Ann Littlewood Zoo Mysteries

Review: Animals Behaving Badly

2012-01-27T00:30:00.000-08:00

While waiting for my Honda's 120,000 mile servicing, I read Linda Lombardi's Animals Behaving Badly. It's a quick, fun read--humor more than natural history--by a zoo keeper. It's a catalog of examples of animals behaving contrary to the stereotypes people hold about them--behaving very badly indeed. The incidents are pretty funny as well as eye-opening, but perhaps not for the "bunny huggers" who need the illusion that animals are sweet and kind.

She cited a kea parrot in New Zealand who stole a Scottish man's passport, which took a lot of time and money to replace. He is quoted as saying: "My passport is somewhere out there in Fiordland. The kea's probably using it for fraudulent claims or something."

She busts a lot of myths, such as "mated for life," documenting massive infidelity in the bird world, as well as routine infanticide, dolphin rapists, and skilled liars. Some animals love alcohol, others like hallucinogens, some go for narcotics. Unprovoked attacks, theft, bullying--she shows that the natural world is hardly Eden.

Come for the laughs more than the science, but she's got some sensible nuggets in there, too.

"... civilization is the opposite of nature for a reason--we invented it because nature is dangerous. In nature, something is always trying to kill you, because that's basically how the system works."

"...what's the problem with believing that faraway creatures are kind, noble beings frolicking in a land of rainbows and flowers? ... what's wrong is that since we haven't quite managed to drive all our fellow creatures to extinction yet, people still do run into them from time to time. And believing that nature is benevolent and animals are noble and cuddly is likely to get you into some serious trouble."

Bless her heart, she cites her references at the end.

Link to Amazon
Link to Linda's blog

Disclaimer: Linda's publicist sent me a free copy. I don't know her personally and I wasn't paid for this review.

We're kind and noble. Really. You can trust us.

A writer's cycles

2012-01-25T14:56:00.000-08:00

Hello? Are you there? I'm back! My blog has been dead quiet for weeks due to the natural rhythms of a writer's life. Here's how it works:

1. New book is in production. Blogging is fun because there's lots to write about and time to write it. The manuscript is turned in, the old project is winding down, and attention turns to new ideas and new projects. It's time to take an interest in the outside world, to share, to write something, anything, other than that wretched novel that took up 100% of the brain-space for months.

2. New book comes out. Awk! No more meandering! It's all about promotion. Blogging is now required! Blog about the book, topics related to the book, events past and future to promote the book, kind reviews of the book, national news relevant to the book, how the dog liked the book, etc.

3. Writer settles into a new project. Time again for an outline, research, initial drafts. Can't draft a novel eight hours a day, the brain won't take it. So there's still time and ideas for blogging. Blog about the research, the agony of outlines, the anxiety of pacing, the angst of characters, and, oh, keep on with promoting the most recent book.

4. Yeepers! That new novel is due. Forget blogging. Enter the Blog Cone of Silence. Days, weeks, months go by... Writer might be dead, for all you know. Writer may wish she were dead. Beneath the silent sea, passion, sweat, doubts, and tears heave and roil.

5. Writer turns in manuscript and falls into a sodden heap. Wanders about in a daze. Wonders why mail is stacked up, full of second notices on bills. All the laundry is dirty. Friends and relatives are feeling neglected and are bitter about it. Dog has bonded with spouse exclusively, assuming spouse hasn't moved out and filed papers. Why is there no food in this house?

6. Go to Step 1.

Don't you think you should learn to manage your time better??

A Zoo Keeper Never Forgets

2011-11-18T10:41:00.001-08:00

My spousal unit arranged tickets for a Lucinda Williams concert last night and we had a great time. Her encore was especially fine--covers of protest songs. I haven't heard Merle Haggard's "If We Make It Through December" in years. Brings a tear every time.

So this morning when he (the husband, not Merle) brought me coffee in bed, I smiled from my pillow with a special twinkle. But no. "Get up. There's a possum in the basement," he announced. "I've got a sign to paint down there. The customer's coming in two hours." He didn't quite wring his hands.

Ah, true love. Our contract is clear: he deals with dead animals, I cope with the live ones. "Go ahead and paint the sign," I said. "If it's on the other side of the basement, it won't attack." And I hauled my rear out of bed wishing we had some thick leather gloves and a catch pole. I drank the coffee, got dressed (opting for boots over sports shoes), and explored what the garage had to offer in the way of capture gear. It offered a five-gallon bucket.

As for how the possum got in--had to be the doggie door--and why our noble canine, Murphy The Hairy Little Dog, didn't deal? His attitude seems to be that he is a lap dog and a ball dog and if we have troubles with empty laps or escaping tennis balls, he's the pup for the job. But interloping possums? He didn't even bark. I doubt he ever knew it was there. So much for keen senses and ancient instincts.

No one would accuse Didelphis virginiana of excessive competence, and this specimen was no exception. The teenage varmint sat hunkered down on the lid of our washing machine in a basement replete with dark hidey-holes. It could not have been more conspicuous. It hissed at me. Again I wished for good gloves. But it just sat there as I clapped the bucket over its head, shoved a thin piece of plywood underneath, and carried it all out to the driveway. I turned the critter loose and it ran off to become someone else's problem. Husband cheered.

So take note, all of you who see my gray hair and wonder just how long it's been since I actually worked at a zoo. It's been awhile, I'll cop to that, but the skill set? Still in place, at least in part. And now I've got the evidence.

The Tragedy in Zanesville, Ohio

2011-10-20T13:39:00.000-07:00

I break blog-silence and interrupt work on Threatened & Endangered to mourn the disaster in Ohio--49 of 56 escaped wild animal shot to death. Most of them were carnivores--lions, tigers, bears. Read about it HERE.

What a horrible outcome to a damaged man's hobby. But how surprising is this, really? What individual can afford to feed and care for that many animals properly? Who would take them if he became disabled? Who wants to live next door? Keeping dangerous animals as pets has got to be one of the worst ideas "animal lovers" can come up with.

Oh, and let me add here, that the vast majority of these private collections make zero contribution to conservation. Especially if they breed tigers. No one outside the pet trade and the traditional Asian medicine trade has any use for mongrel tigers. Read that again--there is no conservation value to tigers or any other wild animal bred outside a planned breeding program coordinated with other institutions. Zero.

This is about people trying to feel valued and loved by surrounding themselves with charismatic creatures. This is about the humane care of wild animals who are totally under the control of people. This is about what happens when private collections are celebrated and envied.

Ohio will take another look at its laws, among the laxest in the nation. Many people will urge tight controls over exotic animal ownership. Those who already own exotic animals will fight hard to prevent this, probably on grounds that they shouldn't be punished for the mistakes of another. As far as I'm concerned, keeping any dangerous wild animal (and most of them are dangerous) as a pet is the mistake. The pet owner may benefit emotionally, but the animal suffers an unnatural life and the rest of us are at risk. Sanctuaries are stuffed with discarded wild animal pets. Enough already.

Cheetahs in the wild. Just to cheer me up.

2011-09-22T21:08:00.000-07:00

Here's a blog I did for Poisoned Pen Press. I'm hard at work on the next zoo mystery plus travel plus house guests, so this will have to do for now!

Day-Tripping with Crime Fighters

Bison Enrichment

2011-09-05T22:48:00.000-07:00

Bison have rather poor eyesight, hence the Large Type Edition.

Try this at home: Enrich the Dog

2011-08-29T15:48:00.000-07:00

I've been reading The Animal Keeper Forum lately, the newsletter of the American Association of Zoo Keepers. It's chock full of "enrichment" ideas--ways to stimulate, entertain, and challenge animals that might otherwise be bored into pacing, chewing on the fence, or harassing their companions. Instead, the keepers rack their brains to come up with puzzle feeders, toys, and a variety of experiences and sensations. They do this not just because they want the best quality of life for the animals, but also because a formal enrichment program is a requirement for Association of Zoos & Aquariums' accreditation.

Mind you, this has to be done is such a way as to not scare the bejabbers out of the critter, not give them the opportunity to damage themselves (think of a two-year-old and a nice length of rope), and not put the keeper or other animals at risk. The ideas are wonderfully creative.

Meanwhile, Murphy nudges my thigh and recommends another walk. How to apply the same creativity to my own dog? We provided lots of toys, puzzle feeders, and walks when Murphy was a puppy because it was entirely clear that he would destroy property relentlessly until and unless we did. But he's grown up now and we've slacked off. Time to think about this again.

Keepers work with scent, object, audio, food, and training categories of enrichment.

I tried scent first by digging out an old bottle of Wrappings perfume, by Clinique, and giving a few squirts to objects in the backyard. Murphy noticed that the yard now smelled like a bordello, but, frankly, he didn't give a damn. Bits of liver treats scattered on the lawn were a different matter. That's enriching as all get out.

Got one!

Next up: objects. I've neglected the rule for toys: rotate them. The eviscerated hedgehog, the shredded tug-a-war toy, the half-gnawed Nyla bones--yawn. I took them all away and dug out a weird fuzzy egg-thing with a squeaker in it. That is Big Fun. I'll give him one of his toys each day and take one away so they stay fresh.

Oooh! I will destroy you!

Audio: That was a stumper. Then I remembered Birdscapes, a big pop-up book by Miyoko Chu with the Cornell Lab of Ornithology. (I love pop-up books.) It opens to a landscape with bird and environmental sounds. I tried the Eastern Deciduous Forest, frogs and a ruffed grouse. Murphy was interested and a little scared, but the fuzzy brown egg was more fun. We have music in the house regularly, which doesn't interest him, but people use the sidewalk out front and sometimes have the effrontery to converse, which requires barking. Enough with the audio enrichment!

What the??

Food: See Scent, above. Liver treats says it all. No, we go farther. An adult dog needs to be fed only once a day, but we feed three times. He's a dog who appreciates a little garnish, not much, just--please--make an effort! A light grating of a nice Parmesan, a swirl of chicken gravy, a dribble of bacon grease. I am guilt-free on that subject. And, of course, there are puzzle feeders. I pull one of these out if we're going to be gone most of the day and either put his breakfast in it or a smear of peanut butter.

Training: We haven't done Circus Dog much lately. I've got this book to write! But it's only 15 minutes after dinner, so that excuse is lame. Murphy loves Circus Dog. Focused attention plus liver treats. What more could a dog ask? We have guests coming, so the show will be on. Sit, lie down, speak, shake hands, up on the stool, down from the stool, jump through the hoop. We working on fetch the brown chew toy versus fetch the white chew toy, but it's not in place yet. Murphy leaves show biz to chew the chew toy.

House guests ought to be on the enrichment list, no? New faces, new petters. And his walks, once or twice a day, to check out the neighborhood and chase the ball at the park. I try to take a different route now and then. Sleep-overs with his friend Sally the cattle dog when we're out of town.

The Enriched Dog

What else can dog people do to keep their canine mentally alert and interested in life? Add a suggestion and I'll see what Murphy thinks of it.

Spoilerville

2011-08-23T21:58:00.000-07:00

I've been hammering away at Threatened & Endangered, so don't expect much of a blog for awhile. That would be #3 in my zoo-dunnit series and it is action-packed. Now to get all that drama in the right order...

But here is a tidbit, a site called Spoilerville. It's for people to discuss books they've already read. So don't go snooping around there if you haven't read whatever book, because you will find spoilers in the discussion. Sounds like fun to me.

Here's the links to my books:
Night Kill
Did Not Survive

Murphy's ready for Spoilerville.

Cow Whisperer

2011-08-07T20:03:00.000-07:00

I freely confess that I don't know much about cows, at least not first hand. I can tell a Holstein from an Angus, but I've never had any hands-on experience. So perhaps some reader can educate me about their psychology.

We were traveling in Central Oregon in early July and got word that elk could be sighted at sun-down on the road to the Painted Hills. That turned out to be true, but too dark for photos. We saw bulls with antlers and calves frisking in the dusk--lovely.

But about the cows. On the way, before we found the elk, I pulled over at a pasture full of cows, I forget why. Son Jesse hopped out of the car and stood at the fence and stared at the cows. The closest ones stared right back. Then they walked toward him.

Notice the cows scattered all over the field.

He kept standing there and cows kept coming. Every single cow in that field bunched up watching him.

The cows came only just so close and if a cow got shoved closer, he or she struggled to get back behind that invisible line. I got Jesse to back up a few steps and the cows all took a few steps forward.

Now Jesse is a charismatic guy, no question. But I suspect this has to do with how cows are wired. They've got hooves, so they obey the "run if it's scary" rule, but if "it" isn't scary, does the rule become "walk up just so close and check it out?

Is this typical? If you have cow-sense or cattle wisdom, enlighten me!

Ivory and Rhino Horn: an Oregon (!?) Perspective

2011-07-12T18:08:00.000-07:00

I live a long way from Africa, in the far western city of Portland, Oregon. A lifetime of interest in conservation and 12 years as a zoo keeper have kept me interested in African and Asian wildlife. I haven't made it to the great game parks of India and Nepal yet, but I visited Kenya this last March.

The myth of Africa is that it is still what the American West once was--open, unfenced, full of wild beasts roaming free. That visit in March showed me how outdated the myth is. Like the plains and mountains of eastern Oregon, northern Kenya is cattle ranches, farms, and towns. Elephants and lions roam there, elk and cougars in Oregon. The elephants and elk are fenced in or out and cursed for damaging farms. Lions and cougars are killed to protect domestic stock.

I don't want to exaggerate the commonality, but I've been finding other comparisons with Oregon.

It's conventional wisdom that Chinese money is driving wildlife poaching in southeast Asia and Africa. Kenyans told me that Chinese truck drivers keep suitcases of money in their cabs for purchasing wildlife products, and this is fueling illegal killing of elephants and rhinos.

This poaching is serious business. Much of it is now run by organized crime gangs with sophisticated weapons, night goggles, and money to buy political protection. Rhino poaching is at a 15 year high and elephant poaching continues unabated because there is a lot of money to be made.

White rhino in Kenya with her sleeping calf.

My reaction to the slaughter is anger and frustration, especially toward end consumers, the people who buy ivory objects to ornament themselves and their homes and who pay for useless rhino horn "medicines". I've remembered or discovered Oregon connections that require me to take a breath, dial back the blame, and try to understand.

People have admired ornamental objects made of ivory for millennia. My Portland grandmother collected ivory. It was legal. She bought pretty little carvings on trips to Thailand and loved them. I remember her crying when some were broken. Yesterday I saw an ad in the Oregonian for an auction that included carved ivory among its offerings.

I took the picture below in a Las Vegas casino Christmas before last.

It's two large elephant tusks intricately carved, with a model ship behind them made of bits of ivory.

The auction item and the Las Vegas offerings are almost certainly older pieces that entered the country before we outlawed their importation and their sale is legal.

So... some people in the U.S. find ivory objects attractive and are willing to pay (plenty) for them. If our government did not enforce international conservation laws, we'd have our own open market for new ivory. But we enforce those laws in part because we have enough people who see exterminating elephants for their tusks as repellent. We'd rather think of elephants alive, roaming those mythical wild spaces or at least the limited habitat we've left them.

As for rhino poaching, the goal is their horns and most of the market is for traditional Asian medicine. A week ago I visited a traditional Chinese pharmacy here in Oregon, in the remote town of John Day. Kam Wah Chung opened as a Chinese social center, labor center, general store, and clinic in 1871, serving Chinese men drawn out of starving Guangdong province by western gold strikes. The building is now a museum, "frozen in time" from the year it shut down, 1948. Click HERE to read its fascinating story.

What captured my attention was that herbalist Ing Hay provided medical care renowned throughout eastern Oregon and the adjoining states. In this intensely racist era, Doc Hay served both white and Chinese patients. Eventually blind, he diagnosed by "pulseology", reading four pulses on the wrists of patients. His treatments were herbal brews, usually described as foul tasting, and he stocked thousands of herbs and other medicinal materials that he ordered from China. Trade with China was far easier and more rapid in that period than I ever realized.

This is the barred pharmacy portion of the Kam Wah Chung building. Note the bear paw and deer leg in the middle, the many boxes of medicines behind.

Consider Ing Hay's competition. My great-uncle graduated from the University of Oregon medical school and worked in Baker City, less than 100 miles from John Day, in the 1890s and early 1900s. I have his black leather medical bag. He could set bones, deliver babies, and sew up wounds, but he had few weapons to combat bacterial infections or pneumonia or many other lethal diseases, such as the infection that killed him at age 49.

Dr. William Parker and Comeaux, about 1896.

Sulfa drugs were developed starting in 1939. Penicillin was discovered in 1928, but was not readily available until World War II, when we raced to develop and produce this new miracle drug to save injured soldiers.

No wonder "the Chinaman" did not lack for customers--Ing Hay had treatments for their ails, and his patients learned that no one else did. He died at about age 83, well respected and one of the few Chinese left in John Day.

Practices change, people adapt, old convictions fade. I have my great-uncle's watch fob with an elk's tooth, from his membership in an Elks Lodge. We no longer allow elk to be killed for their two canine teeth. He used the most modern treatments available, but would not recognize much of medicine today. Cultures are not static, especially modern ones.

Why were Americans so willing to abandon herbal and folk treatments? Why do the Chinese and other Asians maintain those traditions? Whatever the reasons, people trust traditional Chinese medicine today just as Ing Hay and his patients did in Oregon a century ago.

The question that matters to me: How to put an end to the slaughter of elephants and rhinos for knick-knacks and outmoded medicines? One path is law enforcement. Another is cultural change--curbing the demand. WildAid and Rhino Conservation address the market for wildlife products in China and other countries through public service ads. World Wildlife Fund works with practitioners of traditional Chinese medicine in the United States to reduce Chinese-American demand.

Oregon hasn't seen free roaming rhinos for millions of years or elephants for thousands (yes, once upon a time both lived here.) To have a species vanish due to natural processes saddens me--I want them all, now. But that's a naturalist's sentimentality. It's quite a different matter to watch our own species exterminating the wonderful biota we inherited. That's not sentimentality, it's moral outrage. Outrage is fine as a motivating force, but it's not necessarily strategic.

Energetic people of good will are doing their best to let elephants and rhinos continue to live out their lives as they always have. I will do my best to give them a hand and I wish you would, too--Oregonians and everyone else.

Cakes, 911, and Night Kill

2011-07-08T18:01:00.000-07:00

I did my author thing at a book club last night. I'd never met with a book club before. A group of Vancouver, Washington, women had read Night Kill and asked if I would join them.

What a fun bunch of smart women! We had a great conversation about zoos and grief and nature and a dozen other topics. Thanks, Chris and Kelly and Lisa and the rest of you!

I was amazed that one of them had made me a cake--with a lion and a book! Now I know I've hit the big time. Check out Drake's Cakes on Facebook.

The invitation came as a result of a drive-along I did with a Clark County Deputy Sheriff. Turns out, some of the book club members are 911 operators (and married to deputies). I said, "I bet you have great stories." The reply? "Oh, yeah. You should come sit with us." I learned what DRT means--dead right there. (I do so love work jargon.) I also learned that 911 operators can locate you by your cell phone call only on television. If you get lost, don't call them.

I'll be scheduling that 911 experience soon.

Mensa and me

2011-07-03T20:28:00.000-07:00

This week Portland hosted a Mensa convention 2,000 people strong, and guess who was tapped as "the local mystery author"? Yes, I was a little intimidated by speaking to a bunch of smarty-pants, so I spent extra time preparing a PowerPoint slide show and rehearsing.

Yesterday the old Honda galloped back from vacation in central Oregon. This morning I switched from wanna-be cowgirl to wanna-be famous author. I loaded up my book-event gear and drove downtown to the Hilton.

This was not my first rodeo (still a little cowgirl going on...) so first thing, I dropped in on the bookseller to see if she had my books, as she promised in phone calls weeks ago. It's not as if there was an honorarium for this gig--10 hours of prep work and the only payoff is the threadbare "exposure" and the chance to sell books. I go the extra mile to support independent booksellers, but this one is coming off my Christmas list. "Your books didn't come in time. I suppose they'll show up Tuesday and I'll have to return most of them." No phone call to warn me, no apology.

No problem. I brought books. Next I fretted about the computer setup. A lovely woman, who had read my books and liked them (oh, blessed be such readers) was my native guide to the assigned room. The AV went just fine--the previous presenter hooked my computer right up. "You're a genius!" I exclaimed. He gave me this odd look. "I'd better be." Oh. Right. Mensa.

There was just one little hitch--I forgot the power cable for my computer. His didn't fit.

Um, no problem. Frantic call to husband. Plenty of battery life to get started, per the little icon.

Nope. Battery gave out after about 15 minutes. I told my very best zoo stories. Husband arrived, and I was good to go. Yay!

The audience was interested and even enthusiastic. They didn't flinch at my conservation pitch. After the talk, they had lots of good questions. Several were from a boy who looked to be about six, judging by the lack of front teeth. And darned if these folks didn't buy a bunch of my books. Directly from me, which means a far greater profit than if they had bought from that lame bookseller.

I was a happy camper and almost home when I remembered the posters I'd left behind in the Hilton's lobby and had to turn around and go back.

Ready for prime time? You be the judge!

What was the question again?

Nose to grindstone

2011-06-26T20:05:00.000-07:00

I am working away diligently on Zoo Mystery #3 so all I am going to post is a nice picture. It's a pregnant Grevy's zebra, a good metaphor,no? Enjoy!

Another zoo keeper in the mystery world

2011-06-23T14:03:00.000-07:00

Linda Lombardi writes a funny blog, Animals Behaving Badly, and now she has a zoo mystery out as well, The Sloth's Eye. Welcome to the mini-genre, Linda!

Did Not Survive pays off

2011-06-14T21:37:00.000-07:00

I'm pleased to say that I recently received my first royalty check from Did Not Survive and, as promised, I donated it to conservation. Let me hasten to say that the check was modest--it takes time and luck to establish a mystery series and mine is still new.

Here are the organizations and the reasons I selected them:

Health in Harmony, for their program to provide local jobs reforesting Gunung Palang National Park, an employment alternative to illegal logging.

Center for Biological Diversity for their efforts to save natural areas by suing to enforce US environmental laws.

Asian Elephant Support for their efforts to help both wild and captive Asian elephants.

WildAid for their campaign to reduce consumer demand for wildlife products in Asia.

What would be your choices? Let me know what organization and why. I'll consider them when the next check comes around.

Thanks for thinking of us, but bigger would be better. Go sell more books.

My new look

2011-06-14T11:39:00.000-07:00

I inveigled (extorted?) a minor blog make-over from a house guest. Emilie Wapnick is the creator of Puttylike, a website dedicated to "Lifestyle Design for Multipotentialites."

CLICK HERE to see what the 20-somethings are up to these days.

How do you like the new look? Is that a great camel or what?

Balance, breathe, begin again

2011-06-12T21:46:00.000-07:00

Today I watched a little video of a Bill McKibben OpEd piece on climate change (click here). It always gets me down to think of the destruction we humans are causing on my watch and my inexplicable failure to put a stop to it. There's some trick to saving the world that I just can't seem to get.

But I just unearthed in the chaos of my desk a Gary Snyder poem that is a small comfort. Perhaps he won't mind me quoting it if I include a link to his page at City Lights bookstore, where you can get lots of his fine poems. Click here.

As the Crickets

As the crickets' soft autumn hum
is to us,
so are we to the trees
as are they
to the rocks and the hills

Which I take to mean: all this will pass, regardless of what you or I attempt or accomplish.

Is that really the best you can do?

Brewing up elephant conservation

2011-06-03T22:42:00.000-07:00

Here I am doing my utmost for elephant conservation by encouraging the board of Asian Elephant Support to enjoy summer weather and a boatload of beer. This is at ZooBrew, an event at Oregon Zoo showcasing local breweries. (Yes, they have a serious board meeting tomorrow, indoors and cold sober.)

Linda Reifschneider, President and Treasurer (just off the plane from St. Louis); Michelle Schireman (Oregon Zoo zookeeper and supporter); me; April Yoder, Director (Little Rock, AK); Sharon Glaeser, Vice President and Secretary (Portland).

I was pleased to hand Linda a check that was part of the royalties from Did Not Survive, the second in my zoo mystery series.

These folks are supporting important work in Asian elephant conservation. Take a look at their classy website HERE and consider becoming a supporter yourself.

Just a picture--Yellow Necked Spur Fowl

2011-06-01T22:04:00.000-07:00

No time to blog, so here is a picture I took in Kenya of a yellow-necked spur fowl. They acted like quail, scampering over the roads and popping up unexpectedly.

Former House Guest Wins Conservation Award!

2011-05-22T20:04:00.000-07:00

File this under "Good News." Dr. Hotlin Ompusunggu, an Indonesian dentist, received the Whitley Award, presented to her May 12, 2011, by HRH The Princess Royal (that would be Princess Anne). Hotlin is co-founder of Alam Sehat Lestari (ASRI),an Indonesian organization that links the health and well-being of rainforest villages with important wildlife habitat in Gunumg Palung National Park in West Kalimantan, Indonesia.

The US fundraising arm of ASRI is Health In Harmony, which you may have read about in this blog. (Click HERE to refresh your memory.)

I met Hotlin when I hosted a fundraiser at my house. She's a short, energetic, charming woman who showed me how Indonesians cook rice: boil water, add rice, boil until done. Too much water? Drain some off. Not enough? Add more. Perhaps I've made too much fuss about rice...

She and Dr. Kinari Webb established ASRI to provide health care to some of the poorest people in the world and have linked the health of people to the health of the environment. I was especially impressed that they asked the villagers what they needed, rather than announcing the services they chose to deliver. ASRI is innovative in many respects, including helping to protect and restore Gunung Palung and its orangutan population. Orangs are not doing well at all as Indonesian is deforested for palm oil plantations and other crops, so this is important.

Give a thought to ASRI as one of the charities you support. You get two bangs for your buck--healthcare for people, habitat for a multitude of tropical species. Can't beat that!

MS Word for Authors: Out with double-hyphens

2011-05-14T17:25:00.001-07:00

Double hyphens do the work of em and en dashes, but the same way a piece of rope works as a belt or a door plus two sawhorses makes a table.

You aren't stuck with double hyphens. MS Word will be pleased to insert a far more stylish em or en dash if you ask it to. These live at Insert/Symbols. You may need to dig deeper: More Symbols/Special Characters. I generally use an en dash (the width of the letter N, a bit shorter than the em dash).

Instead of digging through menus to find this symbol every time you need it, you can tell MS Word to substitute a dash when you type a double hyphen. MS Word treats "waht" as a typo and changes it to "what". It can do the same for "--".

First, get yourself a dash. Open up MS Word, find Symbols, and insert a dash so that you can see it on the page. Then highlight it and copy it so that it is stored in the buffer.

Next, find AutoCorrect Options. Use Help if you can't find it under Word Options.

In AutoCorrect, look for a small empty box labeled Replace. Type -- (two hyphens) in that box. Next to it is a box labeled With. Click in that box and Paste the dash into it. Back out by clicking OK.

Now test it and see if it works. Let me know if you can't get this to cooperate.

We are experts at dashes.

MS Word for Authors: Help for fumble fingers

2011-05-10T22:33:00.000-07:00

MS Word has a feature named Auto Correct that you might want to get acquainted with.

Perhaps you've noticed, with gratitude, that Word will fix some of your typos the instant you make them.

Perhaps you've noticed that some of those "typos" weren't actually anything that needed changing.

Perhaps you wish Word would fix some of the other mistakes you commonly make.

All this is set up in AutoCorrect and you can tailor it to your needs.

Go to Options and review AutoCorrect. (Use the help to find it if necessary.) AutoCorrect has a few options to check or uncheck. Following that is a long list of characters that Word will automatically replace with other characters. Scroll down this list and see what all Word is up to.

If you really want "nwo" to be left alone and not changed to "now", you can delete it here.

If you are forever typing "Amn" when you mean "Ann" you can add it here.

And you can set up AutoCorrect to change two hyphens (funky) to an en dash (classy). But you have to leave a comment on this blog to get me to reveal the secret.

I love hidden features.

Today: M.E. Kemp, mystery author and pig fancier

2011-05-01T22:31:00.000-07:00

Today is a first for this blog: A guest blogger. Please welcome M.E. Kemp, author of Death of A Bawdy Belle, Death of a Dutch Uncle, and Death of A Dancing Master.

A Pig in a Poke

On the very first page of my historical mystery series (featuring two nosy Puritans as detectives,) I introduced a character who was to become a favorite with readers. So popular was my Priscilla that I wrote several short stories featuring her, one of which one first prize in a New England Writers Network contest. Priscilla is a pig -- a very intelligent pig. Indeed, from the children's book, Charlotte's Web, people may have a vague idea that pigs are intelligent animals, as indeed they are. Probably the breed of the highest intelligence is the handsome pig known as the Tamworth. Ginger-colored and long legged, not your regular fat white pig, the Tamworth is the George Clooney of Pigdom. It is a descendant of the European wild boar, less that ferocious ancestor's truculence. In olden days the breed was known as the Irish Grazer, no doubt for its ginger coloring.

Not one to stint on my research, I visited a heritage pig farm as I wrote my first book featuring Priscilla. In upstate New York is located Flying Pigs Farm and its hospitable owner. Mike took me on an informal tour and answered my questions as we tromped over the hills (they felt more like mountains) to get to the field where he kept his pigs. The pint-sized piggies came a-running and a-squealing to greet us. They are very social animals, Mike said as the piggies nibbled on his jean-legs. They'll eat anything, he said, including trying to eat a cell phone that was dropped in the field. Their favorite treat are apples and Mike arranges to take the "windfalls" from a local orchard -- the piggies don't care if there's a brown spot or a mushy spot on their treats.

Much to my relief it turns out that everything I had Priscilla do in my book a Tamworth would do, including 'going on walk-about,' as the Aussies say. A Tamworth will take off to explore the countryside for a couple days and then he/she will return home to the farm. I came away from my tour with a greater admiration for pigs than ever before. And yes, I do have a collection of pig-mobilia.

That night my hubby and I went out for dinner at a local restaurant. I noted that on the menu they carried pork from Flying Pigs Farm. "Oh," I said to the young waitress, "I just came from there! The piggies are just the cutest things!" At which the waitress said she wished I hadn't told her that, covered her mouth and ran for the bathroom. Needless to say, I didn't order the pork.

Read more about M.E. (Marilyn) Kemp HERE.

Read about Death of A Dancing Master HERE.

Black rhino mother and calf

2011-04-26T13:12:00.000-07:00

Here's two more reasons to contribute to Bowling for Rhinos. Contact your local zoo or go HERE.

If you can't go bowling, send a check to American Association of Zoo Keepers, Oregon Zoo, 4001 SW Canyon Road, Portland, OR 97221-9704 Tell 'em I sent you!

Black rhinocerous

2011-04-25T21:45:00.000-07:00

Black rhino. One of my favorite pictures from our recent trip to Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in Kenya.

What it takes to keep rhinos alive in today's world: an army of armed guards to keep poachers away.

You can help out by supporting an annual zoo keeper event: Bowling for Rhinos. If you live in Oregon, click HERE. If you live elsewhere, contact your local zoo. I've seen the results--this is a cause to support.

Mystery dinner game: Hyenas, Tuskers, Chaos

2011-04-21T21:04:00.000-07:00

Shortly before we left on our huge-deal safari to Kenya, one of the trip organizers suggested I dash off one of those role-playing mystery dinner games for a group activity. "You write mysteries, right?" Yes, but I'd never seen, much less played, such a game, and I was trying to draft the first 100 pages of the next zoo mystery so it could steep while we were gone, and meanwhile pack, finish a bathroom remodel, get typhoid shots, and arrange dog and house care and ... So I said, "Sure!"

I resuscitated my corporate communications chops and welded them to mystery conventions and worked my aging ass off. I stole freely from a game I bought and customized it for a zoo keeper group in Kenya. The final package had invitations with a rhino logo, instructions, name tags, clues in envelopes, and player booklets. The setting was, of course, a safari camp. The game had a cunning murder, wacky characters, a false confession, gunshots, and plenty more. Naturally there was no time for a rehearsal before we left.

One night it was raining too hard for a red-light game drive, so instead of lurching around in an open van looking for leopards and hippos, we gave the game a try. I was a little trepidatious. Not nearly enough, it turned out.

On the plus side, we were all pretty well lubricated--Tusker beer for many, wine for some. The women were keen to do it and argued over who got which of the four female parts. On the other hand, the men were not so enthusiastic. My husband and two other men agreed to give it a try after some arm-twisting, but we were a guy short.

We were staging this at the dining area of the camp and several of the Kenyan staff were on duty to open beers and so on. They thought this game sounded great.

One of them was John (not his real name), a tall young Maasai warrior (apparently all Maasai men are warriors), draped in his red robe and beaded head covering. He's learning the safari business from the ground up, waiting tables on his way to become a driver/guide, for which he will also need three years at the university in Nairobi. (The drivers had extensive training and knew everything.)

Aside from being a sweet, wide-eyed heart-throb (I say that in a motherly way), John was fearless, and he stepped in to take the last role.

I whipped up name tags for people who wanted a role and didn't have one--the murdered woman's ghost (a brilliant idea, if I say so myself), hyena, leopard, lion, bushbaby, giraffe (a non-speaking part), tortoise (also non-speaking), and so on. Everyone who wanted to get in on it had a part, even if it was mostly to growl at random intervals.

And so we commenced. But, honestly, I had no way to know that the illumination at this eco-resort would be dimmer than candle light. Reading 12 point type meant standing right next to one of the scarce little light bulbs. So we had a few issues with the script.

John had a key role, a big part. He speaks at least three languages (his tribe's, Kiswahili, and English), but reading English was a tiny bit challenging. He got the words, but some of the flavor fell overboard. We applauded and kept the momentum. People loved hamming up their character. They vamped and whined and boasted and sneered and mostly forgot the player booklets.

And every time really crucial clues were about to be revealed, the two bartenders, hunched under a blanket together, ran through the middle of the group whooping like hyenas (exactly like hyenas). This aroused the leopard (in her spotted pajamas) to snarl and claw at them which set off the rest of the animals. I think the giraffe stampeded and the tortoise may have been trampled. It was hard to tell in the dark.

After extended chaos and considerable hysteria, the murderer threw her hands in the air and shouted a confession. We cheered.

So all you mystery writers, learn from my tail. Tale.

* Need I say "Tuskers"?
* Set up characters to be either gender.
* Be ready for audience participation.
* Don't expect anything complicated to work at all the way you intended.

And bring a flashlight.

John

Those crazy hyenas

Taking our bows

Pictures thanks to Liz Quinlan

Plot Brain: Part 2

2011-04-07T21:41:00.000-07:00

Arrrgh! The plot's all laid out in a summary, but those first chapters don't quite work in the first draft. Or do they? Is it too slow and dull? Is the build-up to the real action essential and interesting or merely labored? Will my editor like it? Will anybody?

Perhaps if the description were trimmed, the dialog crisped up, the verbs more vivid, then it would be fine. But a cliche is solidifying, the one about rearranging the deck chairs on the Titanic. Structure, not style, is the issue. Probably.

Clearly the root problem is lack of talent. The great reviews on the first two books were flukes of an irrational industry, of minds infantilized by television and bad movies, or of kind-hearted strangers who couldn't bear to speak their real opinions. There is no hope, none at all, of lightening striking three times. I should learn to knit. The world would be better for it, rather than throwing ink and pixels at what is sure to remain a hopeless mess.

Is the wallowing over yet? It better be. This is taking up valuable time. Shoulder to the wheel: what am I trying to accomplish here, the core passion for this tale? Get away from the keyboard and pace in circles until that comes into focus once again. That summary is a jigsaw puzzle where each piece can fit in several places, but some may be missing. Mess with the major scenes. Challenge each one--whether it's needed, where it belongs. Harder: what else could happen? Rearrange, reinvent.

Brain: do your thing. Think, dammit, think!

Is there something wrong with wallowing?

Plot brain

2011-03-15T14:14:00.000-07:00

I am back from a wonderful trip to Kenya and Amsterdam, still getting caught up. More later on Lewa Wildlife Conservancy (pictures!) and Amsterdam's city zoo, Artis.

I am settling in to the first draft of zoo mystery #3 and thinking about "the creative process."

A friend informs me that working on a PhD dissertation makes you stupid. That's what she's doing, and she's missing exits on the freeway, forgetting to buy milk, and tripping over her own furniture.

I understand completely. It's exactly the same for me. When my head is filled with a complex and challenging project (e.g., zoo mystery #3), it gets full. The cortex doesn't seem able to muscle the door on that topic closed and open the door to regular life. The dog reminds me that it's almost noon and I haven't fed him yet. The husband wonders why dinner is at 8:00 PM instead of the normal 6:30 PM. I send out a lot of "belated" birthday cards.

It sounds like chemo brain, but trust me, it's not. The cortex LIKES to be exercised. It feels good to be smacked by inspiration, to prune a sentence until it is shapely and tight, to grasp what that character will do next. Even as I forget the shopping list and park in front of the wrong grocery store, I feel smarter.

Go figure. It'll be good for you.

We're fuzzy, but our horns are sharp.
Japanese serow at Woodland Park Zoo

MS Word for Authors: Hepl with Speling

2011-03-09T23:32:00.000-08:00

MS Word is anxious about your spelling, and for good reason. Many of us are rotten spellers as well as fumble-fingered. Word can help us if we approach this in a spirit of cooperation.

MS Word also worries about your grammar, but has less to contribute there since Word spent the time in Miss Pluperfect's English class flirting with PowerPoint and making fun of Excel. Excel refused to talk to anyone about decent English ever after and this explains why its help system is so incomprehensible (although better now than it used to be). But I digress.

Word is going to check your spelling unless you order it not to. Words that trouble it will show up underlined in red. Right-click and Word will offer alternative spellings in a range of relevance. (Control and click for Macs.)

If you hate the red underlines in general or because Word is flagging words that are spelled just fine, you have choices. 1) Learn to spell; 2) Turn spell check off; 3) Teach Word to spell. We will skip Choice 1 as hopeless and address the others.

The Options menu in MS Word allows you to turn off spell check (and grammar check) or to tailor them to your preferences. Take a look, but read about Choice 3 before you yield to irritation and go turning everything off. (Use the help system to find Options if its not obvious from the menus.)

Choice 3 is to tell Word that whatever it has underlined in red as deeply flawed is in fact just peachy the way it is. Right-click (Macs: Control-click) in the character's name or Polish town or dialect that you want Word to accept as fine. Select Ignore if you want a pass on only this instance, Ignore All for the whole document, and Add to Dictionary for every document you will ever create with this copy of MS Word.

Needless to say, you should be cautious with the Add to Dictionary option. "Mamah" or "likker" may not work in all your oeuvre, so perhaps better to stick with "Ignore All" rather than accepting it for everything forever. On the other hand, if you are writing a series and protagonist "Ivana" is flagged every time, go for it.

You can also go to Spelling & Grammar and use the dialog box to click through all the flagged words one after another instead of catching them on the fly.

Teach MS Word your idiosyncratic words, then take those red underlines seriously. Spelling matters if you want to come across as professional and competent. Find those words underlined in red and review the suggestions. You could be wrong, and Word could be right. This can save you embarrassment and possibly humiliation. Use all the tools you available to do the job right.

Picky, picky, picky.

Book review: Stolen World

2011-02-26T15:00:00.000-08:00

What is it with obsessive collectors? Most of us collect something or other--salt and pepper shakers, British stamps, Hawaiian coins, cheese cake recipes--but we don't risk our freedom, our marriages, or our financial security to possess one more. Some people do and Stolen World, by Jennie Erin Smith (Crown Publishers, 2011)is about people who obsess about reptiles. More specifically, it's about men who smuggle them into the US to sell them to other collectors and who hope to achieve fame and fortune doing so. The "fame" is status in the world of reptile collectors and seems to be almost as strong a motive as the money.

Smith's background is in journalism, but the book reads like a novel. The personalities, adventures, successes, and failures of smugglers Hank Molt, Tom Crutchfield, Edmund Celebucki, and the infamous Anson Wong are recounted in a crisp, calm style. Smith doesn't judge or lecture or make free with exclamation marks because she doesn't need to. She lets these peoples' words, actions, and court records speak for themselves and they surely do. Persistent law-breaking motivated by a yen for adventure, by a compulsion to collect the rarest species, and, of course, by money make for a page-turner, a very good read.

Stolen World is surprisingly short on documentation considering the chronicles of illegal activities undertaken by real people, some of them still living. But what she vividly and engagingly describes is consistent with other books on the same subject--The Lizard King and The Last Tortoise, for two, the latter previously reviewed in this blog.

Smith describes how lax zoos were in their animal acquisitions in the 60s and 70s. Until the feds and their own industry cracked down, reptile curators in zoos were a major market for the animal importers, regardless of local laws or the mortality rate. (I saw a bit of ethically dubious animal acquisition myself when I was a new zoo keeper in the '70s.) When zoos began to clean up their act as a result of stronger US and international law--and public embarrassment--private collectors became the customer base of the reptile market. Smith also chronicles the rise of captive breeding of reptiles, which accounts for the bulk of the US market today. Go to the TRAFFIC website, however, and you will find that smuggling wild-caught reptiles is hardly a thing of the past.

A personal note: What I found truly dismaying is that many of these men claim to "love" reptiles. What kind of love pays locals to pull wild animals out of their habitat, jams them into false-bottomed crates to ship them thousands of miles, and sells the survivors to people who very likely cannot keep them alive for more than a few months? What kind of "love" scorns conservation efforts for the species they desire? Perhaps in their older years, some of these hard-drinking, thoroughly treacherous guys stopped to consider the body count they were personally responsible for, but one is permitted to doubt.

Read another review from a knowledgeable person here. The "herpers" seem to have reacted strongly to Stolen World. Read some of their comments (the word "venomous" does come to mind) here. You will find them in keeping with the people described in this book.

Then read the book yourself. It's a fascinating journey through the intersection of psychology, commerce, and biology.

Here's how you can buy Stolen World and benefit Herpdigest, a free reptile news digest, at the same time:
1) Send a check to Herpdigest/Allen Salzberg/67-87 Booth Street -5B/Forest Hills, NY 11375. Make the check out to Herpdigest.
2) By Paypal - the account is asalzberg@herpdigest.org
3) By credit card, Master or Visa, Discover and Amex, only, send credit card number, expiration date, billing and shipping address to asalzberg@herpdigest.org. Include those 3 numbers from the back of the credit card.
4) By phone at 1-718-275-2190 11 A.M.- 6 P.M Eastern Standard Time (NYC.) If not in, leave message.

Captive bred reptiles at an Oregon reptile event.

MS Word for Authors: Get lost, italic! You, too, bold!

2011-02-22T23:03:00.000-08:00

A tiny tip just in from our far-flung correspondence (no, not correspondents).

To easily get rid of bold, italic, and/or underline formatting, highlight the offending text, then hit Control + space. Back to normal! Yay!

This seems to work the same (Control + space) for PCs and for Macs.

Bold? I know a thing or two about bold.

Book review: Dog On It by Spencer Quinn

2011-02-14T21:17:00.000-08:00

I'm not usually a fan of mysteries that humanize animals. Our species has a long history of interpreting animals as limited humans--they must have our motives, our values, our sensory ability. This leads to grievous errors in understanding our fellow species. When ethology was a new and exciting science, we were amazed at what could be learned by simply shutting up and watching without expectation or judgment, then trying to figure out why animals do what they do. In my zoo mysteries, I present the critters as authentically as I can, with all the superpowers nature bestowed on them and nothing more.

But I'm going soft and making an exception. Spencer Quinn wrote Dog On It in the first-person voice of a big, goofy, K-9 flunk-out named Chet who is partner to private investigator Bernie Little. Yes, Chet understands human speech and far too much of our behavior. On the realistic side, his nose rules, he's obsessed with food and easily distracted by a cat or golf ball, and he doesn't solve crimes as much as enable Bernie's efforts.

Bernie is an appealing sleuth, the other characters are clear and distinct, and the plot and romantic sub-plot have sufficient twists and turns. A teenage girl goes missing--runaway or snatched? Does her father know more than he's saying, or not? It's set in what is apparently a fictional version of Southern California or maybe Arizona.

The real fun of this book, however, is the amiable style and Chet. Charming. A lovely read.

I liked it, too, says Murphy.

MS Word for Authors: Bigger and Better

2011-02-07T21:26:00.000-08:00

Most of us set up our pages with a 12 point font, probably Times New Roman. If you find that this is hard to read, you can easily enlarge it. No, don't go for 14 or 16 points! Instead, "zoom" the screen until it is a comfortable size. Then you won't need to remember to change the font size back to 12 point before you ship off the manuscript. The change won't affect printing, either.

To zoom, go to View. This is somewhere in your top toolbar. In more recent versions, a slider bar can also be found in the lower right corner. See what Zoom is set to and make it bigger. Inspect the results and adjust as needed.

And, by the way, no where is it written that you must draft in double line spacing. Instead of 2, try setting line spacing to 1.5 or even 1.15. I like this because I can see more text on the screen. This change is one you do need to remember to fix before you submit!

This tree kangaroo wants to read over your shoulder.

Book review: Man in the Woods

2011-01-31T17:45:00.000-08:00

Bear with me, mystery fans and animal people, as we take a walk on the literary side. Scott Spencer's Man in the Woods (HarperCollins, 2010) is a novel about a crime, and a dog is an important character, providing both the inciting incident and the denouement. Those characteristics qualify it for this blog. (Thank you to Sandra Parshall, author of the Rachel Goddard series, for recommending it.)

Spencer is a heavyweight, author of the wrenching Endless Love (don't hold the infamous movie against it), A Ship Made of Paper, and other well-received novels. His online biographies are cryptic, but reveal that he has taught writing at Columbia University and the University of Iowa Writers' Workshop, among other venues.

And write he can. Paul is a carpenter committed to an authentic, honest life. He finds a man abusing a dog at an isolated park. Their interchange escalates to a fist fight, and Paul's punch to his throat kills the other man. Abruptly a murderer, Paul takes the dog and flees for home.

"The brown dog sitting next to him, whom Paul has already named Shep, is salivating anxiously and shedding fur at a prodigious rate. The dog is clearly falling apart, but he is trying to keep his dignity. He is like a minor character in a Mafia movie who knows he is being taken for a ride from which he is never going to return, but who has for so long subscribed to the code that ordains his very undoing that it is beneath him, or beyond him, to protest."

We watch as Paul struggles to move past his new knowledge of himself, aided by his beautiful lover Kate, a successful author of a Christian book. Her young daughter, Paul's best friend, and Kate herself find their lives slowly distorted by his blood sin. Spencer uses multiple points of view to show police searching the cul de sacs of the victim's life, led and misled by patient sleuthing and by information discovered by chance, as well as the perspectives of a few who knew the victim.

Paul and Kate are concerned parents, successful in their work, generous to their friends and relatives, thoughtful and kind. Does that matter? Does right living offer a pass on murder? Spencer engages us in the aftermath of crime, exploring the implications that conventional crime fiction usually eschews.

I have but one quibble about this fine book. In a vivid, sad scene, Shep discovers a snake in the house. It's a large but harmless rat snake. Kate is terrified. Paul, who loves the woods and engages in the natural world with joy, feels he has no choice but to kill it and does so, with reluctance. The dead snake is tossed into the bushes and doesn't come up again in the story. What have we here? A heavy-handed metaphor about Eden? Spencer is surely too subtle for that. A second proof that Paul comes up short on problem solving and turns to violence? My reading of Paul is that he would have the wit to pin the snake, grab it behind the head, and toss it outside alive. Perhaps that is the point--he didn't take less lethal action. But he acted like a city person and not the woodsman we are led to believe he is. (If you are snake-averse, skip pages 143-147, but don't skip the book.)

The cliche "complex, fully-rounded characters" is where Spencer begins. Read The Man in The Woods for the wonderful people, for their terrible dilemma, and for the gorgeous language.

Shep?

Murphy's Diary

2011-01-19T19:10:00.000-08:00

8:30 AM Wake up. Hear people moving around. Go back to sleep.

9:00 AM Hear kibble hit food bowl. Think hard. Worth it? Need to pee. No rush.

9:15 AM Crawl out from bed under armchair. Inspect food bowl. Plain kibble? Walk away. Garnished with bits of cheese rind or a dab of gravy? Eat food to reward people. At least they’re trying.

9:20 AM Accept petting and scratching.

9:25 AM First squirrel patrol. Potty time. Raining again.

9:30 AM Time for walk. Nudge woman with nose.

9:31-10:06 AM Nudge. Nudge. Nudge. Takes patience and persistence. It's for her own good.

10:07 AM OMG! Woman is putting on shoes! OMG! OMG!

10:10 AM WTF? Woman is turning on computer. Stare at her with deep disappointment. Bad woman, bad bad. Nudge her with nose. Nudge again. Put front paws on her knees to demonstrate urgency.

10:25 AM OMG! Woman is putting on jacket! Woman has plastic bag! Woman has THE BALL!

10:27 AM Phone rings. Woman answers. Show woman extent of despair by racing in tight circles.

10:35 AM Woman FINALLY hangs up phone. Walks to hall closet! Takes out THE LEASH!

10:36 AM Begin Happy Dance. Leap and frolic. Chew on leash. Yip and prance. Race about. Woman says, “Sit! Stay! Hold still, dammit!” Continue Happy Dance.

10:40 AM Pause. Leash is ON.

10:41-11:30 AM Exercise the woman: walking for her lower body, throwing ball for upper body. Exhausting to keep retrieving ball, but necessary for her health. As usual, she quits too soon. Come home.

11:32 AM Nap. Life is good.

It's hard work to be a responsible dog.

Book review: Tigerland by Eric Dinerstein

2011-01-05T21:10:00.000-08:00

Tigerland and Other Unintended Destinations, by Eric Dinerstein, makes me want to get myself born again and relive my life as a field biologist. Ah, to spend my days tracking tigers, observing bats, pulling off leeches... I missed my calling.

Dinerstein is Vice President for Science at World Wildlife Fund, US. That's a big, relatively well-funded, well-respected conservation organization active in many countries. Which results in some real limits on Dinerstein's candor, alas, about fellow conservationists. And he shows a great deal about his work, but reveals nothing about his personal life.

Within these limitations, this is a fun and fascinating read about the inner workings of conservation research in many parts of the world. Tigers, bats, snow leopards... He writes about forgotten places such as New Caledonia and the heart-breaking task of protecting its rare plants. Each chapter is a personal experience of a different place.

In addition to making me wish to start my professional life over, Tigerland inspires me to reach for my checkbook. He really makes the case that the people out there in the heat, the dirt, and the endless meetings trying to save the natural world from humanity deserve our support.

Conservation is sloooow work.

MS Word for Authors: Cut & Paste

2011-01-03T20:46:00.000-08:00

Here is a tiny tip that might improve your new year a tad. We authors have reason now and again to copy text from a web page, such as to keep a Word file of all our online reviews. One way to do this is simply to highlight the desired text and use the key commands or menu to Copy. Go to your MS Word document, e.g., "My Reviews," and use the key command or menu to Paste. Done!

But the formatting is goofed up. It doesn't look like the usual Normal style text--the font, font size, and other formatting is weird. You need to highlight the text (again) and assign Normal style to it and generally fuss with it.

As an alternative, don't use the standard Paste command. Instead, find the little Paste menu (Vista) or look under File (Windows XP). Select Paste Special. Then choose Unformatted Text. The website text lands in Word without the HTML formatting. Word has no idea what to do with it except to assign it Normal style. Which is what you wanted anyway.

Paste Special is not what you want if you need the graphics on the web page. Use Paste Special/Unformatted Text if all you want is the words.

Experiment with a web page, using both paste methods. Sometimes you will want Paste, sometimes Paste Special will work better.

I'm normal AND I'm special and I'll peck your eyes out if you don't watch it.

Miscellaneous Good Things

2010-12-17T14:04:00.001-08:00

It's been a week of good tidings and joy.

* Got a swell review on Shelf Awareness recommending Did Not Survive for holiday shopping. (Scroll way down to Gift Book Roundup.) DNS has had a zillion online reviews (Thank you, dear publicist Maryglenn McCombs!), but this one kicked off more emails to me than any other, ever.

* I'm in my pjs and Murphy-dog is in my lap in this fun guest blog on Marshal Zeringue's site Coffee with a Canine. I'm thinking every author needs a really cute dog.

* This nice review came in from Mystery Mavens Blog.

* Marian Allen gave this blog an award from her blog. Click here for hers.

* AND: our son is arriving tomorrow for the holidays, all the packages are in the mail, and the summary of Zoo Mystery #3 is done for the moment! Let the wild revels begin!

I'm always dressed for Christmas!

Human mind/canine mind: just a cute dog story

2010-12-15T11:50:00.000-08:00

Murphy is a small, hairy dog with a lot of positive energy. He's good at his guard duties (squirrels, people on the front porch) and friendly otherwise. He's quit chewing up our stuff, and he does tricks. A little dog of many virtues. But being whip-smart was never one of them. "Trainable, but hardly brilliant" is what I've always thought. Turns out he has the same impression of me.

This morning, I was in the bathroom getting my vitamins when he barged in. This is unusual--he's not a morning creature any more than I am. But here he was, full of energy. And he did that "follow me!" thing of wagging his tail while looking over his shoulder at me. I followed him to the dining room. Yesterday, I'd sat on the floor and petted him as we both woke up. I don't usually do that, and I figured he liked it and wanted more of the same. So that's what we did.

A bit later, I was eating breakfast in the dining room and he stood by, staring at the table. So I petted him a little. Then he put both front paws on the empty seat next to me and stared at the table. "Bad dog," I said mildly, and he got down, still staring.

Finally I got it--a little pile of liver bits sat on the table, left over from training last night. He'd spotted or smelled them this morning and, rather than putting his forefeet up on the chair and lunging for it, he'd gone to get me to do it right. He's more of a Good Dog than I realized! And I am presumably a lot dimmer than he realized.

So we played Find, which is a game that consists of "sit/stay" while I sprinkle liver bits all over the house, a game that cannot be played too often in Murphy's mind. I said "Find!" and he raced off to scarf them up.

I blew the morning's Sudoku as well.

Mutual respect? I can only hope.

Portland: Holiday party at Murder by the Book

2010-12-06T19:47:00.000-08:00

Join me and other authors for holiday fun of the murderous sort on Sunday, December 12, at 2 PM, at Murder by the Book on Hawthorne.

Here's the scoop!

The Caribou of Christmas

Book Review: Naming Nature, by Carol Kaesuk Yoon

2010-12-05T11:03:00.000-08:00

Naming Nature: The Clash Between Instinct and Science (2009) is about taxonomy, and kudos to Carol Kaesuk Yoon for tackling the subject with vigor. She sets up contrast between folk taxonomy, finding consistency across a variety of cultures, and compares that with modern scientific taxonomy. This structure is creaky and she overuses certain tropes, especially "the end of fish," but she also provides a tidy history of taxonomy. (Fish aren't really gone, of course. It's just that "fish" fails as a taxon using modern classification.)

She takes us to folk/cultural taxonomy, Linaneus's breakthrough of binomial nomenclature, and the uproar caused by cladists and their DNA analysis.

Those who can tolerate a rather over-amped emphasis on contrasting everyday classification of plants and animals (weeds, pets, fish)with scientific classifications will find many cool ideas about ordering the natural world. For example, certain specific brain lesions impair the ability to identify living things, while the ability to label non-living things remains intact. We are instinctive taxonomists, she proposes, and then asserts that science wrenches this innate sense of the world away from us.

She makes the case that we can no longer understand the natural world without field guides, without interpretation, when we once trusted our own experience. Yoon seems convinced that a layer of science between perception and understanding is a bad thing. She makes a useful, if unsurprising, point that "species" are human categories--nature is not tidy or static, and the scientific definitions fail here and there. She points out that we must live with both viewpoints at the same time--our innate perceptions and the scientific one. For example, dividing human beings into races fails--the boundaries are vague and inconsistent--yet race is a reality of our lives.

The history of science is the history of individuals promoting and resisting change and taxonomy is no different. The low opinion of taxonomists held by other scientists, the deep rifts within the taxonomic community, and the triumph of taxonomy by DNA make for fascinating reading.

Yoon says that we need the experiences in nature to build a personal taxonomy and we need to trust that organization for our own mental health. I wasn't convinced, but I found the history fascinating and recommend the book for that. I have to add, however, that Science (with a capital S) is not well respected in this country. Intuition and emotion seem to carry more credence. Worse, "facts" are often derided as joyless and dull and "experts" as limited know-nothings. My experience (bias?) is that harnessing emotion to the best information available produces far better results on average than simply going with gut feelings. Judging by Naming Nature, Yoon would disagree.

I swim, therefore I am.

Holiday Hippo

2010-12-02T11:36:00.000-08:00

I shared my October signing at Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Phoenix with the African writing team Michael Stanley (Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip). They created the excellent Inspector Kubu mysteries set in Botswana. These guys not only have cool South African accents, they have merch! I won a swell hippo tee shirt in the drawing they held. Yeah, I know, I probably shoulda let someone else have it, but there it was and I won and it is very cool and I do love hippos so... See below.

And you can have one your very own self by clicking here.

Kubwa Sana, a hippo I helped hand raise

Can't have too many hippo pictures. This is Snorkle, an elderly lady at Auckland Zoo with her not-at-all-elderly keeper.

Book review: The Last Tortoise

2010-11-29T20:27:00.001-08:00

The Last Tortoise: A Tale of Extinction in Our Lifetime, Craig B. Stanford, Belknap Press of Harvard University Press, 2010.

Stanford is a professor of anthropology and biological sciences. While his previous publications are mostly in primatology, he has written a swell book on tortoises. Not interested in reptiles? Think again. Stanford's engaging prose and passion for his subjects will pull you in, and his perspective rises well above the ground where tortoises plod.

The Last Tortoise describes the taxon and the species, then the challenges facing it, closing with conservation opportunities. Here's a few things I learned:

* Tortoises run on relatively small quantities of low-grade fuel. Therefore, grasslands can support incredible population densities compared to grazing mammals. I never imagined fields full of giant tortoises.

* New word: Brumate--approximately the reptile equivalent of hibernation, in which body processes slow down and therefore require less nutrient intake.

* Female tortoises can store sperm for up to several years. Gender of the offspring is determined primarily by incubation temperature, with perhaps some chromosomal contribution.

* As China becomes less poor, it is driving the demand for wildlife products. The Chinese eat vast numbers of turtles, some of which are farm raised in ponds. They also eat the far less fecund terrestrial tortoises, which are wild caught. (Note: Here in the US, we did a pretty good job of driving diamondback terrapins toward extinction in the 1800s for the US and European gourmet markets.)

* As a tortoise species dwindles, its price goes up, driving more collecting from the wild.

* US tortoises are not doing much better than African or Asian tortoises. The desert tortoise and gopher tortoise suffer from many human-caused ails, including the usual culprit of "development."

Stanford is a passionate advocate for his subjects, and he pulls no punches about the trend in tortoise numbers, from his title onward. Human predation will eliminate most species from their ecosystems and very soon at that. If they survive, it will be as little groups in captivity.

Stanford recommends a variety of locally-tailored conservation strategies, such as training locals to breed and release tortoises in protected habitat, reserves on isolated islands, and working with pet owners to provide hatchlings for release. Some of these ideas are radical and require careful analysis and cautious experimentation, for example, using Galapagos and Aldabra tortoises to replace extinct giant tortoise species.

I bought my copy through HerpDigest, a newsletter devoted to reptile and amphibian conservation. It's easy if you use PayPal. Just use the "send money" function for $30 to this account: asalzberg@herpdigest.org Be sure to include your address in the note. If you don't use PayPal, send an email to that address for more payment options.

Here's another review, by David S. Lee of the Tortoise Reserve that adds additional information about conservation.

I'd get along just fine if you folks would leave me alone.

Not Just Traditionally Published

2010-11-26T20:55:00.000-08:00

Listen here, campers. I may be a boomer and I may no longer claim desk space in the Information Technology department, but my techo-licks are not (yet) entirely lame. Night Kill and Did Not Survive are Out There in Kindle-land.

Moreover, I was interviewed today by David Wisehart for his site Kindle Author.

I'm a Kindle Author, got that? Now let's see the respect.

Yeah, I'm a ground squirrel and she's an English sparrow. Wanna make something of it?

Giving Thanks to Conservationists

2010-11-25T12:52:00.000-08:00

I have a lot to be thankful for, but I'm restricting this post to those who labor in the fields of conservation or environmentalism, to use the more recent term.

* Thank you to those with the endless patience to negotiate with farmers and ranchers to find solutions to human/wildlife conflicts.

* Thank you to the people with the stamina to endure meeting after meeting to plan how land will be used--the people who speak up for natural areas in the face of economic pressure, the people who understand that "balance" means only deciding how much we will destroy, but who persevere anyway.

* Thank you to the astoundingly ingenious and cheerful folk who teach our young to appreciate pond life and raptors and trees.

* Thank you to the researchers in the often uncomfortable and dangerous wild, collecting the information we need to understand how to support the wild in the face of the changes we create.

* Thank you to everyone who wrote a check or volunteered or sent a letter in support of wilderness designation, greenhouse gas reduction, sane harvest regulations, marine reserves, and other efforts to spare the planet our excesses.

* Thank you to those who take the trouble to educate yourself and then keep these issues in mind when you vote.

I am grateful for all your efforts on this Thanksgiving, the day we celebrate abundance and good fortune.

Bird Creek Meadows, Mt. Adams, Washington

Pronghorn, Central Oregon

Book Review: Forbidden Creatures

2010-11-23T13:39:00.000-08:00

Forbidden Creatures, by Peter Laufer, explores the reasons people want exotic pets, in particular, dangerous ones. He is amazed, and you may be, too, at how many tigers, cougars, pythons, macaws, etc. are in private hands. Most of what you can see at a zoo you can buy on the internet. Caveat emptor--these animals often end up dumped at sanctuaries or killed when they become too big, aggressive, or expensive.

Laufer's strategy is to interview people who live or work in unusual situations with exotic animals. He covers a lot of ground, for example, a woman and her daughter who drugged and smuggled a baby rhesus macaque through US customs; the mish-mash of federal, state, and local regulations covering non-domestic pets; actress Tippi Hedren's sanctuary for unwanted lions and tigers; a tiger in a cage in a feed store; a woman who breeds chimpanzees and monkeys for sale; and biologists dealing with the invasion of ex-pet Burmese pythons in Florida.

It's fascinating stuff, but not well analyzed. Laufer can't be blamed for the lack of statistics about exotic animal ownership--apparently there aren't any--but his attempt to answer why people crave intimate relationships with unusual and/or dangerous animals never quite jells. Partly that's because the reasons are varied. Among them are a need for emotional intimacy combined with a lack of the social skills required to love and be loved by humans, a desire to control ("subjugate") a powerful animal, profit (a very large factor), and prestige. It seems safe to add that some of these people have serious mental health problems, and some have far more interest in profit than in animal welfare. That said, owning a wild animal is a common inclination, and many, perhaps most, of us have kept at least a turtle or two.

One thing that struck me in most of the interviews with exotic animals owners was how insistent they were that the animal "bond" with them, that there must be a reciprocal emotional attachment. It seems not to occur to big cat owners, for example, that a lion "loving" a great ape (i.e., a human) is an odd expectation and that its fulfillment will be incomplete at best. I learned early on, working with volunteers at a zoo, to be wary of those who claimed to have a special bond with animals--they were mostly oblivious to species-specific signals and quick to take foolish risks. The owners described here also show a lack of interest in enabling the animal to exercise its full range of natural behaviors. Companionship of its own kind, housing that includes what the animal would use in the wild (tree stumps, dirt to dig in, etc.) is of little interest. Toys, yes, and cute costumes for monkeys, of course.

This contrasts to my experience as a zoo keeper. We made sincere, if often inadequate, efforts to provide as natural an environment as circumstances permitted, and I am confident that few exotic pet owners come anywhere near the enclosures, food, and social opportunities an accredited zoo provides its denizens. I hand-raised baby monkeys because they were rejected by their--also hand-raised--mothers and worked hard to integrate the young animals back with their own kind to break that cycle. This is a common story in zoos, where hand-raising is preferred only under unusual circumstances. Zoos don't want tame animals that relate to people. They want socially normal animals that get along with their own kind.

Laufer is an Oregon journalist who also wrote The Dangerous World of Butterflies, so he is experienced with the topic of animals, legal and not, and the people who acquire, keep, breed, and sell them. His focus really is people--he is not a biologist. He includes monkeys in the term "great apes" and refers to all captive snakes as "long snakes." He is blithe about leaving his bird-killing cat to roam, against his vet's advice, because he appreciates the wild nature of that cat, but apparently not the wild nature of its prey. To his credit, he had the sand to put a snake on the cover, despite the conventional wisdom that no one will buy a book if they have to look at a snake on their bedside or coffee table.

Read this as an introduction to the topic and for cautionary tales about acquiring species that have no evolutionary shaping to prepare them for living with us. Read it and develop a healthy skepticism toward those cute videos of adult lions hugging their former owners and darling chimpanzees in costumes selling cars and insurance. Read it and wonder at human ignorance and egoism, as well as our optimistic, faltering efforts to connect with other species.

House pet? (Picture by Nancy Parker)

Blogging with the Librarians

2010-11-15T21:21:00.000-08:00

Here's a couple of fun blogs featuring yours truly.

This is from Lisa Holstine, who manages the Velma Teague Library in Glendale, AZ. She organized a reading for me last month and then blogged about it, bless her heart!

And this is a guest blog I wrote for another library:
Saxton B. Little Free Library of Columbia, CT, invited by Carol A. Kubala, Adult Services Librarian.

I LOVE librarians!

And so does Murphy

MS Word for Authors: Underline to Italic and vice versa

2010-11-14T22:54:00.000-08:00

You might want to first read the post "MS Word for Authors: Secrets of Find and Replace," from 10/31/2010. This is a follow up tidbit.

*******************************************************

While italic for emphasis seems to be gaining ground, I'm told that some editors still want underline instead. Switching back and forth in your ms. is a trifle tricky, but put this on a sticky on your monitor and you'll know how to do it whenever you need to.

First, here's how to change underline to italic. Try this on a test document.

On a PC: Open the Find and Replace dialog box and click in "Find what." Then use the key command for underline: Ctrl+U. Beneath "Find what", note the label "Format". Do the key command a couple times and note that "Format" toggles through Underline, No Underline, and blank. Leave it set to Underline. The "Find what" box should still be empty.

Then click in the "Replace with" box. Use Ctrl+U. Do it again, so that Format is set to No Underline. With the cursor still there, use the key command for italic: Ctrl+I. "Format" should now read "Font: Italic No Underline". Again, leave the box above empty.

Now click Replace All.

To recap, you have to specifically turn off underline, you can't just replace it with italic. And you must turn off underline and turn on italic in a single step.

On the Mac I have available for testing, the Find and Replace box does not respond to the keyboard commands. Instead, open Find and Replace, click in "Find what" and use the Format button in the dialog box--Format/Font. Find "Underline style" and select "None". Click OK. Then click in the "Replace with" box, go back to Format/Font and, at Font Style, select Italic. Click OK. Click on Replace All.

In reverse: Set "Find what" to italic. Set "Replace with" to Underline, Not Italic. Replace All.

On the Mac, for Underline, select the single line.

Thank you to my friend Bill who reminded me how to do this. Give it a try and if it doesn't work or if you have a better method, please add a comment.

Sometimes things get confusing.

Book Review: "Zoo Story--Life in the Garden of Captives"

2010-11-08T10:11:00.000-08:00

Zoo Story, by Thomas French, is a journalist's history of six years at Lowry Park Zoo in Tampa, Florida. While I can fault French for overuse of trite expressions such as "alpha males" (referring to humans), this is an excellent book for anyone interested in zoos. He starts with wild African elephants transported to the US, rather than being shot to reduce over population, and uses that to explore what zoos have to offer animals and their visitors.

The book traces the rise and fall of Lowry Park Zoo from a back-water institution to a star attraction, and the subsequent fall from grace of the man who engineered its transformation. French has the good sense and journalist skills to talk to multiple layers of staff, keepers as well as management. He interweaves stories of individual animals and humans. Best of all, he tackles the real issues that zoos face, including the eternal conflicts among funding, animal welfare, and conservation. Animals get sick and die, animals escape and are shot, employees come and go, a zoo's reputation rises and falls.

French avoids the happy-talk of cute stories that most books by zoo professionals rely on and avoids as well the sentimentality and ignorance that assert that all animals in zoos are suffering and would be better off in the wild. He tells a great story with great characters.

Recommended for anyone interested in zoos or in our relationship with animals.

MS Word for Authors: Buried secrets of Find and Replace

2010-10-31T15:09:00.001-07:00

MS Word's Find and Replace is a feature probably very familiar to you. When "Amanda" must become "Bobbie Sue", you probably use Ctrl+H (or Apple + shift+H) or the Edit menu to open up the dialog box and get Word to do the swap for you.

In case you haven't stumbled on this yet, it's perfectly valid to "Find" something and "Replace with" nothing. Word interprets as "find it and delete it".

Another tip: To eliminate those old-fashioned double spaces after periods, enter two spaces in the "Find" box, which will be invisible, and one space in the "Replace with" box, also invisible. Click "Replace All" and the double spaces will be changed to single spaces. Click "Replace All" again in case you put a few triple spaces in there also.

For additional thrills with Find and Replace, click the little "More" button (PC). On a Mac, look for a tiny down arrow in the lower left corner. Run through that list of options for finding and replacing. "Find whole words only" is handy, especially if you are replacing a short word, if, for example, "son" is to become "daughter." Check this box or "Hudson" can become "Huddaughter," which will mystify you when you are editing text a week later!

Still at the dialog box, click on Format and review that list, too. One example: you can search for a particular font and replace it. This is useful if you've changed the manuscript from, say, Courier New to Times New Roman, and you suspect that some of the New Courier is still lurking in the document. It's easy to set up the Find and Replace--Click in "Find what", select Courier New, then click in "Replace with" and select Times New Roman. The font names display under the boxes, which should be empty since you are not searching on specific words. Click "Replace All" and rest easy that the inappropriate font is now banished. (Click "No Formatting" to get rid of this before you start a new test.)

Explore other options hidden behind that Format button. You can, for example, replace one style with another.

One more tip: This time, click on Special, which is next to Format. This is a very cool feature: you can Find and Replace double hyphens with the classier em dashes, get rid of tabs after you set Normal style to indent five spaces automatically, and perform other formatting gymnastics (with caution, please!).

Open a test document, perhaps a copy of your ms. (clearly named "Test"!) and play around.

Hunt and peck. Isn't that the same as find and replace?

A visit to Reid Park Zoo, Tucson, Arizona

2010-10-29T12:01:00.000-07:00

After Bouchercon, I flew to Arizona for a 3-signing book tour and took in 3 zoos. Here's a few shots from Reid Park Zoo in Tucson and A LINK HERE to see the full slide show.

Giant anteater. Reid Park manages the Species Survival Plan (SSP) for this species.

African elephant working for her lunch, a good stretch!

African crowned crane lounging in a pond.

Bouchercon Bits

2010-10-28T15:51:00.000-07:00

I put on my best elephant earrings and hopped a plane for Bouchercon 2010 San Francisco, which ran from Thursday, 10/14 to Sunday 10/17. I was caught up immediately afterward in the Arizona book tour for Did Not Survive, but the SF memories are still vivid. I tend to get overwhelmed by Bouchercon (this was my third), but this time I had Angie as a buddy. She's a pre-published member of my writing group and great company. You'll be hearing more about her mysteries! Another member, Doug Levin, hit the ground running--we saw only glimpses as he hobnobbed with one author or mystery fan or another.

Meeting and greeting, panels and parties--I tried it all. My panel was at 10 AM Thursday, the first day of the conference. About 45 people showed up, which was 40 more than I expected, and we had a good time. Avery Aames did a great job as moderator. Mysteries featuring race horses, fancy cheese, stray frogs, wacky actors, and (of course) elephants made for a lively panel.

I especially liked the panel of international writers and that leads to a couple of mysteries to recommend to you.

The Second Death of Goodluck Tinubu by "Michael Stanley"--Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip. These are a couple of South Africans who were on the panel and who write a nice series starring Kubu, a Botswana police officer with a hearty appetite. Kubu is a nickname, meaning "hippo." (I once raised a baby hippo named "Kubwa Sana" so of course I have a warm spot for the name.) Botswana seems to be fertile ground for novelists and I enjoyed the characters and plot as well as the setting.

The Risk of Infidelity Index by Christopher G. Moore. Moore is a Canadian living in Thailand and a keen observer of his adopted country as well as his fellow ex-pats. His series is labeled "noir" but I did not find this one particularly dark or grim. I envy his ability to construct a complex plot that holds together and appreciate his way with characters.

Barbara Corrado Pope wasn't on this panel, but she writes a foreign series so I'm adding her to the list. Cezanne's Quarry is a tour of 19th century Italy with a young magistrate as our guide through a complex social and emotional landscape that includes the artist Paul Cezanne as a suspect. Besides, Barbara found a great little tapas restaurant in a San Francisco alley where she and I and Angie ate and drank and talked until it got dark. But, really, it's a fine book!

It wasn't all panels and smoozing. There were free drinks, too, thanks to Lee Child and Poisoned Pen Press. Sometime maybe I'll blog about disco dancing. Picture me doing the Village People's "YMCA". Or not...

Bouchercon followup

2010-10-20T14:26:00.000-07:00

So I'm at the airport, waiting to fly from San Francisco to Phoenix on a book tour set up to follow Bouchercon, the big mystery conference. I spent 3 1/2 days hanging out in San Francisco with mystery fans and mystery authors. 3 1/2 days in total imersion in plots, character, sub-genres, etc.

It's over and here I sit at this Asian bar/restaurant waiting for my spring rolls. At the table next to me are two 20-somethings, a narrow-faced blond and her dark-haired girlfriend.

And the blond chick is mid-story about her mom's first husband, who was a Mafia hit man. "He, like, had all this money from killing people and his whole family was Mafia. I googled him and there were all these articles about him and how they couldn't catch him with, you know, evidence. But he did get stuck in prison and my mom was divorcing him and she started dating my dad. My brother was a little kid and my dad would take him to the prison to see this guy and he liked my dad for that. He was going to get out in like two days when he died of a heart attack or something."

The girlfriend breaks her interested silence. "So you never met him?"

"No, he was just my brother's father. But I know some cousins. And this one time my mom had to live with his mother for months because it was safer, when my brother was a baby, and that's why all she can cook is Italian."

The girlfriend leans back and purses her lips. "Well, I can tell you one thing. It's very hard to cook healthy Italian."

"Yeah, all that pasta."

And they paid their bill, got up, and left.

A parting gift from Bouchercon...

Arizona signing schedule change

2010-10-20T14:16:00.000-07:00

Arizona zoo-dunnit fans! There has been a teensy glitch in my reading at Clues Unlimited in Tucson. I'll be there Thursday at 5:30, not tonight (Wednesday) at 5:30. Sorry for the disruption.

Here, there, and everywhere...The Roaming Author

2010-10-12T22:12:00.000-07:00

Awk! Bouchercon is here! I've been distracted by a son getting married, but now it's time to put my author hat back on. I'm off the big mystery conference tomorrow.

I'm packing semi-dressy clothes for that, then regular clothes for readings in Arizona afterward, and stuffing in hiking boots for a few days of vacation. One little suitcase isn't enough. I'm looking forward to seeing all the mystery writers and fans, but I'm taking a couple with me. Well, two members of my writing group are going also. Check out Davy Crockett's Almanack for details.

Here's where I'll be in Arizona. Drop on by and say howdy if you are in the area!

October 18, Monday, 2 PM. Velma Teague Library in Glendale, Arizona, hosted by the famous mystery reviewer Lesa Holstine.

October 19, Tuesday, 7 PM, Poisoned Pen Bookstore in Scottsdale, Arizona. I'll be signing with "Michael Stanley", the writing team of Michael Sears and Stanley Trollip, authors of the Inspector Kubu series.

October 20, Wednesday, 5:30 , Clues Unlimited Bookstore, Tucson, Arizona.

Now where is she?

A zoo blog, for a change

2010-10-04T15:18:00.000-07:00

I've been blogging each week for authors using MS Word, and now I'm also writing a column for Third Degree, the newsletter of Mystery Writers of America, on the same subject. So I've decided to cut back and blog on that particular subject only once or twice a month. Time to get back to other topics!

At readings in Portland and Seattle, a few people have asked me about justifying zoos--keeping animals in cages. I have a couple of thoughts on that to share, then a recommendation or two. First, I see my zoo mysteries more as describing zoos than as defending them. Zoo keeping is a strange and wonderful way to relate to wild animals, and I love writing about it. As for defending zoos, Yann Martel did that better than I ever could in Life of Pi. If you haven't tried it yet, it's a great read.

I also would remind people that The Wild is hardly Eden. At a lecture I attended on hyenas, the scientist was asked if any of the animals had died a natural death. She had studied dozens if not hundreds of hyenas in the wild for decades. She thought for a long moment, then said, yes, one had died in her den of kidney disease. The rest had all succumbed to violence of various sorts. Out there in the natural world, animals die young from predation, fights with con-specifics, parasites, drought, starvation, etc. Let's also not forget shooting, poisoning, and trapping.

The wild is getting worse, and zoos, at least in developed countries, are getting better. But saying that is not a justification for zoos. We ought to be protecting natural habitats from the excesses of our species, and plenty of zoos need to be improved or closed. Read about Chinese zoos and shudder. But also read about the best zoos, full of animals born in zoos, and the remarkable efforts of zoo staff to keep them healthy, active, and mentally stimulated.

Most books written by zoo insiders are full of fun stories and successes. They don't much address the realities of funding, politics, antiquated facilities and techniques, sourcing animals and finding homes for superfluous ones. That brings me to my second book recommendation: Zoo Story--Life in the Garden of Captives, by Thomas French. He's not a zoo professional, he's a journalist and therefore free to tackle the tough topics. His tale of Lowry Park Zoo in Tampa, Florida, and its animal staff and management is very well done. This is the first book I've seen that describes, among other challenging topics, the inevitable conflicts between the animal people and the money people. It's got lots of good animal bits as well--elephants and chimpanzees and tigers--so it's fun. An insightful book that shows what a good journalist can do when he invests years in a project.

Hyena, Sacramento Zoo

For Fiction Authors: Tidy Time

2010-09-26T22:45:00.000-07:00

Spoiler alert: What lies below is Good For You, but not necessarily Fun.

In a break from blogging about how to use MS Word, here are a few reminders about managing your online work.

You will spare yourself frustration, time, and that agonizing "lost file" panic if you get your electronic self organized. If, like me, you spend many hours each week "creating content" on your computer, it is worth a hour or so of housekeeping now and then, right?

1. (You saw this one coming...) Back up your files if you care about them. What if your house burned down? Have you got your work saved to "the cloud" or to a CD or thumb drive stored off-site?

2. Get rid of junk, like all those versions of the manuscript you saved in case you wanted to go back to a scene or phrase you deleted. Get rid of 11 of the 12 almost identical pictures you saved for your blog. Your computer might feel a bit friskier and you will avoid confusing yourself with multiple similar documents.

3. Is your desktop littered with files? Create folders and sub-folders with names that mean something to you. Tuck your documents in where they belong. Then you can find them in a jiffy.

4. Do those documents have good, clear names? Names you will understand 12 months from now? Change them if you need to.

5. Are your anti-virus and anti-spyware programs up to date? It is not wise to be casual or careless about these.

6. Does your email system offer options to tag or organize messages by topic? Take a look and see if you can tidy that up as well.

And that's plenty enough nagging for today!

It's so messy here, so messy...

Oh, to cheer you up, take a look at my totally cool trailer.

MS Word for Authors: Does this chapter look fat?

2010-09-19T23:13:00.000-07:00

Some authors waste a huge amount of energy as they draft a chapter worrying about how many pages long it's gotten to be. I'm one of those dopes. Since all my chapters are in one file, the page count at the bottom of the screen doesn't help. But there is another way to get Word to tell me. This "tip" is for equally misguided souls who have some experience with Word.

This trick works well in combination with chapter titles assigned Heading 1 and Document View turned on, but those aren't essential. You do need a section break after each chapter.

Put your cursor at the end of the chapter title. Space. Now insert the field SectionPages. Here's how.

Word 2007 for Vista: Go to the Insert tab. Find Quick Parts/ Field. Find SectionBreaks and click on it. Click OK.

Word 2003 for Windows XP: Insert/ Field/ SectionPages. Click on it, click OK.

Word 2004 for Macs: Insert/ Field. For Category, select Numbering. The Field name is SectionPages.

Word will drop a number where your cursor was. (This really is a field with programming behind it, not a simple digit.) To speed up adding it to each chapter title, copy the number/field you inserted and paste it in the same place for each chapter title. You will see the number in Document View. Drag the Doc View window wider if necessary.

BUT this section (chapter) page count will be wrong. You must update the fields. Use Ctrl + a (Command + a for Macs) to highlight the entire document. Now press F9 in the top row of your keyboard to "update fields". All the numbers will now be correct, and you will know how long each chapter is. (I had some trouble testing this with a Mac--let me know if it works for you.)

Word will update the fields every time you re-open the document. More important to neurotic writers, you can highlight the document and press F9 whenever you start to worry that the chapter is too short, too long, or full of porridge.

Remember to get rid of the fields before you submit your ms. An easy way is to use Outline View set to Level 1. At each chapter title, delete the field.

Authors are such worriers. Just back up your files and get on with it!

MS Word for Authors--Making Space without the Enter Key

2010-09-06T16:12:00.000-07:00

In previous posts, I talked about how to space text horizontally, such as centering chapter titles, without hammering on the space bar or the Tab key. Now for the Enter key!

First, for ordinary fiction, you don't need a line between paragraphs. Indent the first word of each paragraph and skip the second tap on the Enter key. The indent is enough to set off a new paragraph. (Blog posts are different, so don't copy the formatting you see here and now.) To set up the indent, see the August 16 post "We're Stylin' Now" for instructions on modifying styles. Change Normal style, using Modify/ Paragraph/ Indents and Spacing. Find Indentation/ Special. Choose First Line. Word puts in .5 inch. All paragraphs in Normal style will now be indented automatically.

Second--and I know this will arouse fiery passions in some of you--don't double-space after each sentence. One space is enough and will save some poor person the effort to strip out that extra space before publishing.

Third, if you need vertical space, avoid the Enter key. Perhaps you want to drop the title of each chapter so that it is a third or half the way down the page, which some editors prefer (as do I). I repeat: you don't need the Enter key to do this. Instead, put all that space into the paragraph formatting. You are already assigning Heading 1 style to your chapter titles, right? Modify Heading 1 to put that space in automatically. See the August 16 post "We're Stylin' Now" for instructions on modifying styles. When you get to Format/ Paragraph, check that you are on the Indents and Spacing tab of the dialog box. Find the section labeled Spacing. Throw a big number in there, maybe 120 Before and perhaps 24 After. Click OK, click New documents based on this template, click OK. Test this with a new document. If you don't like it, go back and use a bigger or smaller number. For a short story title, this can be a one-time fix instead of changing Heading 1. Right-click and choose Paragraph, then add the space before as described above.

Really, it's better not to have long strings of hard returns (paragraph symbols). They will give you a headache whenever you need to make changes. Let Word do the work instead!

Oh, come on! It's not THAT hard.

Elephants at the Borders

2010-09-01T12:39:00.000-07:00

Yes, I'll be talking about elephants and Did Not Survive at the downtown Portland Borders Bookstore, 708 SW 3rd. See you at 7 PM this Friday, September 3!

MS Word for Authors: A flick of the wrist over brute force

2010-08-31T09:29:00.000-07:00

Monday Blog

MS Word offers you at least three ways to do almost anything, but some are better than others. "Better" for writers means, of course, less work when you revise. Who said, "There is no writing. There is only rewriting."?

Whenever you find yourself hammering on the same key--usually the Tab key, Enter key, or the space bar, stop and think. Whatever it is you are trying to do, it's going to be a hairball when/if you need to revise it. Long strings of hard returns (Enter key), tabs, and spaces tangle themselves into nasty knots when you tweak them.

Instead, aim to create a lean, intelligent document rather than a Rube Goldberg kludge, to mix two eras in one metaphor. It's not that hard. If you write every day, or at least frequently, the techniques will stay with you. Nothing wrong with leaving yourself a trail of breadcrumbs either, which is traditionally the "lion's mane" of notes on yellow stickies stuck all around your computer screen. (You knew I'd work animals in somehow.)

OK. Enough exhortation. Today I'll cover how to avoid the tab key entirely.

Centering text: If you want text centered, perhaps your title, first be sure the cursor (a vertical bar) is blinking quietly somewhere in the paragraph you want to change. If it isn't where it ought to be, surprises will ensue.

Once you've clicked in the target paragraph, take a look at the toolbar at the top of the screen. There should be lots of odd symbols up there, two rows of them. Drift your cursor (the arrow) over them without clicking anything. Look for a series of little boxes filled with little horizontal lines. Balloons will pop up, helpfully informing you as to their function. Find the one that says "Center text." Click. The text in the paragraph you indicated is now centered on the page.

This is better than hitting the space bar or the tab key to scoot the text to the middle of the page. Why? Because if you change the text, adding or subtracting words, it will re-center itself automatically. Cool,no? The same logic applies to Center Text's neighbors, Align text left, Align text right, and Justify.

Aside from the title, fiction should be left justified--Align text left. The words line up neatly on the left and the right margin is "ragged", like this blog text. Avoid Justify, no matter how much those smooth margins on both sides appeal to your OCD. Justify is reserved for amateurs and graphic designers.

If you set your chapter title to Center Text and then press Enter to start a new line, the words you type on this next line are centered also. Word copies the formatting of the previous paragraph. Set that next paragraph to Normal style and all should be well.

Indent first line: Tab is another way, not the best way, to put text where you want it, but only the first line of the paragraph.

For fiction, normally the first line of each paragraph is indented .5 inch. This sets off each new paragraph for legibility. Don't space between paragraphs (hit the Enter key after each paragraph). It's not needed.

Word has tabs pre-set every five spaces, so you can tab once for every new paragraph. Or you can set Normal style to do this for you, which lets Word do the work. Refer to a previous post for instructions on modifying Normal style. Look for Modify/ Paragraph/ Indents and Spacing. Find Indentation/ Special. Choose First Line. Word puts in .5 inch.

While you're there, check that Line Spacing is set to what you want, usually Double.

Click OK. Click New documents based on this template. Click OK.

Open a new document and test drive it.

It's a worthy goal to avoid ever using the tab key. Your publisher, e- or p-, will appreciate it.

I like to let Word do the work.

MS Word for Authors: Chapter Titles--In which our hero, Dirk Graysteele, learns he is the natural son of Prince Igor The Intransitive and ...

2010-08-23T09:50:00.000-07:00

MS Word for Authors, Monday blog #4

Now that you have assigned style Heading 1 to each chapter and discovered the delights of Document View, consider this. Perhaps you know perfectly well what happens in Chapter 9 and 24 and 33. Or perhaps not. Was the bloody dagger discovered in Chapter 12 or was it 13? Did you remember to move the charging rhino chapter to after the fire bombing?

When you send the ms to your publisher, you probably want simple chapter titles. But until then, it can be handy to cram a mini-synopsis into each. Here's an example.

13 Dirk/Zelda in Rome,neurotox,sex,pitbull

Keep it short so you can see the key words in the Doc View panel. It's easy to clean them all up after your final edits.

Dirk wrestles alligator

The good, the bad, the (not yet) ugly

2010-08-18T14:39:00.000-07:00

The good news is that Did Not Survive is getting some great reviews. This from the zoo world:

"Ann Littlewood is an exceptional writer and as a former zoo employee knows what it is like on the inside. She does not make the offputting mistakes that other authors make when they venture zoo side. ... Whereas all zoo people will enjoy reading them so too would any fan of mystery and suspense. What is more whoever reads them will learn something about zoos and the people who work in them too." Zoo News Digest

From Vancouver, Washington, where Did Not Survive is set:

"There may be only one thing harder than publishing a first novel: pulling a second healthy rabbit out of the same hat.

But Portland writer Ann Littlewood’s sophomore novel is out — Did Not Survive, a second offering in her Zoo Mystery series — and it’s even better than her debut." Carolyn Schultz-Rathbun in The Vancouver Voice.

Of course I'm tickled pink.

And I need good news because I broke my arm on Friday, August 13. My right arm. The one I like to use every single day for tasks such as writing this blog. Sigh. I hunt, I peck, my husband ties my shoe laces. Such are the consequences of frisking about on stumps out in the woods.

But, if all goes well, no surgery needed. That would be ugly.

MS Word for Authors: We're stylin' now

2010-08-16T09:20:00.000-07:00

Monday Blog for Fiction Writers #3

MS Word, in its ceaseless efforts to be helpful, offers a variety of "styles," each with a name. Styles are handy and worth getting to know. It takes a little trouble to understand them, but they can save you a lot of effort forevermore (or until you move to a new computer). Adjusting Normal style to suit your needs saves work every time you start a new document. Applying the style named Heading 1 to your chapter titles opens up many useful features.

Hang in with me, experiment a little with these two styles, and see if the effort pays off.

A "style" in Word is a bundle of formatting applied to a paragraph. We will keep this simple by discussing only Normal style and Heading 1 style. (Note: Heading 1 style and Header style are totally distinct.)

"Style" applies to a paragraph. It's a paragraph if it ends in a paragraph mark, even if it's only one word or a period or nothing but a hard return. And now would be a good time to turn on Show/Hide so you can see those hard returns/paragraph marks. You create one every time you hit the Enter key. Those little puppies carry a lot of information and it's best to know where they are and what they are up to.

First, Normal style. This is the default, what you get unless you choose something else. Word tells you which style applies to the paragraph your cursor is in. Open a new document and look at the top tool bars until you find the word Normal. Remember where that box, the style indicator, is. "Normal style" determines the font, font size, and line spacing, among other things, of each new document. The tool bar shows you some of the style's characteristics--the font, size, etc.--but not all of them.

If you are tired of fixing the font and indent and line spacing for every new document, I have good news for you. Change Normal style and every new document will start out the way you want it. Usually authors want double spacing, Times New Roman, 12 point, indent the first line. All that information can be adjusted in Normal style. Here's how.

Word 2003 for XP: Go to Format/Styles and select Formatting. This opens up a side panel. Click on Normal. Pull down the little menu. Select Modify. Either make changes there or click on Format in the lower left corner. To make the changes "stick" for all new documents, find the Add to template box and click it before clicking OK. Do not click Automatically update. This is devil-spawn that will drive you to an early grave.

Word 2007 for Vista: Right-click on Normal and select Modify. Proceed as for Word 2003.

Word 2004 for Mac: Select Format/Style and click the Modify button. Proceed as for Word 2003.

Explore the options. It's not that hard to set up what you want. Save it and open a new document. Is it all good? If you hit problems, try again and/or add a comment below and tell me the problem.

Now for Heading 1. Apply it to every chapter title (but not the novel title). Click on "Chapter 1," then go to the box that says Normal and instead select Heading 1. That's all there is to it. If you don't like looks of Heading 1, change it the same way you changed Normal style.

Having your chapter titles in Heading 1 style opens up a lot of possibilities. For openers, find Document View and turn it on. Now you can jump around in your document at will. Document View is in the View menu. On the Mac, it's called Navigation Pane. I love Document View and I bet you will, too.

Next time: More on chapter titles.

I wasn't born yesterday. I backed up my files.

MS Word for Authors--Put it all in one file!

2010-08-09T10:15:00.000-07:00

This Blog #2 For Fiction Writers combines persuasion and instruction.

Here's the pitch: Create your novel in one big file, rather than each chapter in a separate file. (Already there? Read on for a couple more points.)

Why not one file? Let me count the ways:
1) You get a page count and word count at the bottom of the screen (and I will not yield an inch to those who say automatic word counts won't do.)
2) You can do a global search-and-replace, say if "Billy" must become "Tyrone", instead of opening and repeating the change in 30-odd chapters,
3) If you fear you have overused "just" or "irrevocably" you can easily search the whole document,
4) Your chapters are in the right order and can be re-ordered and renamed.
There are probably more reasons, but that's enough for now.

But wait, you cry! The file will be too big and therefore slow. The file for my latest 256 page, 85,000 word novel Did Not Survive is 676 kb. A recent picture of my dog came in at 4.38 mg, or over 6 times as big. Text files are small. If your computer can't handle a file of less than 1 mg., no one can help you.

But what if I want to print only one chapter at a time? You still can. Put a section break at the end of every chapter instead of a page break. (Instructions follow.) Don't add any other section breaks. (We are keeping this simple.) Then, go to the print dialog box. Where it offers you the option of entering a page range, enter S3 for section 3, which is chapter 3, or S12 for chapter 12. Then click the print button. That chapter is all that will print. You can even enter S1-S4 to print Chapters 1, 2, 3, and 4.

But it's hard to find the chapter I want to work on. One way to find the start of the chapter is to search for the title, say, Chapter 3. But I will describe a more elegant way in a future post, when you assign a style (Style 1) to each chapter title and turn on Document View.

How to insert a section break: You want it the end of the chapter (or beginning of the next chapter, same thing).
Word 2007 for Vista: Go to the Page Layout tab, then the Page Setup section. Find "Breaks". Look at the list and select Section Break/Next Page.
Word 2003 for XP: Insert/Break. Select Section break types/Next page.
Word 2004 for Mac: Go to Insert on the top tool bar. Find Break/Section Break (Next Page).

With Show/Hide turned on (see previous Monday blog), you'll now see a double line with the words "Section Break (Next Page) in mid-page".

If your WIP is in separate chapters now, here's how to put them all into one file. Back them up first, of course. Then open Chapter 1, go to the bottom, and enter a section break. Leave the cursor right where it is.

Word 2007 for Vista: Go to the Insert tab. Way over to the right in the Text section is Object. Pull the menu down and select Text from File.
Word 2003 for XP: Insert/File
Word 2004 for Mac: Insert/File
A dialog box opens up. Navigate to the next chapter and select Insert. Repeat as needed.

Next week: Assigning a style to your chapter titles and the benefits thereof.

As ever, comments, corrections, and criticsm are welcomed.

I'm sleeping easy because I backed up my WIP.

Washington County Fair

2010-08-05T09:44:00.000-07:00

Saturday I visited the Washington County fair with my sisters. We had a fine time looking at sheep and chickens and quilts. In the cow barn, we found a Jersey who had just given birth to a heifer calf. It was still wet, with the mother licking it assiduously. I was, of course, entranced, but lots of parents were trying to help their kids see, so I got out of the way and came back later.

The calf was standing up by then, standing and falling, and getting back up. A young man was in the little stall with them. He said it was the cow's first calf, and the zoo keeper part of me promptly went tharn. Bring an animal to a busy fair for a birth? A young cow with no experience? What if the calf presented wrong and was born dead? What if she freaked out and trampled the calf? What if she rejected it due to stress?

But, but, but... This was a domestic animal and those zoo keeper reflexes were inappropriate. They became even more inappropriate as I watched the three of them--cow, calf, handler--interact.

The little gal didn't know much, but she knew what she had to do. Find a large brown object, shove your nose under it, and find something to suck. The cow was amenable to this.

Here we had a willing mother and a healthy baby, the infant/maternal dance in perfect step. How often have zoo people prayed for just that? Please please please don't panic and step on your kid or refuse to let it nurse. Please let the baby be strong and healthy and insistent on finding the nipple. This while tip-toeing around the den or stall and watching from remote video cameras.

But that was not the program. The future for the heifer was a bottle, which the boy kept offering her. She wanted no part of it, but eventually he will win out. The calf will be bottle fed, then pail fed. The cow will go to the milking stall twice a day. I will have cream in my coffee, and that is how it is.

MS Word: Crisis Avoidance & Crisis Managment

2010-08-02T12:27:00.000-07:00

This blog is adding a new feature: a Monday series for fiction writers on how to use MS Word--short posts featuring one or two tips. This is my opportunity to give back to the writer community that has been so supportive.

Here you have Post #1 on MS Word.

Why we use Word: The entire point of word processing, as contrasted to using a typewriter, is that the document is easier to edit. Setting up your novel for easy revision will be a major focus.

To start with the fundamentals...

Back up your novel to something other than your hard drive every time you make substantial changes. This has nothing to do with Word and everything to do with writer sanity. Put the backup media (CD, thumb drive) somewhere safe, away from your computer, where you won’t lose it and where the scumbag who steals your computer won't find it easily. As an alternative method, if you use a web-based email program such as gmail or yahoo or hotmail, you can email the file to yourself. Then it lives on "in the cloud" (really, on your email provider's servers), where you can download it if you need it--until you delete the email.

You can replace the computer, but not your work--unless you have a backup. Why not go do that right now? This blog can wait.

To start with a few suggestions for Bad Times with Word: slow down, examine every label, message, and icon very carefully, and proceed methodically. Specific tips:

1) Find the Show/Hide button and turn it on. The button looks like a reverse P, a paragraph mark. In Word 2007 for Vista, it's on the Home tab in the Paragraph menu. In Word 2003 for XP, it's somewhere on the top toolbar, also true for Word 2004 for Mac. That button is there, but it's oddly hard to spot.

Find it and click it on. Now you will see all the hard returns, tabs, spaces, page breaks, etc. that might be causing your problem. These "non-printing" characters may look confusing at first, but seeing what's up with them can help enormously if you are having problems.

2) If you are changing the format of your document, do it one step at a time. Take a close look and save if a change looks OK. “Undo” changes that don’t work out. Use the Undo button or enter Ctrl+Z (PC) or Command + Z (Mac).

3) Worst case, close the document and say “No” to saving the changes. That sets it back to the last time it was saved, and you can try again.

4) Still having problems with inexplicable behavior? Close Word out completely, count to 10 slowly (that's for you, not Word), and re-open it to clear its brain.

That's a little on crisis management. Next week we'll investigate why you should put the whole novel into one file rather than a separate file for each chapter.

The picture has nothing to do with anything.

Fame and Glory!

2010-07-30T11:49:00.000-07:00

Hey, how cool is this? I'm featured in today's Oregonian, in the Arts & Entertainment section! And it's online, too! Me! Little old mystery author me!

OK, OK, I'm calming down. But how cool is that? I mean, really...

All right. All right. I'm going to lie down with a cold cloth on my forehead. Deep releasing breath...

Yippee!

Guest blogs on assorted (but not sordid) subjects

2010-07-26T14:01:00.000-07:00

I've had a fine run of guest blogs lately, about zoo keeping and publishing and transitioning to other roles. Take a peek!

Stacy Juba--25 years ago today
Davy Crockett's Almanack
Mayhem and Magic

Enjoy!

Ann

Annie's Got Her Gun

2010-07-21T22:40:00.000-07:00

Dear Reader,
The things I do for you! I spent last Saturday at a class titled Handgun Knowledge for Fiction Writers, sponsored by Oregon Writers' Colony. The general idea was that I would learn how to write authentic, exciting Scenes With Guns and not make a fool of myself the way people do on TV and in films. Pity the poor actors, stuck with stupid lines from scriptwriters who don't do their homework. So I spent an afternoon in the country with five other writers who didn't know any more than I did about shooting people. I mean, shooting guns.

Gary Crane told us and showed us a whole lot about handguns and ammunition. I learned that a cartridge is a bullet plus a shell case, that it can be "rim fire" or "center fire", and that gunpowder comes in different varieties. I learned that sticking my finger into the barrel of a gun pointed at me won't save my life and that when a handgun does blow up, the energy usually goes sideways and not into the shooter's face. I learned that a revolver is called that because--who knew?--the barrel revolves. I learned that a person getting shot doesn't fall over backwards dramatically--he or she falls down, period. Or not, depending.

We were sitting outside on a lovely day with a lovely view of meadow and woods, and I missed the part about different kinds of cartridges because a western tanager was messing around in a sumac tree behind the instructor. I don't see western tanagers very often and this was a bright male, altogether beautiful.

After the class, we shot off a bunch of handguns. I fired 13 rounds and I'm pleased to say that they all hit the target. By which I mean a large piece of paper not very far away. I was among the first to shoot, and a writer who hadn't had her turn yet asked me how it felt. "Serious," was the word I came up with. "Was it thrilling?" Well, a little. But I'm pretty sure that shooting off a machine gun would not be, for me, what the instructor promised: "the most exciting thing you'll ever do." Not that we had that option.

The class brought up all sorts of thoughts about guns and how they fit into people's lives, about protecting oneself, about personal freedoms and how one person's liberty can mean another person's death. I don't think I'll ever put in the time to really know guns. But I learned some terminology, I know what the recoil feels like, I imagined a few Scenes With Guns.

And I got to see a western tanager.

Did Not Survive treks to India

2010-07-06T22:13:00.000-07:00

I am so thrilled! Here I am working on the launch party, readings and events for Did Not Survive, which isn't officially out until the end of the month, and I found this.

It's for sale in India for Rs 866! I have no idea how much that is in dollars (it's discounted from Rs 1,125, a la Amazon.com). But still! India! Rupees!

Well, it makes sense. Did Not Survive features Asian elephants, and who knows them better than Indians? (uh, Thais? Cambodians? but never mind...)

You just never know where this author biz will take you. Metaphorically.

I found this tidbit because I get anxious at this stage of a new book and was searching for reviews. (I know, I'm not supposed to. You try this someday and see if you can resist.) Some have already come in. Here's one and another.

In defense of camel aesthetics

2010-07-05T15:24:00.000-07:00

I've always thought camels are under appreciated. There's that statement meant to be a slur: "a camel is a horse put together by a committee". True, but that's a compliment, not a slur, on two levels. First, committees tend to make better decisions than individuals, as various studies have shown. (You'll have to look up the references yourself.) Second, a camel is far better designed than a horse to survive and remain useful in an arid climate.

Zoo visitors tend to look at camels and describe them as ugly. I don't think so. In fact, I have a herd of plastic, wood, and straw "camels of Christmas" that come out every year. I admire a big ceramic camel in the Asian Art section of the Portland Art Museum and make a point of visiting it.

I've noticed that camels are often depicted with head thrown back and mouth open. At a recent visit to Oakland Zoo I had a "duh!" moment watching this. A big male camel sniffed the rear end of a female and threw his head back, mouth open. Classic "flehmen"!

Males of many species behave similarly. They are tasting the females urine with a special organ in the roof of their mouth to determine whether she's coming into estrus. Lions do it, elephants do it, horses do it. Read about it Wikipedia. Other strong or unusual scents may trigger the response as well and not just in males. There's even a rumor that humans have a rudimentary vomeronasal organ, even though we don't curl our lips.

In camels, flehmen makes for a dramatic pose that apparently artists and their patrons appreciate. Perhaps the antique ceramic figure I admire was created by a person with a lot more experience with camels than I've ever had.

Picture by Nancy Parker

Bonobo Handshake: A book review

2010-06-18T22:20:00.000-07:00

In my new identity as a book reviewer, here’s a new one on bonobos, (formerly called “pygmy chimpanzees”) that I enjoyed very much. Not a mystery, but well-written popular science about a little-known great ape.

Bonobo Handshake, by Vanessa Woods. June 2010. Gotham Books.

This tale is a headlong scramble through Vanessa Woods’ experiences raising chimpanzees and bonobos orphaned by the bushmeat trade, her volatile romance with a scientist, the history of the Democratic Republic of Congo, and why her father was not a better man. This is not merely a sweet tale of saving little ape lives, although that is there in vivid detail. Through her life in Africa, the lives of the staff at Lolo ya Bonobo, and the lives of the bonobos, she draws us into the history of the Congo, and an ugly one it is. This is not a book for children. No book about the history of the Congo could be.

Woods leaps bravely off the deep end to show us why the mothers of the baby apes are dead, why the Congolese staff is intimately familiar with death, and why she has good reason to fear for her own safety and her husband’s. In vivid, self-deprecating, often present-tense language, she alternates between the grotesque atrocities that humans inflict on one another in this war-torn country and the everyday life of the sanctuary, where getting a starved and brutalized baby bonobo to giggle may be essential to its physical as well as emotional survival. A self-identified “chimp girl,” her comparisons of chimps and bonobos are fascinating and backed up by the research she and her husband accomplished at sanctuaries.

The quibbles: Her publisher erred in not providing a good map of the Congo. Photos would have been a great addition as well. Not much from long-term studies of wild bonobos is included, possibly because the papers aren’t yet available or else not in English. Also, our view of chimps changed radically between the early years of field studies and the decades-long studies that revealed far less appealing characteristics such as murder and warfare; the same could happen with bonobos. Woods goes rather “Joyce Maynard” on her husband, revealing an almost-violent incident that could be taken, by the cynical, as a set-up for emphasizing her point about how bonobos resolve male-on-female violence.

These concerns aside, in a land where millions died by violence in recent years, she asks what the sexy, friendly, relaxed bonobo can teach us. Plenty, I hope, if we can keep the species around long enough. If the apes aren’t enough for you, read it for the global politics, and weep. A powerful read.

Here's a link to the website of the bonobo sanctuary where Woods worked.

Thanks to Gotham Books (Penguin) for providing a copy of the book at the 2010 Public Library Association conference.

Bowling for Rhinos

2010-06-14T11:22:00.000-07:00

Practicing...

Unfamiliar with the concept? Picturing rhinos ramming bowling balls with their horns? Not quite. It's a fundraiser for rhino conservation, and a damn impressive one.

Rhino poaching is at a 15 year high--it takes armed guards on patrol to keep wild rhinos alive. For real.

You've heard of a pod of killer whales and a pride of lions. The group noun for zoo keepers is "a poverty". Nonetheless, the American Association of Zoo Keepers has managed to raise $3,466,911 for direct, on-the-ground rhino conservation over 20 years. That helps support rhino habitat in Lewa Wildlife Conservancy in Kenya, Ujung Kulon National Park in Java, Indonesia, and two parks in Sumatra (Bukit Barisan Selatan and Way Kambas). The money for the Indonesian parks is managed by the International Rhino Foundation. I know the zoo keepers raising these funds as well as the Executive Director of IRF. Friends have visited Lewa and seen their work. Bowling for Rhinos is the real deal.

The money has paid for an airplane, a truck for relocating animals, solar-powered electric fencing, boats, and training and uniforms for rangers.

The Portland Chapter of AAZK has held this event for 20 years. Show up for the bowling on Saturday, June 19 at Sunset Lanes and make your contribution in person (tell 'em I sent you). Or send a check to

AAZK Portland Chapter
c/o Oregon Zoo
4001 Southwest Canyon Road
Portland, OR 97221

Write "Bowling for Rhinos" on the check.
Rhinos need you.

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Blue and Gold Macaws

2010-06-13T13:38:00.000-07:00

Oakland Zoo, March 2010. I think I saw these same birds in March 2001, eight years ago. Macaws live up to about 50 years, so no surprise. These are blue-and-gold macaws. Beautiful. Here's more about them.

Pictures by Nancy Parker

Author anxiety syndrome

2010-06-12T13:46:00.000-07:00

At Bouchercon a few years ago, a huge mystery conference, I met a very successful mystery author. I looked her up afterward, and she had a list of well-received books that I envied. She was waiting for the reviews of her newest book, and she was a nervous wreck--biting her fingernails and twitching. I checked a few weeks later, and the reviews were fine, very positive. It was a puzzle. With her track record, what was there to fear?

Now I understand. When my first zoo mystery, Night Kill, was ready to hit the shelves, I learned what an anxiety attack was all about. Public speaking? Job interview? Getting married? Nah, if you want panic, publish a book. At least if you are me. Visions of humiliation, public contempt, vicious attacks on my writing, plot, and zoo information arose vivid and unbidden. I slept poorly and contemplated changing my name and moving to Belize.

I shoulda seen it comin'. This whole author gig is an emotional roller coaster. Writing is a joy. Then come the rejection letters. But at last, an agent! Whoopee! But can she sell the book? Ah, yes--more rejection. The book sells! Whee! Oops, then it gets published... And so it goes. It's exhausting. But maybe that's part of what I'm in the game for. I'm not one for boredom.

I saved all the reviews of Night Kill, even the bad ones, and recently re-read them. Turns out the bad ones weren't so bad and the good ones were really nice. (Take a peek at those nice ones here.) I'd forgotten most of the positive comments but remembered every one of the negative observations. Go figure.

Now I'm at it again. Did Not Survive is due out in late July. No reviews yet from the big guys: Publishers Weekly, Kirkus, Library Journal, or Foreword. Will they love it? Will the rest of the world love it? Will animal rights activists picket my house? How much property can I afford in Belize?

Take that, human person!

2010-06-08T14:02:00.000-07:00

Some days, all you can do is stick your tongue out.

Oakland Zoo, picture by Nancy Parker

Mystery Review: Thirty-Three Teeth

2010-05-31T13:36:00.000-07:00

I've been neglecting the writing and mystery side of this blog and decided to start incorporating the occasional mystery review. (Thanks to friend Evan Lewis for jabbing me in the ribs about this!)

I've just finished Thirty-Three Teeth by Colin Cotterill, Soho Crime, and I'm here to rave. This is the second in this series and is set in, of all places, Laos in the 1970's, not long after the Communists took over. Yes, it's got animal characters that qualify it for this blog, especially an old, abused Asian bear (non-spoiler: happy ending for bear).

I've been fascinated by Southeast Asia since my son lived in Cambodia (five long years) and a visit there in 2003, but I've never been to Laos. It's reputation among the ex-pats in Cambodia was that Laos was unspoiled, beautiful, and cheaper than Cambodia (and that's pretty darn cheap).

Thirty-Three Teeth pulls you into Laos without a trace of lecture or preaching: climate, geography, history, cultural conflicts, psychology, day-to-day living, and so on. The protagonist is the National Coroner, Dr. Siri, with supporting roles from his young female assistant, a policeman friend, a shaman, and a good many others. The plot is loosely-woven threads of untimely deaths, some of them connected, some not, all of them eventually deciphered by the good Dr. Siri and his friends.

Here's the remarkable thing. Thirty-Three Teeth is pure fun. The dialog made me laugh more than any mystery I've read in the last two years. The villains are corrupt bunglers, the heroes are tired, sweaty, smart, and kind. This is not a mystery full of clues with a tricky plot, nor is it a thriller about desperate CIA agents prepared to kill in the course of espionage. It is grounded in every day reality in a distant, strange land where spirits must be taken seriously, where people are figuring out what it means to live under an officious and ineffectual communist government, where scarcity is a way of life. And, somehow, it is delightful, smart, and open-hearted.

The first in the series is The Coroner's Lunch and there are four others.

Side note: Cotterill has a literacy project going for Laos. I can attest to the problems around kids' books in SE Asia. We tried to buy Khmer language comic books for my son's housekeeper. We finally found some in one of the two tiny bookstores in Phnom Penh. The pair cost the same as a week's salary for her, and she was well paid by local standards. A week's salary for two comic books? Yup. So kids aren't going to get reading material unless someone helps. Take a look at the link. A few dollars will go a long way.

Clicker training demonstration

2010-05-14T18:32:00.000-07:00

Thanks to an ex-zookeeper friend, I learned about this great little video showing clicker training with a dog and then at Franklin Park Zoo. (I saw that griffon vulture! I put her picture in a blog!)

It's also an ad for Karen Pryor's book, but it's really good for a basic understanding of modern animal training and how broad the application is--also how kind and fun it is compared to other methods of getting animals to cooperate. Take a look.

http://www.clickertraining.com/node/2541

A mashup: mysteries, zoo keeping, perfume

2010-05-03T15:45:00.001-07:00

A visit to Oakland Zoo

2010-04-08T22:45:00.000-07:00

We're all going to DIE!!

I was in Oakland a few weeks ago and had the opportunity to visit the zoo with my sister (the one who takes much better photos than I do). The day was sunny and many of the exhibits were spacious and well-planted. Lots of families with kids.

My sister is also braver than I and talked me into taking the tram. Just the right amount of scary, and a nice way to see the place. This is a smallish zoo, but the exhibits are mostly spacious and grassy. Here's some shots.

Blue and Gold Macaw, by Nancy Parker

The males of our native wild turkey have that tuft of feathers, but this may be an exotic species.

Big old eland. I love these guys.

I was surprised to see such a strong statement against circuses with elephants. Sorry if this is too small to read. Circus elephants are chained when they aren't performing and spend their days "on the road." In some cases, the training is very harsh. Not the greatest life. My second zoo mystery, Did Not Survive (due out in July), touches on some of these issues.

Back on the ground, safe and sound.

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Puppy Trains Author!

2010-04-08T22:13:00.000-07:00

I've long admired what positive reinforcement (clicker training, behavior modification) can accomplish, and I've tried putting it into practice with the not-so-new-anymore puppy. With the basic principles in mind, I've kept an eye on consequences. When he does what I want, good things usually happen. Take, for example, getting ready for a walk. Once his brain recovers from the ecstasy of anticipation, he can and does "sit" to have the leash put on, which requires no food reward, just leaving the house. First thing in the morning, he must go outside and pee before he is allowed back in the house. (You can imagine why this rule is necessary, especially when it's raining.)

The most fun is "circus dog." After dinner, I bring out the dried liver treats and we go through his tricks. I don't use a clicker, just "good dog" and then a tiny treat. He is totally into it, alert and eager. We rocket through "sit", "down", "speak", "shake hands". At risk of sounding disloyal, I should clarify that this is not a dog that Mensa will be recruiting. "Sit" came easy and so did "down" (meaning to lie down), with separate hand signals. But to go from "down" back up to "sit" was incomprehensible. "Sit" meant put your butt down. If you were in "down" your butt was already down, so what could "sit" possibly mean then? Bafflement. Eventually we clarified that the front end mattered also and that hoisting it up could be part of "sit". Whatever. Humans are so strange... (I suspect he is still foggy on the concept and just trying the most promising positions until I produce the treat.)

An even more challenging task has been for him to climb onto a little foot stool and sit there. It's less than a foot high, but he was initially horrified when I picked him up and set him down on it. Too weird. Unnatural. Possibly dangerous. No way. I'd just taught him that the stool was scary. My screw-up made this a great situation for me to compare to training wild animals, who are far more cautious than domestic ones.

We started over. I didn't pick him up and set him on the stool anymore. Instead, treats appeared on the stool. Hummm, nice. Next, he found that if he put a forefoot on the stool, he got a treat. Well, that wasn't so bad either. Next was two front feet. Then I provided a boost to get the rear end up. There he was, sitting on the stool, and, my, that was worth a LOT of liver treats. And speak and shake hands worked on the stool, who would have thought? Even more treats! Tonight he discovered that he could get his own butt up on the stool, and, woot! woot! what a payoff! Fan-freakin-tastic! The stool rocks!

I am totally chuffed. It's a little dog and a simple-enough task, but I feel a warm kinship with those talented people who convince rhinos to volunteer for blood draws and elephants to stand still for artificial insemination and orangutans to let their baby take a bottle through the mesh. It's all about one step at a time with the right reward. Okay, it's more subtle than that, and I'll be the first to admit I barely qualify as a beginner. But still. This stuff works! And it's fun, fun for me and fun for a bored dog. No scolding, no force, just a sweet deal. With a rowdy game of tug-o-war afterward.

Karen Pryor seems to be good at this. Try her website. Let me know what you think.

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In the Pipeline: Zoo Mystery #2

2010-03-31T15:02:00.000-07:00

I am happy to announce that zoo mystery #2, Did Not Survive, is wending its way through the production process and should emerge blinking into the sunlight in July. Here's the cover, which gives you a clue about one of the themes.

Yes! You guessed it--elephants! Night Kill was the first in the Finley Memorial Zoo series. In the second, Did Not Survive, circumstances put a pregnant Iris Oakley into close contact with the little zoo's two elephants. While she learns to appreciate these marvelous animals, the book also addresses some of the difficult issues around managing elephants in today's world. Zoos, sanctuaries, wildlife parks, the native habitat not in parks--all have tough problems with elephants. And,of course, elephants have disastrous problems with us. Our two species have yet to find peace, with an alarming number of deaths on both sides. (You know about elephants being killed wholesale for tusks. And elephants kill 200-300 people a year in India.)

While a mystery intended to entertain can't provide definitive answers, I tried to touch on many of the quandaries faced by those who admire and respect these fabulous beasts. Feelings run hot and sometimes bitter about elephants in zoos and I can't hope to please everyone, only to offer a variety of perspectives.

Now comes the part of a writer's cycle where the focus is on letting people know about The New Book. I'm contacting bookstores, libraries, and zoos. Let me know if your writing group or other organization would like to host a discussion of this "zoo-dunnit."

Appearance at event, February 29

2010-02-26T13:44:00.000-08:00

Just a note to let you know that I will be at the Multnomah County Library in downtown Portland (801 SW 10th) Sunday, February 28, from noon to three PM. This is the annual Writers Resource Fair and I will be personning* the Sisters in Crime table. Drop by and say hi!

* Yes, writers get to create neologisms.

Fame and Glory: Ancient Science Rediscovered

2010-02-12T13:58:00.000-08:00

Well how about that. My old International Zoo Yearbook articles from my zoo keeping days are still available! Here's one on handraising a mandrill.

I'm pleased to say another article is cited in the IUCN Hippo Bibliography: Wilson, J. & Littlewood, A. (1978). First year of a hand-reared hippopotamus Hippopotamus amphibius at Portland Zoo. International Zoo Yearbook, Zoological Society of London 18: 211-213.

And part of Mellen JD, Littlewood AP, Barrow BC, Stevens VJ. 1981. Individual and social behavior in a captive troop of mandrills (Mandrillus sphinx). Primates 22(2):206-20 is online.

The Internet may be as close to immortality as I ever come. It was fun to write up the handrearing studies and make use of the tedious amount of daily records we kept on Kubwa Sana (the baby hippo) and Roger, the mandrill.

The behavioral study on mandrills was also very cool. It's rare to have the opportunity to simply hold still and watch animals. It's amazing what you can learn if you try to take yourself out of the equation, just hold still and watch. We did it with checklists and timers, but next time you are at the zoo, find some animal that is awake (a peacock will do) and watch quietly for ten or fifteen minutes. That's a long time for us busy primates, but you will see things that surprise you. Zoo visitors work so hard to interact with the animals, but many times you really can get more out of observation. Try to see with an open mind. Let go of Asesop's fables and kid's books and dramatic nature shows and all that baggage we bring to animals. Just watch.

Here's a couple of pictures from my hand-rearing days.

Roger meets his mother, Lulu.

Yes, you can cuddle with a hippo.

The Agony of Outlining

2010-02-01T21:30:00.000-08:00

I'm shoveling gravel into plot holes and it's heavy work. I am thrilled that Did Not Survive, the second of the Iris Oakley zoo-dunnits, is due out from Poisoned Pen Press in August 2010. Did Not Survive is in production and that means it's time to start outlining #3. I'm bi-polaring between the delight of having a second mystery accepted and the pain of making my brain work. Each book is born from an outline, so all my writer's block happens at the front end. Writing is the reward for outlining, as I see it.

Why go to the trouble of figuring it all out in advance? Because I write myself into corners otherwise. I know I'll get better ideas as I write and, with an outline, I can more easily see where to go back and adjust for the brainwave.

The "outline" is really a chart of brief scene descriptions--the key elements with notes about what day it is, why the scene is necessary, and so on.

Here's a photo of cedar waxwings that my husband took recently. I'm using it as therapy for my sore cortex. Aren't they perfect beautiful beings? Maybe tomorrow a flock of ideas will light on my head and carry my plot to new heights!

Why my blogging is bogged down

2010-01-29T21:35:00.000-08:00

Photo by my friend Cynthia Cheney.

Did you EVER see a cuter puppy? Me neither. Murphy is about nine months old, a Corgi mix. I'd love to know where he got the black ear fringes and muzzle. Something small, hairy, and really busy. Any guesses? He's about 24 pounds, so I think German Shepherd is out.

We agreed to be a foster home after Thanksgiving, and of course one thing led to another, and now we would probably throw ourselves in front of a train rather than give him up. That said, let us not forget how much of your day a puppy wants to occupy. Two walks a day totaling over an hour, random episodes of sitting on the floor and petting him, endless inspections of what he is chewing on NOW. And so on.

I should have some pithy observations about dog behavior and our relationship with canine companions or perhaps the carbon footprint of pet ownership or my efforts at clicker training. But no. Just a cute picture. Maybe later... Right now, I've got to go make liver treats.

Wildlife on The Las Vegas Strip: Part 3

2010-01-13T20:15:00.001-08:00

I'll wrap up my New Year's wildlife tour of The Strip with a just a few more observations. We visited maybe six of the major casinos, maybe a few more. They fall into a pattern: glitzy exterior with some feature to draw attention (the Bellagio's dancing fountain is wonderful), reception, restaurants, shopping, and gaming on the ground floor and hotel rooms above. The gaming areas seemed identical and interchangeable. The shopping surprised me, lots of high-end brands such as Louis Vuitton, Prada, etc. Our native guide explained that the stores inside the resorts pay rock-bottom rent. The idea is that they class up the joint. One of them had a different affect on me.

Yup. Apparently-genuine carved elephant tusks, a big pair. Nothing like picturing a huge rotting bull elephant with his face hacked off to brighten up your vacation. And that carved ship behind them looked like ivory also. I found the store clerk, an elegantly dressed young woman with a European accent, and indicated how uncool this was. She started in with the "but if we didn't kill animals, we wouldn't have meat or leather" argument. I did her no bodily harm, but did indicate that this was horse puckey and that the company she worked for was promoting an anti-conservation message. The phrase "will rot in hell" did not cross my lips, but I think she understood. She said they were legal and I'd bet that she was correct. So what? The point is glamorizing a wildlife product that has contributed to the enormous declines in elephant populations. Bah.

Somehow my companions hustled me off to the Bellagio's Christmas display. I noted that it included natural antlers on Santa's reindeer. No problemo--deer drop those annually and grow a new pair (but you knew that...).

Our time in Las Vegas was up and I didn't make it to the MGM Grand to see lions and the shark reef. If you go, drop me a note. On the flight home, the airline magazine had an ad for a guy named Rick Thomas, a magic-and-white-tiger show at the Sahara. That one blew right by me, never saw an ad for it. (He's recommended by Millionaire Magazine, so there.) And--who knew?--Las Vegas has a zoo! Here's the website of the Southern Nevada Zoological-Botanical Park.

My spouse and I now joke about keeping each other in line: "Behave yourself or our next vacation will be back in Las Vegas." It's not our kind of place, but I got some mileage out of the visit, as well as a great visit with some fine friends.

Adios, Sin City! From the Bellagio's Christmas display:

Visit my website for more animal pictures, etc.

Wildlife on the Las Vegas Strip Part 2: Feathers

2010-01-08T22:09:00.000-08:00

One of the themes of this blog is the way people and animals interact. Las Vegas has a reputation for extreme human behavior, but over New Years I mostly saw bundled up people (it was cold) who were desperately seeking fun, entertainment, and glamor. They mostly found beer. I found flamingos.

Bugsy Siegel founded The Flamingo at the end of World War II. It opened, half finished, on December 26, 1946. The finances went poorly and the resort's backers vented their frustration by ventilating Bugsy on June 20, 1947. The resort maintains a shrine to its founder, or maybe just a historical plaque. You be the judge.

The Flamingo offers a bird collection that you might expect on an English manor--pheasants and guinea fowl loose on the grounds, waterfowl and koi. It's lovely and well kept, with good signs. I didn't see birds on the lawn or in the bushes, but did see a neat flamingo exhibit with wonderful waterfalls. I saw one sacred ibis in with the flamingos. They also had black and black-necked swans and a pair of hybrid whistling ducks with a good sign--they seemed a little embarrassed by the cross. There's a few other waterfowl as well and gi-hugeic fish in the "lake."

The waterways and grounds are free, extensive, and well worth a visit. One of the restaurants offers seating with a view of the "lake".

The last birds I saw were not in professional setting. Outside Jimmy Buffet's Margaritaville, a man offered the opportunity to have your picture taken with four macaws. The birds were very quiet and docile. (I'd love to know how you get macaws to do that.) I don't know macaws well enough to identify species or hybrids and I didn't see how they are housed when not "working". I suspect wire cages given the beat-up tail feathers. This life didn't seem like fun for the birds.

I'll finish this strange wildlife tour of The Strip with a posting of a few odds and ends and the opportunities I missed.

For other takes on human/wildlife interaction, see my website.

Wildlife on the Las Vegas Strip: Part 1

2010-01-07T20:50:00.000-08:00

If you arrived here looking for sex and cocaine, use the back arrow because you've got the wrong blog. This one's about fur, feathers, and flippers.

How, you might ask, did a certified eco-nut, tree-hugging, conservation extremist end up in Sin City on New Year's Eve? It has to do with Death Valley and sign painters, and we will skip that story. Instead, picture me stunned by neon after a week in the desert, gasping from cigarette smoke, and failing at both slot machines and electronic blackjack, without the courage or inclination to delve deeper into gambling, without the bucks or inclination for the high-ticket shows. (Well, we did see Blue Man Group at the Venetian, and it was great, but that's two hours and then there you are again sitting on a huge bed staring at the TV.)

Thus was born the wildlife tour of resorts on the strip. I started, logically, at Circus Circus. On the second floor, a classy high-wire act provided free entertainment. At the cheesy midway surrounding the ring, I asked about circus animals. The people manning the booths where guests throw balls to win stuffed animals, etc. gave me answers indicating that the staff was not drawn from the native English speaking population. When I finally made myself clear to a woman in a sari (dart game), the response was "No, no animals." OK fine. On to The Mirage.

The Mirage houses Siegfried & Roy's Secret Garden and Dolphin Habitat. $15 to get in to a pleasant little zoo. The dolphin pools are first and they are large and clean. No scheduled shows, the trainers work the animals frequently but without much hoopla. Two bottlenose dolphins in the first pool did the spectacular leaps we all love, then the trainer worked closely with one. He tugged the animal out of the water by its tail until it was completely on the shore. Then he signed it to swim around the pool "waving". The whistle and hand signals were subtle, the fish rewards not so much.

I am always amazed by the skill of marine mammal trainers. Give them a bucket of fish and a whistle and they can accomplish anything with a dolphin. They also make a fun show out of "husbandry behaviors." Being able to touch the animal and get it out of the water has got to be a great help in treating any medical problems, and of course it doesn't require force and drama if the animal is used to doing it every day as part of the feeding routine. One of the staff said that most of the dolphins were born there.

For some reason, the facility included a lot of alpacas. Beats me.

Next came the cats, Siegfried & Roy's famous white tigers. One was pacing and squirting in a large, grassy enclosure with a waterfall. Two white cubs (getting some size on them) were being babysat by a young woman. A "white" lion lay regally. (The body was tan, the mane was bright white. Looked peroxided.) All the enclosures looked good and the animals' weights looked OK to me, although I am hardly an expert.

Now, your ordinary zoo lion or tiger is rarely an example of vigorous intellectual ferment, but they tend to have a glint of cunning about them, as though they are keeping one eye open for their big opportunity to show what a predator can do. Not so these white animals. The male lion, especially, looked as if you'd have to point out where the food was each and every day or he might starve. OK, that's not fair. I'm judging based on vague eyes and a bit of tongue hanging out. Forget I said it.

Since no one is likely to see a Siegfried & Roy show ever again, I stood in the gift shop and watched the full video. My feet hurt, but I'm cheap. The show looked stunning, I have to say. Vivid and dramatic. Then the video showed an interview with one of them (Roy?) and he went on about conservation and saving endangered white tigers and lions and reintroducing them into the wild, and I came to my senses. What a load of equine scat. Those inbred mutants wouldn't stand a (sorry, can't resist) snowballs chance in the wild. They're dangerous pets, people think they're pretty, and Siegfried & Roy made a lot of money off them. That's all. And, in case you were wondering, they do plan to keep on breeding them. That's what the cubs are for.

Roy & Siegfried do mention Save The Tiger on their website, the only evidence I found of real conservation. Heaven knows lions and tigers could use the help. Check these links out and donate what you can. Tigers. Lions.

Next up: Part 2: Feathered Headdresses... on Birds

For other takes on human/wildlife interaction, see my website.

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India moves zoo & circus elephants to forest camps

2009-11-29T17:42:00.000-08:00

There's been a flurry of news about the Indian government's recent ruling that zoo and circus elephants will be moved to forest camps. Click here for the article.

Here's an interesting op-ed piece that addresses the concerns I had about how well thought out this was and why temple elephants were excluded, given that they live under worse conditions that zoo elephants (chained more hours, less contact with other elephants). Click here.

The circumstances for elephants in Indian zoos vary, but I believe it is safe to say that elephants in US zoos are far better off. Elephant management is receiving a lot of attention lately, with efforts toward providing them with more exercise and stimulation.

Oh, and the elephant researcher cited is Varma Surendra, not Verma. He was my roommate at the zoo keeper conference in Seattle recently, a charming fellow very committed to elephant well-being, both in captivity and in the wild.

Did Not Survive, the second in my zoo mystery series, explores issues around elephant management. Expect it in August 2010.

2009-11-24T23:43:00.000-08:00

Macaws from Safari West. Picture by my sister, Nancy Parker.

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Zebra picture

2009-11-22T23:04:00.001-08:00

I've spent the day volunteering at the Portland Audubon Society annual Wild Arts Festival. Had a great time with old friends. We shopped and helped the many wonderful artists and chatted with customers. Now I'm too tired to write anything sensible, so here is a picture instead. This zebra lives at Franklin Park Zoo in Boston.

Oh, one other thing...a big one! My publisher, Poisoned Pen Press, just officially accepted the next Iris Oakley zoo mystery. Did Not Survive is due out in August 2010. Christmas came early!

Why murder?

2009-11-15T21:54:00.000-08:00

At a dinner party tonight, somehow the subject of my zoo mystery series came up. (Somehow it always does, no matter how I try not to be, um, obsessive? pushy?). One of the guests looked at me with narrowed eyes and asked, "Why are you so fascinated with murder?" It took me aback. I think of myself as a writer of mysteries, not as a person obsessed with murder. So I said, cleverly, "I am not!"

So much for my keen wit and erudition. But the question did lead to a discussion about why it is I write a genre of fiction that requires an untimely death to kick off the story. Here's a metaphor. Mysteries are the cut-up chicken of fiction. (Hang in with me here.) A cook starts with a cut-up chicken and a big set of possibilities. Rules apply: the chicken has to be cooked--it cannot be served raw. It must not be charred to leather. It should be tasty. Within these rules, the cook can debone it or not; roast it, pot-roast it, fry it, stir-fry it, or stew it. The cook can go for curry, Mexican, Thai, Chinese, Italian using any of a huge selection of sauces and spices to turn out a delicious entree. You see where I'm going with this.

Mysteries have their rules. Somebody dies and there is a puzzle to solve. The puzzle can be about who died, how they died, why they died, and who did it, or any selection of these. There should be suspects and motives, false starts and dangerous situations, surprising secrets, a clever protagonist and a determined antagonist. Most mysteries have these elements.

But the results are highly varied, from police procedurals to village mysteries to mystery/thriller hybrids. And--here's the great part--the setting and characters can be anybody, anywhere. Italian, French, Indian, Swedish, in towns, cities, wilderness, on ships or islands or Indian reservations. The protagonists can be racehorse jockeys, Australian flappers, private detectives, sheriffs, big-city cops, princesses, and on and on.

This combination of structure and freedom felt comfortable to me. I liked knowing what the rules were and having the choice to follow them or to try something different. I knew it would be fun build crime stories that included animals, issues between people and animals, and zoos.

So it's not about murder. It's about how people fall into crime and how their secrets are found out. It's about bravery and cowardice, investigation and hiding.

It's really about Congo peacocks--whole, raw, and alive.

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Ruppell's Griffon Vulture

2009-11-05T19:35:00.001-08:00

Here's a photo from the Franklin Park Zoo in Boston, a Ruppell's Griffon Vulture.

More on Mexico and Animals

2009-10-31T11:10:00.000-07:00

I live in inner Portland, Oregon, in a beautiful older neighborhood with maple and chestnut trees arching across the streets. When I walk, often alone at night, I encounter neighbors walking their dogs on leashes. Cats come up to me to complain that their humans never, ever pet them and that they need a little head rub right now. I see a loose dog perhaps once a year, a guilty-looking escapee. Some of the dogs get to romp at a dog park with other dogs. The rare un-neutered male dog is always a purebred. People argue whether duck-and-potato dog food is better than lamb-and-rice.

Mexico pops my rosy little bubble, as did Cambodia and Thailand. The Mexican neighborhood where my father-in-law lived is on the periphery of the middle-class city of San Miguel de Allende. Only recently have some of the streets been paved. Little brick houses with corrugated metal roofs nestle up to beautiful haciendas built by foreigners. Street dogs run loose, except for the few that are still kept as "roof dogs", stranded on the roof to bark at intruders. If cats live here, they are invisible.

The street dogs are un-neutered, dirty, and sometimes injured. Some are wary of people. They are also alert and busy, interacting with each other, playing, arguing, mating, searching for food, roaming free. I suspect they lead the very same life that dogs have lived alongside humans for thousands of years. It's impossible to imagine them as child-substitutes or adornments or status symbols. They are Dogs, capital D. For the most part, they don't even seem to be companions to people. They have all that freedom, but none of the care that I and my neighbors consider essential to a dog's well being. They probably don't live very long.

No burros on this trip, no dawn serenade of hee-haws, and only a few distant roosters to fill the gap. A filly grazed while tied to a tree down the street, a long-horned cow roamed at the upper end. During the Monday market that lines both sides of the street, a woman sold used clothing and wild birds. The top two looked like house finches. I couldn't identify the one on the bottom.

This Mexican neighborhood is being gentrified and beautified. Eventually, when the recession passes, the rest of the streets will be paved and construction of nice little houses and big gorgeous mansions will begin again. The street market may or may not endure, but the livestock will probably move on. If I return in a few years, perhaps the street dogs will be gone and I'll see only dogs on leashes. But no matter the how much the neighborhood upgrades, I doubt people will be prepared to discuss the merits of duck-and-potato dog food.

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Mexican circus

2009-10-31T10:30:00.001-07:00

My husband and I were touristing diligently in downtown San Miguel de Allende, Mexico, shopping for trinkets in one of the many lovely little stores, when he said, "Ann, there's a zebra outside." After more than a second or two for me to parse this, I realized I should actually take a look. And there it was. The circus had come to town.

Advertising the performance, truck after truck loaded with animals navigated the narrow streets, loudspeaker blaring. This seemed to be a fairly large circus with a lot of animals. I trotted after and took these photos. My husband saw more than I did and said they had many big cats. He took this photo as the trucks moved on.

Later I mentioned the parade to an American friend who lives in SMA, as we in the know call it. (I can pretend I'm in the know!) She said that "Mexican circuses are rough. I wouldn't go if I were you." I had no intention of going, no interest in supporting this business. That is all I can report on the performance.

We encountered the circus again later, on the way back from the wonderful Charco del Ingenio Botanical Garden. The tent was set up and the animals were unloaded. I can only say that they were not thin and they had fresh hay and no visible injuries. I did not see the cats close up. I was very surprised to see four young giraffes. As far as I know, the collection did not include any elephants.

San Miguel is a small and somewhat isolated town. There's not a lot for young people to do there. No doubt the circus will be popular.

My guess is that those animals would be happy to trade life in a zoo for this one of constant travel and whatever performances are required of them. If you have the stomach for it, read the first part of A Different Nature by David Hancocks for horrific descriptions of human exploitation of animals for entertainment. The ancient Romans locally exterminated many African species for wholesale slaughter in the coliseums. Put me off my feed for a week. We limp slowly toward a more respectful relationship with our fellow species, with many detours.

Adios, Mexico

2009-10-21T22:27:00.001-07:00

I returned a few weeks ago from a week in Mexico, in the determinedly historic town of San Miguel de Allende. Ever alert to the ways people interact with animals, I found several striking examples, among them the local street dogs, a circus, and a street vendor selling wild birds. We stumbled on an Indian parade down the middle of town that I watched for close to an hour. Men and boys danced in costumes of leather, furs, horns, and feathers to drums. It seemed that the participants danced to celebrate their customs and history and wore costumes appropriate to that. Alas, I know nothing of which tribes were represented or how Native American cultures function in the area.

I've been reading Animal Investigators by Laurel A. Neme about identifying illegal wildlife parts. Here is an example of the National Fish & Wildlife's beautiful site used to identify feathers. So as I watched the parade, I was especially interested in the feathered headdresses.

Reading a single book, sadly, does not make one an expert on identifying the birds from which the feathers came, and feathers are often dyed and shaped for effect. So I won't attempt that. The costumes were constructed with great care and no little artistry. The headdresses were striking and beautiful. I will say, however, that I was startled to see an entire stuffed owl, possibly a screech owl, on a headdress. And of course I wondered if endangered parrots were the source of any of the brighter headgear.

I'm not going to sermonize about killing birds for feathers to adorn themselves. Mexico has its own laws, and indigenous people have their own customs and, in some cases, special rights. Decorating with feathers is a custom, tradition, and pleasure that has existed at least as long as humanity. Readers of this blog should know where I stand on exploiting wildlife populations and I'll leave it at that. More on the circus later.

I'm interested in hearing from people who know something about these tribes and their cultures, as well as from any feather experts who would like to chime in.

Blog Action Day: Climate Change

2009-10-12T18:47:00.000-07:00

On Thursday, October 15, bloggers all over the world are writing about climate change and its affect on different parts of our lives--food, politics, art, and so on. No surprise, I will write a bit about the consequences for wildlife and their habitat. I am in Mexico at the moment, working on a steam-powered computer and a vintage browser, so please forgive my lack of links to references.

I've heard debates about global warming for what? ten years?, but all the doubts that it was happening never made sense to me. I read Natural History magazine and other bits and pieces of science news. The botanists have known for quite a long time that the climate is changing. Spring comes earlier in the northern hemisphere--the plants wake up sooner. The birders and ornithologists knew it also--migratory birds return earlier. So it is not news to anyone paying attention that the natural world is changing rapidly due to climate change. Today, the die-hards either say it's natural and not our fault, or else that we can't do anything about it. Neither is true. How can we radically alter the gas ratios in the Earth's atmosphere and not expect consequences? And if we can make these changes, surely we can unmake them.

Here's a few examples of what a hotter world looks like. Trees are dying in western forests from multiple causes, among them hotter summers with less water. My guess is that different species of trees or shrubs will take their place. The birds, insects, reptiles, mammals, etc. will change accordingly. The flexible ones will remain (raccoons, deer) and the ones that are finely attuned to one ecosystem will perish or (optimistically) follow it to new locations. Glaciers are melting faster than they are being replaced. The western US, mostly arid to begin with, will become drier in summer as the streams and springs fail from lack of snowmelt. Lack of snow cover in the winter will affect many species of plants. They are vulnerable to freezing and dehydration when the ground they are dormant beneath is bare.

Enough of the bad news. The point is not to sink into depression, but to be further spurred to action. For the sake of the birds at your feeder, the deer you see on your camping trip, the frog your kid caught on the farm, start doing what you can. You know the drill: drive less, buy less, eat locally grown food, and, most especially, let your senator, representative, mayor, state senator, governor, etc., know that this is a top priority for you. Put their phone numbers into your cell phone or post them next to the land line and start calling.

Tell them you know it's going to cost extra to fix this and you are willing to pay more for utilities that use green power, for public transportation, for investments that reduce use of coal and oil. Tell them that, yes, you get it, reducing our carbon footprint is going to be hard on the economy. Tell them to do it anyway. What do you think our economy is going to look like if we don't get a handle on this?

Do what you can. That's all any of us can do. Each day or week or month, try to add one more change to your life, one more email or phone call, one more adjustment that helps reduce your impact. That's what we gotta to do. And then look up from the bad news and enjoy the wonderful world we inherited.

A lion placeholder

2009-10-09T18:46:00.000-07:00

I won't be available to blog for a week, so here is a fine picture of a lion taken by my sister, Nancy Parker, to assuage my conscience. He lives at the National Zoo.