This week on Inside Appalachia, Appalachians are often called mountaineers — but are they also “pioneers?” A new documentary reckons with what it means… to be a pioneer. In Michigan, an Appalachian mountain man competes in a championship tournament, for skipping stones — and we wade into a mountain wetland to search for one of the region’s most elusive creatures.
Appalachians are often called mountaineers — but are they also “pioneers?” A new documentary reckons with what it means… to be a pioneer.
In Michigan, an Appalachian mountain man competes in a championship tournament for skipping stones — and we wade into a mountain wetland to search for one of the region’s most elusive creatures.
You’ll hear these stories and more this week, Inside Appalachia.
In This Episode:
O Pioneer Shares A Vision Of Appalachia
A Rock’s Throw Away
In Search Of The Bog Turtle
Trouble Finding Teachers
O Pioneer Shares A Vision Of Appalachia
O Pioneerblends animation and documentary to track the lives of three West Virginians. It explores the question of what it means to be a pioneer — and how those qualities show up in our day-to-day lives.
Producer Bill Lynch recently viewed O Pioneer and then met with filmmakers Jonathan Lacocque and Clara Lehmann.
A Rock’s Throw Away
If you’re standing next to a body of water — like a lake, or river, or even a tiny creek — and there are flat rocks lying there, the impulse to skip them is just about irresistible. Just about anybody can do it. But, some people are really good at it.
Kurt Steiner of Western Pennsylvania is considered one of the best in the world at skipping rocks.
Bog turtles are the tiniest turtle in North America, and among the most endangered. Their habitats are disappearing.
Radio IQ’s Roxy Todd went along with biologists, who are researching how many of these rare turtles still exist.
Trouble Finding Teachers
Across the country, schools are forced to double up on, and sometimes even cancel classes because of teacher shortages. The problem is felt here in Appalachia, too, where vacancies are often filled by substitutes who lack formal teacher training.
WVPB’s Chris Schulz reported on West Virginia’s efforts to keep schools staffed.
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Our theme music is by Matt Jackfert. Other music this week was provided by Jeff Ellis, Erik Vincent Huey, Frank George, Lobo Loco, Mary Hott and Gerry Milnes.
Bill Lynch is our producer. Zander Aloi is our associate producer. Our executive producer is Eric Douglas. Kelley Libby is our editor. Our audio mixer is Patrick Stephens.
You can send us an email: InsideAppalachia@wvpublic.org.
With more than 70 tables of reptiles, amphibians, invertebrates, birds and exotic plants, organizers like Hunter Armstead hope to educate the public on proper care and appreciation of these unique pets.
Since 2014, the West Virginia Reptile Expo has brought animals, supplies, plants and related artwork to Charleston for its annual event.
With more than 70 tables of reptiles, amphibians, invertebrates, birds and exotic plants, organizers like Hunter Armstead hope to educate the public on proper care and appreciation of these unique pets.
“If you give people the chance to experience and learn something new, it’s interesting to see how they slowly open up to these types of animals that normally they may be afraid of,” Armstead said.
Armstead said keeping pets is an altruistic act that can be emotionally helpful for people.
“It really is emotionally helpful for a lot of different people, to have something that is accepting of them,” Armstead said. “It’s just a relationship where they take care of that animal, they make sure the animal is happy and well fed and well housed, and it can be therapeutic.”
While pets can make a great addition to the home, Armstead cautioned against bringing home a new pet without doing proper research.
“It’s just important for them to remember that if they are going to bring a new pet home, they need to do research on that pet before they bring it home,” Armstead said. “This can be done by talking to any of the experts at our show…and our guests will have the best success keeping a new pet.”
The expo will be located in the Wilson Student Union at West Virginia State University in Institute, West Virginia. Tickets are $5 per adult and free for kids under 10.
A racehorse collapsed and was euthanized during a race Wednesday at a track in the Northern Panhandle. This is the first reported death after an injunction stopped officials from enforcing safety regulations in West Virginia’s thoroughbred racing industry earlier this week.
A racehorse collapsed and was euthanized during a race Wednesday at a track in the Northern Panhandle. This is the first reported death after an injunction stopped officials from enforcing safety regulations in West Virginia’s thoroughbred racing industry earlier this week.
A summary of the race at Mountaineer Casino, Racetrack, and Resort in New Cumberland from horse racing results company Equibase shows the horse, named Little Christy, had a “bad step and fell in mid stretch, being euthanized on the track.”
The injunction stops both West Virginia and Louisiana from following safety regulations from the Horseracing Integrity and Safety Authority. It has been criticized by animal rights groups like Animal Wellness Action, who once more reprimanded the decision after the horse’s death.
The group’s Executive Director Marty Irby said if West Virginia horse racing is to thrive in the long term, the state should get behind the agency and its regulations.
“I can’t really believe it, it’s quite surprising because they’re basically just siding with animal abusers,” Irby said. “It doesn’t make sense for the state.”
State officials like Attorney General Patrick Morrisey praised the decision earlier this week, saying HISA had the potential to harm the state’s horseracing industry.
West Virginia Public Broadcasting reached out to the West Virginia Racing Commission. The agency said it is preparing a statement.
With Valentine’s Day coming up, love is on a lot of people’s minds…but what about animals?
If you have ever watched animals interact, it seems like they feel love. Penguins mate for life. Elephants form a bond through wrapping their trunks together before they mate. Some types of wolves mate for life and help raise the wolf pups. So, do animals actually feel love?
Our Inside Appalachia team stumbled into this idea after producer Roxy Todd remembered a single, lonely otter she had once seen at the West Virginia State Wildlife Center.
“She looked really sad, all by herself on the rocks, not playing and not swimming,” Todd said.
She had expected to see not one otter, but lots of otters, doing what otters typically do.
“You know, when you picture otters, what do you picture? They’re having fun,” Todd said. “I had this expectation they would be frolicking doing tricks in the water.”
But she said this otter seemed despondent.
“I just kept wondering, what happened, and what was going through her head,” Todd said. “Could she feel loneliness?”
And if she could feel loneliness, Todd wondered, could the otter also feel other emotions? Like, could she feel love?
Well, this question is up for debate.
Most biologists will say that animals cannot feel love.
“Love? No, there’s no such thing in the animal kingdom,” said Rich Rogers, the furbearer biologist for the West Virginia Division of Natural Resources. Rogers is helping study the regional otter population. “[Love is] an emotional term. There’s a fidelity to that family unit until those young disperse, and then no, there’s nothing there.”
So Rogers said love is an emotional term, but animals have emotions, right?
“Since Darwin, scientists have thought that there are some basic emotions that animals can feel,” said Cynthia Willett, a professor of philosophy at Emory University.
Willett published a book called ‘Interspecies Ethics’ in 2014, which explores animals’ wide variety of emotions. She said some of the obvious ones are happiness and sadness.
“But Darwin did not include love among those basic emotions. And so there’s been this prejudice or this bias, at least since that time, that animals could not experience love,” Willett said. “And yet we see it all the time with animals. So why is it that we tend to not believe what we see?”
There are a few different types of animal love Willett has studied — the mother to offspring love, which she said is clearly established. But also friendship love. Willett said in 2006 at a zoo in Japan, a snake became friends with a hamster — its prey! They even cuddled together.
And the third type of animal relationship?
“The most surprising kind of love at all is romantic love,” Willett said.
Like, love love — not just friendship love.
A good example of this behavior is with birds, Willett said. Similar to humans, birds have courtship rituals — basically, they date. They bring food to one another, do dances, clean one another, etc.
Animals generally are social creatures, Willett said, adding that they need companionship, which in a way is a form of love.
“And without it, they start to lose that ‘joie de vivre’, that sense of being alive.”
‘Joy de vivre’ is a French phrase that describes the sense of life that gives us purpose, that makes life fuller and richer — something we often find through relationships and love. And Willett said animals feel it too.
“And when they don’t have that, they shrink. They diminish. They have less energy. Life goes dull,” she said.
Although Willett has not studied otters specifically,anecdotally she said she has seen them play and bond with each other and humans. They kind of remind her of how dogs love, Willett said.
So yes, Willett said she believes otters dofeel love. She added that it is not that the science or biologists are wrong, there just might be more nuance.
And for the solitary otter at West Virginia Wildlife Center? Well, Trevor Moore — the biologist at the center — said he cannot definitively rule one way or another on love, loneliness or any human-like emotion.
“Animals definitely have personalities. There are definitely individual personalities,” Moore said. “You can see that, that’s very well documented throughout science and in captivity and in the wild. But how much we project our own emotions and our own view of them? I don’t know.”
On his family’s farm in Randolph County, W.Va. 20-year-old Collin Waybright has a hobby that’s very different from streaming TV shows or playing video games. Waybright is one of the state’s youngest falconers. To be a falconer, you have to love birds and Waybright fits the bill.
“They all have different flight styles. And it’s amazing,” Waybright said. “They’re just so effortless. They can just soar on thermals. And whenever it gets a little windy, they just kind of tuck their wings back a little bit and go into it.”
Since he was a teenager, Waybright said he’s been impressed by the way birds’ bodies are built, and he feels it’s proof that a higher power has a hand in creating animals.
“Birds can teach us many things,” said Waybright.
Falconry, the sport of hunting with falcons or other birds of prey, dates back to 5,000 B.C in Mongolia. Some historians say people may have been bonding and partnering with birds of prey even longer than that.
Like most falconers, Waybright loves watching the birds hunt. But even more than that, he just loves watching them fly. At times, it’s like he vicariously gets to fly himself.
“I definitely have wished quite a few times that I could fly. I wish I could be up there. Just flying around. Be really cool.”
Learning To Be A Falconer
Waybright is one of 31 people in the state who have falconry licenses. Some surrounding states like Pennsylvania have more falconers, according to Rich Bailey, ornithologist with the West Virginia Department of Natural Resources.
Each state has its own licensing program, which includes an extensive test, and several years apprenticing with a master falconer. “It’s a very hard test,” said master falconer Mick Brown, who’s been practicing falconry for 18 years in Ohio, and all over the U.S. “I have an insurance license, investment license and a real estate license. The hardest test I ever took [was] the falconry test, to be honest with you.”
The test includes how to take care of a raptor, including disease and medicines, to ensure that people and wild animals are both protected. Only licensed falconers can care for birds of prey.
“If I go out of town, I can’t have you feed my bird,” said Brown. “I have to have a licensed falconer feed my bird. There’s not that many. So, I have to either take it to a falconer’s house and have him feed him or have him come to my house and feed him. So it’s very difficult.”
Brown said becoming a falconer requires a good deal of money. “It’s very expensive to get into.” Brown said he estimates it takes about $10,000 to get started. The cost of food is also expensive. https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EZXTzxQhIYc
Waybright’s First Hawk
Waybright had a little help with his initial expenses, since he was just 14 years old when he started as a falconry apprentice. Another falconer loaned him the pens he needed, as well as the goshawk trap he used to trap his very first bird of prey.
The first thing a falconer does once they receive a license to become a falconry apprentice is trap their own young bird in the wild.
“The typical way that falconry works is you trap a young bird in juvenile plumage and train it,” Waybright said.
So in the middle of January six years ago, Waybright trekked out in the snow to try to catch a young red-tailed hawk. He said there were subzero temperatures the night he left a rabbit as bait in a Swedish Goshawk trap.
He went to check the trap early the next morning. “It was dark and the trap was shut. You never know what you’re going to catch. You could catch an owl, a hawk, something like that. This was the first bird I had caught, and it was a juvenile red-tailed hawk. Out of all the birds that I could have caught for the first time in that trap, it was what I was after. And that is just amazing to me to this day.”
He named that red-tailed hawk Ace. He loved that bird, and for about two months, he spent all his spare time training Ace, hunting with Ace. His mom, Marsha Waybright, said her son and the hawk were nearly inseparable. Falconry requires that a falconer forms a strong bond with a bird of prey.
Hawks aren’t motivated to hunt on command; they hunt for the same reasons a hawk does in the wild—because they’re hungry. That means a falconer has to keep close tabs on their bird’s weight, making sure they don’t get overfed- but also stay healthy. Waybright taught Ace calls so they could communicate in the woods. Waybright hunts small animals with his hawks, like rabbits or squirrels. Waybright walks through fields and forest and the bird follows, flying from tree top to tree top, scanning for prey. They hunt together like this, but the birds really do most of the work. Waybright usually lets his hawks eat the prey, after they kill it.
Waybright got very attached to his first bird, Ace. They hunted together, for several years, just the two of them.
In the wild, half of hawks die in their first year. If they survive past that, hawks typically live another nine or so years. But if a falconer is feeding them, they can live for up to three decades. Collin’s hawk Ace wasn’t so lucky.
“Ace ended up passing away in the second season I trained him,” Waybright recalled. “He was fine one day. Then the next day, he was acting a little bit slow. Next day, there was clearly something wrong. [So I] called the Raptor Center.”
The West Virginia Raptor Rehabilitation Center in Fairmont advised Waybright, trying to determine what was wrong with Ace.
“And then the next day he had passed away. So that’s one of the hardest things, ever.” Waybright said the veterinarians told him Ace probably died from a genetic disease.
Since then, he’s trained eight birds of prey. He’s released some of these birds back into the wild.
Teaching Others
Even today, six years after first discovering his love of hawks, he recalls the first time he saw a bird of prey, at a public event at Stonewall Resort.
“I saw this raptor display, and I thought it was just amazing.”
Now, doing presentations with the public is one of Waybright’s favorite parts of being a falconer. Especially teaching children about birds.
Credit courtesy Marsha Waybright
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Collin Waybright teaching a group of kids about falconry and introducing them to his hawk Rico.
“I ask them questions as I’m talking to them, and their reactions to the questions are just priceless. I’ll look at them and ask, ‘how much do you guys think this bird weighs?’ And I’ll get guesses from 20 to 100 pounds. It’s just funny whenever you say, ‘well, no, this guy only weighs about two to three pounds.’ And then the jaws drop, you know?”
Most of these public talks have been put on hold during the pandemic. But Waybright said he does offer informal demonstrations at his family’s farm, where his mother also manages a bed and breakfast. And one day, he said if someone approaches him with the right passion for learning falconry, he’d consider taking them on as an apprentice.
His advice to anyone who is interested is that they “go hunting with a falconer. Go experience that. Go make sure if it’s something you want to do.” Waybright said if someone approached him and asked if he would teach them, he would have to evaluate if the person is serious about becoming a falconer. “It’s not for everyone. You don’t want to get into it blindly. Make sure it’s something you really want to do before you become a falconer.”
In a quiet neighborhood in southeast Ohio, Talcon Quinn and her 12-year-old apprentice Juniper Ballew have revived an age-old tradition with just three ingredients: a deer skin, some water and a handful of animal brains. They have transformed a hairy, fleshy animal skin into buckskin, a buttery soft material stronger than fabric.
In a special report as part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Project, reporter Clara Haizlett met with Quinn and Ballew to find out why they practice the tradition of brain tanning.
Quinn has trained Ballew in the art of brain tanning, through an apprenticeship program with the Ohio Arts Council. While most modern tanneries use chemicals to tan, Quinn and Ballew use the traditional method of soaking the hide in animal brains.
Credit Clara Haizlett/ West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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In the final stages of the tanning process, Talcon examines her hide while Juniper sets up the work space.
Brain tanning requires a strong back and a stronger stomach, patience and some serious elbow grease. To tan one hide it takes around 16 hours of intense labor extended over multiple days.
Quinn’s workshop is located out of her garage at her home, which is in a quiet neighborhood on the outskirts of Athens, Ohio.
Holding a deer skin, Quinn instructed her apprentice to “find the neck, find the membrane side, and what I’d like you to do is go down the spine, and put your weight into the cable.”
Quinn coached her apprentice through a step called cabling, a technique for softening the hide. At this stage in the process, the deer skin was slippery and limp, resembling a slimy blanket. Following Quinn’s lead, Ballew leaned back and pulled at the hide, abraiding it against a wire cable. Back and forth she yanked at the deer skin, one foot in front of the other.
Both Quinn and Ballew are from southeast Ohio, a cradle of forests, rivers, lakes and the foothills of the Appalachian Mountains. Growing up in the region, Quinn spent a lot of time outdoors, developing a deep appreciation for her natural environment. In her early twenties 20s she began providing more of her own food by fishing, hunting, and picking up roadkill.
Prior to adoption of these practices, Quinn was a vegetarian, then a vegan. Yet in spite of this shift in lifestyle, she continued to set high ethical standards for herself. Quinn decided that if she was going to source her own meat, she wanted to be respectful and use all of the animal. That is what led her to brain tanning.
“I think because I’ve always been a craftsperson and I’m not easily squeamish, I just took to it really easily and fell in love with it in ways,” Quinn said. “I mean there’s times where I don’t like it at all because it gets smelly.”
Credit Clara Haizlett/ West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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Talcon wears a buckskin bikini that she tanned and sewed.
Quinn sources her hides from local game processors where animal carcasses are often just thrown away after the meat is processed. After skinning the deer, she starts tanning, transforming the throw away hides into bags, clothing, and knife sheaths. She sells these unique pieces online to a diverse group of customers. Quinn also teaches brain tanning to learners of all ages and identities. Her favorite class to teach is the buckskin bikini top class.
“The bikini top class was passed down to me and it’s been this really beautiful thing,” Quinn said. “It’s people of all different body shapes coming together to make something very sacred and beautiful for their body, and to encourage them to honor themselves and feel sexy.”
By sharing brain tanning with customers and students, Quinn hopes to encourage a more respectful relationship between humans, animals and the environment.
“It’s heavy. It’s heavy work,” she said. “And there’s a lot of respect and like gratitude and even a sense of grief for the loss of the animals or the loss of a spirit. But I also really believe that everything continues on and by continuing on it lives on. That’s the one thing I hope people see when they see my work, that it’s a lot of humbling respect that I put into it.”
When Quinn found out about the Ohio Arts Council apprenticeship program, she saw the opportunity to pass on the tradition of brain tanning to a young person in her community. Ballew belongs to the Potawatomi Tribe, a Native American group centralized in the Great Lakes region. Although Ballew was introduced to tanning at a young age, she never had formal training in the skill. Now under Quinn’s tutelage, Ballew has made her own buckskin medicine pouch. Ballew plans to incorporate the medicine pouch into the regalia that she wears at tribal powows in Michigan. She said that brain tanning, no matter how obsolete it might appear, still has value in today’s society.
Credit Clara Haizlett/ West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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Juniper shows off her tanned hide which she will sew into a medicine pouch,
“There is so much out there that has like shriveled up and died because people don’t think it’s valued enough,” Ballew said.
For Ballew, brain tanning is about connecting with her Potawotami ancestors and their way of life.
“The great thing with how Native Americans hunt is that they take one and they’re satisfied with it because they use all of it and what they don’t use goes back to the earth,” she said.
In Native cultures around the world, brain tanning was an ordinary practice, including here in Appalachia. In 18th century America, European settlers and Native Americans often traded food and supplies for buckskins or “bucks” for short. According to regional legends, this is where the slang word “buck,” meaning “dollar” comes from. Yet as the fur trade became commercialized and Native Americans were removed from their lands, traditional tanning methods fell by the wayside, displaced by industrial chemical tanning. Today the majority of global leather comes from China and instead of using natural materials as tanning agents, most modern tanneries use chemicals.
Although tanning has changed a lot over the years, Ballew said that traditional tanning still holds important cultural value.
“My uncle, when we FaceTimed the other day, he called it ‘learning the language of his grandmother,’” Ballew said. “Because she was taken by the settlers and taught English and forced to cut all her hair off. He was learning what she had been forced to forget.
Credit Clara Haizlett/ West Virginia Public Broadcasting
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Juniper and Talcon display their finished brain tanned buckskins.
“I want to inspire kind of a new definition of Appalachia, particularly around here where it’s just so poor,” Ballew said. “And I want the youth to grow up knowing that there are these skills that were kind of lost but they’re not forgotten. We still have it and we can make it something new that viable for today.”
Although they have come to the practice for different reasons, together Quinn and Ballew are reviving the tradition of brain tanning, hour by hour and hide by hide.
This story is part of the Inside Appalachia Folkways Reporting Project, a partnership with West Virginia Public Broadcasting’s Inside Appalachia and the Folklife Program of the West Virginia Humanities Council. The Folkways Reporting Project is made possible in part with support from Margaret A. Cargill Philanthropies to the West Virginia Public Broadcasting Foundation. Subscribe to the podcast to hear more stories of Appalachian folklife, arts, and culture.
