She is the founder of Keeping Track,
an organization that recruits and trains volunteers to go into the wild in search
of tracks, hair, claw marks and other signs of wildlife. Since its founding
in 1994, Keeping Track has trained more than 1,000 trackers in seventy-seven
communities in eight states, stretching from New Hampshire to California. On
Tuesday, December 4, Morse will visit Mount Holyoke to help establish a new
chapter of Keeping Track for the Mount Tom and Mount Holyoke ranges. In a 7
pm“talk and slide show in Chapin Auditorium, she will outline her organization’s
work in, as she puts it, “keeping track of our wildlife neighbors.”
Morse will also bring her extensive
collection of evidence of those neighbors: plaster casts of tracks, pelts from
every North American carnivore from the least weasel to the polar bear, preserved
animal feet, skulls, and other objects. The exhibit, which occupies eighteen
conference tables, “has been called a museum without walls,” Morse says. “It’s
a lot of fun. We love doing it, and the public loves it.” A highlight of the
evening will be the slide show of the organization’s remarkable wildlife photographs.
Among the evening’s sponsors is MHC’s Center for Environmental Literacy.
“My purpose is to
gauge interest in the Mount Holyoke community in establishing
a Keeping Track chapter,” says Morse, who has been featured in
Smithsonian, Audubon, and Vermont Life and on National Public
Radio’s Morning Edition. The organization is dedicated to drawing
together people from all walks of life to participate in the work,
to inspire community participation in the preservation of wildlife
habitat. “Already, we’ve seen some positive results as a result
of local chapters’ activity. Communities have really been able
to draw together a large constituency for habitat conservation--and
not just card-carrying preservationists,” she says.
In fact, participants in other
Keeping Track chapters regularly include such diverse groups as farmers, hunters,
teachers, retirees, businesspeople, lawyers, scientists, and students. “Not
only does Keeping Track help to forge a relationship between the people and
the land,” Morse says, “but our programs build trust and understanding among
the human community as well.”
By the time the ten to fifteen
participants head off into the woods in search of their first raccoon tracks,
they’ll be well-prepared. Morse will lead six training sessions out in the woods,
three here and three at Keeping Track’s outdoor research center in Jericho,
Vermont.
At Jericho, Morse is so familiar
with the territory that she recognizes the signs of not only species, but also
individual animals—many of which she’s taken to giving names. There will also
be two evening classroom sessions, more potluck than lecture hall. The training
covers more than simple tracking, encompassing habitat fragmentation and conservation
biology, habitat identification, and the use of habitat selection principles
to map out special areas of study, called transects.
Does Morse really believe that
rural western Massachusetts, with its large areas of relatively undeveloped
lands, needs this kind of attention and protection? “Let me put it this way:
The most remote place in southern New England is just a five-hour drive away
from 70 million people, and that’s only the tip of the iceberg of resource extraction,”
she says.
Within the Mount Holyoke and Mount
Tom ranges, work done by MHC students under the leadership of
Peter Houlihan, a postdoctoral fellow with the Center for Environmental
Literacy has revealed a number of areas that have a high biological
value, but little or no protection. “There’s just too much pressure
on the environment,” Morse says. “It’s being nickel-and-dimed
to death acre by acre, region by region.” In too many cases, she
says, “there is no real way for citizens to be involved in the
planning process. I would hope that the citizens who collect the
data can present a unified force for all planning. We can’t keep
doing what we’re doing. It’s unsustainable, and it’s wrong.”
