A Walk on the Wild Side with Susan MorseBy Margaret Michniewicz
photo: Margaret Michniewicz She’s been followed out West by a cougar in heat and witnessed a bull moose charging a logging truck in Maine, but usually habitat specialist and professional tracker Susan Morse is found in less harrowing circumstances, lovingly photographing wild animals and scrutinizing the signs these critters have left behind. Morse, 57, is the founder of Keeping Track, Inc., an eleven-year old non-profit organization whose mission is to inspire community participation in the long-term stewardship of wildlife habitat. As the Research and Program Director of Keeping Track (KT), she is at once fervent, poetic, and frank about the world she introduces to KT participants. Through its programs, KT guides adults – and children – in learning to observe, interpret, record, and monitor evidence of wildlife in their own community. The data collected is then available to conservation planning groups and communities so that, as Morse describes it, “intelligent choices” can be made about the area’s future. It’s a world inextricably linked to ours, and Morse is adamant that the future well-being of Vermonters depends on the care we take now of wildlife habitat. We are, after all, merely critters ourselves, sharing the same ecosystem. “I believe in people, which strikes some as a paradox for a wildlife person,” Morse says. “I believe in people and the reality, for better or worse, that people will save habitat for animals; people need to save habitat for animals.” Like the normally “docile, wonderful, gentle” moose, who will rigorously defend her offspring, the sternness with which Morse might prosecute human foibles is balanced by the twinkle that frequently accentuates her gaze, while her speech is peppered with witty analogies and mischievous anecdotes. A forestry major turned English major whose post-graduate study was Shakespeare, Morse is exceptionally well-spoken and eloquent whether the topic is mold-covered bear scat, Latin Jazz from Brazil, elk hunting, or William McDonough’s Monticello Diaries. Following the tracks of Susan MorseIt was not through studying forestry at Penn State that Morse became a tracker by profession – when she was in college, wildlife wasn’t even part of the discussion in that field as it is now, she says. This career (one of a number she pursues, as well as naturalist, teacher, professional forester, writer and photographer) seems to be the summit naturally reached by someone who, since childhood, essentially lived to be in the woods. She is the fourth generation in a family of foresters and landscape architects. As a teen she hiked with David Brower, the founder of Friends of the Earth and giant of the Sierra Club. An athlete and voracious reader since youth… these are the early tracks that eventually led to what has been for all intents and purposes a self-taught endeavor. She credits Harley Shaw and other scientists for sharing their expertise, and did her fair share of “dirt time” in the field, but the art of tracking is not one developed through traditional channels. One of the legacies that Morse will ultimately leave, however, is one of transforming the perception of the practice from a curiosity performed by society-shy loners to one embraced and practiced by community folks and scientists alike in the common goal of conservation. Morse says of her childhood dreams, “I wanted to be who I am, I suppose… I wanted to be in the woods.” She has had a lifelong fascination with Africa, which was partially sparked by reading about Joy Adamson’s experiences with lions. While in grade school, Morse wrote to Adamson and in addition to sending her young fan pictures of lions, Adamson also sent the aspiring wildlife biologist an unwelcome message. “She basically told me that in order to be what I wanted to be, i.e., out in the field, studying wildlife… that what I needed to do was to marry somebody who was doing that and therefore I might have the opportunity to tag along if I married the right person.” Not more than ten years old, Morse recalls this very early disappointment: “Not that I had anything against marrying the right person,” she explains. However, “I saw myself as having a central role.” While she has seen her dream come true after all, Morse is blunt about the numerous ways that society’s rigid concepts of gender forced her to negotiate hurdles all along the way. “As a woman, as a child, as an athlete, as all that… I was denied. Every gate: CLANG!” she says, clapping her hands. “It was metallic, it closed, it slammed, it is a wonder it didn’t break my foot. I got kicked out of the American Athletic Union for being the first woman to run a marathon… There were lots of opportunities that I did not enjoy as a young woman trying to find a place in a nontraditional world, because of my sex. Fortunately,” she smiles, “today is different.” Participation by women in Keeping Track classes is at least fifty-fifty, if not more so, and Morse heralds the high numbers of women who are members and leaders of conservation commissions or grassroots organizations. “I’m very gratified by that because I guess I felt all along that that was a perfectly natural thing to expect,” Morse says. “I’m not going to say I think that it’s because women are more maternal or nurturing – I wouldn’t want to give in to that cliché – I don’t believe it for a minute. But,” she continues, “I do think that maybe something about our culture has partitioned men and women in ways that have inspired women that this is something they can do, this is what is important to them, and they’re empowered to do it.” Morse’s countenance is such that you wouldn’t be surprised to find her stoically enduring a broken limb. Yet, she brushes a tear quickly aside as she continues, and admits “I’m getting a little emotional about this as I speak, because I feel that’s the important piece that Keeping Track has to offer: we can offer a very empowering environment, for anybody, men, women, and children alike, to believe ‘I can think holistically about health, about rural health, environmental health and I can effect some difference. I can do something positive and make a difference in my community and in my world.”  photo: © Susan C. Morse Trekking with a TrackerSpringing at the chance to observe Morse in her natural environment, I tagged along with the Nashaway Trackers, a group from Massachusetts taking KT’s Wildlife Monitoring course, on an early October day as they experienced their first field trip to a remote habitat in northern Vermont. Within fifteen minutes of setting out on our five-mile expedition we gathered around the base of a rocky outcrop, where, Morse was visibly pleased to inform us, bobcats frequently hang out. Such locations are favorites of cats in the wild avoiding predators just as kitties at home seek refuge in hard-to-scale nooks, out of reach of the family dog. Within seconds of removing her twenty-five-pound backpack, Morse was down on her knees, on the hunt for evidence of recent bobcat loitering. Meanwhile, she cracks us up with her amusing analogies. For example, the scent-marking of the turf here with urine and feces is essentially Bob posting a personal ad to a pretty kitty, or during the non-breeding season, a warning to other wild cats to stay away. Her keen senses and finely honed powers of detection and observation are evident from the wealth of ecological and biological information Morse shares about the animal in question and descriptions of its surroundings. Her ability to teach is enhanced by her storytelling skills, which holds the audience of all ages riveted – and more importantly, inspired. Inspired, and at the same time sobered by the realization that every impact we have on our world causes consequences and sometimes, catastrophes. With over a dozen of us lumbering through the woods, however quietly and gingerly we intended to proceed, the wildest life we saw was a snake curled up on top of a spruce sapling, and the dashing form of a chipmunk. The closest we came to peril was when Morse used a bear skull to reenact the recent disturbance by a bear of a subterranean bumblebee nest, whose residents were still reeling and irate at the marauding they had suffered. But the objectives of KT are not so much for a participant to get an animal in her sights as to hone skills of observation and analysis of the clues left in the critter’s wake. And clues we found! Tracks and a urine-filled rut-hole indicated that we were within an hour behind a bull moose at the height of the rut (mating season); claw marks, bite marks, and shiny black hairs stuck in the sap of a red pine tree provided dramatic evidence of bear scent marking over the years; the scat of bears tipping us off to the fact that black cherries were on the menu. Our guide pointed to a mass of branches clustered into a nest-like assemblage that she explained was created by a bear seeking beechnuts. The bears can sit high off the ground, popping hundreds of beechnuts into their pre-hibernation mouths, comparable to a couch potato with her bag of chips. Morse strides along, suddenly turning on her heel and challenging us to find the next “hot sign” – a tiny strand of hair, black tipped, course and hollow, which indicated a moose with winter coat had chosen to pass under a branch with not quite enough clearance. For the ultimate goals of KT, details such as these are revealing and important. For example, by examining bear scat on one occasion, it was determined that the creature had eaten a particularly rare plant fruit found miles away. It was proof of the wide swath of connected wild lands that the animal needed, and used. With all of this type of information as ammunition, so to speak, volunteers can advocate for their communities’ habitats and their contribution to viable wildlife populations and habitats throughout whole eco-regions, says Morse. Community Impact?To date, volunteers from over 100 communities have been trained by KT, including groups from northern New England to California, Florida to Quebec, the Vermont Agency of Transportation, and the Lewis Creek Watershed Association (LCA). LCA, for example, wanted to establish educational and recreational trails with as minimal negative impact on wildlife as possible; when state agencies were not able to provide adequate information, the group hired KT to train members to gather the data they needed about wildlife whereabouts. Janet Pesaturo formed Nashaway Trackers after attending a workshop led by Morse a year ago. “What I admire most about Sue is her firm belief that ordinary people can make a difference, and her ability to maintain a positive, proactive attitude,” Pesaturo says. “She has inspired me to focus on what little good I can do for the environment…without feeling discouraged by all of the ongoing damage and losses that we hear about everyday.” As Pesaturo sees it, “If people worry too much about whether their own little efforts will actually amount to anything significant in the scheme of things, they become discouraged into inactivity – which is certain to accomplish nothing.” For all her fondness of bears, bobcats, moose, and otters, Morse is pragmatic about why it’s in the best interest of humans that wildlife habitat be left undisturbed by development. “Vermont prides itself most on being a rural state, that’s the image we project, that’s what we want, tourists come here… that’s what we are selling! And we’re selling it many ways and losing it in a million ways – but we’re not investing in any of it,” she says. “In my view, we are losing our support system for rural enterprises and protection and conservation of our natural resources. It’s very disturbing, but all around me the system seems to be falling apart. Agencies whose job it is to support what we say is dear to us as Vermonters are disempowered by lack of funds and political resolve. “There should be a cultural consensus of what it is that we define as rural Vermont and we should all be working to conserve that.” Underscoring each point by hitting her palm with her fist, Morse continues: “That includes wildlife habitat, includes clean air, includes clean water, includes farms; it includes managed timberlands and wilderness!” Stopping Morse once she’s started on this topic is like facing down a charging bull moose, but her passion calls on each of us to step forward when the opportunity comes. “People like John Muir and Rachel Carson – we look back at what they did and we’re in awe. We laud them, we teach them in our schools – so why the hell aren’t we doing this [in our practice]?” Morse asks. “But John Muir and Rachel Carson are no different than you and me, except that they lived in a time when they could say ‘No, no, no: Yosemite is not going to be ruined or No it’s wrong to poison the planet!’ And why aren’t we living in a time when we can effectively say we must not tolerate this genocide? Can’t we be known as the truly great culture that acted decisively and insisted that clean air clean water and healthy humans and natural environments are international priorities. Imagine the future of multiple generations looking back on our bravery and sacrifices with gratitude. I dream about that.” The Politics and Finances of NatureMorse regrets the ways in which groups that should share this vision are polarized, or fail to collaborate. “It worries me that as a community, environmental leaders are fragmented, all competing for the same limited dollars – we’re all really compromised by that.” She continues, “Where is the outcry? Whatever happened to our ability as a whole nation to respond – with horror – to the idea that we should mine the national Arctic refuge? There was a time when that just wouldn’t have flown.” She believes it is essential to bring many groups together in the fight to protect natural habitats for the long-term welfare of human and beast, whether the terms used by those involved are “deer camp” or “ecosystems”. “I am hoping that our KT clients and many other people will become spiritually and intellectually involved in probing the whole very complex subject of how do we live, sustainably, on this planet? And one of the things that we can do here to enhance wildlife habitat, on managed timberlands, one of the things we can do here to preserve wilderness stay out, humble ourselves to the messages that we may learn, and strike a balance,” she says. “It really behooves us to look strategically at what’s left, at what we’ve protected for habitat. I am proud of the fact that America has a wonderful tradition of conserving land, we really do. I’m immensely proud of that. To me, that’s intrinsically American – right up there with democracy.” She continues, “But it hasn’t always been the best land for wildlife; it has been the most scenic land, the most desirable for our recreational pleasures. Now, we really need to get to work and preserve and conserve a fabric of land that will meet the needs of wildlife throughout ecoregions. “Wildlife really don’t get to come to the table and be heard and that’s where Keeping Track is important because hopefully, through Keeping Track, the women and the men practicing Keeping Track can be the voices for wildlife – wildlife therefore will be heard.” For more information, contact Keeping Track, Inc.
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