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EcoHearth Spotlights
Rich Bard
Rich Bard is a wildlife biologist who began his career as a zookeeper. Having spent most of his adult life moving around the country working with various wild animals, he settled near the coast of Maine in 2004. Amid the striking beauty of this remote region, he passes the time with his family, hiking, snowshoeing, gardening and watching the tide ebb and flow.
Leave The Trail Behind
Most of the ragged survivors of our crusade to exterminate Mexican wolves—a slaughter that ended less than 40 years ago—have been living in cages all these long years. Generation after generation of lobos have paced their fence lines, scanning the air with their powerful noses, searching for a trace of elk or deer when there is only processed zoo food and people with hot dogs and French fries. How long can a species hold on to its wild edge, when every year only those most adapted to life in a cage manage to breed? 
Donning snowshoes, I leave the plowed, shoveled and accessible world that we humans carve out of the winter snows. Each snowfall is cleared from what is “in bounds” for human use during the winter, as the plow banks and piles of snow grow taller each time. Anything outside of that maintained boundary is off limits – unless you put on your snowshoes. 
It's almost the end of February. Still the dead of winter in Maine. Night time temps regularly dip below 0º. Nothing but snow and ice as far as the eye can see. Skin gets all pasty white from lack of sun. (Not being the most racially diverse state in the U.S., most Mainers start the winter fairly white anyway.) People resort to desperate measures to help them through the rest of the winter: TV, alcohol, garden catalogs, full-spectrum lighting, ice hockey, you name it. 
What exactly is the creature that roams the forests and fields of the northeastern US and eastern Canada under the name “coyote?” Can it be the same species as that found in the western US, an animal half the size of its eastern counterpart? Is it a completely different animal? Or is it some combination of coyote mixed with dog or wolf genes? I’ve written about coyotes a few times now and, based on the comments I get, people want to know more about this mysterious creature. 
Not long ago, I wrote about a Supporting Sponsors
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The Complete Book of Raw Food, edited by Julie Rodwell, includes over 375 recipes for a vegetarian raw diet. See more items in our Eco Shop. |
