Cambridge Forum; WGBH Forum Network; Storytelling in the Electronic Era (Part 2)

I'm going to talk a little bit about the book I wrote but also it has to be some background on what I do and kind of well what I hope is the science of what we call urban and suburban ecology and sort of started off of just curious sort of an overview of what Amy and I are are shooting for this afternoon. So 15 or so minute presentation. Talk about a little bit of background of urban ecology. My background might just go out. Oh it sounds OK. OK something changed in my head. Talk about urban and suburban ecology and then get into the book a little bit in some of the ideas and themes and goals I was trying to interject into the book. This is my first attempt at writing for a general audience so it's kind of an experiment for me. And then Amy and I are going to have a 30 minute discussion about some various issues related to our work into urban and suburban wildlife. And then we'll open it up for questions and comments after that. So OK

real quickly a little bit of my background. I had a wallet biologist a research scientist with USGS this Cooperative Research Unit program located at the University of Massachusetts Amherst and there's about 40 of these cooperative research units in the country started in the 1930s and 40s. I'm really proud of the program so I kind of push it. I'm kind of a cheerleader for it and I've been working in with a cooperative research program for quite a while. Our main mission is research and teaching through graduate education and we kind of the unique thing about us is we work in collaboration with a lot of state and federal agencies and our host university and these are some of the major people we work with particularly mass Wildlife Department of Conservation of recreation Fish and Wildlife Service and UMass Amherst. A little bit about my work I've worked on a bunch of different wildlife species and different parts of the country and different issues. But for me the thing that has my attention right now are these three species in Massachusetts that you might not even be aware

that they exist of Massachusetts. And the numbers they exist but we started working on moose three or four years ago in the state in conjunction with mass wildlife. And we're interested in a lot of things about moose. First of all that they're back in Massachusetts which is an amazing thing and how they're interacting with the landscape here. We're just starting to work on bears now actually the state's been working on Bears for a long time but we're we're starting to collaborate with them on looking at Blackberry ecology and movements in habitat use. And a third species we're interested in which we hope to start in a couple of years a bobcat and we picked these three species because they require large landscapes to exist and they're living here and in one of the most urbanized states in the country with one of the highest levels of human population with the highest density of roads. And so how are these animals getting along and what can we do to further their continuance in Massachusetts. And then just to I had to throw in a little bit of data

before I get into the book because I'm excited about this we're using GPS GPS assisted technology so global positioning system calls. And in the old days 10 years ago we used conventional telemetry callers and you've all seen biologists out there waving antennas in the field and and getting locations. And in a good year you'd get a hundred locations on an animal that was really a pretty good effort. Now these GPS callers are turning back 2000 to 9000 locations in a year and all these dots on the map and these lines connecting those dots is the movement of one moose in Massachusetts. And it's really we almost have too much data and now the challenge is going to be analyzing it all. And one of the things we're interested in is how are these large animals interacting with development in the state. And this is an aerial photo of Barry Massachusetts a small town in central mass. And you can see some of the concentrations of dots around the development and the animal passing through. They certainly cross roads as I'm sure you know

and they'll pass through some of this development but they tend to stay away from it when it gets to a certain level of housing. So it's those sort of interactions we're interested in. And then here is one of our We've got callers on three bears right now. We hope to put callers on more this coming year but this is talk about an urban animal. This is Northhampton Massachusetts. You know not particularly a small town by any means certainly a lot of development. And this was a solid with with a couple of cubs and she's living right in town and lots of bears are living in town. The cluster of yellow points you see in the lower right is where she stashes her cubs during the day. Behind Cooley Dickinson Hospital and a really dense area brush. And then she goes out and she goes out at night and forages So she's with the Cubs in this area during the day she goes out and forages all of these points around town. So certainly an urban wildlife species and one that gets people's attention when they see a black bear in town. The general study of

urban and suburban ecology involves a lot of things these days. And as you know cities are really getting to be astronomical in size. Millions and millions of people this is Tokyo Sao Paolo in Brazil just massive cities. And as you know around cities develops suburban sprawl and just about every case and the top photo is Levittown New Jersey one of the first suburban developments post-World War II that's sort of started this trend. But it's all over the world now the lower right is actually in China and on the left could be Anytown USA. So you have this ring of suburban development around cities. And then also you have development extending out beyond that ring of suburban development. So we're making up words to try to describe this leapfrogging and infilling and parcel ization parcel lising where we're chopping up the landscape basically moving into wildlife habitat building our homes and our

our shopping malls or whatever we're also eating up agricultural land and forest land and other things other resources and I put resources and in quotes because in my profession these days I'm starting to hear we use resources all the time. I'm starting to hear people not liking that word. It's sort of connotates. You know people have control over this over nature. But I think we forget that we all use resources. We use water we use wood fiber you know all these things that we need to protect where we're certainly resource users. And that's one of the issues we're facing these days with the kind of development we're seeing on the landscape. Also with this development you certainly have traffic lights noise you know all these things that go along with it. And we're just barely starting to understand what this means to our lives and to the lives of other animals. And the one thing I want to throw in because you know I grew up in Watertown near here and it was it was a pretty

good life. Watertown is kind of an interesting little town. But by and large our cities and the suburban areas are great places to live. I mean we have pretty good lives here. I lived for quite a while in Madison Wisconsin a shot here. Beautiful city really fun place to live. So I don't want to give the impression that I think all of this is negative and you know and something that we shouldn't be happy to have. The issue is sort of the extent of how we're using things today. We're also have recognized that urban and suburban areas are ecosystems in and of themselves are parts of larger ecosystems. So there's ecological structure and processes that go on in these places and there are ecological communities there's plants and animals that exist in these in these places. So you might be living in the biggest city in the world and you're you're part of an ecosystem you're not separate from that no matter how big the city. But there's certainly altered ecosystems. These developed areas of

ours. And for one thing there's a lot of and permeable surfaces which certainly affects things like heat gain and water runoff altered hydrology as we channelize streams in control flooding and those sorts of things even our open spaces are somewhat natural spaces within towns and cities have a very simplified structure. We mow the lawns and we clear out the brush and we prune the trees very different from even something like a prairie where you look out and you see sort of what looks like a monoculture. But ecologically it's it's a very complex system with a lot of niches for for animals and we sort of simplify that within our cities and towns. And then another. Another thing about urban and suburban areas. There are a lot of invasive species so non-native species. In fact we can document pretty clearly that invasive non-native exotic species whatever you want to call them start in developed areas and radiate out from there.

And I won't go into this as a European starling with three quarters in its beak and I won't tell you the story yet and maybe during the questioning period if you're interested you can hear what that's all about. Ecologists have called these communities some ecologists have called them recombinant communities and really what that means is you have wildlife existing in these areas but it's very different from what would be there naturally. And it's it's a mix of exotic and native species and with certain characteristics. And one thing we certainly see is that in urban and suburban areas we have lower diversity of species there are fewer numbers of different kinds of species in these areas. But what is there tends to be very abundant. So they're adapted to the circumstances they can do very well. You know think how many grey squirrels are in the city of Boston and how many pigeons and starlings and house sparrows these species that exist in these developed areas. They tend to be what we call ecological generalists. So the specialists the the wildlife that needs

a particular kind of wetland are a kind of force structure is not going to exist in these areas because that habitats are not there. So what you get are ecological generalists and they tend to be species within their group that have the higher reproductive rates. They're able to produce a lot of young and also as I said in these areas there's a high proportion of non-native species OK so to sort of jump from there into this book I actually several years ago and Downer Hazel was an editor with Harvard University Press and we connected through e-mail and she was looking for people to write books. And I said well I work on urban wildlife and I'd be interested in writing a book and I envision something like this urban wildlife management an excellent book but a very science oriented textbook kind of a kind of book. And she said well we're really interested in something more for a general audience. And I had

kept a journal for a long time and I was sort of interested in that kind of writing but I hadn't really done it before so I thought well I'll take a shot at it. And and that's how this book developed. And when I first thought about it I was you know just thinking about my experiences as a biologist and some of the things I've worked on in the past and what I'm working on now. And I divided the book into three sections and the chapters opened up with just some of my experiences in the wild and different places places I've been really fortunate enough to work for a time a Kate Churchill Manitoba in Alaska and out west in places in New England as well. And so I wanted to present some of those parts of nature that I observed and sort of as a contrast to the urban and suburban part of this. And not only the contrast but sort of look for the similarities that might exist between the two. Then the main part is so that sort of leads into the chapter The main part of the chapter is looking

specifically at some aspect of urban and suburban ecology. So even though I say it's you know this isn't a science book in the preface I really am hoping to sort of get across some information some things we've learned about these ecosystems and the wildlife that lives there and how humans and wildlife interact in these areas. And I focused more on suburban areas. It's hard to sort of separate the Urban from the suburban from the rural it's all connected. But I tried to focus more on the suburban areas because that's primarily where I work but also that's the area where most of the interactions between wildlife and people occur. These days that's where you're hearing most of the stories. And then the final part of this was actually Ann's idea which was a brilliant idea. She said we were talking about the book she said. Is there a species that you could follow through the book an urban species. And I hadn't thought of it. But as soon as she said that a huge light bulb went off in my head and the coyote is the perfect animal for this for a lot of reasons.

One is that they they historically they were restricted to the prairies and plains of the west and then with development. Probably the extirpation of wolves coyotes have colonized all of North America. They're in every state now except Hawaii. And just it's practically unprecedented to see an animal spread that rapidly. And of course they're in our urban areas and suburban areas. And as a predator and you know not a huge predator compared to wolves and mountain lions but a big enough predator they capture that that part of our attention as well. And that was also kind of in the reading I've done in sort of dabbling on the side interested in the symbolism of all of this. And you know reading about coyotes you read about the coyote the trickster and Native American lore and stories and every culture in North America has a Kaido

coyote involved with it in one way or another. Very important to to Certainly all the Native American cultures of the West. And I thought you know in our society as well. The coyote is a real symbol for sort of our relationship to nature. You know we love it we cherish it we want to protect it. Yet we're kind of scared of it. We're kind of we kind of don't know how to react to it. And that's where I was never really sure if I like the title of the book but I came up with it when I was writing and started using it. But it's that sort of image. It's like you're in your kitchen making a cup of tea and you look outside and there's a coyote and it's like what do you think about that. Some people think it's great. Some people are fearful and it's those sort of mixes of images that sort of spurred me on. So real quickly some themes I tried to build into the book that if you read it maybe you can look for. I have this sinking feeling in me as you know being a biologist for a long time that

where nature really is is leaving us we're we're walking away from it. But we're But nature is also leaving us extinctions and erosion of diversity of species landscapes processes even cultures on the planet I think is really happening. And and it's sort of an image that I tried to put in those first the first parts of the chapters where I see these animals and then there they're leaving me they're disappearing into the sea or walking into the fog. And then I'm going back to my office and in suburbia that kind of imagery. But I think it's a real thing that's happening at the same time some of nature is returning. It's showing up in our neighborhoods and it's adapting to the world as we have made it. And there's this idea that ecologists talk about organisms exploit resources and not exploit in the negative sense that you know we talk about ourselves how we might exploit the planet. But if there's a

resource out there there are going to be animals that go for it. People ask me you know what use are mosquitoes and biting insects. And the answer is you can't have all that protein walking around and not have something take advantage of it. That's that's what wildlife that's what wild organisms do. And that's what they're doing in our cities. There's food there's shelter there's protection from predators. So they some of them show up. But again it's greatly altered system. Only certain species are going to be able to be successful in that system. We. Another thing that is of a concern to conservationists is are increasingly considering these animals as pests. We're sort of moving into a phase of more pest management than anything they're OK. We like Beaver. They're cute. But if that little sucker starts flooding my yard I want the National Guard out here to morrow to get rid of them. And it's so that sort of dichotomy and I put this in. Nature doesn't care. I mean nature is basically just responding to what we do to

the planet. So again we might not like invasive species but hey they're just they're just responding to the resources and the changes in the environment and they're just doing what they do. And this idea of dichotomies that I'm kind of interested in. You know one of them is I think in today's society nature themes and nature shows are more popular than ever. Yet we're using consuming resources greater than we ever have in our history. And you know the whole idea that we love nature and we fear it. Those sorts of things. I tried to put into the book the book really did get way more personal than I had I intended it to at first. And but part of that wasn't just sort of I'm hoping it's not just sort of this self-indulgent thing like look at me and all the cool things I've done. It's really that these these issues are issues for all of us we're all whether you could live in the biggest city in the highest highrise in the world and you're affected by this and who is responsible for the

degradation and destruction of nature. It's it's not again in my business you hear a lot of conflict between environmentalists and loggers and ranchers and you know sort of the blame is sort of placed on some segment of society who will. It's it's all of us. I mean we're all consuming resources and living the lifestyle we want to live. And so it's it's all part of part of the game and that's why I tried to work into the sort of the personal approach and I put down there Mr. ection of the environmental movement. I think it's something that the environmental movement needs to think about pretty carefully. And actually they are people are starting to work with the ranching communities and with timber harvest companies and other things to you know to find some common ground and make some progress in terms of conservation for all of society. I put some tension and personal conflict in there mainly to sort of explain myself

a little bit. I come home to my wife as a raving maniac half the time talking about these issues. And it's again this tension that I think we all sort of feel you know we're we're looking we're concerned about sprawl and resource use and peak oil and all these things. And I think are we going to really just let this happen. And the idea that I think we can do better I can do better we can. You know again it's a personal issue and there's sort of that tension that I try to put in the book. Also this you know this really great idea Dr. E.O. Wilson has had lots of them and this is one of them. Biophilia this innate deep seated love of nature appreciation of nature that I think everybody has and being fortunate enough to work out west work with a whole bunch of people. I mean I see this in people who ranch who farm and who log and who hunt and who trap and you know you come to some larger communities and especially

more urban influence communities and people don't want to believe that. But I think it's a it's a real universal thing. We might all show it in different ways but I think it's it's sort of a resource in and of itself that we need to capture. And then the final thing here. This is something again that's very personal for me. Whenever I've been bothered by things upset with things gone into one of my raving fits. It never fails if I just get out in nature somewhere and take a walk. And it's I think it's something that our society needs more than ever that kind of open space that access to nature is something that really helps us. OK a few final thoughts real quickly and then I'll turn it over to to Amy. So this idea of losses going on biodiversity you know losing species and then losing open space. You know what are we going to do about it. What what's the impact on us. You know just we need to be thinking about these things pretty

carefully. Of course related to all of this is our use in allocation of resources. Peak oil is a big topic right now. But you know it's amazing gas gets to 4 gallons $4 a gallon and we're all looking at we're in line for a Prius. It drops down back to 225. And you know I think I'm going to go get that Hummer that I've always wanted and that's in the course of a year. So thinking about these these issues how we use and allocate resources is huge. And if we think oil is an issue we haven't seen anything yet because global water use is is going to be a giant issue for us. And I don't really know how we're going to handle it. But it's it's a big one. And I finished off the book talking about certainly one of my heroes although Leopold and his idea of the land ethic and and just sort of trying to maybe reinvigorate that idea getting us to think about land as a community to which we belong. You know such a such a great idea. I think at the basis of

finding our way through how we're going to respond to to our lives and the planet. And then the 7 billion pound gorilla in the room is our own population. And it's kind of amazing how. I don't think we're even really talking about this anymore. I mean this is what drives everything that's going on the planet and it you know a biologist that looks at this growth curve and says well that that populations imminently going to crash. You know we think we're going to arrive at some asymptote and level off and everything's going to be hunky dory and you know I don't know about that. And I think it's an issue it's a very difficult issue it's a politically charged issue an emotional issue for reasons that I couldn't even imagine until I started talking to people about it. But I think it's it's really are the main thing and I think we need to start a dialogue about it soon. When I started writing the book a few years ago we had just top six billion. And it's taken me a while to write the

book but it hasn't been that long and we're approaching seven billion and there's people are saying now that by the year 2050 there'll be nine to 10 billion people on the planet. It's just it's kind of even hard to conceive. OK. That's that's it. Again I want to thank the folks at the museum for inviting me and I want to thank everybody at Harvard University Press for working with me and being so patient. They were really great folks. And with that I'm going to turn it over to Amy. My name is Amy Stein. I have a show upstairs called domesticated modern directness of our natural history and I gave a talk last night about this work is while father was an opening of the show and I just like to thank you for having me here and I'm so thrilled to be here with Steven and discussing my work in the context of a wildlife biologist and this on this audience. So I'm just going to go into some of the images that led me to and you know last night I spoke and had a little bit of an issue

with my presentation. So this is my presentation I'm going to go through these images quite quickly because I wanted to speak a little bit about the work that brought me to the domesticated series as quickly as I can but I came to the series. My background is I am a photographer now I live in New York City I live in Queens. I live for many years in Manhattan in a very developed space. And I came to photography as a person in my early 30s. So this is my second career. I have an undergrad and graduate degree in politics political science and for a couple of years for many years worked in Washington D.C. in the sort of the confluence of the Internet the online world and the political world of policy and politics. So I came to photography in my early 30s and this was the first series that I endeavor to do. It's called women and guns. I started this in on the Eastern Shore of Maryland in rural Maryland and this work I show it because it led me through a number of issues related to

recreational use of guns and hunting as well into an area where I was looking at the animals themselves and really looking at taxidermy. So I'm very excited to be showing work here in the Natural History Museum where we are surrounded by space specimens and taxidermy. So I'm just going to show a few of these images from women and guns on that I started in about 2002 when the first early days of my my experience as a photographer I was teaching myself to to conceptualize ideas to also find subjects and to to get access to them and also photograph them and work to the technical and interpersonal details of making making the images. So I started spending a lot of time out in the woods with female hunters. This is a woman named Michelle Eliott. She's a nurse and a hunter and she was in the first image as well. And just spending time out in that in that quiet scene with Hunter waiting for the animals to come by her she is in a deer stand and then spending time also trying to

locate younger female hunters as well. This is a young woman who has killed her first deer on the Eastern Shore of Maryland on a day called Youth or day and she's holding the heart of the deer that she's killed. She went with her father on this day. She was excused from from school and she went with her father to hunt and she killed her first year. And this family actually I was told for a number of reasons were they were bringing back the organs to use them for a soup or for some kind of meal in addition to the meat. And so I found them at the way station so I became very interested in when I took this image. And also this image taken on the same day in the same parking lot as a photographer and as a photographer works on a number of different series I've gone on to work on a number of different series. I often look for clues with my own work as I'm as I'm working on a project and this image was a sort of a seminal image for me. I just walked by the back of the truck and there was the deer and I found it. You know the

Reds in the image the blood the red of the of the the light and of the piece of fabric in the back of the truck the leaf and the deer itself are just as I was looking through my contact sheets I I found it very very beautiful and I became I was working on women and guns and also looking for something a new train of thought to follow. And sometimes these things happen organically you don't even know that they're happening. But now I look back often on my work because this image was such a sort of a roadmap for me in a way a moment. And I decided to I asked around about what happens to these animals after they're killed. And the person in the that was running the way station said well the other go to the meat cutter or the taxidermist. And so I don't know if you're familiar with either of those places but the meat cutter is a place where the animal is sectioned up and cut for meat.

I hope this is of structure to both of the younger audience. And. And you cut the animals cut up and the taxidermist is a place where the animal is is skinned and recreated for either a trophy or some sort of setting for a natural history museum or for use in a hunter or an individual's home. And so pretty quickly I decided I spent some time in some taxidermy shops and became fascinated with the idea of the recreation of these animals that they were killed. Let's go back for a second that they're killed in these kind of situations and then recreated this is very soon after this I decided to take a trip. I scouted and researched a number of taxidermy schools and locations in Pennsylvania. Again it was living in between Washington D.C. and New York City and and the Eastern Shore of Maryland and decided to spend some time I spent about three weeks to a month in taxidermists schools all over Pennsylvania. So because I lived in New York City at the time and I'm I don't I'm not

often interested or haven't been interested in urban environments and urban subject matters. I find Pennsylvania to be a place where I can get to quickly and explore some of the issues that I'm interested in especially taxidermy. But I knew at this point I wanted to push the work further but I'm going to show you a few images that I only show really and presentations from that initial trip and that initial exploration of what taxidermy is and how people learn how to do it and interact with animals in this way. This is a domestic dog that has been taxidermy. And often these these domestic pets it's quite problematic for taxidermists though often they won't take them because of a number of issues related to the fact that the pet owner brings their animal and then maybe rethinks that decision never comes back for the animal. This is why this dog is here or when they do come back for the animal because they have such a such a personal relationship over years and a daily relationship with the animal they feel that the taxidermy specimen does not does not look like a reflect the

personality of their sort of live beloved pet. So you see a lot of I became very interested in this for a moment and for this reason a lot of taxidermists will not take personal pets but they do do a lot of wild animals killed by hunters. And here we have a woman in high school. She's learning how to make a make shift. They start with small mammals also fish and then move on to larger specimens and I became really interested in this kind of training process and also making images in this situation that weren't just illustrations and literal interpretations of the process. But we're a little more artful I guess or a little more interpretive or open ended and again at this point I was it was the summer before I started graduate school I did an MFA in photography at the School of Visual Arts. So at this point I was working in and sort of starting a new chapter in my experience in my professional career moving from sort of a political science to photography and I did not have a background in

photography other than what I had sort of trained myself to do so I decided to go back to graduate school and get an MFA. And that experience led to the domesticating series which ended up being initially my thesis I moved on to another body of work. What was the main body of work that I sort of came out of graduate school with. So again these are these are just some of the images I show because for me they are very important in my mind. This was the work I was making that was so interesting and so valuable at the time. But now I see that it really led me to to oh this is isn't too much for people but to the domesticated theories where I was using taxidermy in animals as as a as subjects in the in a story in a larger narrative. So I'll go onto that now. OK. So I just wanted to show two more images. It is early work that I did in a town which I'm about to tell you about which really does relate to Steven's work. I mean I'll tell you that I grew up in a in a suburb a planned community called Reston

Virginia. I don't know if anyone has heard of Reston Virginia but it's named after Robert E. Simon who was the the founder and the person who planned Reston. It's a really we I was. My parents were in the Foreign Service and we lived in Karachi Pakistan. And when we came back from a very chaotic place Karachi Pakistan they decided to move to Reston Virginia. So I spent a lot of my childhood and early sort of my high school years in a very planned unmitigated unmediated environment. Reston was a pre-planned community like Columbia Maryland and there was not a lot of white urban wildlife in Reston Virginia that I can remember very a lot of the houses look very similar. There wasn't a lot of organic growth in Reston. In fact things were very controlled. You could only. There were certain colors called rest and green and rest and brown and those were the colors that you could paint your houses if you wanted to put up or erect a basketball hoop you had to ask permission and petition the the homeowners association. We did. I did grow up with a lot of municipal pools and golf courses but

those were often hidden in certain they weren't visible from the road so they made a big effort to control the visual environment of the of the planned community. So the people that lived in it would feel restful and feel that they weren't you know no there were no billboards or strip malls at the time. But at any rate I was living in New York City and going out to Pennsylvania as I said but this work I did in a town outside a town called Metamora Pennsylvania and I'm about to show you where it is on the Google map. It is a town of about 2000 people and it is what would be considered an excerpt. It is sandwiched between the Delaware River and a sort of I call it a big mountain park. And this early work was based on I'm going to show you two images from it based on a little project I did that was in my son's. Now I know I was working up to the domesticated series but I found myself in Dannemora Pennsylvania and I met a taxidermist named David Clark who was a taxidermist who was willing to work with me before I met David and before I found myself in Mount

Morris which I really do feel is a magical place and is the scene of all the images that are upstairs. But I went to I knocked on many taxidermists doors and I asked them if I could borrow their animals and take them out into environments outside of the taxidermy shop. As I said at the time I was photographing in the shop and photographing the items and the animals themselves but really knew that I wanted to take them out of that environment. And many many people laughed at me turned me down told me to go away wouldn't answer my calls horrifying e-mails because they just didn't see the potential or they didn't have an interest in the work and they certainly weren't going to loan or rent for the summer that I had. They're very expensive animals that they in a way did not own. They were owned by the hunter that was commissioning the work to me. But David Clark took a chance on me and let me take some of his animals many of his animals out in out into the woods outside of his store. So I want to go into the series that I started because

of the relationship with David Clark and my relationship with the town of Mount Morris and that is domesticated which is showing up stairs. This is the first image I made for domesticated ants and it's called the trash eaters. I started spending a lot of time because he let me into his into his life and into a shop at Dave's taxidermy store which is on Pennsylvania Avenue in Mount Morris Pennsylvania. It's the main main strip of Mount Morris and it's a place where many hunters and his local friends would meet and discuss their experiences hunters and also their the daily animal sightings that people in the town would see. And I started hearing these stories at the time I really didn't know what I was going to do or that the town was really that important to me. But as I started going out into the town as in reaction to the wonderful stories I was hearing from his clients and from people who would stop by his store and just kind of talk talk to chat.

I started getting deeper and deeper into the stories and hearing more and more interesting stories of the human animal encounters that were happening. Initially I was hearing them they were happening at dusk. I would hear again and again at dusk all the animals they come down from the surrounding woods and they walk through town. They come through town they're doing small migrations through town or they're coming down to eat on the refuse of humans. So this is the first image I made. We have the domestic space the indoor space I've left that is the the one and only image I've used artificial lighting with. But and then we have the coyotes on the outside of the house eating all use and this is a story that we're all familiar with if you live in any area where you have coyotes or animals that are forger's because these animals for them it's much easier for them to come down from the surrounding mountains and the garbage or as we're throwing away more and more protein Laden Laden and calorie laden items and food it's people had told me you can't leave your dogs and cats or small animals out at night and you certainly

don't want to leave garbage cans out because the garbage would be strewn all over the lawn when you get up. So I was lucky enough to be able to use to borrow animals that were I use all indigenous animals from the area. These are taxidermy animals. And so this was the first of a series of images that are upstairs and really I was trying to prove out the concept that I can make images that were believable in some way but using taxidermy animals. So these animals are so lifelike that while I was shooting the while I was there on the tripod shooting the scene there were people stopping in their cars and pickup trucks and asking why the animals weren't moving. So they were also on the scene wondering why these animals were so still. So it's really a credit to Dave's artistry and the wonderful you know the intersection of you know luck in terms of the poses of these animals and also my ability to put them into a scene where they would naturally

look natural and sort of naturally be OK. So I'm just going to go through a couple of the images and talk about the project in general but before I go through some images I just want to go forward and show these two these two Google map and love Google Maps images of Madame Morrice. And so let's just go forward so there is the town. It's about 20 square blocks. It's mostly residential. Founded in the 40s and 50s. So the architecture in the town again I grew up in a town that was really founded in the late 60s early 70s with very modernist architecture. So many of the structures and houses that we can see in these images were really kind of magical to me and were very exotic to me in a way just to go forward. So you can see that the town is about 110 miles outside of New York City and Hotton it was a town I can get to easily for the day or for a weekend. So that was important to me when I came to the town I had no relationship to the town other than the ones that I created by really inserting myself into the scene. Driving with my husband the many by the few square blocks to drive

many many times of the town and again mostly residential town but a town that exists on the edge of an actual space between the Delaware River and this sort of you can see the elevation the the mountain where the animals would come down from that is sparsely populated with a few houses but that is mostly natural space and the habitat for animals. And so here you can see the area beyond and beyond that to sort of the left of the screen would be what's considered I guess the beginning of the Poconos. If anyone knows that area. But I really do love to show this to Google maps because my experience in the town is very much illustrated by these maps and by the way the fact that the town is really finds itself wouldn't say it's isolated because Milford is just down the road if anyone knows that town and across the river is Port Jervis. But I do find I really wanted to contain my experience to Mount Morris because of that that mountain there and I'm going to talk about some of the images that take

place on the edge of that mountain. This image is called watering hole. It is this house is one of the last houses on the edge of the mountain in town. So it's sort of the I don't know the name of the street exactly but it's that it's that street that faces the mountain. So you have a family that is has created They've lived there for decades and they have they've sat down there their family and their roots on the edge of town and they they wanted a pool even though they can only use it for a couple you know a couple of months a year. They're on the edge of town. And so what they found was they they did not have a fence around the pool and the bear would come down. They were seeing bear coming down swimming and drinking from their pool. And that's why I decided to call this image watering hole. I heard this story from someone now I can't even remember when I first started hearing this story but it's sort of a this this house on the pool are kind of famous in the town. Again it's quite small. Everyone knows each other. But I became

fascinated by this idea of these sort of bears swimming in the chlorinated pool so I went to the house and found that they had erected a fence they have two small children. The children are now teenagers but they had erected a fence around the pool to keep the bears out. And it does keep the bears out. So again I want to say I don't know if I've said that these images are all staged and they're recreations of real stories that I heard. So my effort my attempt here with these images and with all the images in the series is to distill and distill that tension of the of the interaction between the human and the animal. I mean it's interesting when I read Steven's book I was fascinated with this idea of the leaving of the turning away of the animal returning to its own habitat and us kind of retreating into our homes. And you know having just read this book in the last sort of month to a couple of weeks I mean I really do feel that some of the many of the ideas that are in the book are are ideas that I was thinking about when I was making this body of work because here we do have a community of people who are living very close to nature right up against a

natural space where there are coyotes bear deer raccoons other other urban wildlife. But in a way they do want to I was looking for these these clues and these traces of distancing the kind of the the the holding nature it at arm's length and this chain link fence is something that comes up that I found again and again in this town as a boundary between the natural and the wild and the cultivated space the beginnings of the of the town. And in some cases with the edge of the pool it's happening. I mean it's not gradual. There is. It's a fine line it's a bright line. So and I'm not sure many of the images are upstairs and they really do speak to the both the metaphorical or symbolic boundaries between the natural and the cultivated or the human in a populated environment but also the metaphorical and the literal boundaries. So just to go forward the few images. So here we have Matamoras and there again is the chain link fence part of what I

did as as a researcher I guess when I was researching the project. I talked to many locals but I also interviewed the Department of Natural Resources knowing and also animal control knowing that they would have a lot of great stories for me. And I'm one of the stories I heard from the Department of Natural Resources was a sting operation that they were they had created with the help of my taxidermist where they commissioned taxidermy animals and put hydraulics in. So they would move slightly to capture hunters or people who would who were tending to stop their car shoot animals out out of their car windows and out of the backs of their homes or their backyards which is of course illegal. So they would found that these people they would catch them basically and find them take away their hunting licenses things like that take you know try to make it so that they wouldn't do this. So this image is based on the those interviews and I found there was really satisfying. This is a nursery that exists in the middle of Mount Morris and there have been spottings of small animals in the nursery. Little traces of the

animals taking little bites out of some of the plants but of course I made this image in February-March time. It's very cold and snowy outside. And so this is again my my interpretation of of just these little snippets of stories sometimes I would read them in the local Pennysaver but often I would just hear them second or third hand from from local people. And as I became more well-known in the town people would share stories of me or say oh you know I heard you were doing this or you photographed in my uncle's nursery. Did you hear about this story so that was really satisfying to just gather stories and there were many stories that I just didn't have time or the ability to do. I was I want to say I was borrowing the image the borrowing the animals from the taxidermist before the hunter picked them up. So many of these these animals are trying to make sure they were indigenous to the area and they're probably all now in the Hunters homes as trophies either in small diorama or small scenes themselves or as individual

trophies in the Hunter homes locally in the Mount Morris Milford Port Jervis area. So in some cases I had very little time I was given a call. The animals Don but the hunters coming in and a couple of days. So I hope that you know you have the scene ready to go. So I was scouting finding the story scouting the location trying to find in many cases the original people to be in the images and men and then trying to sort of hope that the animal made itself ready for me. And then using it before the hunter came back to claim it and people have asked me because I've just done this talk a couple of times you know did the hunter know that you were using their animal. I don't know the answer to that is I don't know. But Dave Clark does have many of these images up in his store and I wonder if some of the hunters have seen their animals. You know here's here's the mountain again. The mountain has become like a chain link fence. It has become quite a big symbol in a lot of my work. This is also a very every day. It's almost become a cliche that the deer by the side of the road. And so we have the main

highway and then the service road that runs a lot of this strip malls that exist on the edge of town. This is called new homes. This is quite a new image I made. I have a book that came out at the end of 2008. And since the time that that went to print I decided to create more images. I still wasn't satisfied. I wanted to do more in the town since the series is done. But this is a new development. Townhouses have finally come to Mount Morris along the Delaware River. I don't know what state of construction these these homes are in now but at the time they stood for many months to a year they stood in this state because of the financial collapse and the real estate economic collapse in fall of 2008. And so the Bobcat's were seen out there making the best of the situation and sort of sleeping and living in and among the the half constructed homes so this is called new homes. Well I found that the people of Metamora Square are very welcoming

and I think that because I I was working in a collaboration I mean I do call it a collaboration with my taxidermist who supported what I was doing and understood it. Although initially he was a little skeptical. I thought I was working with PETA thought I was trying to do it just didn't get. Why would you would want to do this. And I think eventually I went back so many times and he oh you're here again. It's Saturday you know you're here again and now you have this plan and you want to stuff that animal in that Honda Civic. You know what's going on. Really. But I kept because I kept bringing the animals back I guess and peg them a little bit of money and showing him I kept showing him the results of the images of the chutes. I mean it was he would always give us the animal and a little brush so that I could brush the animal's hair and make sure he was very proud of the animals that he wanted to make sure the eyes were you know sometimes at the end of the taxidermy process there's a little glue around the eyes make sure they were pristine. And for my purposes I wanted the animals to look a little roughed up and wild but I always took the brush and I always understood. I tried to understand where he was

coming from and when I would show him the images he would be I think he was puzzled and surprised and I started to understand what I was doing. And in terms of the people you know I would just go up to them and start asking them about their daily lives and they'd love to share. I mean everyone has a bear story. One house down from this this house there was a bear trying to hibernate under the house. And along this this this road this fronting of the of the mountain. There's also an image upstairs of a little girl and a coyote. There were many animals. This is sort of the frontline to the wild space and the animals would sort of come down on their small migrations but they were so disappointed that I didn't that I couldn't do this. There's an image of the bear trying to hibernate under the house. And I thought I really wanted to try to do that. And in the end I just had to finish the project. So I found the people very welcoming and like most people when you ask them about themselves and their stories and their place even though I live in New York City and they found this initially a little puzzling. They were really interested

in opening up. And I always took images back to show them that they were really thankful and gave them images brought them the book they were really thankful for that and interested in that. So it was a it was a wonderful experience. Right. So if the if the meat cutter will could get the skin the animal and if they're careful doing that then of course you know that they can be. But in terms of my you know looking for a project I'm looking for a natural sort of place. Just trying to think about what I'm interested in conceptually as an origin that that animal on the on the truck bed was the origin. You know having gone to the knee cutter it's some it's pretty bloody and gory and it's really it's really the first process the first part of the process of the taxidermy where the animal is scanned and then whatever whatever happens to that body the need and the organs happens to it. But I was more interested. I found out in the art and the artifice of the recreation of the animal and everything that happens after the skin is tanned and how it's if put over the form and then how it is

conceptualized in either a small situation that the taxidermists makes or then in the hunter's home or you know how it then functioned when you get back into this environment. Yeah. It's a it's a it's a difficult question I know that in the competition you know I am actually not even that familiar with them but I guess you could say it for any species. Best fishing competitions you know people people do these sorts of things. I I guess part of it makes me kind of uncomfortable. I mean I sort of view hunting in a in a different in a different way sort of a different role. I mean I I I sort of see it as a way to connect to the land to harvest local food. I think about the way we

produce food. You know in sort of industrially in the country and so I think of hunting in some ways as you know certainly we all can't do it because there's too many of us. But a better pure way of if you're going to eat meat and that's you know that's a way of doing it. You know the competition thing I guess I'm just going to sort of pass. I don't even know what to say about it. You know it's there. There are there's just so much stuff out there. Human behavior just amazes me all the different things people think of doing so. Sorry. I'm going to just like totally turn tail and run. I mean I do agree I find that having spent time with hunters that they are are also conservationists and then when to think about going to the grocery store and how you know having seen some of these new documentaries of food. About factory farming it seems to me that if it is done with respect for the animal I think it often is the more time I spent with the were sort of respect I have for

that practice in a way and I agree I mean if we all did it it would be we all carried on guns and went into the woods that we would there would be no animals that probably that was our main source of food. But enough of us go to the grocery store and choose that other route. So I do feel that especially with my women and gun series it often leads to the question how do you feel about hunting and I mean I do I do see a use for it and if it's done you know if it's done out of a backyard or out of this. When you have a car that's one thing. But if I do feel that hunters do that I know that I have met through my work. I have great respect for the land and for conserving the animals that they are in. And the hours that hunters spend alone in the woods up in these lines you know we're down in the blinds are really it's magical it's peaceful and wonderful. So you know but it isn't a thorny issue. That's right. Well said. I mean I wish I had said part of that because that's the way that is the way I feel about hunting. You know the competition thing.

I don't know. But you know and that's the way