The wild isn't retreating.
It's moving in.

Field Notes

It started in a comment section, not a study. A trail camera I'd set for a client, three states over, caught a black bear working a fence line at 2 a.m. — in a county that had no business having black bears. Then it happened again, from a different state. Then again, from viewers whose regions had never come up in that context before.

I started keeping a loose list — not data, just notes, the kind you keep when something nags at you before you have a name for it. Close to two decades in the field by then, resetting cameras before sunrise and filling logbooks nobody else ever reads. Species showing up somewhere they historically hadn't. People asking the same handful of questions, over and over, usually right after an encounter, never before one.

Eventually the list got long enough that keeping it to myself felt like the wrong call. What tipped it wasn't one sighting — it was the messages, the same handful of questions arriving from further and further away, always sent after an encounter instead of before one. This kit is that list, organized into something you can actually use — read before you need it, not while you're standing in your driveway at dusk trying to remember what you saw three months ago.