Book excerpt: The Wildlife Confessional is a window into the wildlife profession, a career peopled by state and federal biologists, game wardens, land managers, consultants, students, professors, interns, researchers, students, and the community of peers who have built their careers (and sometimes, their lives) around working with wildlife. The authors whose stories have been collected here represent men and women from all walks of wildlife biology and take place across North and Central America, from the Gulf of Alaska to San Ignacio, Belize; from the tropics of the Hawaiian Islands to the deserts of Arizona; and in the desert springs, coastal bluffs, national parks, stock ponds, pickup trucks, traplines, doctors’ offices, rooftops, outhouses, and bombing ranges scattered everywhere in between.