{"id":478066,"date":"2026-06-15T07:56:15","date_gmt":"2026-06-15T07:56:15","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/478066\/"},"modified":"2026-06-15T07:56:15","modified_gmt":"2026-06-15T07:56:15","slug":"the-snake-wrangling-84-year-old-who-lives-on-a-remote-barrier-island","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/478066\/","title":{"rendered":"The snake-wrangling 84-year-old who lives on a remote barrier island"},"content":{"rendered":"<p class=\"Paragraph-styles__ParagraphStyled-sc-ffb5f5ba-0 fqhmpl\">Every week, 84-year-old Carol Ruckdeschel walks the wind-whipped beach on Cumberland Island, Georgia. Wearing white rubber boots, and with her dark hair in pigtail braids, she jots down everything she finds in a field journal: spoonbills, sandwich terns, shearwaters, sea oats, moon snails, micromolluscs, whelks, calico crabs. This morning, she records a committee of vultures perching on a dead snag. Bottlenose dolphins swim offshore. Feral horses lope along the dunes. Shark teeth glint in the sand.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"Every week, 84-year-old Carol Ruckdeschel walks the wind-whipped beach on Cumberland Island, Georgia. Wearing white rubber boots, and&hellip;\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":478067,"comment_status":"","ping_status":"","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[26],"tags":[111,139,69,147,406],"class_list":["post-478066","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","category-wildlife","tag-new-zealand","tag-newzealand","tag-nz","tag-science","tag-wildlife"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478066","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=478066"}],"version-history":[{"count":0,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/478066\/revisions"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/478067"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=478066"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=478066"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.newsbeep.com\/nz\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=478066"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}