Update: About me and IFP

I’ve been interning at The Scientist for a week now and loving it.  I’m thrilled to finally be focusing my efforts on writing, without the distraction of all that pesky science that my graduate education required.  And as I predicted, I’m learning more than I ever did in school.  For every article I write, I’ve got to cram in about two or three semesters worth of background information on some subject I never would have considered adding to my transcript in college.  This week’s lesson was on using infrared-fluorescent protein (IFP) to label mouse livers…check it out!

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Sharing my backyard: The wild turkey comeback

I had a dream last night: My 4-year-old coonhound Barley scratched at the backdoor to go out. She was clearly excited about something so I went to see what was outside. It was late and the porch light was out (been meaning to change that for days) so I couldn’t see much. I decided I’d let her explore. I started to open the backdoor when a wolf or a wild dog or something – something big and mean and slightly mythical that could only exist in the depths of my unconsciousness – leapt into my house, running wild and terrorizing poor Barley, who clearly had just wanted to say ‘Hi.’ I woke up in a panic and breathed a sigh of relief to see Barley dozing obliviously beside me.

A little shook up, I went to the bathroom, splashed some water on my face, and succeeded in calming myself down. After all, it was just a dream. But as I was starting to fall back asleep, I started to wonder…what is out there? Surely no monstrous wolf-like creatures, but I know I’ve heard stories of coyotes meandering into people’s back yards and rumors of bears and cougars wandering the Hoosier National Forest back in the mid-19th century. But who lives there now? And who lives in the habitats that we call our homes during the summer months when we boldly venture outside of the Hoosier state?

It’s a worthy question, I decided. What animals exist in and around the places that Barley and I have lived over the past few years and what’s going on in their lives? So I’m starting a series to investigate just that.  I call it ‘Sharing my backyard,’ as that’s how I imagine Barley views these animals. I start this series with a story about wild turkeys I researched earlier this semester for the school newspaper, the Indiana Daily Student.

I see wild turkeys every so often as Barley and I are heading out to the lake for a hike or a swim. But we had one particular experience that captured my interest in the bird and motivated me to learn more. I was house-sitting for a professor who is fortunate enough to own over 40 acres of undeveloped land. So naturally, Barley came with me to stay at his house for the week. She was outside, wandering the woods as usual, when she started barking…repeatedly. When I went out to investigate, I was surprised to see three wild turkeys standing at the far corner of the yard. Barley was at the near corner, right next the deck. Talk about all bark and no bite.

Finally, she worked up the courage to start walking towards the birds. Cautiously, she inched her way across the yard. At first the birds were unphased, but as Barley got close, they started to take notice. They didn’t panic, however. They simply turned and starting walking back towards the woods. As they reached the end of the grass, they synchronously lifted off the ground and flew off into the distance, at which point Barley of course ran barking up to the wood’s edge, confident she had showed them who was boss. I was fascinated by the whole experience. I learned two things that afternoon: 1) my dog could never make it as the hunting dog she was bred to be, and 2) wild turkeys can fly!

Curious, I started doing a bit of research. Turns out, wild turkeys were once completely eradicated from most of the Midwest, but thanks to a massively successful conservation effort, they are back in full force. In Indiana, their numbers have grown exponentially over the last thirty years and have finally started to level out, indicating that the populations are starting to stabilize. This is great news for the turkeys, of course, but also for the hunters of Indiana, as wild turkey hunting is as popular as ever. Here is an unedited version of the article I wrote for the school paper just a few months ago:

Once completely wiped out from most of the Midwest, wild turkeys have fought their way back into to Indiana’s backyard and now draw over 50,000 hunters annually. Maybe Benjamin Franklin had the right idea when he suggested the wild turkey over the bald eagle as the U.S. national bird because of its courageous demeanor.

The historic bird was extricated from Indiana and many other Midwest states in the late 19th century when European pioneers cleared much of the forest that wild turkeys call home. In addition to the habitat destruction that took place, subsistence hunting likely contributed to the eradication of the wild turkeys.

“Times were tight, and if you needed some meat for the pot, you didn’t go to the grocery story, you went out and pursued it,” said Steve Backs, Wildlife Research Biologist with the Division of Fish and Wildlife.

Amazingly, after half a century of restoration efforts, the wild turkeys are back, with an estimated 125,000 birds in Indiana today.

The turkeys are a great success story in Indiana, said avid turkey hunter Steve Siscoe, property manager of Green Sullivan State Forest. Between 1956 and 2004, 2,795 turkeys were released in a total of 185 different sites. Initially, the birds were transplanted from other states to the most habitable parts of southern Indiana. Once those populations started to thrive, they were used to seed new populations all over the state.

“It’s been a special ride for those that have been involved,” said Randy Showalter, Regional Wildlife Biologist for The National Wild Turkey Federation.

By 1970, three counties had enough wild turkeys to host Indiana’s premier spring hunting season. An estimated 62 hunters killed six birds over the course of the four day season. Today, 91 counties host over 50,000 hunters that bring in a 10,000 plus harvest each spring.

Wild turkey hunting has become so popular and successful that in 2005 the state of Indiana decided to hold its first ever fall season, boasting a harvest of 716 birds.

“Fall turkey hunting is vastly different from spring turkey hunting,” said Siscoe.

Among other differences, the fall season is restricted to archery and crossbow hunting until the last five days. Furthermore, the birds behavior differently in the fall than they do during the spring breeding season, Backs said.

“It takes a lot of work to find those small flocks of turkeys,” he said. “And they’re not as receptive to answering to calls as they are in the springtime.”

Nevertheless, the first fall hunting season has remained a success, with this past season bringing in another 610 birds. While the harvest numbers have dipped slightly since the initial catch in 2005, this is likely due to dwindling interest, not decreases in turkey numbers, Backs said.

Still, wild turkey hunting remains a primarily spring sport. The Division of Fish and Wildlife is going to continue to emphasize the spring turkey hunting opportunities, Backs said. The fall season is really just a byproduct of having good turkey populations.

“These are the good old days when you look at some wildlife species,” Showalter said, referring to the successful restoration of not only wild turkeys, but whitetail deer, Canada geese, elk and others. “It’s kind of nice to be here at this time.”

Notes:

Source of data for graphic: 2008 Spring Wild Turkey Harvest Check, Wildlife Management and Resource Notes No. 958, by Steven E. Backs, Wildlife Research Biologist (7/7/08), Indiana Department of Natural Resources, Division of Fish and Wildlife Station Results

Link to the original IDS article

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Energy drink explosion

The introduction of Red Bull to Austria in 1987 marked the birth of the energy drink era.  When it hit U.S. shelves just 10 years later, the energy drink market exploded, now bringing in over $6 billion each year.  But the question is: are they safe?

Check out my recent article on energy drinks in the Indiana Daily Student…

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Don’t let the bed bugs bite

They hide from the sunlight and come out at night to suck people’s blood. And the scariest part of all: They’re real.

Check out my very first cover story in the Indiana Daily Student about bed bugs!

Science Watch Site

My science writing course from this past semester has created a website of our work, including a series of blog entries chronically our class trip to the National Association of Science Writers conference in Palo Alto, CA last October. The site, know as Science Watch, is now available for public viewing. Check it out!

Learning from Nature : An interview with Erika Check Hayden

Photo taken from Hayden’s website

I have to admit, I was a little intimidated by the prospect of interviewing Erika Check Hayden. Not that much older than I, she has already established herself as a prominent figure in the science writing community. With an undergraduate degree in biology from Stanford University, Hayden began writing for the Stanford Daily and the Stanford Alumni Magazine. She then worked for Newsweek magazine in NYC, covering science, medicine, and other breaking news events. In November 2001, she began her current position with the journal Nature, writing about new technologies, environmental issues, and other science news.

We had arranged to meet at the welcome reception at the 2008 National Association of Science Writers conference in Palo Alto, CA. We found a small room, away from the hubbub of the conference activities, and sat down to talk about her transition from the world of science to the world of writing about science.

How does your biology background affect the way you write about science?
Having a biology background definitely grounds me in some of the history of science and the scientific method and believing in the way that science works. If I didn’t have that, it might be a little harder to kind of get into the heads of scientists and the way they think, and I think that’s maybe a challenge people have if they don’t have a science background. I love science, but I also know it’s a very human endeavor so I don’t look at scientists as different from other people necessarily. I think that’s a help because there are human motivations going on, and it helps you put things in context. I think that’s very helpful for being in science journalism.

But because you’re already familiar with all the language and the jargon and the technical words, that stuff might not stand out as much to you as much as it would if you didn’t have a science background. Even though I’m writing for Nature, my audience is gonna have chemists and physicists in it, and it’s kind of a balance to figure out what I can get away with that they’re still going to understand but that people who are experts in the field are not turned off by because it’s so ridiculously elementary. So that’s an interesting challenge of being somewhere like Nature or Science. I think it would be different if you were at a generalist’s newspaper.

What was your first published story about?
It’s funny because I don’t really write about this stuff anymore, but one of my first stories in the Daily was about this professor at Stanford who had a theory about multiverses, so it was more about cosmology. I thought that stuff was fascinating. When I first started being a journalist, I would write about anything in science. Now-a-days I’m a little bit more hardcore biology. When I got out of college, my first internship was at Newsweek in NY. They had a really big demand for science stories, but the types of science stories they wanted were not pure science. So I think one of the first stories I did for them was about this diet book, Sugar Busters, because it was the beginning of the whole low-carb thing. So the first thing I did was contribute to a little box, maybe a 600-word box, about the science behind this diet.

What proportion of your stories do you come up with and pitch to your editors?
That’s probably about 75% of the stories that I pitch and 25% that they kind of assign or ask me to do.

Has that changed over the course of your career?
Oh yeah. When I first started at Newsweek, I don’t think they took a pitch of mine for probably the first year that I was there…unless they were really desperate. And being at Nature it also took me a long time to get used to what they wanted. So you feel out your beat, you feel out what your publication wants. So once you figure that out, align your mind with where your audience is, then you do a better job of making successful pitches.

Tell me about your first interview.
I used to prepare a lot more for my interviews. I think now I think about interviewing more as a conversation whereas back then I thought if I didn’t ask kind of the key questions then I was gonna sort of miss the entire story. I think the thing to know about interviewing is that it’s driven by you a lot but it’s also driven to a certain extent by who you’re talking to. They’ll tell you what they want to or are able to tell you at any time, but you can’t trick them into saying stuff they don’t want to say; you can’t get them to reveal things, most of the time, that they don’t want to reveal. So you’ve got to do the best you can and kind of hope that they’re gonna meet you half way.

Have you had any interview disasters?
Absolutely. They happen every single week. Actually, I had one yesterday. But see this is what I mean that if the person you’re talking to doesn’t want to talk to you, there’s not much you can do. I was working on this story about a biotech company that seems to be in some kind of trouble. I’ve been trying to get a hold of the CEO or the COO, and they’re not answering my emails, they’re not answering my phone calls. So finally yesterday I managed to get the cell phone number of the COO, and I called him up. He’s clearly doesn’t want to hear from me, but I still have to ask him all these questions because you can’t write things without giving them a chance to respond. He’s telling me he’s not gonna comment, but I still have to keep asking him questions. It’s my job at that point to get him on the phone as long as I can because maybe he’ll say something. But he didn’t, and finally I just had to say ‘Bye. Thanks for your time.’

But you get comfortable with the idea that sometimes your interview subjects are gonna be antagonistic or they’re not gonna want to talk to you for very good reasons, but you’re just doing your job. It’s hard to talk to people who really don’t want to talk to you, but a lot of times I’m totally astonished by how open people are, especially in the scientific community. One of the coolest things about being a science journalist is the amount of time people are willing to spend talking to you or explaining things to you. They’re excited about their work; they’re excited that you care. The vast majority of times that I’m interviewing somebody, it’s more of a challenge to get them to stop talking than it is to get information. That’s a great thing about being a science journalist.

Is it common for you to be interviewed on the science you report? Are you comfortable with that?
Yeah, that’s happened a few times. It’s becoming more and more common just because everybody has this increasing demand for content, and one way to get it fast is to talk to people who have been doing the reporting. I used to be very uncomfortable with people asking me to play that explainer role because I didn’t feel I was an expert. But I think I’m kind of changing my mind about that. As a journalist, if you can’t do a good job of trying to put your finger on the pulse for someone else, maybe you don’t understand it well enough yourself…

–Jef (Jennifer) Akst

For more information and samples of her writing, visit Erika Check Hayden’s website.

Also, check out some of Hayden’s latest articles:

• HIV: The Next Shot - Nature, July 31, 2008.
• Chemistry: Designer Debacle - Nature, May 15, 2008.
• Stem Cells: The $3 Billion Question - Nature, May 1, 2008.
• Profile: George Church - Nature, Feburary 14, 2008.
• Evolution: Scandal: Sex-starved and Still Surviving - Nature, April 10, 2008.
• The Genome Turns Personal - Discover, December 12, 2007.
• How Africa Learned to Love the Cow - Nature, December 21, 2006.
• The Treasure of Mumbai - Wired, December 2006.

Are hurricanes growing stronger?

Tropical cyclones plague the American coasts each year and are the costliest natural catastrophes in the U.S. With Hurricane Gustav resulting in the largest evacuation in Louisiana’s history and Hurricane Ike costing an estimated $30 billion in damage, this storm season once again begs the question: are tropical storms growing in intensity?  Read more…