CANR
WORK TITLE: Coyote America
WORK NOTES: PEN/E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award longlist
PSEUDONYM(S):
BIRTHDATE: 10/19/1948
WEBSITE:
CITY:
STATE: NM
COUNTRY:
NATIONALITY: American
LAST VOLUME: CANR 106
http://hs.umt.edu/history/people/emeriti-faculty.php?s=Flores
RESEARCHER NOTES:
PERSONAL
ADDRESS
CAREER
WRITINGS
SIDELIGHTS
BIOCRIT
PERIODICALS
Kirkus Reviews May 1, 2016, Louie Flores.” Contemporary Authors Online, Gale, 2002. Literature Resource Center, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?p=LitRC&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CH1000032531&it=r&asid=76c1635314724bfb5bf399db3f8b36e3. Accessed 12 Feb. 2017. “Dan, “Flores, Dan: COYOTE AMERICA.”.
Library Journal Apr. 15, 2016, Cynthia Lee. Knight, “Flores, Dan. Coyote America: A Natural & Supernatural History.”. p. 110+.
Publishers Weekly Apr. 4, 2016, review of Coyote America: A Natural & Supernatural History. p. 75.
Library Journal July, 2010. Valerie Nye, “Flores, Dan. Visions of the Big Sky: Painting and Photographing the Northern Rocky Mountain West.”. p. 81.
Natural History June, 2016. Laurence A. Marschall, “Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History.”. p. 46.
Reference & Research Book News Nov., 2010. review of Visions of the big sky; painting and photographing the northern Rocky Mountain West.
Oregon Historical Quarterly Fall 2002 p. 391., Historical, Derek R. Larson, “The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains.”. p. 391.
The Geographical Review vol. 88 no. 2 1998 p. 302+. , Geographical. John B. Wright, “Caprock Canyonlands: Journeys Into the Heart of the Southern Plains.”. p. 302+.
Wilson Bulletin vol. 107 no. 1 1995 p. 188+. , Bulletin. Clayton M. White, “The Mississippi Kite.”. p. 188+.
ONLINE
H-Net, https://networks.h-net.org (February 24, 2017).
H-Net, https://networks.h-net.org (February 24, 2017).
Christian Science Monitor, http://www.csmonitor.com (February 24, 2017).
H-Net, https://networks.h-net.org (February 24, 2017).
Christian Science Monitor, http://www.csmonitor.com (February 24, 2017).
Open Letters Monthly, http://www.openlettersmonthly.com (February 24, 2017).
H-Net, https://networks.h-net.org (February 24, 2017).
Christian Science Monitor, http://www.csmonitor.com (February 24, 2017).
Open Letters Monthly, http://www.openlettersmonthly.com (February 24, 2017).
New Yorker, http://www.newyorker.com (February 24, 2017).
H-Net, https://networks.h-net.org (February 24, 2017).
Christian Science Monitor, http://www.csmonitor.com (February 24, 2017).
Open Letters Monthly, http://www.openlettersmonthly.com (February 24, 2017).
New Yorker, http://www.newyorker.com (February 24, 2017).
Obsessive Book Nerd, http://www.obsessivebooknerd.com (February 24, 2017).
Dan Flores
From Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia
For the American football player, see Dan Flores (American football).
Dan Louie Flores
Born October 19, 1948 (age 68)
Vivian, Caddo Parish
Louisiana, USA
Residence Santa Fe, New Mexico
Alma mater
Northwestern State University
Texas A&M University
Occupation Writer, Historian
Professor Emeritus at the University of Montana
Years active ca. 1980-
Spouse(s) Susan I. Flores (married 1972-1978, divorced), Sara Dant (married 2014-present)
Dan Louie Flores (born 1948) is an American writer and historian who specializes in cultural and environmental studies of the American West. He held the A.B. Hammond Chair in Western History at the University of Montana in Missoula, Montana until he retired in May 2014.
Contents [hide]
1 Background
2 Works
2.1 Books
2.2 Essays and articles
3 Awards and honors
4 Invited lectures
4.1 Film and Media
5 Critical reception
6 References
Background[edit]
Dan Flores is a writer who lives in the Galisteo Valley outside Santa Fe, New Mexico, and is A. B. Hammond Professor Emeritus of Western History at the University of Montana-Missoula. Flores was born in Vivian in Caddo Parish in northwestern Louisiana and grew up in nearby Rodessa. During the 1970s, he received his MA in history from Northwestern State University in Natchitoches, Louisiana, and his Ph.D. in 1978 from Texas A&M University in College Station, Texas, where he studied under Professor Herbert H. Lang.[1] He began his academic career at Texas Tech University in Lubbock, where he taught from 1978 to 1992, spent a year at the University of Wyoming in 1986, and then relocated to the University of Montana, where he held the A.B. Hammond Chair in Western History from 1992 until he retired in May 2014.[2]
Works[edit]
Books[edit]
Flores is the author of ten books.
Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History (New York: Basic/Perseus, 2016)
American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains (Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2016)[3]
Visions of the Big Sky: Painting and Photographing the Northern Rocky Mountain West (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2010)
Caprock Canyonlands: Journeys into the Heart of the Southern Plains, 20th Anniversary Edition (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2010)
The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001; paperback edition, 2003)
Southern Counterpart to Lewis & Clark: The Freeman & Custis Expedition of 1806 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, Red River Books paperback, 2nd edition, 2002)
Horizontal Yellow: Nature and History in the Near Southwest (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999; paperback edition, 1999)
The Mississippi Kite: Portrait of a Southern Hawk, with Eric Bolen (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993)
Caprock Canyonlands: Journeys into the Heart of the Southern Plains (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1990; paperback edition, 1997)
Canyon Visions: Photographs and Pastels of the Texas Plains, with Amy Winton, Foreword by Larry McMurtry (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1989; paperback edition, 1989)
Journal of an Indian Trader: Anthony Glass and the Texas Trading Frontier, 1790-1810 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1985; paperback edition, 1998)
Jefferson & Southwestern Exploration (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984; paperback edition, 1986)
Essays and articles[edit]
Flores' essays on the environment, art, and culture of the West have appeared in magazines such as Texas Monthly, Orion, Wild West, Southwest Art, The Big Sky Journal, and High Country News, and include:
"Reviewing an Iconic Story: Environmental History and the Demise of the Bison," in Geoff Cunfer and Bill Waiser, eds., Bison and People on the North American Great Plains: A Deep Environmental History (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 2016): 30-50 [4]
"Wolf West," Wild West (June 2016), 46-53[5]
“Western Art for the War Weary,” Wild West (December 2015), 50-57
"Where Pronghorns Play," Wild West (August 2015), 58-65
"Mother Earth Laid Bare: Learning to Love the Badlands of the American West," Site Lines: A Journal of Place X (II) Spring 2015
"Empires of the Sun: Big History and the Southern High Plains," OAH Magazine of History (September 2013)
"Coyote, An American Original," Wild West 25 (April 2013): 52-9
"Earthlings: Evolution and Place in Environmental History," in Douglas Sackman, ed., A Companion to American Environmental History (London: Wiley-Blackwell Publishers, 2010): 595-614
"Bringing Home All The Pretty Horses: The Horse Trade in the Early American West, 1785 - 1825," Montana the Magazine of Western History 58 (Summer 2008): 3-21, 94-6
"Wars over Buffalo: Stories vs. Stories on the Northern Plains," in Native Americans and the Environment: Perspectives on the Ecological Indian, Michael Harkin and David Rich Lewis, eds. (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007): 153-72
"Land That I Love," Texas Monthly 35 (July 2007): 74-80
"Societies to Match the Scenery: Twentieth-Century Environmental History in the American West," in A Companion to The American West, William Deverell, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2004): 256-71
"Beyond Ecology: Restoring a Cultural Landscape," High Country News, May 13, 2002
"A Very Different Story: Exploring the Southwest from Monticello With the Freeman and Custis Expedition of 1806," Montana the Magazine of Western History 50 (Spring 2000): 2-17
"Nature's Children: Environmental History as Human Natural History," in Andrew Kirk and John Herron, eds., Human Nature: Biology, Culture, and Environmental History (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999): 11-30
"Essay: The Great Plains ‘Wilderness’ as a Human-Shaped Environment," Great Plains Research 9 (Fall 1999): 343-55
"In Montana, The View from the Ranchette," High Country News, May 10, 1999
"Place: An Argument for Bioregional History," Environmental History 18 (Winter 1994): 1-18
"Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy: The Southern Plains from 1800 to 1850," Journal of American History 78 (September 1991): 465-85
"The Ecology of the Red River in 1806: Peter Custis and Early Southwestern Natural History," Southwestern Historical Quarterly 88 (July 1984): 1-42
"Zion in Eden: Phases of the Environmental History of Utah," Environmental Review, 7(4) 1983, 325-344.
Awards and honors[edit]
Flores' work has received numerous accolades and awards including:
PEN 2017 E.O. Wilson Literary Science Writing Award Finalist for Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History [6] [7]
Best Western Short Nonfiction, 2016, Finalist, Western Writers of America Spur Award, for "Where the Pronghorns Play"
Outstanding Magazine Article, 2014 Wrangler Award, Western Heritage Association and National Cowboy Museum, for “Coyote, An American Original”
High Plains Book Awards, 2011, Winner in the category of Art/Photography Books, for Visions of the Big Sky
Montana Book Awards, 2010 Honor Book, for Visions of the Big Sky
Southwestern Book Design Awards, 2011, Finalist, for Visions of the Big Sky
Best Western Short Nonfiction, 2011, Finalist, Western Writers of America Spur Award, for “Horse Trading in the Early West”
Ray Allen Billington Prize, 2009 Article Award, Western History Association, for “Bringing Home All the Pretty Horses”
Outstanding Magazine Article, 2009 Wrangler Award, Western Heritage Association and National Cowboy Museum, for “Bringing Home All the Pretty Horses”
Friends Choice Award, 2009, from Friends of the Montana Historical Society, for “Bringing Home All the Pretty Horses”
Best Western Short Nonfiction, 2009, Finalist, Western Writers of America Spur Award, for “Bringing Home All the Pretty Horses”
Vivian A. Paladin Award, Best Article for 2008, Montana, the Magazine of Western History, for “Bringing Home All the Pretty Horses”
Julian Rothbaum Prize, 2005, Distinguished Book Prize, University of Oklahoma Press, for The Natural West
Caroline Bancroft History Book Prize Honor Book, 2002, Denver Public Library, for The Natural West
Best Contemporary Nonfiction Book, 2000, Finalist, Western Writers of America Spur Award, for Horizontal Yellow
Nonfiction Book Prize, Finalist, 2000, Oklahoma Book Awards, for Horizontal Yellow
Best Western Short Nonfiction, 1998, Finalist, Western Writers of America Spur Award, for “When Buffalo Roamed”
Outstanding Magazine Article, 1997 Wrangler Award, Western Heritage Association, National Cowboy Hall of Fame, for “When Buffalo Roamed”
Ray Allen Billington Prize, Best Article, 1984, Western History Association, for “Ecology of the Red River in 1806”
Best Book on the West, 1984, Westerner's International Co-Founders' Award, for Jefferson & Southwestern Exploration
Best Book on Texas History, 1984, Coral Tullis Prize, Texas State Historical Association, for Jefferson & Southwestern Exploration
Best Article on Texas History, 1984, H. Bailey Carroll Prize, Texas State Historical Association, for “Ecology of the Red River in 1806”
Invited lectures[edit]
In March 2016, Flores discussed "Animals, Art, and the Environment" as part of the Russell Event at the Charles M. Russell Museum in Great Falls, Montana.[8]
In January 2016, Flores gave the keynote address, entitled "Loss and Remorse over the 'American Serengeti,'" for the National Cowboy Poetry Gathering in Elko, Nevada.[9]
In October 2015, West Texas State A&M University invited Flores to present their annual Distinguished Lecture.[10]
In 2013, Flores delivered the fourth annual Pilster Great Plains Lecture at the Mari Sandoz Heritage Society's annual conference at Chadron State College in Chadron, Nebraska.[11]
Flores delivered the Town/Gown Lecture at the University of Saskatchewan in Saskatoon, CA, in May 2011.
In March 2011, Flores gave the Plenary Lecture for the Georgia Historical Association in Savannah.
In October 2010, Flores gave two public lectures for the Colorado Historical Society.
In January 2010, Flores gave the Sparks Lecture at the School of Advanced Research in Santa Fe, NM.
In November 2009, Flores gave the Hall Symposium Lecture at the University of Kansas in Lawrence.
In 2008, Flores presented the prestigious C. Ruth and Calvin P. Horn Lecture in Western History and Culture at the University of New Mexico's Center for the Southwest.[12]
Flores spoke at the June 2008 Prix de West Art Awards at the National Cowboy Museum and Western Heritage Center in Oklahoma City.
In April 2008, Flores presented the Snell Lecture at Lee University of Tennessee, and the President’s Lecture hosted by the History and Biology Departments at Belmont University in Nashville.
As part of the Santa Fe (NM) Salon, Flores spoke in December 2007.
In June 2007, Flores was invited to deliver a talk at the Conference on Rivers and Civilization for the Academia Sinica in Taipei, Taiwan.
In April 2006, Flores spoke and was the featured writer at the High Plains Writers Series at West Texas State University in Canyon, Texas.
At the February 2006 National Park Service conference on Lewis and Clark in St. Louis, Flores gave an invited talk.
In October 2003, Flores delivered the Aubrey L. Haines Lecture at Yellowstone National Park.[13]
In 2002, Flores delivered the Catherine Cater Humanities Lecture at North Dakota State University.[14]
Flores gave the Hartman Hotz Lecture at the University of Arkansas in November 2002.
In April 1996, Flores delivered the Charles Wood Lecture at Texas Tech University.
Film and Media[edit]
Flores appeared in the “Finding Fenn’s Fortune” episode of Expedition Unknown in 2015 (original air date: November 18) and was featured in Anthony Bourdain’s Parts Unknown “New Mexico” episode in 2013 (original air date: September 29).[15]
Flores provided much of the historical narration for the 2010 documentary film Facing the Storm: The Story of the American Bison, which aired nationally on PBS in April, 2012.[16]
Flores provided historical narration for the documentary El Caballo: The Wild Horses of North America, produced by The Fund for Animals and High Plains Films in 2001.[17]
Critical reception[edit]
As an historian of place, Flores is "one of the best this country has produced," according to acclaimed author Annie Proulx. "His work ranks with that of Thoreau, William Bartram, Aldo Leopold, John Muir, Peter Matthiessen."[18] Douglas Brinkley calls him "a master of the American West and a personal hero."
Flores' latest book, Coyote America, has been widely praised as "terrific," "fascinating," "absorbing," and "brilliant." Natural History proclaims "The coyote stories in this book are among the best, and Flores is a master storyteller."[19]
Historian Elliott West has called Flores "one of the most respected environmental historians of his generation"[20] and William Kittredge concurs, stating that Flores belongs in "the ranks of first-string Western American writers." "Engaging and provocative," "personal, passionate, and scholarly,"[21] Flores' work draws broad praise, including from author William deBuys, who calls Horizontal Yellow "one of the best books about place you'll ever read.".[22]
Emeriti Faculty
Dan Flores
Dan Flores
A.B. Hammond Professor Emeritus of Western History
Email: dlfnewmexico@aol.com
Personal Website
Personal Summary
Dan Flores held the A. B. Hammond Chair in Western History at the University of Montana from 1992 to 2014. His specialty is the environmental and cultural history of the American West. He is the author of eight books, most recently Visions of the Big Sky (2010), Caprock Canyonlands (a 20th anniversary edition, 2010), and The Natural West (2002). His essays on the environment, art, and culture of the West also appear in magazines such as Texas Monthly, Orion, Southwest Art, The Big Sky Journal, and High Country News. His work has been honored by the Western History Association, the Western Writers of America, the Denver Public Library, the National Cowboy Museum, the Oklahoma Book Awards, the University of Oklahoma Press, the Montana Historical Society, the Texas State Historical Association, the High Plains Book Awards, and the Montana Book Awards. His next book is Coyote America: The Coyote in Continental History and Culture
Field of Study
American West, U.S. Environmental History, and Native American History
Selected Publications
Coyote America: A Natural & Supernatural History (Basic, 2016)
American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains (Kansas, 2016)
Visions of the Big Sky: Painting and Photography in the Northern Rocky Mountain West (University of Oklahoma Press, 2010)
The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2001; paperback edition, 2003)
Southern Counterpart to Lewis & Clark: The Freeman & Custis Expedition of 1806 (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, Red River Books paperback, 2nd edition, 2002)
Horizontal Yellow: Nature and History in the Near Southwest (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999; paperback edition, 1999)
The Mississippi Kite: Portrait of a Southern Hawk, with Eric Bolen (Austin: University of Texas Press, 1993)
Caprock Canyonlands: Journeys into the Heart of the Southern Plains (Austin and London: University of Texas Press, 1990; paperback edition, 1997)
Canyon Visions: Photographs and Pastels of the Texas Plains, with Amy Winton, Foreword by Larry McMurtry (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 1989; paperback edition, 1989)
Journal of an Indian Trader: Anthony Glass and the Texas Trading Frontier, 1790-1810 (College Station: Texas A&M University Press, 1985; paperback edition, 1998)
Jefferson & Southwestern Exploration (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 1984; paperback edition, 1986)
Publications
“Bringing Home All The Pretty Horses: The Horse Trade in the Early American West, 1785 - 1825,” Montana, the Magazine of Western History 58 (Summer 2008): 3-21, 94-6.
“Land That I Love,” Texas Monthly 35 (July 2007): 74-80.
“Wars Over Buffalo: Stories versus Stories on the Northern Plains,” in Michael Harkin and David Rich Lewis, eds., Native Americans and the Environment: Perspectives on the Ecological Indian (Lincoln: University of Nebraska Press, 2007): 153-70.
“Jefferson’s Grand Expedition and the Mystery of the Red River,” in Patrick Williams, et al., eds., A Whole Country in Commotion: The Louisiana Purchase and the American Southwest (Fayetteville: University of Arkansas Press, 2005): 21-39.
“Societies to Match the Scenery: Twentieth-Century Environmental History in the American West,” in A Companion to The American West, William Deverell, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2004): 256-71.
“Der Wirkliche Llano Estacado,” in Karl May im Llano Estacado, Meredith McClain and Reinhold Wolff, eds. (Hansa Verlag, 2004): 61-71.
“A Prairie Story: How the Plains Indians Lost Their Empire (and Their Homes) in Texas,” In Donald Willett and Stephen Curley, Invisible Texans: Women and Minorities in Texas History (New York: McGraw-Hill, 2004): 106-117.
“Loving the Plains, Hating the Plains, Saving the Plains,” in The Past and Future of the Southern High Plains, Sherry Smith, ed. (Norman: University of Oklahoma Press, 2003): 219-244.
“Reinventing the World at the Head of the Columbia, in The River We Carry With Us: Two Centuries of Writing from the Clark Fork Basin, Tracy Stone-Manning and Emily Miller, eds. (Livingston, Mt.: Clark City Press, 2002): 175-84.
“Poetry to Trespass For,” in The Waltz He Was Born To: An Introduction to the Writing of Walt McDonald, Janice Whittington and Andrew Hudgins, eds. (Lubbock: Texas Tech University Press, 2002): 111-21.
“Bison Ecology and Bison Diplomacy Redux: Another Look at the Southern Plains from 1800 to 1850,” in American Environmental History, Louis Warren, ed. (Oxford: Blackwell Publishers, 2003): 160-75.
"A Very Different Story: Exploring the Southwest from Monticello With the Freeman and Custis Expedition of 1806," Montana, the Magazine of Western History 50 (Spring 2000): 2-17.
"Nature's Children: Environmental History as Human Natural History," in Andrew Kirk and John Herron, eds., Human Nature: Biology, Culture, and Environmental History (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1999): 11-30.
"Essay: The Great Plains ‘Wilderness’ as a Human-Shaped Environment,” Great Plains Research 9 (Fall 1999): 343-55.
"Place: Thinking About Bioregional History," in Michael McGinnis, ed., Bioregionalism (London: Routledge Press, 1998): 43-58.
"Making the West Whole Again: A Historical View of Restoration," in Bob Keiter, ed., The Native Home of Hope: Community, Ecology, and the American West (Salt Lake City: University of Utah Press, 1998): 58-68.
"Environmentalism and Multiculturalism in Western History," in Hal Rothman, ed., Reopening the American West (Phoenix: University of Arizona Press, 1998): 24-37.
"Spirit of Place in the American West," in James Sherow, ed., A Sense of the American West: An Environmental History Anthology (Albuquerque: University of New Mexico Press, 1998): 31-8.
I’m a writer and former professor, born and raised in Louisiana but a resident of the American West – West Texas, Montana, now the Santa Fe area of Northern New Mexico – for more than 35 years. I spent most of my university career at the University of Montana in Missoula, where I was A. B. Hammond Professor of the History of the American West. A writing career that has so far produced ten books started with a major book on western exploration, followed by one on Indian traders in the Southwest. I went on to write several creative nonfiction and historical books about places in the American West, from the Llano Estacado and the Near Southwest to the Rocky Mountains and Great Plains. Along the way I also wrote a book on the artists and photographers of the Northern Rocky Mountains, and teamed up with artist Amy Winton for a book of my photographs and her pastels of the canyons of West Texas. More recently, with my Amazon Bestseller, American Serengeti, and my New York Times Bestseller, Coyote America – both books published in 2016 – my focus has been nature writing and the “biographies” of animals like bison, wolves, wild horses, and especially the epic story of North America’s fascinating and now most widespread small wolf, the coyote. My articles and essays on the environment, art, and culture of the West have appeared in magazines such as Texas Monthly, Orion, Wild West, Southwest Art, High Country News, and The Big Sky Journal, for which I wrote a column, “Images of the American West,” for eight years. My books and articles have been honored by the PEN America Literary Awards, the Western Writers of America, the High Plains Book Awards, the Montana Book Awards, the Oklahoma Book Awards, the Western History Association, the Denver Public Library, the National Cowboy Museum, the Montana Historical Society, the Texas State Historical Association, and the University of Oklahoma Press.
'Coyote America' Honors An Animal Making North America Home For Centuries
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July 7, 2016 5:05 AM ET
Heard on Morning Edition
David Greene talks to historian Dan Flores about his book, Coyote America, a biography of an iconic animal of the American West. Increasingly, the coyote has become associated with suburban life.
DAVID GREENE, HOST:
Our next guest believes America's true symbolic animal is not the bald eagle. It isn't even the buffalo. It's the coyote. Dan Flores is a historian of the American West. And he's written a book that can only be described as a coyote biography. The animal's been living near humans in North America for centuries. The name coyote itself goes back to the Aztecs. Now, culturally, the coyote has been a subject for Mark Twain, Walt Disney, even Saturday morning cartoons.
(SOUNDBITE OF TV SHOW, "LOONEY TUNES")
PAUL JULIAN: (As Road Runner) Beep beep.
GREENE: (Laughter) Politically, though, the coyote's been a hot button. There were campaigns to kill the coyote with guns, traps, poison for much of the 20th century and more recently, environmental movements to protect it. Today, one thing we can say about the coyote is - it's pretty visible, even on the East Coast. For freaked out city-dwellers, Dan Flores has some advice.
DAN FLORES: You have to get over the thought, to start with, that this is the end of civilization - that there is a coyote trotting down the street or maybe sitting in the seat across from you on the commuter train.
GREENE: Oh, yeah, just riding to work with you - yeah, that commuter train thing actually did happen. Now in his book "Coyote America," Flores explores the qualities that have allowed coyotes to survive, even thrive, in a changing landscape.
FLORES: Increasingly, they're becoming animals of the inner city. And they've developed - I mean, they're so intelligent - remarkably intelligent, I would say - and so easily adaptable and cosmopolitan in how they can live that they've figured out how to live, I mean, right in the midst of the loudest urban metroplexes in North America.
GREENE: You told this really unbelievably sort of charming tale of a coyote your friend encountered just a couple years ago. And it kind of speaks to the personality of the coyote. Can you remind me about that?
FLORES: Yes. This is a Navajo friend of mine. His story was, I think, one, as you said, that kind of captures the charm of the animal because he was given the task by the local Navajo chapter of taking out a coyote that they thought was a problem animal - that was chasing pets.
And he went out in his pickup with his rifle in the gun rack and one morning, sort of rounded a corner on a dirt road. And here is this coyote standing right in the middle of the road. So he's reaching for his rifle. And the coyote looks at him through the windshield of the truck and yawns at him. And at that point -
GREENE: (Laughter) I don't care about your gun. I'm not - whatever, dude.
FLORES: Indeed. He's able to recognize that there's not really a threat from this guy.
GREENE: That's amazing. I mean, the yawn - who knows if it was accidental or the coyote was sort of sending a message. But, I mean, they have the teeth and the jaws of a predator. As we know, they can eat dogs, cats. They've attacked pets. They live among us. I mean, should we be worried?
FLORES: Well, coyotes are basically small wolves. But like wolves, in fact, they don't really have humans as a template in their prey list. So you can get in trouble with coyotes, to be sure. If you habituate them and let them around you too closely - if you feed them, which is a disaster.
GREENE: Hmm. OK, good advice.
FLORES: One shouldn't - yes, one should never do anything like that. But there are only two records in American history of humans actually being killed by coyotes.
GREENE: Well, then why were they so hated and so hunted by people throughout the 20th century?
FLORES: Well, that's an interesting question. I think it had to do, for one thing, with no one bothering to conduct any science on the role that coyotes play in the natural world until really the 1930s. And the campaign to exterminate them - it really sort of began in the 19th century as part of the international fur trade when coyotes were being trapped in the West for the value of their pelts.
And then I think the livestock industry began to consider coyotes as sort of a junior wolf and therefore - besmirched with the reputation that wolves had as predators of livestock. I mean, as late as the 1970s, coyotes were actually ranked, in terms of American attitudes towards animals, at the very bottom of the list. That included things like cockroaches and rats.
GREENE: They were below cockroaches and rats? - like less popular than -
FLORES: They were below - yes.
GREENE: That's amazing.
FLORES: And it's really sort of the resurrection of wolves. When wolves become environmental media stars in the late 1970s and 1980s - that the reputation of coyotes begins to change. But there were a lot of factors that were playing a role. I mean, pop culture was one of them. Walt Disney changes attitudes about coyotes by producing six pro-coyote films in the 1960s.
GREENE: Very sympathetic - making them seem like - I mean, they're very relatable characters who are being, you know, under real threat.
FLORES: That's exactly right. I mean, and I was part of the generation that basically had my nature aesthetic shaped by sitting in front of the television and watching what amounted to the first nature documentaries that Walt Disney did. And of course, there was Wile E. Coyote, too, who managed to provide an appealing character for the public.
GREENE: You live in New Mexico outside Santa Fe, where I gather it's pretty common for you both to see and I guess, even more frequently, hear coyotes.
FLORES: Indeed so.
GREENE: What do they - I mean, I don't want to make you sort of make animal sounds or something. But, I mean, can you remind us what they sort of sound like?
FLORES: They have a sort of yodeling howl.
GREENE: Uh-huh.
FLORES: I mean, it sounds - everyone is familiar with a wolf howl, obviously. And a coyote howl is similar to that. But it's higher pitched. And it often concludes in sort of a series of barks or yaps.
GREENE: Feel free to do it if you want to. I don't want to hold you back.
FLORES: Well, it's kind of a howl, as I said. It's kind of a woooo. But then they end with wer wer wer wer with a bunch of yaps and yodels at the end. People refer to it as - it's manic. It's idiotic. It's like they're losing their minds. It's like they're ventriloquists.
You can hear one of them. And he sounds or she sounds like they're 15 in a particular spot.
GREENE: Uh-huh.
FLORES: So - and as I say in the book, I mean, my take on the coyote howl is that this is the original national anthem of North America.
GREENE: Mhmm.
FLORES: These animals have been howling this tribute to their love for being alive and being in America for more than a million years. And so I think we need to sort of pay homage to the fact that we've got an original national anthem. And it's provided by coyotes.
GREENE: Historian Dan Flores is author of the new book "Coyote America." Thanks so much.
FLORES: Thank you very much, David.
Quoted in Sidelights: has a biography that outdoes that of just about any animal they’ve ever heard about, a biography that in fact is about as compelling as our own.And: Coyotes have been living in close proximity to people for at least a thousand years and they know how to do it well. We’re the ones who need a bit of experience with co-existence with coyotes, but once we understand them and learn how to co-exist, there are many benefits and pleasures from having creatures as wild as interesting as coyotes in your world.
Marc Bekoff Ph.D. Marc Bekoff Ph.D.
Animal Emotions
Coyote America: The Evolution of Human-Animal Relationships
Dan Flores' book is an engaging story of a most adaptable animal and much more
Posted Jun 16, 2016
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"Persecuting an animal in a war you can’t win is an ideological act, not a decision based on science or understanding"
Dan Flores' new book Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History is a wonderful read. It's chock full of detailed information and stories about this most adaptable mammal, but it's really much more. For example, there is a lot of food for thought for conservation psychologists and anthrozoologists who study human-animal relationships, because coyotes are often involved in conflicts with humans because these amazing nonhuman animals (animals) can live just about anywhere, including in and around various human communities. I've studied coyotes for decades and work closely with Project Coyote, and I'm often astonished at how much I learn when new studies appear in the literature. Simply put, coyotes are fascinating beings who have figured out how to thrive in an increasingly human dominated world. As such, they are persecuted and killed by the tens of thousands each year, but they continue to bounce back in epic fashion.
The book's description about this most amazing survivor—in many ways misunderstood victims of their own success—reads:
With its uncanny night howls, unrivaled ingenuity, and amazing resilience, the coyote is the stuff of legends. In Indian folktales it often appears as a deceptive trickster or a sly genius. But legends don’t come close to capturing the incredible survival story of the coyote. As soon as Americans—especially white Americans—began ranching and herding in the West, they began working to destroy the coyote. Despite campaigns of annihilation employing poisons, gases, helicopters, and engineered epidemics, coyotes didn’t just survive, they thrived, expanding across the continent from Anchorage, Alaska, to New York’s Central Park. In the war between humans and coyotes, coyotes have won hands-down.
Coyote America is both an environmental and a deep natural history of the coyote. It traces both the five-million-year-long biological story of an animal that has become the “wolf” in our backyards, as well as its cultural evolution from a preeminent spot in Native American religions to the hapless foil of the Road Runner. A deeply American tale, the story of the coyote in the American West and beyond is a sort of Manifest Destiny in reverse, with a pioneering hero whose career holds up an uncanny mirror to the successes and failures of American expansionism.
An illuminating biography of this extraordinary animal, Coyote America isn’t just the story of an animal’s survival—it is one of the great epics of our time.
I was able to interview Dr. Flores about his new book and am pleased to share this discussion with you.
Why did you write Coyote America?
A fresh take on coyotes in a readable book aimed at a general audience seemed, to me, something we (and coyotes) have needed ever since wolves acquired environmental star power. While we were struggling to re-introduce gray and red wolves to their former ranges, coyotes were almost nonchalantly spreading across the continent and trotting down the streets of our biggest cities. I’ve been attracted to them for a host of reasons—their North American origins, their unusual intelligence, their resistance to domestication, the way they have served as our avatar stand-ins so frequently, and the way they hold a Darwinian mirror up to us—but I think it’s their success as a species that most made me want to write about them. That’s an unusual mammal story in the Anthropocene.
How did you become so fascinated by coyotes?
I’ve probably been preparing to write this book since I was 12 years old, which was when I saw a Walt Disney film—the first of several pro-coyote films Disney did in the 1960s and 1970s—called “The Coyote’s Lament.” As I write in Coyote America, I was probably a charter member of the first generation of Americans to have their environmental aesthetic shaped by nature programming on television. My problem seemed to be that growing up in Louisiana I was in a coyote-less landscape. I was utterly shocked a couple of years later when I took a dying rabbit call I’d bought into my local woods and, rather than the gray fox I was hoping to see, I got treated to the sight of a large, orange-eyed canid trotting very purposefully towards the tree I was sitting in. What I discovered at 14 years old was that coyotes were colonizing Louisiana and even hybridizing with red wolves in the Midsouth. It was like rounding a corner in the French Quarter, encountering a moose, and discovering that exotic creatures from faraway places were moving into your world. It seemed to me even at a young age that Coyote Manifest Destiny was a very cool thing to have happening around me.
What are your major messages?
Well, to be honest, I’m trying to re-arrange the furniture in people’s heads about coyotes. I want them to understand that we have another wolf in America, a small version that’s native to this continent and that has a biography that outdoes that of just about any animal they’ve ever heard about, a biography that in fact is about as compelling as our own. For people living in cities and in the South and Northeast, where coyotes are fairly recent arrivals, I want to ease their fears about an animal they’re probably unfamiliar with. Coyotes have been living in close proximity to people for at least a thousand years and they know how to do it well. We’re the ones who need a bit of experience with co-existence with coyotes, but once we understand them and learn how to co-exist, there are many benefits and pleasures from having creatures as wild as interesting as coyotes in your world. Finally, I’m hoping readers take away with them the futility and wrong-headedness of persecuting these animals the way we have for the past 125 years. Persecuting an animal in a war you can’t win is an ideological act, not a decision based on science or understanding.
What are your views on "predator control" by Wildlife Services?
"I drew no conclusion that Wildlife Services is looking hard for any new solution, and until taxpayers and politicians and activists force their hand, they’re going to be quite content to kill 80,000 coyotes a year from now on out."
Unlike the U.S. Forest Service, the Park Service, or even the Bureau of Land Management, today’s Wildlife Services is a federal agency with a single constituency, in its case the agricultural sector, and in the case of coyotes specifically, the sheep industry. In my interviews with Wildlife Services scientists for the book I came away thinking this is a primary reason they seem so tone-deaf to the criticism and outrage their staggering kill rates produce in the environmental community. Under different names Wildlife Services has also been around for more than a century, so there’s a dogged sense of inertia. I did emerge from my interviews at their Predator Research Facility believing that, in the case of coyotes, they know full well their poisons and traps and aerial gunning will never reduce coyote populations anywhere. And no one in his right mind believes that taking out problem animals will ever act as a deterrent to individual coyotes getting in trouble. But Wildlife Services’ “cooperators” expect them to do something, and killing is what seems to satisfy both the industry and the agency. I drew no conclusion that Wildlife Services is looking hard for any new solution, and until taxpayers and politicians and activists force their hand, they’re going to be quite content to kill 80,000 coyotes a year from now on out.
Do you think we'll ever get to a point where true coexistence is the rule, rather than the exception?
I think the trajectory of history is pretty clear at this point: the more we know about these animals the more we’ll appreciate and enjoy them, and as that happens more towns and communities and cities are going to learn how to co-exist with them. We have to make sure the coyotes remain a little wary of us, of course, or at least think we’re a bit too weird to trust fully, but the coyotes themselves already have the co-existence thing down pretty well. We’re the part of the equation that needs to work on things. Taking the long view, ultimately I’m buoyed by the knowledge that we humans co-existed very well with coyotes for some 15,000 years. It’s only been across the past 125-150 years that the relationship really went south. But the human/coyote interaction has been on a steady upward arc since about 1970.
What's your next project?
Actually the next project is already out. My book American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains, was published at almost the same time as Coyote America. It describes how, a little more than a century ago, we Americans destroyed one of the grand wildlife spectacles in the world—the single largest slaughter of wild animals discoverable in modern history, in fact—but also how we might re-create a 21st century Great Plains wildlife park of bison, gray wolves, wild horses, grizzlies, elk, bighorn sheep, and pronghorns, to my mind the most exciting conservation project in the West today. As for a project beyond these two, I’m not sure yet. Books are an awful lot of work so I’m waiting to see how these two fare. If there is another—and there probably will be—I suspect I’ll next turn to the wolf story in America.
Is there anything else you'd like to tell your audience?
I’m an advocate of the Marc Bekoff philosophy. We’re fellow travelers out of the same evolutionary stream as the animals inhabiting the world around us. If we look for it we will find something connate in them, important things that have to do with enjoying being alive and of this planet.
Human-animal interactions in the rage of humanity
Thank you Dan. I truly appreciate your taking the time to answer these questions.
I really enjoyed Coyote America and I hope it will receive a broad and global audience because it touches on numerous topics that are essential to consider in the age—or rage—of humanity, a time when human-animal interactions are strained to the max. Coming to understand coyote-human interactions is an excellent way to come to understand much of what's happening in today's human-dominated world in which nonhuman interests are far too frequently trumped by invasive humans.
Marc Bekoff's latest books are Jasper's Story: Saving Moon Bears (with Jill Robinson), Ignoring Nature No More: The Case for Compassionate Conservation, Why Dogs Hump and Bees Get Depressed: The Fascinating Science of Animal Intelligence, Emotions, Friendship, and Conservation, Rewilding Our Hearts: Building Pathways of Compassion and Coexistence, and The Jane Effect: Celebrating Jane Goodall (edited with Dale Peterson). The Animals' Agenda: Compassion and Coexistence in the Human Age (with Jessica Pierce) will be published in early 2017. (Homepage: marcbekoff.com; @MarcBekoff)
Quoted in Sidelights:
From Publishers Weekly: Flores's mix of edification and entertainment is a welcome antidote to a
creature so often viewed with fear.
Kirkus Reviews: Well written throughout and just the right length, Flores' book makes a welcome primer for living in a
land in which coyotes roam freely.
Natural History: The coyote stories in this book are among the best, and Flores is a master storyteller.
Dan Louie Flores
Born: October 19, 1948 in Vivian, Louisiana, United States
Other Names : Flores, Dan
Nationality: American
Contemporary Authors Online. Detroit: Gale, 2002. From Literature Resource Center.
Full Text: COPYRIGHT 2016 Gale, Cengage Learning
Updated:Apr. 19, 2002
Table of Contents
Listen
PERSONAL INFORMATION:
Family: Born October 19, 1948, in Vivian, LA; son of Willie Clyde, Jr., and Kathryn (Hale) Flores. Ethnicity: "White." Education: Northwestern State University of Louisiana, B.A., 1971, M.A., 1972; Texas A & M University, Ph.D., 1978. Memberships: American Association for Environmental History, American Historical Association, Western History Association, Montana State History Association, Texas Institute of Letters. Addresses: Home: P.O. Box 746, Florence, MT 59833. Office: Department of History, University of Montana, Missoula, MT 59812.
CAREER:
Freelance writer, columnist, and conservation editor for various outdoor and environmental magazines, 1971--; Texas Tech University, Lubbock, professor of history, 1978-92; University of Montana, Missoula, Hammond Professor of Western History, 1992--. Visiting professor, University of Wyoming, 1986.
AWARDS:
Townshend Whelen Prize, Digest Books, 1976; "best book on the West" citation, Westerners International, and "best book on Texas" citation, Texas State Historical Association, both 1984, for Jefferson and Southwestern Exploration: The Freeman and Custis Accounts of the Red River Expedition of 1806; Ray Allen Billington Prize, Western History Association, and H. Bailey Carroll Prize, Texas State Historical Association, both 1984, for "Ecology of the Red River in 1806"; Wrangler Award, National Cowboy Hall of Fame, 1997, for magazine article; finalist, best western short nonfiction, Western Writers, 1998; finalist citation, best contemporary nonfiction book, Western Writers, 2000, for Horizontal Yellow.
WORKS:
WRITINGS BY THE AUTHOR:
Jefferson and Southwestern Exploration: The Freeman and Custis Accounts of the Red River Expedition of 1806, University of Oklahoma Press (Norman, OK), 1984, 2nd edition revised, 2002.
Journal of an Indian Trader: Anthony Glass and the Texas Trading Frontier, 1790-1810, Texas A & M University Press (College Station, TX), 1985.
(With Amy Winton) Canyon Visions: Photographs and Pastels of the Texas Plains, Texas Tech University (Lubbock, TX), 1989.
Caprock Canyonlands: Journeys into the Heart of the Southern Plains, University of Texas Press (Austin, TX), 1990.
(With Eric Bolen) The Mississippi Kite: Portrait of a Southern Hawk, University of Texas Press (Austin, TX), 1993.
Horizontal Yellow: Nature and History in the Near Southwest, University of New Mexico, 1999.
The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains, University of Oklahoma Press (Norman, OK), 2001.
Contributor to history journals, environmental periodicals, nature writing anthologies; associate editor of Ethno-history, 1984-86.
WORKS IN PROGRESS:
"A book on the art of the Northern Rockies and Plains," 2003; "a book on bison and Plains Indians," for Yale University Press, 2003.
Sidelights
Dan Louie Flores once told CA: "My work on the history of the Southwest originates in my family's long interrelationship with the area--my French and Spanish ancestors have been in western Louisiana since the early eighteenth century--and in the strong sense of history and landscape that yet affects me. The latter is probably the reason I do what scholars now call environmental history. My discovery early in graduate school that Thomas Jefferson had dispatched into 'my' country a southwestern counterpart to the Lewis and Clark expedition and that since 1806 no one had bothered to assemble the documents and write the story of that Jeffersonian probe was tantamount to having my first book choose me to write it."
Flores more recently told CA: "As I look back over my work in light of current projects, I realize that the thread that strings through all of it is some instinctive (I don't think it is learned) fascination with the evolving historical relationships between human cultures and specific kinds of landscapes. To one degree or another, most of my articles and essays and all of my books have had something to do with regional ecologies (the Red River Valley, the Great Plains, the American West) and the endlessly intriguing ways that people have interacted with them across time. This approach has always involved a personal relationship with the land, as my early books were about the historical and environmental circumstances of the places where I lived. But more recently it has led me in something of an autobiographical direction, as I have explored my own reaction to place. So my recent and present work has become an experimental type of environmental and personal history, often (as with Caprock Canyonlands, Horizontal Yellow, and The Natural West) written in first-person. Thus my books and articles have combined the personal essay with historical research, the study of cultures with an effort to understand the ecological history of places.
"When I look at much of what I've written, I can't help but think that the country made me do it. Using words like 'sense of place' and 'continuum' makes it sound as if the environmentalist bent of my work has mystical origins; I rather think the sources lie in the concreteness of geology, landforms, skies, and the topophilic pull these have on all of us in some genetic way. Particularized environmental history related through closely observed personal essays that also feature social criticism thus seems to be my current direction."
Flores, Dan: COYOTE AMERICA
Kirkus Reviews.
(May 1, 2016):
COPYRIGHT 2016 Kirkus Media LLC
http://www.kirkusreviews.com/
Full Text:
Flores, Dan COYOTE AMERICA Basic (Adult Nonfiction) $27.99 6, 7 ISBN: 9780465052998
A thoughtful study of Canis latrans, that quintessential North American mammal."The coyote is a kind of special
Darwinian mirror, reflecting back insights about ourselves as fellow mammals." So writes historian Flores (Emeritus,
Western History/Univ. of Montana; American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains, 2016, etc.) from his
perch outside Santa Fe, where, he fondly recounts, he lives within howling distance of any number of the song dogs.
Many urbanites have assumed it to be an invader of ecological niches that has been colonizing cities only recently
owing to an annihilation of its wild habitat. They are to be forgiven, given that Los Angeles alone is estimated to harbor
5,000 coyotes, forcing Angelenos to "go Aztec and learn to live with them." However, writes the author, the coyote has
long been a fixture of human settlements in North America, drawn to them by "our close fellow travelers, the mice and
rats that flourish around and among us in profusion." That more coyotes are being seen in Chicago buses and on
rooftops in Queens would seem to be more a function of there being more ways to report on their movements, since
coyotes have been merrily swimming across the Mississippi for millennia as well. Flores' portrait sometimes carries
over into outright advocacy on issues such as bounty killing to control coyote numbers, but on the whole, it is a spirited
blend of history, anthropology, folklore, and biology that is capable of surprises; for instance, Flores writes in detail of a
kind of coexistence among wolves and coyotes, supposedly traditional enemies, that has emerged in places like
Yellowstone, even as the return of Canis lupus from the brink of extinction has come as a bit of future shock for the
smaller canids. Well written throughout and just the right length, Flores' book makes a welcome primer for living in a
land in which coyotes roam freely in, that is to say, the Coyote America of his title.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Flores, Dan: COYOTE AMERICA." Kirkus Reviews, 1 May 2016. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA450833029&it=r&asid=774fa4252ff85f38a17442b23059b066.
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Flores, Dan. Coyote America: A Natural &
Supernatural History
Cynthia Lee Knight
Library Journal.
141.7 (Apr. 15, 2016): p110.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Flores, Dan. Coyote America: A Natural & Supernatural History. Basic. Jun. 2016.288p. illus. bibliog. index. ISBN
9780465052998. $27.99; ebk. ISBN 9780465098538. SCI
Whether referred to as a "prairie wolf," "desert dog," or "junior wolf," the coyote is an exceptionally resilient canine
that has spread from its original territory in the deserts of the Southwest to every state in the continental United States
and now thrives in some of our largest cities. Flores (emeritus, Western U.S. history, Univ. of Montana; American
Serengeti; The Natural West) considers the animal from several perspectives: its evolutionary history and the biological
adaptations that have enabled it to endure decades of brutal persecution, as well as its onceprominent status as a deity
in a number of Native American cultural traditions. In a straightforward style, the author unpacks the myths and urban
legends surrounding the coyote and conveys his admiration and respect for this incredibly intelligent predator.
VERDICT This title would make an excellent companion to Hope Ryden's God's Dog and Shreve Stockton's The Daily
Coyote and is highly recommended for natural history enthusiasts interested in moving beyond the conventional
wisdom about coyotes to gain a deeper understanding of their presence in our midstCynthia Lee Knight, Hunterdon
Cty. Historical Soc., Flemington, NJ
Knight, Cynthia Lee
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Knight, Cynthia Lee. "Flores, Dan. Coyote America: A Natural & Supernatural History." Library Journal, 15 Apr.
2016, p. 110+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA449543088&it=r&asid=70960879056d16df6feff59ce02fc5ba.
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Coyote America: A Natural & Supernatural
History
Publishers Weekly.
263.14 (Apr. 4, 2016): p75.
COPYRIGHT 2016 PWxyz, LLC
http://www.publishersweekly.com/
Full Text:
Coyote America: A Natural & Supernatural History
Dan Flores. Basic, $27.99 (288p)
ISBN 9780465052998
Flores (American Serengeti), emeritus professor of Western history at the University of Montana, looks at the coyote
and its history on the North American continent in this educational volume. Having lived for a decade in the pinonjuniper
mesas south of Santa Fe, N.Mex., "the evolutionary heartland of America's native canines," Flores considers the
coyote's howl "the original national anthem of North America"one that dates back "nearly 1 million years." He traces
the animal's roots, giving lessons on both physiology and mythology. "As a literary character," Flores notes, the coyote
is a "complex figure full of nuances of all sorts" as well as a "trickster who is forever falling for the oldest trick in the
book." Flores also presents accounts of Coyotes in urban environments and their depictions in pop culture. For
example, in Chicago during the 2007 heat wave, a coyote walked into a sandwich shop and jumped onto a freezer to
cool down, to the surprise and amusement of employees and customers. Similarly, considerations of fictional characters
such as Wile E. Coyote, introduced by Warner Bros, in 1949, provide entertaining counterpoints to the coyote's status
as "North America's oldest surviving deity." Flores's mix of edification and entertainment is a welcome antidote to a
creature so often viewed with fear. Illus. Agent: Melissa Chinchillo, Fletcher & Co. (June)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Coyote America: A Natural & Supernatural History." Publishers Weekly, 4 Apr. 2016, p. 75. General OneFile,
go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA448902744&it=r&asid=592ad43e826e2a99e2d76dfb76519df9.
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Flores, Dan. Visions of the Big Sky: Painting and
Photographing the Northern Rocky Mountain
West
Valerie Nye
Library Journal.
135.12 (July 2010): p81.
COPYRIGHT 2010 Library Journals, LLC. A wholly owned subsidiary of Media Source, Inc. No redistribution
permitted.
http://www.libraryjournal.com/
Full Text:
Flores, Dan. Visions of the Big Sky: Painting and Photographing the Northern Rocky Mountain West. Univ. of
Oklahoma. 2010. 248p. illus, bibliog, index. ISBN 9780806138978. $45. FiNE ARTS
Flores (A.B. Hammond Chair in Western History, Univ. of Montana) has published numerous books on topics
concerning western U.S. landscapes and environmental issues. This beautiful look at the landscapes of the northern
Rocky Mountain region (Montana and Wyoming) addresses regional issues and history related to the entire West and
Southwest of the United States. Flores's essays (miniature lectures) explore topics of concern to the West while
providing biographical information and historical context for artists whose works depict this region. The book's
chapters are a chronological progression of art, beginning with Native American rock drawings and moving through to
Ansel Adams's 1940s photographs. The 140 color and blackandwhite images are a catalog of landscape and animal
paintings (Audubon, Russell, Moran, Remington, Dixon) and photographed landscapes (Curtis, Throssel, Cameron,
Adams). VERDICT With thoughtful and wellresearched essays, this title is recommended for art and history students
from high school through college and others interested in exploring the history of the West and Southwest through
artwork.Valerie Nye, C011. of Santa Fe, NM
Nye, Valerie
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Nye, Valerie. "Flores, Dan. Visions of the Big Sky: Painting and Photographing the Northern Rocky Mountain West."
Library Journal, July 2010, p. 81. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA231087965&it=r&asid=775b9ab6e547fddda0b1ba521ad752b2.
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Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural
History
Laurence A. Marschall
Natural History.
124.5 (June 2016): p46.
COPYRIGHT 2016 Natural History Magazine, Inc.
http://naturalhistorymag.com/
Full Text:
Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History
by Dan Flores, Basic Books, 2016; 288 pages; $27.99
Between 1915 and 0947, by its own account, the U.S. Fish and Wildlife Service shot, gassed, or poisoned nearly two
million coyotes. For much of the early twentieth century, this attempt to eliminate large predators had the blessing of
ranchers and conservationists alike. Sheepmen, with some justification, saw coyotes and wolves as a serious threat to
their livelihood and even naturalist and nature essayist John Burroughs wrote that predators "certainly needed killing"
so that more "useful and beautiful game" like elk and deer could be preserved.
The war against coyotes, one of the main themes of this absorbing book by historian Dan Flores, was, from a twentyfirst
century viewpoint, both ruthless and useless. Beginning in 1915, when Congress hired three hundred hunters to fan
out over the west, predator eradication developed into an industrial enterprise that the author grimly labels "species
cleansing." The effort included a federal Eradication Methods Laboratory in Denver, which specialized in brewing
lethal poisons for predators and finding ways to administer them most efficiently. A favorite method was to dope horse
carcasses with sodium fluoroacetate, an extract of an Australian pea plant, and scatter them in the countryside. Coyotes
feeding on the tainted meat would feel nothing for a while, but would die an hour or two later, far enough from the
carcass so that other coyotes would not associate the meat with danger. An even more effective method, inspired by
World War II weapons research, involved explosive cartridges filled with cyanide and baited with coyoteattractants,
causing nearly instant death and no outward signs of poisoning. "It left," Flores writes, "pretty corpses."
Yet coyotes survived and even flourished. Flores attributes their resilience in part to their innate intelligence and their
ability to learn from one another. Some aboriginal cultures knew this well and invested the coyote with supernatural
powers. Modern science has identified several natural evolutionary adaptations that have contributed to the coyote's
success. The first is a flexible social structure that enables coyotes to act both collectively and as individuals, adapting
quickly and appropriately to external threats and changing environments. The second is a lengthy childhood, which
makes it possible for young coyotes to learn from recent experiences of their parents. Finally, and most remarkably,
coyotes are able to react to species threats by birthing more pups, increasing litter size by as much as a factor of three.
And so, as the U.S. waged war on coyotes in the west, the animals simply multiplied and moved east, spreading
through woodlands and along highways, establishing residence in every state except Hawaii by 2010, when they were
seen trotting contentedly among the housing developments and golf courses of Delaware. They live in cities far from
the lone prairie, with an estimated 2,000 in Chicago, and more than 5,000 in Los Angeles. In 2006, New York
newspapers were filled with photos of Hal, a coyote that showed up in Central Park, and in 2015, three coyotes tried to
make a home on the campus of Columbia University. "Everyone in America is now living...in a sea of coyotes," notes
the author, so that "just about everyone has a coyote story." The coyote stories in this book are among the best, and
Flores is a master storyteller.
BY LAURENCE A. MARSCHALL
Marschall, Laurence A.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Marschall, Laurence A. "Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History." Natural History, June 2016, p. 46.
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Visions of the big sky; painting and
photographing the northern Rocky Mountain
West
Reference & Research Book News.
25.4 (Nov. 2010):
COPYRIGHT 2010 Ringgold, Inc.
http://www.ringgold.com/
Full Text:
9780806138978
Visions of the big sky; painting and photographing the northern Rocky Mountain West.
Flores, Dan.
U. of Oklahoma Press
2010
234 pages
$45.00
Hardcover
The Charles M. Russell Center series on art and photography of the American West; v.5
N8214
Observing that depictions of the Big Sky country of the northen Rocky Mountain West seem to have been coopted by
writers, Flores (history, U. of Montana, Missoula) addresses why the visual artistic history of the northern Rockies is
relatively unknown compared with that of California or the Southwest. To remedy this situation, 25 essays showcase
imagery relating to the Old/New West as visualized by Native Americans, Lewis and Clark, George Catlin, Karl
Bodner, Alfred Jacob Miller, Audubon, Albert Bierstadt, Frederic Remington, Charles M. Russell, among other welland
lesserknown artists. Photographers whose works are featured include L. A. Huffman, William Henry Jackson,
Edward S. Curtis, and Richard Throssel (of Indian heritage). The 10 x 10 " volume includes a bibliography. Every
collection of western art must have this splendid characterization of a romantic land.
([c]2010 Book News, Inc., Portland, OR)
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
"Visions of the big sky; painting and photographing the northern Rocky Mountain West." Reference & Research Book
News, Nov. 2010. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
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The Natural West: Environmental History in the
Great Plains and Rocky Mountains
Derek R. Larson
Oregon Historical Quarterly.
103.3 (Fall 2002): p391.
COPYRIGHT 2002 Oregon Historical Society
http://www.ohs.org/homepage.html
Full Text:
The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains By Dan Flores
University of Oklahoma Press, Norman, 2001. Photographs, maps, notes, bibliography, index. 297 pages. $29.95 cloth.
WITH THE NATURAL WEST, Dan Flores, A.B. Hammond Professor of Western History at the University of
Montana, offers a fine example of the application of environmental history to the West while simultaneously raising a
host of questions guaranteed to challenge those already familiar with the field of environmental history. The
introductory essay, "Nature's Children: Environmental History as Human History," sets the theoretical tone for the
volume by advancing the ideas that environmental history must be rooted in the longue duree and the deep study of
place while also recognizing certain human evolutionary traits at play in our interactions with nonhuman nature.
Properly understanding the environmental history of the West, argues Flores, means rejecting the traditional mythology
of the fall from the garden (or the displacement of natureloving Natives by naturehating European conquerors, in this
case) and accepting historical evidence of an environmental continuity with the distant past, the story of "a species
doing now exactly what evolution so precisely shaped us to do all along" (p. 18). Concluding that "the causes of the
human assault on the world ... are evolutionary and mammalian" (p. 19), Flores suggests that it is our reticence to
acknowledge our kinship with nature that has prevented us from recognizing that the limits of carrying capacities,
ecosystem health, and bioregional stability apply to ourselves as well as all other forms of life. Only now, at this stage
in our evolutionary history, are humans beginning to recognize their essentially animal nature and the constraints that
may imply, a process that environmental history can help to move forward by asking the kinds of questions that Flores
poses in the collection's other essays.
As the subtitle suggests, the remainder of the book is not a comprehensive environmental history of the West but rather
an exploration of environmental history in the West. Treating topics as varied as the 1806 Red River expedition of
naturalist Peter Custis, the cultural history of the grizzly bear, Mormon natural resource policy, and the dramatic
contrasts in our aesthetic and economic appreciation of the two dominant natural features of the Westthe Great Plains
and the Rocky MountainsFlores skillfully weaves together examples that both support his theoretical approach and
illustrate the importance of place in environmental history. In fact, place provides a context for the entire book. The
author seeks to connect the practice of history to realities "on the ground"public policy, personal behavior, cultural
understandingnot by reverting to an outdated environmental determinism but by drawing on the work of other
historians and theorists to argue that environmental history should bring us to "think about ourselves as inhabitants of
places, of watersheds and topographies, of an evolving piece of space (with an evolving set of fellow inhabitants)
different from every other one" (p. 106). Thus the environmental history of the West writ large must be in a sense a
mosaic, a series of tales about various groups of humans playing out a common evolutionary story in a variety of
settings that, taken together, can tell us a great deal about both who we are and how we have adapted (and adapted to)
the places in which we live.
Throughout the collection, Flores offers both personal introductions, opening many of the essays with his own
reflections on the subject locations, and consistent grounding in the broader historiographies of the West and
environmental history. The works of Walter Prescott Webb, Frederick Jackson Turner, and the lesser known James
Malin are cited as frequently as contemporary environmental historians such as Donald Worster and Richard White,
lending a sense of intellectual continuity to the package while also allowing it to serve as something of a primer on the
field. Combined with an excellent bibliography, the essays collected in The Natural West provide a provocative
introduction to the practice of environmental history and its application to the West. Already appearing on college
reading lists, the book should find a broad general audience and serve well the author's goal of reaching "the student of
the West, the interested general aficionado of Western nature and Western life" (p. 8). Its solid scholarship and hopeful
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tone should also be welcome additions to the ongoing debates over the place of nature in human history and how our
understanding of the past should shape future environmental policy and practice.
Reviewed by Derek R. Larson
The College of St. Benedict/St. John's
University, Collegeville, Minnesota
Larson, Derek R.
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Larson, Derek R. "The Natural West: Environmental History in the Great Plains and Rocky Mountains." Oregon
Historical Quarterly, Fall 2002, p. 391. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA96402185&it=r&asid=0fa2159e6e10c9d4d80256c7bfb2d795.
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Caprock Canyonlands: Journeys Into the Heart of
the Southern Plains
John B. Wright
The Geographical Review.
88.2 (Apr. 1998): p302.
COPYRIGHT 1998 American Geographical Society
https://www.amergeog.org
Full Text:
By DAN FLORES. xi and 200 pp.; ills., bibliog., index. Austin: University of Texas Press, 1997. $24.95 (cloth [1990]),
ISSN 0292711212; $19.95 (paper), ISBN 0292725051.
"If the lesson of history is change, and that of science is to show consequences, what is lesson of nature for human
societies?" This is the obvious yet eternally mystifying question that drives this exactingly researched and wonderfully
written book by the environmental historian Dan Flores.
Caprock Canyonlands is geography with its boots on and with sweat dripping from its thoughtful brow. The scholarship
is there, but little space is wasted on doubting the relevance of studying large, rangy questions of land and life. Flores
prefers to assume that the search for a balance between development and environmental protection is an obvious
enough calling and that there is sufficient ideological room for work with a more traditional, geographically grounded,
cultural perspective.
This lack of theoretical bet hedging is refreshing. Such an absence of structural artifice is a risky path in academic
circles these days. Unapologetic caring for a landscape is often dismissed as simplistic, unrigorous, elitist, and just
plain silly. Yet, in the more humane chambers of our geographer hearts, many of us know with certainty that every
landscape needs its cleartimbred voices, its defenders willing to speak openly of stewardship and sustainability.
Analyzing and defining these elusive concepts remains vital, as does the real work of engaging complex matters of
political economy to find equitable, policybased solutions. Fielddriven work that intelligently explores the human role
in changing the face of the earth is, however, always of use and is seldom dated. For those who believe that exploring
landscapes and evoking concern for their future is a noble enough purpose for a book, I strongly recommend Caprock
Canyonlands.
In this fine volume, Flores has the confidence and knowledge to speak on behalf of a littleknown reach of canyon
country that breaks the margins of the southern Great Plains and the hearts of those who try to claim it. He shows us
that the llano estacado of West Texas and eastern New Mexico is much more than a fiatearth society. In this entrada we
discover the eroding edges of the southern Plains, the steepwalled cliff faces and biotic surprises of the caprock
canyonlands. This is another "place no one knew" one as endangered and achingly beautiful as any remote, thinly
peopled, and exploited part of the world.
Flores presents us with "a natural history of the spirit of a place in the American West" (p. xi). He succeeds. But the real
purpose here is landscape conservation. Yet this book is no offputting environmentalist rant. The author wants us to
know this place: its rocks, reptiles, and Clovisera hunters; its wolves, bison, and slowwitted cattle; the sound of
Comanche war parties and Comanchero caravans; the conflicting dreams and dustblown lives of West Texas pioneers
and Mexican warriors. The text is rich in facts yet flowing. The voice shifts from precise natural science, to Ed
Abbeyesque bawdiness, to Sauerian wisdom without sounding strained. Flores is honest enough to allow all of his
thoughts to come through. We accompany him across this terrain and quickly find that he is good company
opinionated, steeped in local knowledge, literate, skilled with maps, and caring.
Along the way we learn ample amounts of geography. We learn that sand sage reduces rheumatism and that boiled
cottonwood bark makes a syrup that, when poured over a broken limb, makes a durable, twomonth cast. We find out
much about the interplay of structural geology and water in arid lands and of the depletion of fossil water from the
Ogallala aquifer. Flores reminds us that even Walter Prescott Webb, the author of The Great Plains (1931), later
recanted his view that human culture is shaped by the desiccated realities of this biome. In 1957 Webb retreated and
called the Plains a "mirage" in which limits are largely ignored. Flores states his mind: "[T]he idea that we have
adapted to the western environment is a palpable fiction" (p. 170). He wants to remind a new generation of readers and
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settlers what painful histories come from overzealous, illconsidered attempts at engineering away elemental matters of
earth, air, fire, and water. This is a wellplowed furrow in the literature, yet Flores makes a thoroughly researched,
indelible contribution.
Caprock Canyonlands is in the mold of some fine books: Bill deBuys's Enchantment and Exploitation: The Life and
Hard Times of a New Mexico Mountain Range (1985), Richard Manning's Grassland (1995), Edward Abbey's Desert
Solitaire (1968), and William Bowden's Frog Mountain Blues (1987). The threats to Flores's bone country are familiar
and many gravel and caliche mining, oil and gas development, dams, dumps, and poor management of livestock.
Flores explores efforts to conserve scientifically and scenically important portions of the canyonlands from destructive
exploitation. With this comes the only weakness in the book. The story of failed national park, state park, and
wilderness legislation is deftly told. The marvelous but probably illfated proposals of Bret Wallach and Deborah and
Frank Popper to turn the plains back into a "Buffalo Commons" are readvanced. But Flores only touches on the work of
The Nature Conservancy and turns away from a serious discussion of the most proven approaches to landscape
conservation in the West. The use of land trust techniques such as conservation easements and land exchanges receive
no mention. But this detracts little; Flores has done his job. The goal of saving this marvelous, underappreciated
expanse has now been stated purposefully and with fieldhoned eloquence.
Flores feels the ache from the waning of a world. He closes with both despair and hope. Environmental awareness, he
believes, may be "nothing more than the anguished thrashings of a sentient species[,] . . . of the smart monkey whose
sticks won't fit together and won't reach the highest fruit" (p. 175). Yet he ends the book with the wish that our kind
finally accept "what a firm and potentially symbiotic grip our toes and terra firma have on one another."
Place this book on your shelf next to other favorites that advocate land stewardship. But keep it close by. In the sturdy
hands of Dan Flores, this old saw emerges as a fresh challenge. The maps, photographs, and paintings are gorgeous.
The writing is fine. Look elsewhere for landscapeconservation techniques. But read deeply into this volume to recall
what drew many of us into our trade in the first place. JOHN B. WRIGHT, New Mexico State University
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
Wright, John B. "Caprock Canyonlands: Journeys Into the Heart of the Southern Plains." The Geographical Review,
vol. 88, no. 2, 1998, p. 302+. General OneFile, go.galegroup.com/ps/i.do?
p=ITOF&sw=w&u=schlager&v=2.1&id=GALE%7CA54657551&it=r&asid=92e9d380c1963de20a253ba33043eb59.
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The Mississippi Kite
Clayton M. White
Wilson Bulletin.
107.1 (Mar. 1995): p188.
COPYRIGHT 1995 Wilson Ornithological Society
http://www.wilsonsociety.org/
Full Text:
This is an enjoyable book; it transcends the usual tiresome and sterile reading of life history data. Two chapters in
particular (covering 30 pages) make this book delightful. One chapter deals with the Mississippi Kite (Ictinia
mississippiensis) in History and the other with Conservation and Management. The History chapter has four subsections:
(1) Western Exploration and Discovery of the Mississippi Kite, (2) In the Southern Wilderness; Wilson, Long,
and Audubon, (3) The Pacific Railroad Surveys and After, and (4) Mississippi Kites and TwentiethCentury
Environmental Change. Section titles give an excellent idea of their content. The detective work behind the information
is stimulating. For example, while the kite's scientific diagnosis and naming is credited to Alexander Wilson in 1811, it
was actually discovered the first described (without being given a name and accompanying Latin description) following
the 1806 expedition to the Red River. The results and findings of that survey, however, were largely overshadowed by
the seemingly more glamorous Lewis and Clark expedition, and thus the report of the Red River expedition was
delayed in publishing. Only 200 copies were ever produced. The naturalist of the Red River expedition was Peter
Custis, discoverer of the kite. He commented on his apparently subadult specimen (the wouldbe type specimen) as "A
species of Falco which I have not seen described" and then gave a very exacting description but only in English. Too
bad he did not follow the rules of nomenclature of the day and so was robbed of the privilege of naming a new species.
The above events give a favor of the interesting material covered. The chapter on Conservation likewise has four subsections:
(1) Kites in Cites, (2) Predators and People, (3) Winter Problems, and (4) Protected Areas. This chapter, in
addition to discussing contemporary problems such as DDT and landscape alterations, also reviews historical aspects.
The bulk of the book (some 100 pages) covers standard life history information with chapters on Breeding and Nesting,
Raising Young, and Food and Feeding. There is an extensive literature reference with 106 citations. In the introductory
chapter a lengthy discussion, revolving more or less around two range maps, treats in good detail the changing nature
of the species distribution and status. This chapter complements nicely Appendix C which reviews the past decade of
sightings state by state. The Mississippi Kite is a species that has benefited in this century from more recent habitat
alterations, having even moved into urban settings. The pre1980s data relative to distribution and occurrence is treated
in less detail and scattered throughout the book. There are delightful discussions of sexual size dimorphism, diets and
helpers at the nest. Unfortunately, the treatment of size dimorphism largely limits itself to the hypothesis of food habit
relationships as a driving force for size dimorphism (gender size differences are slight in raptors that feed on slow,
easily caught food and dimorphism increases and is greatest in raptors that feed on agile, hard to catch food). Only lip
service is given to the many other theories and especially the currently more favored and compelling sexual selection
and female dominance ideas to explain the reversed sexual size dimorphism of raptors. Kin selection and the role of
juvenile plumaged birds in nest helping is described and in fact helpers, which occurred at 17% of a sample of 209
nests, are mainly yearlings.
This book is wellwritten, easy to read, and contains new information with some provocative discussions. The price is
hard to beat in today's market, and I highly recommend it even for nonraptorphiles.
CLAYTON M. WHITE
Source Citation (MLA 8
th Edition)
White, Clayton M. "The Mississippi Kite." Wilson Bulletin, vol. 107, no. 1, 1995, p. 188+. General OneFile,
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D'Onofrio on Flores, 'American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains'
Author:
Dan Flores
Reviewer:
Karen D'Onofrio
Dan Flores. American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains. Lawrence: University Press of Kansas, 2016. 222 pp. $24.95 (cloth), ISBN 978-0-7006-2227-6.
Reviewed by Karen D'Onofrio (University of Colorado Boulder)
Published on H-Environment (August, 2016)
Commissioned by David T. Benac
In American Serengeti, Dan Flores transports the reader back in time and across the globe as he draws comparisons between the Great Plains grasslands of North America and the savanna grasslands (the Serengeti) of East Africa. With the big history/deep history approach that Flores employs so well, the reader is taken on a natural historical journey through the Great Plains ecosystems spanning millions of years. On this journey, he explores the evolving history of the Great Plains ecosystem by focusing on the relationships between seven very distinct mammals and the changing environment. Flores pays particular attention to the changes brought about by natural causes and human influences.
The first chapter charts the arrival of Homo sapiens (humans) into North America during the Pleistocene epoch. Their arrival profoundly altered the North American landscape and ecosystems, but these early humans were, according to Flores, the first to truly experience “untouched nature” (p. 20). Flores then proceeds to describe the human presence on the plains in three phases. The first phase focuses on deep history and charts the arrival of humans around fourteen thousand years ago and the subsequent demise of the megafauna. The second phase describes the Archaic people who “perfected a long-term sustainable life way on the plains” (p. 21). These people introduced the bow and arrow, developed farming practices, and established trading networks with other groups of Native peoples. And finally the last phase, described as the “modern era,” witnesses the arrival of Europeans and the reintroduction of the horse and other domesticated animals from Europe. Flores concludes that the Great Plains is an anthropogenic environment—a landscape entirely created by human activities. This is just one of the themes that Flores revisits throughout the book.
Flores covers a lot of ground in this book. In subsequent chapters dealing with large North American mammals, he explores a variety of themes and draws on methodologies employed in intellectual and cultural history. The result is a rich history of the Great Plains. Many of the megafauna disappeared at the end of the Pleistocene, but the pronghorn and the coyote managed to survive, despite the efforts of humans to hunt or exterminate them.[1] Flores suggests that the ability of these mammals to adapt to the presence of humans and ecological changes led to their survival. The chapter on the horse explores its reintroduction into North America by the Spanish during the modern era. Flores discusses how Native tribes co-opted the horse to use in their hunting traditions and trade networks. He goes on to explore the ontology of human reactions to wild animals in his chapter on the grizzly bear, arguing that human attitudes and fears toward wild animals emerged from a deep culture history. It is these attitudes and fears, Flores argues, that have shaped the Great Plains landscape, especially in how humans view carnivores as in need of extermination. The chapter on the bison is timely, considering the recent nomination of the American bison to the status of the national mammal.[2] The story of the bison and its “rescue” from near extinction is well known, but as Flores points out, Native peoples also play a large role in the successful reintroduction of the bison into the plains landscape. The final animal chapter focuses on efforts to reintroduce the wolf and laments the reasons for the Mountain West as the location for recovery efforts rather than the highly cultivated landscape of the Great Plains. Ironically, the very same federal institutions responsible for the carnivore extermination programs of the early twentieth century undertook the successful reintroduction of the wolf during the latter part of that century.
The final chapter explores the visions and imaginations of the Great Plains, from the many perspectives of nineteenth-century artists and writers, to the federal government, conservationists, and biologists of the twenty-first century. Flores charts the changing attitude toward the environment by the federal government agencies from one based in preserving land for its scenic values, to one focused on preserving the land for its ecological value. And finally, Flores discusses a plan put forward by conservation biologists, which identifies an area in eastern Montana as the most likely place for a restored “American Serengeti.”[3] Flores acknowledges, however, the challenges ahead if the plan is to materialize, not least the challenge of convincing ranchers to accept the reintroduction of large carnivores into the humanized landscape.
Flores clearly identifies the culprit Homo sapiens as the species responsible for the many changes to the Great Plains landscape, but he also offers us hope and notes that “we” can make amends for the wrongs of the past. Although Flores references the similarities between the large mammals found in North America and the African Serengeti, these connections could have benefited from some deeper analysis. Flores might have, for example, extended his discussion to include the different attitudes and approaches to wildlife and land conservation in Africa compared to the United States and considered whether the United States could learn anything about conservation and rewilding efforts from other nations.
Ultimately, American Serengeti is a fascinating and approachable book that is suitable for students, scholars, and nonacademic audiences who enjoy reading about the intersections between natural history and the environmental history of the American West.
Notes
[1]. See also Dan Flores, Coyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History (New York: Basic Books, 2016).
[2]. See U.S. Department of the Interior, “15 Facts about Our National Mammal: The American Bison,” (blog), May 9, 2016, https://www.doi.gov/blog/15-facts-about-our-national-mammal-american-bison.
[3]. Edward O. Wilson, Half-Earth: Our Planet’s Fight for Life (New York: Liveright, 2016), 179-180.
Printable Version: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showpdf.php?id=46948
Citation: Karen D'Onofrio. Review of Flores, Dan, American Serengeti: The Last Big Animals of the Great Plains. H-Environment, H-Net Reviews. August, 2016.
URL: http://www.h-net.org/reviews/showrev.php?id=46948
BOOKS BOOK REVIEWS
'Coyote America' takes a fresh look at a well known enemy
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Ever since the first settlers arrived in America, the relationship between humans and coyotes has been hostile. Now, author Dan Flores explores the idea of coexistence.
By Steve Donoghue JULY 14, 2016
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Author Dan Flores knows that in the popular mythology of the American West, coyotes are those “ever-trotting, golden-eyed creatures of vertical red canyons and sere deserts,” but he opens his compassionate and captivating new book, Coyote America, very pointedly in a different setting altogether: suburban Louisiana, where he had a boyhood encounter with a pair of coyotes while taking in the morning newspaper.
That ubiquity in the haunts of humans is the theme running throughout the book. For the thousands of years that humans have lived in North America, coyotes have been seeking out cities and settlements in order to make their homes on the peripheries. Coyotes prowled the side-streets of Aztec cities like Tenochtitlan 600 years ago much as they prowl the side-streets of Cape Cod today. Their yipping, singing cries filled the nighttime for 19th-century prairie settlers just as they do for Boston residents living near the Arnold Arboretum or Mount Auburn Cemetery. “Close encounters with coyotes,” writes Flores, “have now become the country's most common large-wildlife experience.”
"Coyote America" is a history of the coyote-mankind encounter, which has been one of bloodshed and slaughter for most of its length. Mark Twain may have famously characterized the species Canis latrans as “a long, slim, sick and sorry-looking skeleton ... a living, breathing allegory of Want,” but humans were hunting, trapping, and attempting to exterminate coyotes long before Twain was born, and their efforts have persisted into the present day: In the United States alone, the ironically named Wildlife Services still kill some 80,000 coyotes every year. Many of Flores's descriptions of the details of these extermination campaigns are not for the faint of heart, and it is depressing to think that even these levels of inventive savagery were eclipsed by the American attempt to exterminate the coyote's distant cousin, the wolf – a campaign covered in gruesome detail in Jon Coleman's aptly-titled 2004 book "Vicious."
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Bounty offers and open killing seasons have been common throughout American history, Flores writes, and the rhetoric involved was often hysterical. “Farmers, ranchers, writers for any manner of national publication, and eventually employees of almost every state and federal agency involved with wild predators seemed almost to vie with one another in labeling the coyote a vile species of vermin that should not be allowed to breathe up good air.”
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Flores goes on to point out, with the gentle understatement that underpins much of "Coyote America," that at a distance, “the hatred seems hard to square with anything rational.”
And yet, as the coyote's abundance in American folklore and indigenous mythology attests, all such efforts have been in vain. Coyotes are notoriously smart and adaptable – much like the humans who have for so long tried to wipe them out (Flores points out that both Homo sapiens andCanis latrans are both young enough species to make this almost a kind of sibling rivalry) – and even the most aggressive “management” programs tend to fail. Reducing the total population of coyotes in a given area by 70 percent, Flores openly enthuses, “ – not just once but year after year after year – produced no appreciable effect on coyote population density!”
Intriguingly, coyotes owe a big part of the success of their city-infiltration to the attempts of those cities to address the problem of roving canines. For most of American history, coyotes were prevented from roaming streets and playgrounds and city dumps by another distant cousin, Canis familiaris. But in the late 19th- and early 20th-century, urban centers of all sizes began toughening their stance on stray dogs, and as city pounds and leash laws were strengthened and stray dogs began to disappear, coyotes, who were always waiting on the outskirts, watching for their chances, began slipping back in.
Where strolling lovebirds in the Central Park of Edith Wharton's days sometimes distastefully mentioned roving stray dogs, their 21st-century counterparts are far more likely to see roving coyotes at twilight.
The good news suffusing Flores's book is that the reaction of such onlookers would likely take a different tone today than in the past. When Hope Ryden wrote her coyote book, "God's Dog," back in 1975, the pitch of righteous indignation she reached about the US Department of Agriculture's federally sanctioned war on coyotes (“Fifty-five million years of Canis latrans evolution they would snuff out by any obscene means at their command,” she wrote) was amplified by a sense of public disengagement.
But despite the fact that American ranchers continue their war on the coyote (a war Flores assures us is hopeless in any case), in most other segments of the population, the increasing appearance of coyotes in the daily urban experience is a welcome thing, bringing a touch of the exotic in a very familiar form. Flores can end his book on a note of hope that's very rare in 21st-century natural histories of any species, including our own. In "Coyote America," he warns us, “coexistence with coyotes is an essential lesson.” His exuberant book is the lesson plan.
Quoted in Sidelights: Flores stares long and deeply into the coyote's eyes, returning to us with cultural treasures both sparkling and lyrical.
And: Coyote the god is fascinating, Flores shows that coyote the socially flexible omnivore deserves our highest respect. Even more than those of gray wolves, the genetic endowments of coyotes lend them stunning versatility in most ecosystems
Fresh Fellow Travelers
By Justin Hickey (July 1, 2016) No Comment
Coyote America26195972
By Dan Flores
Basic Books, 2016
My first and most astonishing encounter with a coyote happened several years ago, in Boston’s Arnold Arboretum. Beginning one evening around dusk, a friend and I had been soft-stepping along the institution’s 281 acres of winding paths with our necks craned, looking for owls in the canopy. As night fell, we saw dozens of bats in flickering flight above us, and heard a Lollapalooza of frog calls from three tiny ponds. No owls, though.
Once febrile super-darkness descended, and our chances for a quality glimpse of anything vanished, we headed for the Arborway exit. We approached the pathway to the street adjacent to a lengthy iron gate, which loomed in silhouette thanks to the orange wash of the streetlights. Then, perhaps thirty feet ahead of us, a mammalian wisp scurried, with head and tail low, before the stretch of gate. My friend and I stood in awe at both the brevity and majesty of the sighting, which seemed like the night’s own quick finger-work.
I’ve seen coyotes twice since, each time just as briefly: in the Breakheart Reservation of Saugus, Massachusetts during full daylight, and once more in the Arboretum at night. In both instances the small canids appeared as fleet-footed slips, like nature’s stagehands accidentally glimpsed. Only my first encounter felt truly iconic.
And yet, to hear author Dan Flores describe modern meetings between humans and urban coyotes, I’m surprised to have never seen one on my front porch. A professor of Western History at the University of Montana, Flores traces the natural and supernatural history of the country’s most cunning and versatile predator—that walks on four legs—in Coyote America. He shows that coyotes bedding down in Los Angeles, New York, and dozens of other cities isn’t new, and that their resilience mirrors our own. They’ve survived the epic Pleistocene Extinctions of 10,000 years ago, and our own relentlessly misguided campaign to eradicate them from the 20th century. In clear, loping prose, Flores says,
The news media have given us a false impression that coyotes have no business in places like Los Angeles or Chicago or Manhattan, that for reasons related to either the inviolable nature of modern cities or the coyote’s suspect character, coyotes in cities make up a bizarre and inexplicable invasion. Yet the archeological and historical evidence is undeniable: for the 15,000 years since we humans have been in North America, coyotes have always been capable of living among us. Something about our lifestyle has always drawn coyotes to human camps, villages, and cities. That something is ecology at its simplest, even if it makes us squirm a bit. A coyote’s primary prey happens to be our close fellow travelers, the mice and rats that flourish around and among us in profusion. As for fearing us too much to tolerate our presence, coyotes have taken our measure far too perceptively for that.
UrbanCoyote Flores stares long and deeply into the coyote’s eyes, returning to us with cultural treasures both sparkling and lyrical. For example, the Aztec word for a wolflike creature, “coytl,” provides the origin point for the animal’s name. In commenting on Coyote the spiritual essence, he says, “As North America’s oldest surviving deity, Coyote bequeaths to us down the timeline a continental world of imagination, creation, and artistry but also of self-absorption, hubris, and big trouble.” Native peoples have told such a wide range of stories about Coyote as a lovable trickster/rogue that you might mistake their creation for Tom Sawyer. Ironically, it was Mark Twain’s unflattering depiction of the coyote in Roughing It, calling the species “sick and sorry-looking” as well as a “living, breathing allegory of Want,” that helped tilt public sentiment against the canids. The memoir’s 1872 release coincided with the post-Civil War renewal of Manifest Destiny, and it makes sense that while marginalizing (and failing that, eradicating) Native Americans, the U.S. also went to war against the animal with a human-like capacity to thrive in adverse conditions.
Though Coyote the god is fascinating, Flores shows that coyote the socially flexible omnivore deserves our highest respect. Even more than those of gray wolves, the genetic endowments of coyotes lend them stunning versatility in most ecosystems (they’ve migrated to every continental state in the Union). Many of the species’ greatest traits developed in coevolution alongside wolves, which need packs to survive and are carnivorous. Coyotes, in contrast, live by a principle of fission/fusion, allowing packs to form under ideal conditions without excluding the possibility of a loner or single pair thriving in hostile territory (like a forest full of wolves, or a suburb).
Coyotes are also capable of an autogenic response to their local environment, which means their litters may contain between 2 and 19 pups, depending on food supplies and predation by wolves or humans. Such an astonishing fact is central to why Coyote America is both an uplifting and horrifying read. The worse the species is hounded, the quicker replacement pups populate a given region.
coyotesInitially, wolves stood tallest in the nightmares of ranchers and homesteaders who settled the west. Sheep and other livestock needed protecting, and so until around the 1880s, wolves were the clearest targets for securing civilization’s ever-expanding borders. Yet with wolf numbers drastically reduced—by the Bureau of Biological Survey—two major things happened: first, humans and the bovines they’d dragooned into frontier life were suddenly everywhere. In areas where food scarcity had been the norm for thousands of years, a flock of sheep seemed like a food court to already resident coyotes. Second, in areas where coyotes didn’t already exist, they followed the species leaving a trail of trash and rodents. A lack of wolves suppressing coyote populations made packs—and when situations permitted, individuals—bolder toward humans, who were more devious than their traditional sparring partners by a wide stretch.
But despite the efforts of a nation well-versed in monetizing a species to death (our other victims included bison, grizzly bears, bighorn sheep, and elk), coyotes refused to vanish, even when their skins became usable in place of a dollar. About the second half of the 19th century and its victims, Flores says,
Hundreds of thousands is an abstract figure, too big and vague to linger in the mind. But maybe this will. While we’ll never get closer to a true figure of all the coyotes killed in those decades of their first encounters with Americans, we can speculate with some certainty that every one of those coyotes wanted to live rather than be shot down, struggle in bewildered fear in a steel trap, or suffer a wretched death from poison.
The author declares that individual animals have a right to exist without the kind of knee-jerk political correctness that might lose him an argument in the gutters of an internet message board. He speaks as a man who shot a coyote when he was seventeen, then came to recognize their beauty while abiding with them as an adult. Such temperance is crucial to winning longterm ethical battles, like the one in which the scientific community found itself by the 1930s. At this point in the war on coyotes, it became noticeable that the employment of awful poisons like strychnine wasn’t actually lowering populations. The Animal Damage Control Act of 1931 allowed Congress to appropriate $1 million a year for ten years in the hope of permanently eradicating coyotes. But back in 1916, a naturalist named Joseph Grinnell advanced the idea of the environmental niche, by which every creature plays a vital role in nature. Completely remove one animal, and everything that it eats (and that used to eat it) faces a population imbalance that cascades to other species.
This idea, coupled with the decision of naturalists to study complex animal life unmolested in National Parks like Yellowstone (founded in 1872) and Glacier (1910), led to a coalition of those who realized the cruel insanity of exterminating coyotes. Chief among them was Aldo Leopold, who said that, “A thing is right when it tends to preserve the integrity, stability, and beauty of the biotic community. It is wrong when it tends otherwise.”
SilentSpringA first wave of eco-warriors wore down the walls of received wisdom, which stated that predators are inherently disposable to a utopian ecosystem. The next few transformative decades saw people outraged not just about Women’s Liberation and Vietnam, but about the use of poisons like DDT. Rachel Carson’s 1962 book Silent Spring revealed how the chemical killed not only insects, but worked its way up through the food chain into apex predators like California condors. Walt Disney even produced a series of nature films starring coyotes, portraying them sympathetically, as if they had souls and possessed a fundamental right to exist.
It testifies to the potency of Flores’s writing that as he describes the vile treatment of coyotes in the past, when the world seemed more raw and murder more a daily presence, the details still shock. And yet no matter how much scientific evidence accrues for peaceful coexistence, there will always be people who simply enjoy killing. Coyote hunters still conduct “roundups” that involve cash prizes, contributing to the 500,000 coyotes killed annually for the sake of farming and ranching. That’s nearly one death a minute, of an animal that looks quite like the one who licks your face in the morning.
Good news lives in the cities. In places like Chicago and Tucson, people are acknowledging that coyotes belong. They are graceful, sing mournfully at night, and invest landscapes with the spiritual. For these reasons, there’s an urban willingness to accept animals scorned by the countryside. Here in Boston, I’ve got to envy Flores his opening anecdote, about meeting a furry thief trotting down the driveway with half a six-pack in his jaws. The encounter reads as casual, neighborly. In the dark, without eye contact, I feel like I’ve only witnessed Coyote, the essence. I’d love for one of them to pause, stare, and sniff. I’d nod and say, “Welcome.”
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Justin Hickey is a freelance writer, and editor here at Open Letters Monthly.
SEPTEMBER 5, 2016 ISSUE
BRIEFLY NOTED
COYOTE AMERICA, by Dan Flores (Basic). “Close encounters with coyotes have now become the country’s most common large-wildlife experience,” Flores writes in this engaging study. Coyotes are a common sight in cities, strolling down city blocks in Los Angeles and scavenging through Central Park. Flores examines the mythology around the animals, which were often deified: Native Americans told stories of mischievous Old Man Coyote, the Aztecs worshipped the erotic god Nezahualcoyotl, and Carl Jung referred to the coyote deity as “a bestial and divine being.” Flores also details a century of large-scale eradication attempts by the government, which continue today, even though, in the sixties, nature programming made coyotes popular with the public.
Review: Coyote America by Dan Flores
Review: Coyote America by Dan FloresCoyote America: A Natural and Supernatural History by Dan Flores
Published by Basic Books on June 7th 2016
Pages: 271
Format: Hardcover
Genres: Non Fiction
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four-stars
With its uncanny night howls, unrivaled ingenuity, and amazing resilience, the coyote is the stuff of legends. In Indian folktales it often appears as a deceptive trickster or a sly genius. But legends don’t come close to capturing the incredible survival story of the coyote. As soon as Americans—especially white Americans—began ranching and herding in the West, they began working to destroy the coyote. Despite campaigns of annihilation employing poisons, gases, helicopters, and engineered epidemics, coyotes didn’t just survive, they thrived, expanding across the continent from Anchorage, Alaska, to New York’s Central Park. In the war between humans and coyotes, coyotes have won hands-down.
Coyote America is both an environmental and a deep natural history of the coyote. It traces both the five-million-year-long biological story of an animal that has become the “wolf” in our backyards, as well as its cultural evolution from a preeminent spot in Native American religions to the hapless foil of the Road Runner. A deeply American tale, the story of the coyote in the American West and beyond is a sort of Manifest Destiny in reverse, with a pioneering hero whose career holds up an uncanny mirror to the successes and failures of American expansionism.
An illuminating biography of this extraordinary animal, Coyote America isn’t just the story of an animal’s survival—it is one of the great epics of our time.
Growing up in the mountain desert area of Colorado, and now living in the Denver suburbs, coyotes have always been a common sight for me. Lately, though, it seems the nightly news cannot wring their hands hard enough over their appearance. I’ve seen/listened to several stories telling us that our ever-expanding suburbs and deforestation are to blame, while others argue they’re merely happy for free, easy meals from our house pets. I think I’m the only person in our neighborhood who isn’t upset about their presence. When I happened across Dan Flores’ Coyote America at the Tattered Cover, I simply couldn’t pass it up.
Coyote America is composed, primarily, of two separate histories of the coyote: one is the physical, “scientific” history, and the other is the mythological history of the animal. Flores examines the coyote’s physical habitat, spanning back as early as the Aztec empire, when the coyote was concentrated in smaller locations. He examines how and when coyote’s range began to expand, and the unique tie to humanity that coyote has always had.
Today, we think of coyotes as wild animals that have no business in major metropolitan cities, but Flores argues that not only is that incorrect, but that coyote has always been our neighbor. Being a scavenger and opportunistic hunter of rodents and other small animals, coyote just adores human settlements, big and small. Coyote America does a fantastic job, too, of arguing against the misnomer (and it is a misnomer) of coyote as a dangerous, vicious animal that will attack humans at will.
On the other hand, Coyote America also explores the Native American mythological traditions surrounding coyote. Coyote has, throughout time, played both creator and destroyer, and almost always that of trickster. Seeing myth evolve along with civilization is not only fun, it feeds directly into my trivia mindset.
Now, Flores is given to flights of fancy. Coyote America does attempt to ascend the mythological and scientific and ascribe some sort of deeper meaning to coyote’s presence in our cities. In fact, he boldly tries to assert the coyote as our — human beings, but especially American human beings — spirit animal. The reverence for which he holds the coyote is endearing, but it does get long winded and eye-roll-worthy on more than a few occasions.
I greatly enjoyed Coyote America. It’s a relatively breezy read, at 271 pages it ends before it outwears its welcome. The mythological history of coyote is very interesting and fun, but the real meat of the book comes from the biological and historical exploration of the animal. I’m a big fan of books which attempt to break the cycle of fear mongering the news and your neighbor who was terrified of seeing a coyote on the greenbelt attempt perpetrate. If you can ignore Flores’ propensity to wax sentimental and poetical about coyote’s status as our spirit animal, it’s a worthy read.