Alan Tennant: Natural History Writer

“I’m a writer. I write on a variety of natural history subjects. Writing is a craft like any other you’ve learned,” Alan Tennant explains. He sits back in the out door chair under the awning of his porch at his house in Marathon, Texas near Big Bend National Park. “Making jewelry, pottery, rugs, you’re stitching words together.”

Tennant’s On the Wing was on the New York Time’s Best Seller List for several weeks and was rated as high as No.4 on the Amazon Book List. National Geographic owns the option to make a movie out of it.

“It’s a picaresque,” Tenant said. “An adventure story that started in Padre Island, went on to Central America and then up to the artic. George Vose, the pilot, and I followed falcons in our small Cessna across the American continent. We experienced what they experienced; head winds, lightening, vicious vortexs, thermals, hunger. These were young birds too, who without their parents, left their place of birth - many times solo and flew thousands of miles, all by instinct.”

“It’s a journey that allowed me to study the relationships of people, countries, birds. Its about getting arrested, landing in uncharted terrain, crossing borders at night,” Tennant said. “And the path of these birds afforded me the opportunity to journal the environmental degradation across the continent.”

Tennant, who taught writing and literature at the University of Texas at Austin in the late 60’s said, “People don’t realize how much chaff you have to throw out. I wrote probably twenty thousand pages to get three hundred good ones.”

“UT was a hot bed for protesters back then. Viet Nam - I’m anti-military. Some of us professors had to keep the students cool. It was the time of Kent State. I didn’t want to see any more kids get killed,” Tennant said.

“I was one of four people that founded Wildlife Rescue. We took care of injured animals, many times we’d get them from the Humane Society. Back then if nobody claimed them they were destroyed,” Tennant said. “I don’t have pets now because I travel so much, but back then I’d have as many as seventy animals in my Austin house. Dogs, cats, possums, foxes, golden eagles, fawns walking around my living room. People shouldn’t pick up fawns. The doe leaves them but comes back twice a day to feed them. People pick them up thinking they’re abandoned, then they forget where they got’em.”

Tennant enjoys fruit and vegetable smoothies and rides his bike 30 to 40 miles a day when he’s home in Marathon, but much of the time he’s traveling. “But I like Marathon,” he said. I like it because there’s a lack of people, pollution and cars. It’s the darkest place on the satellite map and usually warm. People are real nice.”

Tennant writes every day when he has a project, “Sun up to sundown.” One of his present projects can be seen at his website www.alantenant.com where he explores the life of grizzly bears in the wilds of Alaska.

“If you’ve seen Werner Herzog’s film “Grizzly Man” you’ll know what I’m talking about. In fact I’ve probably been in the close proximity of those same bears,” Tennant said. “Timothy Treadwell, the Grizzly Man, and his girlfriend Amy Hugenard were eaten by bears there in October of 05. We went back to the same place exactly a year later.”

Tennant and Treadwell’s best friend Marc Gaede, who wanted to experience, “up to the point of being eaten,” his dead friend’s love of the place called “The Green,” flew in by float plane illegally and spent several days recording the life of pre-hibernating bears.

“We used the red plastic flare pistol more than once. It was our first line of defense,” Tennant said.

Tennant grew up in Ft Worth and got a Masters in English from UT Austin. He presented his doctorate dissertation but never finished the PHD program. He also earned a bachelors in herpetology. He has written ten other books, nine of them about snakes and several of them on their third publication. “I had a rancher come by last week and tell me that he had finally learned that snakes, mountain lions, eagles had as much right to be here as we do. Now that’s a widening of perspective. People used to kill them at the drop of a hat. Hell, they named the Alpine airport after an eagle killer,” Tennant said. “But little by little that point of view is changing and I think it’s beautiful.”