The Basement: Dan Flores | Ice Age Giants, Camels in America, and Coyote Resilience
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What is the opening discussion about Dan Flores and his work on American wild animals?
Olen Shannon Maldonado, käsitehtyjä artisaanituotteita myyvän Jauwi-lahjakaupan perustaja. Valitsin Shopify, koska alustoja testatessani totesin sen ehdottomasti yhdeksi helppokäyttöisimmistä alustoista. Minulla oli tärkeää pohtia kehittymistämme tulevaisuudessa. Kaikki myyntiin tarvittavat työkalut, kuten varaston suunnittelu, ovat kätevästi Dashboardissa. Aloita ilmainen kokeilu shopify.com-sivustolla.
Today I'm talking with Dan Flores. Dan is a historian of the American West, and he spent forty years writing the biographies of North America's wild animals. Coyotes, bison, wild horses, wolves.
Forty years writing biographies for animals that can't sue him for defamation.
That's
just
my
business
model, honestly. His most famous book is Coyote America, and the story it tells is hard to believe. For most of the last century, the federal government tried to erase one animal from the continent with poison, bounties, and money from Congress. The coyote one. Today we're covering that war and the two brothers who exposed it, the footprints at White Sands, and the Direwolves. Real direwolves?
Finally, one that might outlive that stock
kid. There's a moment where Dan analyzes a set of 23,000 year old footprints, like a witness statement, a teenage girl, a toddler on her hip, a ground sloth rearing up when it catches her scent. That one, that one is a good story. Let's go down to the basement.
Mm-hmm. Yeah.
I'm excited to talk to you, sir.
Well I'm excited to be here.
Before we Talk about animals. I want um this is a storytelling show. And you're a storyteller, so this is perfect. Take me back to Uh you're you're a junior in college. You're meeting with your creative writing professor. And something ends up in sports affi, what happens?
Uh well I'm impressed that you know that. Yeah, so I was uh an English major, uh as a undergraduate and um I had a a creative writing professor who was uh who was quite good uh and uh h he published sort of wild west kind of novels. Um, and so I was impressed by the fact that, you know, he knew the publishing world and had an agent and all that sort of thing. So he asked us to do uh a piece in the in his class, uh, as if we were going to write it for a magazine. And so I sat down and duly uh wrote this piece and uh he read it and I frankly don't remember exactly what sort of grade he gave me on it, although I I one of the things I remember he did say to me was that he said, So you do you've got a ready flow of words, and that's a good thing for a writer.
So that's kind of almost the only memory I had of what exactly he said. But I did have the fun. before the semester was over, of going into his office, having sent that piece to Sports Affield magazine and had an editor there um after taking a look at it uh about a month later sent me a letter, an official letter head stationary Sports A Feel and said, uh, we like your piece. It was about crows and ravens and uh we're we're going to publish it. And so I got to go into my creative writing professor and show him a letter of acceptance from a national magazine for that piece I did.
Did you get a check?
I did get a check. Yeah. It was my first gig. It was uh you know, they didn't uh because I didn't have any illustrations for it. In fact, one of the things this particular editor, his name was David Pitzel, I've never forgotten him, because he sort of became uh he took me under his wing and sort of told me how to play the game and what he would be interested in and what to look at. And one of the things he told me was that we're gonna have to hire an illustration. illustrator to illustrate your piece because you don't have any illustrations, you don't have any photographs to go with it. Go and buy yourself a 35 millimeter camera, get codachrome film, get yourself a 300 millimeter telephoto lens, and follow the sort of photographs we publish by a guy, one of their photographers named uh Edwin Bauer.
Follow the kind of photographs he does, and when you submit things to us in the future, send me photographs and I can double your check.
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Chapters
8 chapters
1
What is the opening discussion about Dan Flores and his work on American wild animals?
0:00–6:56
2
How does Dan recount his teenage encounter with a mysterious animal that sparked his lifelong fascination?
6:56–21:12
3
What does Dan explain about the supernatural role of the coyote in Native American mythology?
21:12–45:05
4
How does the conversation shift to the federal predator‑control campaigns and the Murray brothers’ scientific work?
45:05–1:31:04
5
Why can’t coyotes be eradicated and how are they managed in cities?
1:31:04–1:46:29
6
What explains the extreme speed of pronghorns and their unique herd behavior?
1:46:29–2:01:05
7
How did the U.S. government’s policies shape the near‑extinction of the American bison?
2:01:05–2:39:31
8
What is the story behind Dan Flores’s childhood chicken, Chicky, and its impact on his thinking?
2:39:31–2:55:20
Speakers
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