The Tourist Trail now available in paperback

A brief update to let you know that The Tourist Trail is now available in paperback from Amazon.

And I’ll be posting from here on from www.TheTouristTrail.com.

The Tourist Trail now available on the Kindle

I’m pleased to announce that my novel The Tourist Trail is now live and ready for download on the Kindle.

If you’d like to read a few sample chapters before making the purchase, you can do that to.

I think you’ll like it.

So what about print?

We’re working on the print edition right now. If you want to be notified when the print (and iPad) editions are out, please join the notification list.

The Tourist Trail was four years in the making. It began with a volunteer trip I took to Patagonia to assist with a penguin census (yes, even penguins need a census). The short story won a prestigious fiction contest and I soon began expanding it into a novel. The scope similarly expanded, inspired by the efforts of the Sea Shepherd Society and other animal researchers and activists.

The Tourist Trail is an ambitious novel. And I’d like to think it’s also an important novel.

PS: Please update your feed readers. I’m migrating this blog to the new URL: www.thetouristtrail.com.

Change of Address

Now that I’ve gotten serious about turning The Tourist Trail into a novel, I’ve created a web site and migrated this blog on over.

So please update your feedreaders to the new address: http://www.thetouristtrail.com/blog.

I hope to see you there!

Why doesn’t Japan just stop killing whales?

For Japan, the whaling industry is a money loser.

And, thanks in large part to the efforts of the Sea Shepherd Society, whaling is also a public relations nightmare.

Yesterday, according to the New York Times, Japan again defended its right to whale as it pleases. Not only is Japan in the process of putting an activist from the Sea Shepherd, Peter Bethune, on trial, it is now preparing to go to court with Australia. All over an industry that is losing the government millions of dollars.

So why doesn’t Japan just end this already?

I attended an animal rights conference in 2007 and Paul Watson, the founder of Sea Shepherd, was there. And I asked him this very question. I was, at the time, under the impression that Japan would stop any day. After all, if there’s no money in it, it was only logical that Japan would stop.

But Paul pointed out that if Japan were to stop whaling that they would then have to defend their dolphin hunts and their overfishing of bluefin tuna and so on.

For Japan, whaling may be a money loser but it’s a war they must fight to protect other industries — industries that are very profitable.

In other words, if Japan cedes on whaling, it fears that its entire fishing (overfishing) industry will be at stake.

I was wrong in 2007. Japan was not about to give up whaling then. Which is why I support the Sea Shepherd Society and the efforts of the Australian government. Japan is on the wrong side of history. I only wish they could come to this realization sooner than later.

Pay Attention to Penguins

Dee Boersma, director of the Penguin Project, spoke at a TED event recently and I highly recommend watching it:

Dee has devoted more than 20 years to studying penguins and she has the data that shows that penguin colonies are declining, and quickly. Just as important, she has clear recommendations for how to solve this problem.

If you watch the entire video you’ll see footage of Turbo the Penguin. Turbo was the inspiration for a penguin in my short story (and soon-to-be novel) The Tourist Trail. You can download the short story on the right.

Turbo is an amazing bird. For some reason he has adopted the researchers. They have never fed him or given him any reason to hang out with them. He just does it. And he doesn’t bite when touched — which is highly unusual. He also has his own Facebook page — and a growing legion of fans around the world.

Penguins don’t need Google Maps

Exactly how penguins navigate is still largely a mystery. Every year, penguins travel thousands of miles and still somehow find their way home.

Here’s an inspiring story about a penguin rescued by the IFAW, relocated two thousand miles away for rehabilitation, and then, amazingly, seen again back near his home.

The first time we saw penguin IF-0141 was back in May 2006. Together with 194 fellow Magellanic penguins, he had come ashore in the southern tip of Argentina. Victims of an unknown oil spill, the penguins were extremely weak and hypothermic – just moments away from death.

Flash-forward to December 2009, just days from the turn of the decade we received news from Pablo Irazoqui, one of the Park Rangers working in Cabo Vírgenes. Pablo had spotted a band on one of the penguins. There he was, number IF-0141, more than 3 years and 2000 km (1242 miles) from where we last saw him swim off!

Once again, IF-0141’s story is positive-proof that wildlife can be successfully rehabilitated and released back to the wild. Seeing him healthy after all of these years is yet another cause for celebration as IFAW starts a new decade of rescuing animals in crisis around the world.

You can read the full story here.

One of the residents of San Juan Island

This very social fox was one of several I encountered during my brief stay in the San Juans…

Penguins research going high tech

I just came across an interesting article on how the researchers in Punta Tombo are using computers to aid in data entry and spatial tracking.

And at least one Magellanic penguin appears to approve of the new devices.

Researcher Eleanor Lee sheds light on just how much data they collect each year:

“Up until now, we have collected 6 months worth of data in field notebooks every season. Since the project’s inception, we’ve banded  55,000 penguins, measured 25,000 eggs, and measured 174,019 chicks.  We had 1,838 data books in our lab as of Spring, 2008.”

To learn more about the Penguin Project, make a donation, or even follow the penguins by satellite, visit Penguin Sentinels.

Sea Shepherd history on Vancouver Island

I visited Vancouver Island recently and happened upon this display at the hotel in the town of Sidney.

It’s hard to see through the glass, but it’s a piece of the first Sea Shepherd ship — the one that really got the entire whale wars movement off the ground.

I’d love to know how this ended up in the hotel. It was amazing to see up close.

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Signs of hope for the African penguins

The most-visited penguin colony in the world is in South Africa. According to this article in DiscoveryNews, more than 600,000 tourists visit each year to see the African penguins.

The African penguin population has decreased by 90 percent over the past century, earning it an “endangered” label. It stands to reason that the locals better figure out how to reverse this trend, if for no other reason than to protect the tourism industry.

And that’s just what is happening. The environmentalists got the government to agree to protecting a 12-miles area of water that is normally trawled by massive fishing nets — nets which take much of the penguin’s food, forcing penguins to go further and further away from their nets.

Sure enough, the GPS monitors attached to the penguins proved that the birds didn’t have to swim out as far, conserving precious energy.

There are only 26,000 breeding pairs of African penguins, so it’s clear to me that this test needs to be made permanent.

Here’s the home page of the South African government’s environment agency if you want to send them an email. I just did, for what it’s worth. I may be living in Seattle but I plan to travel to South Africa some day and I want those penguins to be there when I arrive.

It’s sadly ironic that protecting tourism is what drives wildlife protection these days. But it’s a strategy that works.