex-alpha named Amani. (Amani lived by himself in a separate pen. It's a long story, but he had to be neutered to go with the other male who lived in that pen, named Matsi, who died a year before I got there. A neutered male would be pretty quickly killed by the rest of the pack.)

My duties as an intern were to conduct regular "enclosure walks" with the wolves to check on the enclosure and on the wolves' health and behavior. I also led guided tours for visitors, ran the Visitors Center, and did various other projects like making interpretative displays and helping build a new cook shack for the interns. For a first job, it was pretty cool. There was some drama, as is to be expected whenever you put three college girls in a confined space for a summer with a somewhat moody supervisor (who also lived on site), but it was worth the pretty rare experience of getting to wake up to the sound of wolves howling every single morning.

The coolest part of the job was definitely living in Wolf Camp. Because the Center was on Nez Perce tribal land, everything had to be designed with the idea that it could easily be removed if the tribe required it. Thus we had no electricity, no running water - nothing. We lived in wall tents on site, mere feet from the main wolf enclosure. We used a cook tent for food (and later the cook shack, which had actual wooden walls instead of canvas) with a propane stove and water jugs hauled in regularly from Winchester, and every morning we had to clear off the mouse droppings from the countertops so we didn't get Hantavirus. Every so often we would go to WERC's main office in Winchester to do laundry and take a shower.

And I loved it. I remember my tent fondly. Since I was the first intern to arrive for the summer, I got the "assistant biologist" tent (since there was no assistant biologist that summer), which was a bit bigger and nicer than the other intern tents. It was also a bit more private. From the parking lot, you walk south down the Wolf Camp road to the three intern tents all  bunched together near the cook tent, then on south past the outhouse, and then on to my tent. Further down, closest to the wolf enclosure, was my boss's tent.

Well worth the 1/2 mile walk.

There were specific rules about life in Wolf Camp, one of the most important being how human waste was disposed of. Whenever we had to pee, we could just pee on the road, but whenever we felt the need to produce solid waste, we had to use an outhouse. I usually would just walk the half mile to the nice composting toilet at the Visitors Center whenever I felt the need arise, because the outhouse in Wolf Camp wasn't especially nice. It was just a big oil barrel with a toilet seat on top of it, enclosed on just three sides because the south side had to stay open so sunlight could hit it and speed up decomposition. Used toilet paper couldn't go in the barrels, so you had to put it in an empty coffee tin and burn it when you were finished.

The wonderful, glorious composting toilets.

This particular adventure occurred one of my first nights in Wolf Camp. As I said, my boss was kind of moody (I can imagine why, what with the constant turnover of annoying young interns), and because I had issues of my own, he didn't really like me very much from the get-go. Still, I wanted to make a good impression.

One night just before bed I decided to have a pee, so I strapped on my headlamp and walked out of my tent to the road. I scanned the road to the right (toward my boss's cabin) and to the left (toward the outhouse) to make sure nobody was coming down the road, when something caught me eye.

There, up the road, were a pair of eyes looking back at me.

I knew instantly that it was an animal of some kind. Humans don't have the reflective tapetum lucidum that produces the bright eyeshine of most wild animals. My heart leapt up into my throat and I stared hard at the lights, trying to figure out what the animal was: a deer? A bobcat? A black bear? And then, seconds later, a second set of eyes appeared, glowing out of the darkness, unblinking.

I probably stared at those lights for a good three or four minutes. They didn't move, just kept staring right back at me. Of course, I had my headlamp on, and it didn't go far enough to illuminate the animals and I was sort of scared to turn it off. After all, I was in the middle of freaking Idaho - the first time I'd ever spent any long amount of time away from a comfortable city house - and if something was going to eat me, I wanted to know what it was first.

But somewhere through all this staring and glaring, I suddenly remembered: my boss has two cats. And they follow him around wherever he goes.

The moment that thought crossed my mind, the outhouse - at which I had been shining my headlamp for the past three or four minutes - lit up from within in a bright orange glow, as my boss torched his toilet paper. And the open part faced south. Almost directly toward me.

Instantly I rushed back into my tent and blew out my kerosene lamp. I waited in silence. Seconds later I heard the crunch-crunch-crunch of my boss's footsteps passing my tent to go back to his cabin. I prayed he wouldn't stop in, and he didn't, luckily. I also prayed he somehow wouldn't know that the person shining a light on him as he did his business was me, but... there wasn't really anyone else around I could blame it on.

The next day, he took me and another intern to the visit the wolves. As we knelt in front of the fence, the wolves sniffing and licking our hands through the chainlink, my boss was telling us something about the history of the Sawtooth Pack - I don't remember what - when he abruptly turned to me and said, "If you want to watch wildlife at night, you should know they don't really like when you shine a bright light on them."
---
EPILOGUE
As of July 2013, the Sawtooth Pack is no more; Piyip was the last remaining member, and he finally died at the ripe old wolf age of 17. WERC now houses a pack of wolves rescued from a roadside zoo, and it continues to carry out its mission of educating the public about an animal that, even today, has a pretty bad reputation (seen Frozen yet?).

 Clockwise from upper left: me with Amani; Ayett (alpha female); Motomo (alpha male); and Piyip (both bottom photos). I never got a good picture of Motoki, who was my favorite.

The Search for Scat

One day, I fell into a frozen river while searching for otter poop in Missouri.

As I've alluded to in some previous posts, my master's research at the University of Missouri was on estimating the population size of reintroduced river otters in eight rivers in central/southern Missouri. We did this using noninvasive genetic sampling, i.e. picking up river otter poop at latrine sites (river otter communal bathrooms) and taking them back to the lab to pull DNA. It wasn't a very glamorous project, but we got some pretty good data and I got to learn how to do all those fun genetics techniques like extraction, PCR, electrophoresis, genotyping, etc. At first I wasn't very excited about the prospect of spending 2 years working in a lab, but it ended up being quite interesting.

It's really amazing how much information you can get from DNA, especially DNA that came from an animal's dropping. You can identify unique individuals, look at how genetic diversity changes across a landscape to identify barriers to dispersal and inbreeding, track lineages and evaluate relatedness of individuals within and across populations, and a whole lot more. Biologists are increasingly using this type of research on a wide variety of animals, even training scat-detection dogs to help them locate samples in the field. (I almost got a job once training these scat detection dogs in Seattle, after which I would have taken my dog up to Canada to help find wolf, cougar, and bear scat in the woods. I didn't get the job, but sometimes I still think about trying it out. Click here to read a National Geographic story about a friend of mine, Karen DeMatteo, who is working on a post-doc in Argentina, using her dog Train to sniff out scat.)

The best part is you can do it all without ever touching or harassing the animals, which can alter behavior and potentially cause capture-related mortality. As a matter of fact, it became a sort of running joke during my two years in graduate school that I was earning my degree studying river otters, and never ONCE did I actually see one. My friends would come back from their field work catching salamanders or tagging fish and return to joyously rub in my face that they caught a glimpse of an otter. Jerks.

Anyway, the field collection for my project occurred from January-April 2009. The Missouri Department of Conservation (MDC) hired a team of four technicians to cruise along the rivers finding latrine sites and collecting scat (and an especially disgusting substance secreted from otter anal glands, ingloriously dubbed "anal jelly"). We had to do this in the winter because otters tend to restrict their home ranges then, and because colder temperatures are better for preserving DNA. Unfortunately this meant canoeing on the rivers in sometimes extremely unpleasant conditions.

It's hard to tell since it's nice and sunny, but I'm pretty sure the temperature was about 5 degrees F. 

I only went out with the crew a handful of times, mostly to get a feel for the rivers and the scat collection process. They didn't need my help, and usually I think they found me more a hindrance than anything (I always sat in the middle of the canoe without a seat and without an oar, and I felt like they were chauffeuring me around). Most of the time we would start at daybreak, leave a truck at a drop-off point about halfway down the 15-mile river transects, and then get to the starting point and spend the day cruising both banks in search of latrines. We'd mark all the ones we found in the GPS and clear all the old scat off of them, then return in 6 days to collect all the new stuff.

Ice forming on my waders
 as I ran alongside

Ice dripping from the woods

As I said, sometimes the weather was extremely cold, and it made for unpleasant canoeing. We all wore neoprene coverall waders over jeans or thermal underwear so we could embark/disembark without getting wet, and because many times we had to drag the canoe through the shallows. However, this story takes place when temperatures were at their coldest: single-digits with below-zero wind chill. Since I couldn't help row, I had a very hard time keeping warm while I rode in the middle. Thus, if the banks were relatively clear, I would ask them to drop me off so I could run alongside. The waders made this kind of difficult, and I had to watch out for thorns and sticks that could easily tear holes in the soft fabric.

Look closely and you can see the ice crust,
and the path  being carved through it

Worse, one day during this cold snap, the river we were on finally started to ice over. It wasn't terribly thick, and the crew was able to barrel through it, carving a path through the thin crust. However, we finally got to a spot where the ice was just too thick. Despite the crew's attempts to back up and batter it at full speed, they were making very little progress. The brush on either side was too thick to allow us to drag it from the banks, or to carry it overland (plus those canoes are pretty heavy).

Enter me, scientist/fifth-wheel, wanting to stop being a hindrance and actually help out. Being one of the taller members of the team, I offered to wade into the deepening river and physically push the canoe through the ice while the rest of the crew walked the bank. So I stepped into the freezing water and took my position behind the canoe.

The water started out probably at the level of my hips, and it was easy to push it along the bank. But gradually the water grew deeper as the river narrowed. I could feel the iciness through the neoprene waders, glad that I had duct-taped all the little holes and leaks I had gotten from running along the brushy banks. Within minutes the water came up to my waist, my chest, until I was tip-toeing along the bottom of the river and watching it lap against the suspender straps.

And then, all of a sudden, the bottom seemed to drop out. My forward momentum was too strong to allow me to put on the brakes, and so my feet scraped along the last few inches of riverbed to kick pointlessly through the open water. I tried to cling to the edge of the canoe and hoist myself further above the river, but to no avail - water rushed in and flooded my waders with a sluuurrrrp.

Once that happened, of course, it didn't really matter if I got wetter. I threw caution to the wind and just dog-paddled through the river, pushing the canoe along. My legs felt like they weighed 100 pounds now that my waders were full of water; luckily, even though the fabric kept the water in, it was trapped there with the heat of my body, so it warmed up fast. But it was still uncomfortable as hell.

The icy stretch didn't last long as the river grew shallow again and the water ran faster. We were maybe only a half-mile from our drop-off point, so I bore the cold and discomfort without complaint - and I'll admit I sort of loved the extra respect my brave little endeavor had bought me with the awkward crew. As soon as we got back to the truck, though, I shed those waders as fast as I could - not caring if the two guys on the crew saw my gloriously stark-white thermal underwear, or the goose-pimpled stark-white flesh underneath - and put my warm, dry jeans and boots on.

the White River
in the spring

That may have been the last time I cruised the river with that crew. I went back with a fellow graduate student a few months later, during the spring, to help with her salamander project, and was able to see some Missouri rivers in all their glory. I have been to many states across the country, but I have yet to see streams that rival those in the Ozarks. They're crystal clear, with numerous natural springs to feed them, winding through deciduous forests and rolling hills and little Ozark settlements containing a unique and interesting breed of Americana humanity found nowhere else.

And they have river otters.

After being extirpated for decades, MDC brought them back, and Missouri now boasts a healthy population of them. My research enabled me to get a glimpse into their habitats and their secret lives, as well as create a mathematical formula to estimate their population from scat counts - completely noninvasive, so the otters never need be captured or disturbed - so that managers elsewhere can count poops and estimate how many otters are there.

So maybe I was stuck in a lab for two years, and got dunked in icy cold river water, and never saw the animal I was studying, but I'm extremely glad I got involved with this project.

Plus Mizzou has an awesome football team.

River rafting...in Mexico

One day, I rafted a big river in Mexico with a bunch of people who had no idea how to steer a raft.

In 2012, I joined the Peace Corps in Mexico. Long story short, I quit after a month...well, four, if you include the three-month training. I'm not proud of it, but I don't regret it, either. I made a lot of good friends and had a lot of fun adventures, like exploring the city of Puebla, taking the wrong bus in Queretaro and ending up on the wrong side of town with a 50+ pound suitcase, and hiking in to some volcanic crater lakes that I'm sure only a few Americans (or Mexicans, really) have ever seen. But basically, I think the universe was telling me to quit.

View from my roof in Tehuacan

I won't go into too much detail, but to sum it up, there were a number of negative things that occurred in a very short period of time to convince me I was in the wrong place:

• My host mother for the 3-month training in Queretaro died after a month, which was pretty traumatizing.
• Then, I got placed with an older couple who fed me nothing but bread and milk (not even real milk, but milk made with vegetable fat), and kept their better food in a refrigerator they kept locked so I couldn't get into it.
• My site placement was in Tehuacan, Puebla, a hole of a town in the middle of the desert (and I hate deserts), which was recently voted worse than cities like Ciudad Juarez, Monterrey, Veracruz, and other cities that are renowned for violence and drug problems. Granted, my host family there was great, but the environment - not so much. As a result:



My super-awesome host brother
and mother in Tehuacan, dropping
me off at the bus station to begin
the long trip back to the U.S.

• I got four eye infections and my first ever case of pneumonia, I'm guessing from the enormous chicken farms for which the Tehuacan area is known. My vision in my right eye, which was already bad, dropped 2 whole diopters almost overnight (if you don't know what that means, well, it's bad). I couldn't sleep because I would cough uncontrollably, especially at night. (One of the results was actually kind of cute, though; my host mother, a lovely middle-aged Mexican woman who couldn't ever understand my horrible accent when I tried to speak Spanish to her, would just walk into my room in the middle of the night with hot tea to soothe my throat. She was awesome.)

But in general terms, I don't think the PC was ever for me. I'm far too independent, and far too reliant on recreation for balance and happiness - and that's just not something you can easily do in Tehuacan, especially not as a single American woman. It's too hot, too dangerous, and too inaccessible. You're not allowed to drive, so you're dependent on buses and other people driving you, and that really restricts what you can do or where you can go. Plus my Spanish skills never got very good and that really frustrated me. I also was alone in my town, while many other volunteers got sent to sites together - there were at least four from our group alone who went to Puebla. With my horrible Spanish, I definitely could have used that kind of support.

The Mexico Peace Corps program is a bit different than other programs, in that they place volunteers who are more "specialists" into natural resources programs. Most typical PC volunteers around the world become English teachers, though some work in protected areas management, teaching about sustainable agricultural practices, building better healthcare infrastructure, and the like. But in Mexico, half of our group was in Environmental Education, and the other half - including me - was in Natural Resources Management. Many of my fellow volunteers had backgrounds similar to mine: biology, GIS, or other physical sciences.

My placement in Tehuacan was with the Mexican equivalent of the National Park Service, called the Comision Nacional de Areas Naturales Protegidas (CONANP), working in La Reserva de la Biosfera Tehuacan-Cuicatlan. It's a large natural area spanning the states of Puebla and Oaxaca, including amazing

Military macaw (not my photo)

canyons, river valleys, deserts, and mountains. It also has one of the only populations of Military Macaws, or Guacamaya Verde. The agency requested me as a volunteer there hoping they could use me to help monitor the macaws, as well as other species in the Reserve like neotropical otters, deer, and others. (In reality, though - and I don't have time or energy to get into it - CONANP, like many Mexican governmental entities, is beset by so many political, societal, and monetary problems that getting anything done is usually quite miraculous. Imagine Yellowstone National Park, but with about a hundred indigenous communities still living inside it and trying to eke out a living from the resources the Park is trying to protect. The frustration, boredom and pointlessness was another one of the reasons I quit.)

Anyway, to get to the story....

The boat.

One day, my coworkers - my counterpart Ceci and her supervisor, Juan Manuel - took me with them on a trip down the Rio Grande in Oaxaca to survey for neotropical otters. Since I basically did just that for my master's research, I was pretty excited to get back on a river. Our objective was to set up some remote cameras and locate any scat/tracks we found.

We arrived at the drop-off point after a two-hour drive down some of the scariest, curviest roads I've ever experienced, south through the high Oaxacan desert mountains past the city of Cuicatlan and numerous other little communities. Our boat was a little inflatable raft. Along with the three of us, we also picked up a fourth person, who I think was a student at a local university but I can't remember.

Cool views

We set off. It soon became clear that nobody knew how to steer the boat, except me, and they wouldn't let me do it because I couldn't speak Spanish and I'm a woman. Basically, every time we saw an obstacle, Juan Manuel would try to steer away and would inevitably ram directly into it. I sat in the front with an oar and tried my best to control things from there, but Juan Manuel steered from the back and there was no predicting or counteracting his efforts.

Green heron

Setting up a camera trap

Green iguana

Within two hours we had been swept under dozens of low-hanging branches and nearly capsized several times. Ceci got knocked out of the boat on one of these little forays into some trees, an episode which also cost me my hat, an oar, and several chunks of skin on one hand. We got stuck on some rocks, trapped in some whirlpools, and utterly, completely soaked. When Ceci went under, she actually damaged one of her ears, and starting experiencing constant headaches that lasted well beyond my departure from Mexico.

my hand after a rendezvous with a tree

There were good times - seeing cool birds and lizards, finding otter scat and tracks, and even possibly catching a glimpse of one leaving the river (though none of us were sure). The worst part, though, was toward the end.

We had been rafting all day and were eagerly watching the shores for signs of the pick-up spot, where another biologist would be meeting us. Gradually, the light began to recede, the chill began to set in, and all we could do was trust Juan Manuel's repeated encouragements of "Esta cerca, esta cerca." And then, the sun set, and complete darkness fell, and we were still out on the river.

I am quite a good swimmer, and none of the rapids or obstacles throughout the day had seriously worried me, but around this time I began to get very, very nervous.

Especially as we came around a bend and heard the foreboding roar of what were certainly the roughest rapids we had yet experienced. And we would be going over them in complete darkness.

Backwards.

Yes, Juan Manuel, utilizing the same level of skill and agility he had shown all day, in his efforts to avoid the worst rapids somehow got us completely turned around. Ceci shrieked and I held on for dear life (having lost my oar) as the boat sped up and swept us down into a hole blacker than the black of the river we could see. For a few terrifying moments were were stuck swirling in circles as the river gushed over us and around us and into the boat, resoaking what few parts of us had dried and threatening to tip us and crush us into the rocks beneath. But finally we managed to push ourselves out, and the river jettisoned us back onto the calmer waters beyond.

And just around the next corner was our ride, waiting beside an enormous bonfire he had set up on the beach.

We didn't get home until late, late that night, partly because Juan Manuel decided to stop for tacos in a little village on the way home. (One thing about Mexican culture in general - it's never too late for food. And nothing will ever make them hurry.) I perceived the adventure as yet another of the Messages from the Universe telling me to leave. I found out later that the Peace Corps probably would have kicked me out anyway if they'd have gotten wind of the trip - they have pretty strict policies on volunteer safety, and I'm sure they wouldn't have given me permission to go (or would have made me wear a helmet). I just didn't feel safe working in that environment, going on trips like this haphazardly with little or no training or thought for our safety.

Or maybe, by then, I was just looking for excuses. I try not to think about it. Like I said, I don't regret my decision to leave, though I regret disappointing Peace Corps or Ceci or the rest of the CONANP office who maybe really did have high expectations for me, even I never got a chance to learn what they were.

Mexico has some amazing resources and I hope they can protect them into the future. And whatever their problems, their shortcomings, the aspects of their culture that we can't understand or that frustrate us, we could learn a thing or two - or a thousand - from them. Like the importance of family. The benefits and pure joy of a laid-back, no-hurry lifestyle. How to make really, really good food.

And it may surprise you to learn that, unlike the United States, Mexico has officially recognized the reality of climate change and is taking steps - however small - to address it.

Who's behind the times now?