Written by: Leslie Brown
Photo: Cascades Carnivore Project
In May, Jessie Thoreson completed her master’s degree in fire ecology from Oregon State University, where her thesis examined the role of cultural fire and other Indigenous stewardship practices in Northern California’s black oak woodlands.
Her research differed from her work for CCP, where she spent time in the North and South Cascades collecting scat to help establish population levels of wolverines, Cascade red fox, and other carnivores. But one huge similarity stood out, she said – the importance of spending time in the field, not simply in front of a computer.
“You develop a whole different commitment and relationship to a place from being in the field,” she said. “It almost seems inappropriate to try to interpret a place without lived experience there.”
Jessie spent two summers working for CCP, first in 2018 after graduating from Western Washington University with a degree in environmental studies and again in 2021 before starting her graduate program in Corvallis.
“I feel lucky to have discovered CCP,” she said. In her first season, she hiked over 500 miles through the North Cascades, where she collected scat and hair from the Cascade red fox, as well as wolverines, martens, and lynx. In 2021, she spent time in the high meadows and forests around Mount Rainier and the Goat Rocks Wilderness, focused largely on wolverine research.
Both were rich experiences, she said. She recalled one arduous day in the Pasayten Wilderness in the North Cascades, where she and other members of the crew spent hours clambering over blowdown trees, rewarded when they came upon a bear track, with a wolf track inside it and the scat of a moose nearby. “It just showed how wild that place was,” she said.
Jessie, who was born and raised in Seattle, has a second passion – she’s a singer/songwriter and the lead for a band called The Crown Fire, a “nerdy reference,” she notes, to fire ecology (a crown fire is a forest fire that spreads from the top of one tree to another). The band plays folk rock with a jazz influence.
Her work as an ecologist informs her music. She recalled one song she wrote while working for CCP and living in Winthrop: She had been sitting in the field behind her trailer, a place she considered her home, when she saw a coyote sauntering through the field completely at ease. “It was so clear that this was the coyote’s place,” she said. “It wasn’t mine at all.”
The song that came out of that experience, “Coyote,” is a lyrical piece and was a single on her band’s debut album, Round River. “Coyote in the moonlight, singing a sweet song …”