Please check out Geri Vistein’s new book, “I Am Coyote”, available through Amazon beginning on October 9th! Congratulations, Geri!
The brief review on Amazon states the following: “Coyote is three years old when she leaves her family to seek a home of her own and a mate to share it with. Journeying by night through a Canadian winter, she doesn’t know that her search will become a 500-mile odyssey. Nor can she know while enduring extreme cold, hunger, and harrowing brushes with death that she and her descendants are destined to play a vital role in the forests of the eastern United States, replacing wolves (exterminated a century ago) as the keystone predator the landscape desperately needed.”
“Combining rigorous science with imaginative storytelling, I Am Coyote reveals the complex outer and inner lives of coyotes. We are not the only sentient beings on this planet; we are not unique in experiencing love, fear, grief, joy, and acceptance. This magical story will change the way you think about the animals with whom we share the world.”
A few more reviews are in order:
“This is not a book about ‘a species of animal’ and what ‘it’ does. Geri Vistein takes us so deep into Coyote’s skin and behind the eyes and nose that she reveals for us the intricacies and perceptions of creatures who lead lives among us. This is the right perspective for understanding who we are here with on Earth. Vistein has chosen one of the absolutely most wondrous fellow-creatures in America to make our introduction.” –Carl Safina, author of Beyond Words: What Animals Think and Feel.
“For wild predators every day is a drama of life and death – Geri Vistein uses these daily theatrics to tell the tale of the colonization of eastern forests by coyotes. The story invokes the spirit of Ernest Thompson Seaton’s classic “Animals I Have Known” but is more firmly rooted in modern scientific findings not available to Seaton”. Roland Kays, Ph.D., Professor, NC State University, Dept Forestry & Environmental Resources, Lab Director, NC Museum of Natural Sciences.
“Vistein, a carnivore biologist, tells the story of one of the early migrants from the coyote’s point of view and asks readers to consider coyotes as “intelligent, sentient beings” able to experience “fear, joy, affection, loss, grief, puzzlement, and acceptance but never anger.” Vistein’s writing is impassioned and poetic as she tells of the female Coyote who travels east—facing danger from traps, traffic, guns, and dogs—to finally find a refuge in Baxter State Park. When Coyote finds a trapped coyote, she helps him to free himself (he chews off his paw). They become mates and, as seasons and years pass, raise four litters of pups. Readers learn about the complex social structure of coyotes (previous years’ siblings help out) and that life as a wild creature is often tragic—though Vistein balances the harshness of death with a wider, natural-order-of-things perspective. A sensitive, passionate story told from an intriguing point of view”. -Kirkus Review
Coyote Yipps 
