DAN DE VRIES

WILDLIFE EDUCATOR

Dan De Vries is a poet and novelist living in San Francisco. As a college and university student he studied English language and literary arts, but he has from childhood been an avid reader of popular writing about science and natural history. One of his earliest reading memories is how, as a first grader, his parents bought him a subscription for a juvenile book club and one of the early editions was a book about dinosaurs. His parents, who were then members of a fundamentalist denomination that did not believe in evolution, sent the book back. He responded by going to a bookmobile and taking out another two. About dinosaurs. His parents, both of whom are still alive, accepted the theory of evolution and the reality of dinosaurs long ago. They even renew a subscription to Smithsonian Magazine for Dan each year on his birthday.

Dan’s interest in coyotes developed during time he spent in Laramie at the University of Wyoming (from which he as an MA degree). Although Canis latrans was (and remains) “underappreciated” by most of the ranch set there, many wonderful stories about coyotes, including the rich mix of indigenous peoples’ accounts of Coyote as the great North American trickster were also an important part of the Rocky Mountain environment.

Between Wyoming and moving to Northern California, Dan planted trees for three seasons in British Columbia. While planting trees on an island in Johnstone Strait between Vancouver Island and the BC mainland he had the rare thrill of hearing the native sea wolves singing at night. Besides that, seeing firsthand the devastation of clear-cutting on the BC islands and in the interior had a powerful impact on his environmental consciousness, and conscience.

Dan’s BC experience provided material for a cycle of stories, That Treeplanting Story, published recently by IFSF Publishing in San Francisco. Between stays in California, he spent a year at the University of Michigan where four of the stories in that collection won a major award in UM’s Hopwood competition.

As a thirty-year resident of San Francisco, Dan is particularly interested in the behavior of, and human coexistence with, urban coyotes, of which there are quite a number in his own West of Twin Peaks neighborhood. He has canvassed San Francisco neighborhoods with Project Coyote educational material on behalf of both Project Coyote and San Francisco Animal Care and Control. He very much enjoys tabling for Project Coyote at environmental gatherings and fairs.  In summer 2019, he had a wonderful time talking about coyotes with day campers at an outdoor activity camp for youth and their dogs in Marin County.

In addition to That Treeplanting Story he has published a book of poems, Past & Presently, also with IFSF Publishing.