Blog
EXOTIC ANIMAL AUCTIONS: A CRUEL REALITY
In COLD-BLOODED TRADE, the third installment of the Nick Tanner eco-crime thriller series, a notorious wildlife trafficker sources many of her animals via exotic animal auctions. i talked briefly about these in a previous post; but let's dive a little deeper here. Why...
How do Exotics End Up in Canned Hunts?
This past week saw the release of my second novel in the Nick Tanner series, Canned Hunt. It takes place primarily in the truly awe-inspiring Book Cliffs of Utah and along Green River, with stops in the decidedly less inspiring (IMO, anyway) Las Vegas, Nevada and...
COLLOSSAL GALL
MONEY BEAR, the first in the Nick Tanner series, throws a harsh spotlight on the cruel but highly lucrative underworld of Bear gallbladder poaching. A single gallbladder that might earn a poacher a couple hundred dollars in the U.S. can reportedly go for $3000 in...
Turtle Smuggling
A few days ago I spent one of the fastest hours of my life chatting with Luke Pearson, a young doctoral candidate who’s spent four years in the swamps of Mississippi, studying Macrochelys temminckii, commonly known as the Alligator Snapping Turtle. In the photo, Luke...
Otter Tracking
As a volunteer with The Marine Mammal Center’s Morro Bay facility, my hands-down favorite critter is the Southern (aka California) sea otter. Sea otters once numbered in the hundreds of thousands, but due to their amazingly dense fur (170,000-1,062,000 hairs per...
Is it Wrong to Feed the Birds?
In my experience as a wildlife rescue volunteer, I’ve had numerous chats with people who feed the local critters. They toss out scratch for wild turkeys, fruit and veggies for the deer, kitchen scraps for the raccoons. They hang hummingbird feeders, fill bird feeders...