5 great animals I've written about

Dogs with jobs, vermin menacing the masses, and a newsletter that isn't about Mother's Day

For mothers who are writers, and for writers who are or have mothers, and for journalists who explore how we value mothers and families, Mother’s Day can bring a whole new layer of pressure.

Even I have felt acutely aware of the date not as a day to be celebrated but as a timely content peg. Should I use the holiday to write about the mothers I’ve met who’ve dealt with addiction and incarceration, and how they work so very hard to carve out their own sense of stability in a system set up to destabilize them? Should I write about what I saw on a recent trip to Arkansas as part of the maternal health fellowship I’m participating in, and what it says about a country where some women have to drive two hours while in labor just to safely give birth at a hospital? Should I finally publish the deranged essay I wrote while in the throes of postpartum to discuss how our mental health infrastructure can so easily fail even the most privileged, well-equipped among us? Well?? Should I???

Those stories are important and deserve more than being relegated to one day a year. Also, I’m exhausted, and I bet some of y’all are too. So instead, I want to talk about some really, really great animals I’ve had the pleasure of encountering on the job.

I’ve freelanced for over a decade and joke that much of my career was built as one long dopamine chase: the high of breaking into a new publication, of course, but also the joy of flinging myself down a rabbit-hole of curiosity — the utter luxury of getting to be an intellectual tourist, dropping into worlds hitherto unknown to me, and get paid for it. Stress and precarity of freelance aside, a lot of these stories have been a total blast. (Don’t worry, I’ll write more about my personal pivot away from “fun” some other time.)

While my reporting has encompassed a range of subject matters impossible to concisely quantify, animals have always, always been a throughline. Give me an interspecies friendship, or wildlife in the big city, or a dog with a job, or insects menacing the masses, or a bug with weather-predicting mythos, and I’m there, notebook in hand, stroking the dog’s ears, cheering on the caterpillar race, and carefully side-stepping the hissing geese. Here are a few of the most memorable animals from the Critter Beat:

Carmine, the charismatic black coyote (Atlanta Magazine, 2020)

In a rare and thrilling overlap of “interspecies friendship” meets “vermin gone mainstream,” I delighted in following the story of an unusually friendly black coyote sneaking into people’s yards in the burbs to play with their dogs’ toys (and in some cases, their dogs), as well as the effort to humanely capture the animal before he got hurt. I learned so much about coyotes while working on this, but it was also fascinating to dig into the public’s understanding (and misunderstanding) of these animals, whose movements have been shaped and reshaped by human development. The coolest full-circle moment was, after the story published, finally getting to see Carmine in-person after he settled into his home at a wildlife sanctuary with his bestie, Wilee. (Get it?) Ever since reporting this, I’ve been the person in the neighborhood group reminding people to “please report your coyote sightings to the Atlanta Coyote Project!!!”

DJ, the orchid-sniffing canine conservation detective (Garden & Gun, 2025)

DJ, a handsome Belgian Malinois, travels the world using his powerful schnozz to help scientists locate the scat of ocelots, the roots of rare plants, and other endangered or at-risk species. Last year, he and his handler, Karen, began helping the conservation team at the Atlanta Botanical Garden locate extremely rare specimens of Isotria medeoloides, or the whorled pogonia orchid, which is nearly impossible to study because it is so hard to find: it can remain dormant underground for ten years. They found the orchids, thanks to DJ, who could smell the root of the plant deep down in the soil and was rewarded each time with a tennis ball. (Meanwhile, my beloved Juno hasn’t yet figured out how to open our ajar front door without clawing the paint off. I guess it takes all kinds.) My favorite detail from the story: DJ first ended up with Karen because he got kicked out of the police academy — recruits found him too intense and intimidating. Now he stays busy saving endangered species instead.

Starfish the opossum (NYT, 2019)

I’ll probably never win a Pulitzer, but I can at least die knowing that I got the New York Times to print the word “verminfluencer” in its vaunted pages. I’ll simply never forget watching Starfish hold court among the hot-pink combat boots and pleather corsets of Junkman’s Daughter, Atlanta’s own Hot Topic-scented novelty store. Starfish may have been short of tail (her littermates nibbled it off), but that didn’t slow her down from amassing hundredes of thousands of loyal followers, a few of whom I got to meet in-person at her meet-and-greet. One of them told me that, aesthetically, “possums are the new llamas,” and seven years later, based on the sheer volume of opossum memes and paraphernalia people still send me, I think her insight proved prescient. This actually wan’t the first time I’ve written about opossums (and may it not be the last), but it certainly cemented my love for the “vermin gone mainstream” genre.

Izzy, the facility dog at Children’s Hospital of Atlanta (NYT, 2020)

Pardon the pun, but woof — I still can’t really even write about Izzy and Everett without tearing up, to be honest. Getting to meet Izzy and her handler, Vandy, on Zoom in the midst of spring 2020 was healing. (I wish I could’ve met her in-person so I could touch that crimped flaxen fur behind her ears.) (Izzy’s, not Vandy’s.) And listening to Everett’s mom talk so honestly about how special Izzy was for her son, during a super-scary time for both their family and whole entire world, was such a privilege. I still get goosebumps thinking about their bond. And in the story, photographer Melissa Golden’s beauty shot of Izzy among the flora is simply a sight to behold (unlike my circa-Myspace-looking image above). Just, what a good girl!!! Go hug your dog!!

And last & most certainly least: Gary, the injured goose that refused to be rescued (NYT, 2019)

Friggin Gary. Leg all tangled up in fishing line, stubbornly hobbling along the shore, surrounded by people just trying to help, hissing at them the whole goddamn time. I stood at the edge of a pond in a suburban Atlanta park for the better part of the morning watching people try to catch this jerk, but I should’ve known better: geese do not acquiesce. I was writing about suburban wildlife rescue groups and was eager to witness a triumphant, heartwarming moment of, say, a volunteer bottle-feeding an abandoned baby squirrel or tenderly wrapping an injured hawk in a towel and taking them to a wildlife rehab. Instead, the universe gave me Gary. (Maybe this was vengeance for the other thing I wrote about geese.)

“Gary’s got friends in high places,” one volunteer said with a shrug, shortly after giving up on saving his life. May the bastard outlive us all.

(Not Gary, but certainly in league with him.)