This week Dispatches from the Field welcomes Matthew P. Bettelheim, an editor of the new book The Wildlife Confessional: An Anthology of Stories to share with us how he came up with the idea to put this together. It sounds like we fit right in! Check out the end of the post for ways to pre-order the book.
When the late biologist Dr. Charles Jonkel, co-founder of the Great Bear Foundation, was given the rare opportunity in 1966 to pioneer the first ever study of polar bears in the Arctic, little did he know that the years to follow would not only change how the world sees polar bears, but would also leave him looking back at those years to wonder how he even survived the experience:
“The night he scared himself, he sent his friend Henk Kiliaan home after all their remembering. It wasn’t hard to do – scaring himself – what with the whiteouts and the polar bears (always the polar bears), helicopters falling from the sky, and the vast whiteness of it all and everything in between. Lost in the high Arctic where he couldn’t have been more alone no matter the company he kept. He might have done stupid things in his youth. Hell, he had done stupid things in adulthood, too. But he had also lived a full life, all in the name of science, that truly began in the high Arctic when he set out to answer a simple question: How do you catch a polar bear?”
So begins “Kick it in the Ice Hole,” the adventures of a bear biologist that recounts how learning to catch a polar bear launched Jonkel’s storied career. This is just one of the tales that make up The Wildlife Society’s new anthology, The Wildlife Confessional, a collection of fifteen stories by thirteen biologists, including published authors Marcy Cottrell Houle (Wings for my Flight, One City’s Wilderness, The Prairie Keepers) and J. Drew Lanham (The Home Place: Memoirs of a Colored Man’s Love Affair with Nature. In short, it is a collection of biologists’ adventures, misadventures, revelations, reflections, mishaps, and pivotal experiences with wildlife.
The Wildlife Confessional was first conceived many moons ago, long before 2014 when I began exchanging emails with co-editor Thomas A. Roberts about an idea I had for an anthology. My first introduction to Tom was more than ten years earlier when my editor loaned me a copy of Tom’s very own anthology, Painting the Cows. At that time, I had just joined the ranks of an elite group of scientists known as “wildlife biologists” and was interning at Bay Nature magazine, so a collection of stories about wildlife biology seemed a natural fit. It was. In love instantly with Tom’s brand of self-effacing honesty and insight, I hungrily devoured Painting the Cows and its companion anthology, Adventures in Conservation, and then loaned my copies out to friends and colleagues until one day I realized my books hadn’t found their ways home.
In 2005 I lucked into Tom’s email address and reached out to him about meeting for drinks – hopeful I might be able to meet another local writer/wildlife biologist – but because it it too easy to get swept up in the current of everyday life, we never made it happen. And then, during a happy hour for our local San Francisco Bay Area Chapter of The Wildlife Society in the fall of 2007, I heard someone mention “Tom Roberts” and realized that Tom Roberts, the Tom Roberts, was sitting at the next table over. So I did what any normal person might do when faced with a “celebrity crush” and rushed over to introduce myself and heap praise on his work, coming across no doubt as a babbling fool in the process. By the time all the pieces began falling in place in 2014 to plant the seed for this anthology, Tom Roberts seemed the natural person to reach out to as a co-collaborator. And so The Wildlife Confessional was born. Together, we waded through more than 45 submissions to carefully curate The Wildlife Society’s first anthology, a true window into the wildlife profession.
This is a career peopled by wildlife biologists, game wardens, land managers, researchers, students, and the community of peers who have built their careers (and sometimes, their lives) around working with wildlife. Members of the biologist community may specialize in a certain group of wildlife – like entomologists (insects), ichthyologists (fish), ornithologists (birds), herpetologists (reptiles and amphibians), and mammalogists (mammals) – or practice their “–ology” on a larger scale – like law enforcement, policy, habitat restoration, resource management, research, outreach and education – but they share in common a passion for wildlife and the outdoors, and a learned (resigned?) resiliency to the pitfalls and mishaps inherent in a career that revolves around wildlife.
The authors whose stories we’ve collected represent men and women from all walks of wildlife biology – State and Federal biologists, consultants, students, professors, interns – and take place across North and Central America, from the Gulf of Alaska to San Ignacio, Belize, from the tropics of the Hawaiian Islands to the deserts of Arizona, and in the desert springs, coastal bluffs, national parks, stock ponds, pick-up trucks, traplines, doctor’s offices, roof tops, outhouses, and bombing ranges scattered everywhere in between.
To bring the stories behind The Wildlife Confessional to life, anthology contributor Ivan Parr (“A Terrible Bird is the Pelican”) – who is also gainfully employed as a wildlife biologist, botanist, and nature photographer – put pen to paper a second time. But this time around, Ivan set out to create the lighthearted illustrations that accompany each story. If a picture is worth a thousand words, Ivan’s art speaks volumes about the wildlife profession and the adventures wildlife biologists face every day.
In early January 2018, the print-side of the project launched through the crowd-source publisher Inkshares (https://www.inkshares.com/books/the-wildlife-confessional-an-anthology-of-stories) 
and was successfully funded at the end of February after pre-selling over 250 copies. Today, with over 300 copies sold, the book is still available for pre-order (eBook: $6.99 / Paperback: $14.99) as we navigate the final stages of layout, design, and publishing before the anthology goes to print.
Here’s a sneak preview of what you can expect in the forthcoming book:
- In The Pirate Kit Fox, kit fox expert Brian Cypher recounts the one that got away – a kit fox so formidable and cantankerous, it nearly brought a grown man to tears.
- On an island, no one can hear you scream; so we learn the hard way in The Long Drop, in which Eric Lund must get his hands dirty while stationed on Laysan Island after a gray-backed tern finds itself doing laps in the loo.
- Islands can also be a place of reflection, as we experience through the eyes of Brianna Williams in The Tower Colony during her turn working with breeding seabirds in an abandoned Air Force station radar tower.
- In Lost and Found, J. Drew Lanham looks back on the formative years that shaped his inevitable career as a birder, a path especially rocky for a young African American growing up in South Carolina in the 1970’s.
- In The Big Horn Sheep De-Watering Device, veteran author and wildlife biologist Thomas A. Roberts makes a beginner’s mistake and pays for it when a four-and-a-half foot long pipe wrench becomes his cross to bear in a trek across the desert.
Dispatches from the Field 