Candace Savage - Curious by Nature: One Womans Exploration of the Natural World

ALSO BY CANDACE SAVAGE

SCIENCE AND NATURE

Prairie: A Natural History

Mother Nature: Animal Parents and Their Young

The Nature of Wolves: An Intimate Portrait

Bird Brains: The Intelligence of Crows, Ravens, Magpies and Jays

Aurora: The Mysterious Northern Lights

Wild Cats

Peregrine Falcons

Grizzly Bears

Wolves

Eagles of North America

The Wonder of Canadian Birds

(published in the U.S. as Wings of the North)

Wild Mammals of Western Canada

(published in the U.S. as Wild Mammals of Northwest

America; coauthor with Arthur Savage)

CULTURAL HISTORY

Witch: The Wild Ride from Wicked to Wicca

Beauty Queens

Cowgirls

Our Nell: A Scrapbook Biography of Nellie L. McClung

A Harvest Yet to Reap: A History of Prairie Women

FOR CHILDREN

Wizards: An Amazing Journey through the Last Great Age of Magic

Born to Be a Cowgirl: A Spirited Ride through the Old West

Eat Up! Healthy Food for a Healthy Earth

Get Growing! How the Earth Feeds Us

Trash Attack! Garbage and What We Can Do About It

ONE WOMANS EXPLORATION
OF THE NATURAL WORLD

CANDACE SAVAGE

CURIOUS

by Nature

GREY S TONE BOOKS
DOUGLAS & MCINTYRE PUBLISHING GROUP
VANCOUVER/TORONTO/BERKELEY

Copyright 2005 by Candace Savage
First U.S. edition 2005

All rights reserved. No part of this book may be reproduced, stored in a retrieval system or transmitted, in any form or by any means, without the prior written consent of the publisher or a license from The Canadian Copyright Licensing Agency (Access Copyright). For a copyright license, visit www.accesscopyright.ca or call toll free to 1-800-893-5777.

Greystone Books
An imprint of Douglas & McIntyre Ltd.
2323 Quebec Street, Suite 201
Vancouver, British Columbia
Canada V5T 4S7

Cataloguing data available from Library and Archives Canada
ISBN 978-1-55365-092-8 (pbk.)
ISBN 978-1-926706-46-7 (ebook)

Editing by Jane Billinghurst
Copy editing by Viola Funk
Cover design by Jessica Sullivan
Cover image by Walter Bibikow/Getty Images

We gratefully acknowledge the financial support of the Canada Council for the Arts, the British Columbia Arts Council, and the Government of Canada through the Book Publishing Industry Development Program (bpidp) for our publishing activities.

CONTENTS

O ne of the best things that ever happened to me was being stung by a bee. I was only two or three years old at the time, and my memory of the event has blurred around the margins, like an old-fashioned photograph. Somewhere, grayed back into the distance, lies the big, wood-frame house where I lived with my family. But neither my mother nor my father nor my sister is with me. I am all alone in a wide expanse of grass, and a yellow-and-black bee is walking on my hand. Already, I have watched as it crept, glistening, from my elbow, up my forearm, and onto my palm. I have never in all my life seen anything so beautiful. My small body is alight with wonder.

A moment later, disaster strikes and I run screaming into the house. How could anything so pretty have hurt me so much? Yet fifty years on, Ive begun to think of that brief trauma as a lasting gift. The flash of pain had etched the beein all its gloryonto my memory. Though I can no longer recapture the sensation of seeing the world with new eyes, I can at least remember a time when I remembered it.

Since then, innocence has given way to experience, and I am no longer able to consider every insect with the respect it deserves. The joyful shock of the Very First Time cannot be repeated. But I still get a buzz of delight every time I find out something new or revisit a familiar experience or fact from a fresh perspective. Learning gives me pleasure, even when it carries a sting. And it is that satisfactionthe pure, animal happiness of sniffing around and finding something worth chewing onthat I hope to share with you through this collection of writings.

The essays assembled in these pages were written over a period of twenty years, between 1985 and 2005. (A complete list of the sources from which they were drawn appears at the end of the book. In preparing the material for re-publication, I have updated facts and figures and reported on recent events to bring the stories up to the present.) The earliest entry in the collection, Storm-Petrels: At Home with the Tubenoses, originally appeared in a book published in Canada as The Wonderof Canadian Birds and in the United States as Wings of theNorth. One of seventy short species accounts that make up that volume, the piece included here focuses on unexpected aspects of the storm-petrels reproductive and family behavior. This theme is not surprising, given that at the time it was written, I was newly widowed and playing a harried mother hen to my then two-year-old daughter, Diana. Much of the writing for Birds/Wings was done during nursery-school classes and the half-hour respite offered by the childrens television series Mr.Dressup!

Over the next decade or so, my life flowed around many an unexpected bend, sweeping me, and Diana along with me, from Saskatoon, Saskatchewanthe Paris of the Prairiesto Edmonton, Alberta, with its family connections, and then north to Yellowknife, Northwest Territories, on the shore of Great Slave Lake. My seven-year sojourn on the bedrock of the subarctic wilderness provided the setting for many adventures, some of which are recounted in these pages. Im reminded, for example, of a once-in-a-lifetime excursion to watch a family of wolves at their den on the tundra and of the heart-stopping moment when I found myself dumped out on a barren esker, somewhere in the High Arctic, while a research team in a helicopter attempted to capture a grizzly bear on the other side of the ridge! (I am relieved to report that they tranquilized the bear and then returned to collect me.) Essays like The Nature of Wolves: Wild Lives and A Future for Grizzlies: Artemis Beckons were inspired by moments like these, when I was privileged to sense the electric vitality of living things.

Meanwhile, there was also a quieter drama unfolding during those northern years as Ia thirty-something single parent with a full-time job, a waggish, freckle-faced daughter, and an ever-growing menagerie of silly petsbegan to get my bearings as a writer. Morning after morning, I discovered myself crawling out of bed in the cold and dark, so that I could fit in a couple of hours of writing before regular school-and-work hours. No one was more surprised than I by this weird behavior. But if I was prepared to give up the comforts of sleep in order to hunch over a computer keyboard, then my desire to learn and to write deserved to be acknowledged. The job and the pay check would have to go and, with them, the high costs of living in the North. If I intended to work as a writer, it was time to move on.

And so the early 1990s brought me and my chancy aspirations back to where I had begun, on the Great Plains grasslands. A stubble-jumper by breeding and inclination, I was raised in the Peace River country of northwestern Alberta, educated at the University of Alberta in Edmonton, and, for the past decade, have found myself most at home in the wide open spaces of Saskatchewan. Despite a population density on a par with that of Mongolia, my adopted province boasts a rich artistic community and a standard of cultural servicesincluding the first arts board on the continentthat have supported my quixotic ambition to earn my living as a writer. And if the magnetic pull of the North helped me to find my course, the generosity of the prairies has encouraged me to put down roots. A deepening appreciation for the prairie ecosystemand an opportunity for uninterrupted periods of research and reflection now that my chick has flown from the nestare reflected in the most recent writings in this collection: Prairyerths: Entering the Underworld and Stuck on the Prairies: Where Is Here?, both of which are excerpted from