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Along the Path

Updates as we learned about Lawson's journey and times -- and reports from the trail as we progressed along it. Plus tales of the process of publishing the result.

Reprise of the Turkeys

11/25/2015

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When Lawson visited some of the remnants of the Santee Indian nation, a week or so into his journey, he said that "they made us all welcome; shewing a great deal of Joy at our coming, giving us barbacu'd Turkeys." He mentions wild turkeys a lot, and he talks even about the uses for their feathers: "their chief Doctor or Physician, ... was warmly and neatly clad with a Match-Coat, made of Turkies Feathers, which makes a pretty Shew, seeming as if it was a Garment of the deepest silk Shag."
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I found this beautiful turkey feather one day while hiking. I consider it an omen of the highest possible good.
My point, tiny though it may be, is that in them days, turkeys was everywhere. EVERYWHERE. The place was crawling with wild turkeys, and then as now: good eating.

Then we Euros hung around a while and pretty soon, along with the passenger pigeons and the Carolina parakeet, they were about done. Come around 1900 the parakeets were gone and the pigeons were on the way out. The turkeys were down to some 30,000. Think, current populations of polar bears, as explained in this excellent story in the Cool Green Science blog of Nature. 

Fortunately, Theodore Roosevelt and other conservationists got the message. Habitat setasides worked; so did game laws recognizing that the birds were not limitless. Hatch-and-release programs didn't work -- you raise a bird in a barnyard, then fling it into a forest and say "Good luck"? Nuh-unh. But catch and reintroduce into new protected territory programs did. Nowadays wild turkeys number in the millions, with a conservation status of least concern. Hunters love them, and they are notoriously difficult to shoot, being mistrustful and sharp of eye.
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An arrow handmade by John Jeffries of the Occaneechi and given to me. A treasured keepsake.
Anyhow. Hunters and conservationists working together -- a story of people finding their common goals and working on them. The wild turkey is considered the greatest conservation success story in the nation, if not the world, and it shows that as bad as things are, we can still make change. A worthy thanksgiving thought, I think. 
Anyhow. The feather above I found as I walked along the Trek, and I considered it a wonderful omen and wore it in my hat for a while. Then I carefully brought it home, where it remains now. The arrow was made and given to me by the wonderful John Jeffries, of the Occaneechi, who is carrying forward not only traditional native American respect for the world around us and craftsmanship but a friendship to all who reach out in good spirit and hope of understanding. I'm glad I found my feather, and I'm glad I met John to show me what a feather like mine looks like put to good use.
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Image of these turkeys courtesy of the Cornell Lab of Ornithology, © Lee Anne Russell.
A final thought. Of course, we all know that Benjamin Franklin thought ill of the bald eagle as a national symbol: " He is a Bird of bad moral Character. He does not get his Living honestly," preferring to steal from other fishers. More, "like those among Men who live by Sharping & Robbing he is generally poor and often very lousy. Besides he is a rank Coward," easily frightened by the small King Bird. The King Bird, by the way, goes by the Latin name Tyrannus tyrannus. So let's see if we can think of any modern applications: a bird that  looks very big but is terrified of something very small that it allows to tyrannize it. On the other hand, Franklin goes on to say, consider the turkey: "For in Truth the Turkey is in Comparison a much more respectable Bird, and withal a true original Native of America… He is besides, though a little vain & silly, a Bird of Courage, and would not hesitate to attack a Grenadier of the British Guards who should presume to invade his Farm Yard with a red Coat on."

​So let's see if we've got this straight. One bird bird bullies other birds and steals their food, though the eagle himself can be bullied by something very small he ought not to give a moment's thought to. Another bird, though a bit vain and silly, is brave and has made his way back from the brink of extinction with the help of good and decent people.


And we take as our symbol the bully bird who proves a coward. As we celebrate a holiday about thanks and sharing at the same time seemingly half our population trembles in fear of refugees, that symbol seems sadly apt. 

As for me I stick with the turkey feather. I believe I may adopt the turkey feather as my own personal symbol. Maybe I'll stick it back in my hat.

Anyhow. Happy Thanksgiving from the Lawson Trek. 
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Smile for the Camera

11/6/2015

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Uhhh ... anyway, hi you guys. Hi and everything. You know. Hi. Oh -- and, anyway, see ya.
The Lawson Trek's cameras have come down.

It's no biggie -- with the help of zoologist Roland Kays of the Biodiversity Lab at the the North Carolina Museum of Natural Sciences (especially ace young scientist Troi Perkins) we put up a couple camera traps. One in Umstead Park, a state park in Raleigh, the other in Crabtree Creek Nature Park in Morrisville, NC. The Umstead Park one early on gave us a couple bucks in velvet (he stopped in periodically; that's him above, I think), and the Crabtree Creek one was keeping us updated on the activities of a raccoon that seemed to come by most nights.  The camera got it coming and going.
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Come on: the reflections of its eyes in the water? How cool is that?
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Raccoon butt.
Eventually the Crabtree one stopped working, which meant a day that I had to find its coordinates and slog my way back into the squish to retrieve it and figure out what was wrong. We figured it had probably drowned in a rain event -- the cameras do fine in the rain, but nothing electronic likes to be underwater, no matter how waterproof(ish) its casing. I'm told it's working again back in the lab, but that doesn't give us any information on how that raccoon spent the remainder of its summer.

The big buck at the top of the page is one of the last images we got from the other camera, which Troi went to gather back up last week. Enough was enough, and the camera wasn't catching too much, though I was glad to see the buck a last time or so before the camera was liberated. 

Kays's lab is part of the eMammal project, with the Smithsonian Institution, that uses camera traps to spot, track, and learn about mammals in the field. He's published research on camera trap use: last year this piece in Methods in Ecology and Evolution on using cameras to quantify levels of animal activity and just this fall this piece in Landscape Ecology about the use of volunteer-run cameras (like ours!) as distributed sensors. Now our cameras, however interesting they were as observation posts, were not part of any experiment. As Roland rightly pointed out, we put ours where we hoped we'd see animals. Actual science would have been putting many cameras randomly over an area to see where the wildlife showed up.

So farewell, cameras -- thanks for being our eyes in the forest, giving us a glimpse into the peregrinations of raccoons and bucks and a glimpse into how the big kids do science.
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Honey, I'm Home

11/5/2015

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So anyhow, I'm back, and as Homer first reminded us -- and it was old news then -- the return is as great a challenge as the journey.
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My office looks almost as though for a year I have been in it only to plan my next foray out of it or describe my last one, never to inhabit or organize it. Which is not to say it usually looks much better than this, but just so you know: after a year of either planning a Trek, taking one, or getting in a blog post so I could start planning the next one, this is what it looks like. I should be thinking of folders, drawers, and shelves, but I beg you not to blame me for instead thinking of kerosene and a household match. Hold on, there's the phone: "Me? What show now? 'Pile People'? I haven't heard of it. Let me get back to you."

Sorry.

The laundry -- my main indoor daily chore -- has become a thing of madness, though I am working my way back in. Fortunately we had a dry summer so the outdoor chores I was failing to do in some ways went unnoticed. In my other chores I have mostly been derelict, with the expected result that I have returned to a houseful of people who at the very least have grown used to doing without me and more often cannot fail to think "dereliction of duty" when they notice I am around.

A year ago we had a cat. Now instead we have two birds. One of the three fish, if he has not died, is floating rather more substantially with the current than was once his habit, and he is significantly less wedded to the notion of the top being up just all the time.

Both license plates have stickers, but it took a firm reminder from someone with a very fancy car to get there.

All of which is to say, I didn't have to shoot an arrow through a dozen axes and kill off most of the neighborhood, but coming home is never easy.

Lawson dropped his pack and there he was, instantly falling for the young Hannah Smith, daughter of settler Richard Smith.  Lawson had the benefit of being utterly unconnected in North America and thus able to walk into the bush in December and walk back out in February, saying, "Okay, I guess I'll live here now," and then just living there.

I'm not saying I envy him. I'm just saying that was his world. And if my world is somewhat less adventurous, it has its rewards. 
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Some kind of cool fungus.
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A rainy day.
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Metaphor for parental love? or just pretty?
For one thing, it has the same constant barrage of amazing things to notice as the Trek does, though with Sunday school and dinner and bills and the vacuuming you have to remind yourself to notice a little bit more. That's not bad, but you do have to remind yourself.
For another thing, it has the State Fair. You can talk about all the history you want -- nothing is as cool as the North Carolina State Fair, and here are some Lawson Trek-ian images to prove it. 

​It's not like traveling among the Indians, but it's still pretty cool. 
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So anyhow. Home, for the duration. If you're wondering, what I'm doing now is planning how to make a book out of this undertaking, and I'll have updates for you about that as necessary. In any case, as I begin writing, I'll keep sharing details that I didn't get the chance to put up here during the madness of the actual travel.
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North Carolina State Fair, Raleigh. One of the world's great environments.
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